DER UR-BOONEKAMP

Acute Puncture

My physioterrorist doweled the two-by-six of my thumb with a needle thin needle, muscles and tissues and nerves slow-witted and dumbed. This thing, this acute puncture, is not to my liking, as needles and pricking are for the addle-minded and those who hunker down in doorstops, heads cowered in newsprint and shopper’s sacks. Nerve-endings have no endings, nor beginnings I suppose. Mine, at least, are none too savvy at differentiating between good pain and unsavory pain, pain that separates finger stumps from knuckle brads. Electro-convulsive shock for the thought-wearied and incontinent. Dis-endoweled perhaps, perhaps worse. I prefer icing and mustard poultices, or a firm Syrian interrogation fluke bone slung from the caging above my head. The Chinese prefigured the need for jibbing arm bones with darner’s awl and friction oil, to ease the passing of bloods, bile and nerve endings. Now that my shoulder is half-mended, the need for pricks and bolos is inexcusably mercenary at best. A thumb nub in the billet of my shoulder, pressed into the soft tissues surrounding the charnel bone, seems much more reasonable and less invasive. Narcoleptic narcosis, nothing less will do. A Trotsky icepack on the hubcap of the shoulder, where scapula and tendon yarn cloister bone, spurred and horned with brick a bract, and so forth. Sleep would certainly panacea the whole shebang, were I capable of sleepiness and better manners. As I am not, nor do I see a torpor in the near to middling future, I will simply cloy the underside of my eye pokes and be done with consciousness all together, or for the time being at most.

Arm Seeds

Black seeds shuck arm-bone
clear through to dogwood, spurr

and marrow