With a purple marker the surgeon plotted points across my abdomen where later the constellation would be cut away and removed. I stood facing the supply cabinets looking off into the murky depths of betadine, which reminded me of rust water, or the ochre of an aged puddle of blood. I thought about his scalpel slicing into me, my skin filleted and fleshed away like hide from a hooved animal. I imagined forceps and hemostats lost and left behind corroding within. The taste of iron suddenly filled my mouth and I asked if I could have a soft drink before the surgery. He moved over my body as if it were not my body or the body from which the question came.

I was told I could rinse my mouth with a saline solution. “Swish and spit Paul, it’s necessary that you don’t consume any liquids prior to the operation”. His hair was voluminous and shiny like a fox’s fur, and he smelled like a warm ATM withdrawal. His smile, a radiant flash accompanied by the sound-effect of two swords striking or a star being born, made me feel yellow inside.

I dropped the paper cone into the trash, and then slipped back into my robe, which hung loosely over my body like linen used to cover the dead or indecent. I felt the cool breeze of gurneys icing by and sheets being removed. We arrived and checked-in at the registration desk where three tanned, torpid women attempted to look busy.

Two large doors opened before us, and I was led into a large porcelain room equipped with plastic wrapped apparatus and fixtures fitted with hoses and tubes. The operating table reminded me of a movie I had once seen where a frightened, remorseful subject of a lethal injection was fastened with both arms outstretched and secured to separate boards. The anesthesiologist and surgical nurse showcased the padded crucifix with glamorous waves and gestures of the hands as if I was in the showcase showdown or that was my cue to climb up.

I stared upward into a large, round bank of lights above me, and then surrendered to the table’s Christian design. The cool prickle of antiseptic diverted my attention from the face of the anesthesiologist, an Indian woman looking lovingly at me from behind a mask that, if removed, would reveal a thin set of lips and a fine, dark mustache. She moved over me like a mother while the surgical nurse slid an IV catheter into my left arm and inflated my artery with barbiturates. My eyes rolled sideways like two olives in tandem beneath the brine and vodka of my bleared vision, then came to rest against the glass of the Indian’s gaze. I focused on her forehead where a red bindi dot burned in vermillion versus of things sacred and concealed and began counting backwards from ten.

Ten, nine, eight, and I could feel the body’s wires course with the current of integers and amnesia. Seven…six…five… and I met with the warm embrace of ambrosia, the anonymity of the self separating, like a locust from it’s thin papery larvae luggage, and I spread my wings, falling gracefully from the outer bark of inauspicious surroundings into the warm romantic breeze of altered consciousness. The cacophony of surgical sounds rippled through my cortex and transformed into an unbroken ocean upon which I stood, a sea snake with scaled skin coiled and contemplative, reposed in it‘s pre-shed state, then suddenly I was a Portuguese man of war pirouetting down into the smeary blue depths of unconsciousness. Five…four…three… I tired hard to hold on, opening my eyes one last time meeting with golden gilded smile of my sleep keeper and the corona of a salty half inserted sun.

Black is a word too big to fit into the box in which I was buried. I laid for ten hours, unresponsive beneath the bale umbra of unconsciousness and lost to an unaccountability so profuse and profound that the deepest trawlers and draglines could never touch bottom or snag a survivor from that nadir of nothingness. There, at the bottom between oblivion and abyss, my body laid in suspension like a lipid buoyantly bobbing between two worlds. The one that hurt to touch, and the other one waiting to receive me like a deep blue embrace.

After the operation, I never really woke up. It was a slow ascent, a surfacing, a decompression back into reality where the pain issued and ebbed from an unidentified source; rising within like bubbles from the seal of something broke. I was wrapped in blankets and set to thaw under a set of pale fluorescent pillars that sizzled like mist or speakers unspoken through. Over the intercom doctors were paged and cryptic codes were corresponded in grated voices that sounded like transmissions from Mars. As the anesthesia lifted from my limbs and released me to the custody of corporeal sensations I attempted to speak.

I tried to call out but the air escaped without inflection. Panicked, I tried again and encountered a clot of congestion knotted and lodged in my throat from ten hours of intubation. Taking in air around the obstruction and clenching my throat tightly in an attempt to cough, I thrust the nest of callused crimson and gelatinous grief from my hull until my mouth overflowed with the stuff. A nurse responded to my distress, firmly placing an oyster colored pan beneath my chin and telling me to cough. She asked me to rate my pain using a scale of one to five. I held up five fingers then slumped further into the sheets as I watched as she injected narcotics into my IV line.

If truth is a road, then pain is a way back and scars are not testimony to truth or fact, but to how we once felt. I had felt nothing there in that darkness of an unaddressable world, not the cold steel table ready to resist my stains nor the bulge of my newly stitched navel – not even the relief of a retired, unwanted former self snipped away. And, suddenly, as the slow drip of drugs smuggled back across my borders, I was back at the bottom of the abyss with the creepy antennaed crustaceans and pale fish, floating beneath myself, beneath the pain of plastic surgery and magic tricks gone awry. From my box, my separated and sawed-in-half-self sown back together again, I stared upward through the vitreous bottom water and tried one last time to touch the surface where it always seemed to hurt the worst.

