Poem Ending with Lines by Yeats

I’ve got a dark force swimming inside me
sort of like the Beast from the Black Lagoon

or the famous statue of Lacoön with
everyone’s limbs entangled in snakes

and its phosphor eyes and sulfur breath
are searching out the little blobs that are

trying to kill me

as it swims through all my
pipes and passages ransacking

(sadly) even some of the good Samaritans inside who just
happen to be nearby where the cowardly

dastards are dividing with no
rhyme or reason

and the dark force this time is my
new lover injected by angels in

scientific smocks and its gnashing
teeth are looking for detritus to bite

(I’ve always wanted to use that
word in a poem I pronounced

debt-tritus after my California mother’s pronunciation
but in a poem New Jersey’s Allen Ginsberg once read

he pronounced it de-try-tus so it’s
up for grabs)

slithering through every crack and opening
putting its tiny massive head where

no light shines to find the floating
crap game of cancerous cells where they

attach themselves this time at the
base of my only tongue

and smash them to smithereens
foreclosed and forgotten

dispelled in the drainage system of my
only body back into the

black sea from which they came
the both of them finally reduced to a

tiny point of light above a sloshing
brackish harbor

water lapping with low sounds by the shore
in the deep heart’s core

5/29/12 (from Down at the Deep End)

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