insight into a deliberately damaged consciousness

cursed and unreachable,
he’s knit from silver hair,
frostbit and fossilized

with black tree bark
for skin. all calloused and rugged,
and ancient like the moon

he stands; cross-stitched
with empty heights that echo pain
into his scarred abdomen.

like an unfeeling sunrise
his eyelids reveal the eclipse
of poison-yellow irises

who’ve dawned both rise
and fall of cherry-petal life.
a wall of icy crystal

keeps him numbly wake
and slicing through the land,
in apathy and unabashed -

butcher and hero,
wolf of the stalactite-toothed creek,
the untamed predecessor

of Victor’s monster.
Odysseus’ cunning wit
without the heart for home

displaces his longing
and makes deafening the silence
of his nocturnal jactitations

from that needle-thin itch
that can’t be scratched
in the ripple-covered looming hole

through the back of his skull,
which no eye rolls backwards enough
to gaze inside and solve.

under the hardened mantle
of stranger, night, black beetle
he yearns, directionless,

and hates to sense
his heart erupt and subside
for that and for those

who he unable is to hold.