Often, I hear people discussing their ‘hopes’ in a fashion I find eerily similar to how we speak of the departed; they speak from a source of sentimentality, blind optimism, habituated reverence, and spiritual angst. Hope accomplishes nothing; it is an empty wish without an agent and/or agency. It acts like an anesthetic or an analgesic for those who fear and refuse to confront reality – those who refuse to take action or assert themselves. Hope is a vacation-land where the weak and resigned seek refuge; a retirement home for those who have ended or surrendered their wills, passions, and pursuits, settling to live vicariously through the lives and stories of others (those who don’t require hope)… Hope is what we cling to when we lack experience and or knowledge, it is a sort of celebrated ignorance. Like religion for people in prison, hope is all that’s left for the disenfranchised and dispassionately bereft.

Humankind’s most haunting and harrowing nightmares have been playing out in war’s theater for centuries. Tyranny, brutality, and naked aggression (under the guise of diplomacy) have become boring war cries of cliche; commonplace concepts used as cannon fodder in media and motion picture. We not only accept it and surrender to it, we expect it and yawn in its myriad of painted and decorated faces. What happens when we’ve become inured to violence, apathetic and divested of sexual desire; fearless beings besieged by anomie?

What will motivate us when the dark, macabre and taboo have been co-opted by every sitcom and Sunday advertisement? We live in a world, in a time where nothing shocks or induces fear (aside from visible signs of aging, obesity, and monetary loss). My belief is that nothing should shock, except the realization that we’ve committed our lives to the construction and perpetuation of lies. Lies that have lost their charms and powers of persuasion, for me at least. So, if fear is truly the heart of love, then oblivion is the heart of happiness and I am in retirement from both.

I cast out beyond the bank of reeds
into the cool dark depths where sunken catfish kept.
The muddy bottom of the lake bed
like a basement floor – full of things that crawl.

I thought back to the time when I was ten
watching Houdini’s water torture escape upside-down
from the foot of my bed.
Tony Curtis, the handcuff king
drowning – dangled by a broken ankle.

As the rod tip bowed
and the bait bell clapped
I rose to my feet – head full of rush
and I reeled in the worm
wet and limp, broken at one end.

I remembered feeling the bulge of dirt beneath my nails
as grass roots gave way and I thrilled with the thought of dying,
of being dead.

I remembered burning the feathered, black bodies of birds
behind the big oak at the edge of our property that bore obscenities
scratched in with a pocket knife I had stolen from my father’s tackle box.

The stray cat I had coaxed with a bowl of milk.
how the cinder block from the creek split his skull in two equal halves
as the last bit of milk swirled with red into a rosy pink.

I remembered cutting into my own flesh with a paring knife
from my mother‘s apron – the warm draw of blood
like cherry filling oozing from the seams of a freshly cut piece of pie.

I remembered holding my best friend
beneath the brown, stained waters of Sulfur Pond
the smell of shore mud stirred from the struggle.

I remembered finding my grandfather’s German Mauser
and seating its muzzle against the roof of my mouth,
working its smooth action as an erection warmed
the insides of my thighs.

I remembered rummaging through the wreckage of fall woods
where my father and I once hunted together,
clad in red flannel and camouflage as we stalked through thickets and spoils
abiding an indifference responsible for the shame and secrets of most men.

We warmed our hands between our legs and spoke brokenly
as two cups of coffee steamed together as one.

I returned to those woods late last week, ten years later, like a faint echo
frozen at the foot of a double-trunked oak,
overlooking a flat of persimmons whose fruit laid spoiling on the forest floor.

I spotted the shape of a man.
I didn’t mistake him for a brother, for I never had one
and if it had been my father his feet would have fallen
heavier and further apart.

I raised my rifle – looking through the scope
where simple division was calculated by crosshairs
where his head was divided into four equal parts.

He crossed over a small creek, then turned toward me – lighting a cigarette.
He had the stenciled face of a man who sold insurance and vacationed
with his wife and kids somewhere warm, somewhere else.
He didn’t belong there.

I steadied my forearm on my knee and sealed shut, my left eye
so there’d be no witnesses.

With my teeth, I pulled the glove from my right hand
so I could feel the sting of the trigger against the pink tip of my finger.

As I clicked the safety forward and slowly squeezed the 5lb trigger
I thrilled at the thought of killing and being killed.

His knuckles were mounds of meat
buried deep beneath the thick skin that covered over his hands like hide.
I wondered how a hand that large could ever hold a face?

Gray hairs, like wires, and snares bristled the backs of his hands.
The backs of his hands.
Some of my fondest memories still stick in those snares.

I wonder, how many legs have I chewed through over the years?

I have found no truth in dreams
or department stores
no answers in the acute awareness
and sobriety of Sunday’s psalms.

Like bombs beneath cars
we ride and count down.

Are we there yet?