Visible Man

If my skin was transparent,
like fine-spun glass,
or breathing see-through plastic,
like a living visible man,
what hidden wonders
would be revealed?

If one were to pick through
the piles of meat
like a butcher removing entrails,
what deep-sea phantasms
would be illuminated?

If you peek behind my lungs
and have a look-see under my liver,
you'll find a wild, feral creature,
fur-covered and slippery,
bursting with juicy, throbbing life;
but immobilized, held motionless
in a dry box,
a plain.rectangular coffin.

How long had this
fierce, pulsating force of nature
been kept in suspended animation?
I looked at the chart
and checked over the dates.
The containment had occured early on,
as soon as the first instructions had been given
and the first diagrams drawn up.
Domestication was deemed impossible,
so the piss and vinegar furball
was beaten into submission,
and walled up alive
like a monk or nun
punished for their untamed carnality.

When I first discovered
this amazing animal inside of me,
it called to mind caged tigers at the zoo,
pacing back and forth in their tiny cells,
kinetic energy which should have been
exploding, shooting them across
open spaces like a canonball,
trapped, suffocated,
simmering and stewing
in their atrophied muscles.

Tenderly, I unwrapped the frozen beast,
like a petrified candy bar,
fur, feathers, claws and teeth;
and it began to twitch and jump
and flop about violently
like a landed mackeral,
it's pop-eyed head held down
to the chopping block.

Flinging the rabid foam of it's trauma
in all directions, rib cage bellows
pounding and shuddering,
it flailed and fumed and spewed,
until I stroked it and soothed it,
whispering kind words,
and it's spastic writhing subsided,
and it was calm and still,
purring with power
like an idling motor,
eyes blazing super-novas,
a nuclear chocolate soda
fizzing and bubbling starshine;
the macrocosm in the microcosm.

And now that my atavistic
sacred-cave spark
has been rekindled,
my spiral-coiled connection
to the center of each grain of sand
and the core of every sun,
who knows what
dark and sublime mysteries
will present themselves.

And like a cow with it's
multitude of stomachs,
I wait, as joyously expectant
as a mother-to-be,
with my two hearts
beating exuberantly.

David W. Aronson
November, 2005