Septimus in the Arizona Desert--Poem On a Man That Might Have Lived

He sat there in the Arizona heat 

confusing the twinklings 

of the neighbor's poorly tuned guitar

for bright fractures in the sky, 

small peelings back of blue,

for silvery portals, rising and breaking open

like heat bubbles 

in car paint on a sunny afternoon.

But that was not what he was thinking about. That was only the beautiful splintering glass that covered what he was really thinking about. No, he was thinking mainly of his gasping hands, sliding off of the white pseudo-plastic lawn chair, mainly of his wrinkled breaths. How long must he sit in his own decay, he thought, his skin stretched like fly paper snagging moments, hours, years, short lifetimes even (for those that died young, like Susy). A predator of time, he was. Today another conquest. With the tendrils of his mind he skinned his latest prey.

The book that lay beside him seemed to be dying too, from the acid of his fingers, the acid of his thoughts. He couldn't even read it, had never learned, so the words inside were useless moving things he couldn't know, like ants he had squished and collected just to look at, but never to ask their purpose or why they lived. He kept it because the words looked pretty. He kept it because the lines and curves of these letters, these particular words, 

tasted like strawberries

growing dewy in a mountain field, and 

like tree roots, twisting like human spines to heaven,

if tree roots could taste good. 

And even though he couldn't read it, he could feel knowledge squirming in his brain, trying to awaken from its cavernous sleep. Whenever this happened he could smell, 

on the eastward winds, the smell of dusty bookshelves; 

the air smelled of the deliberate neurons of

East Coast learned men. 

He leaned forward, 

stuck out his tongue to catch them, 

in the afternoon light,

orangey with 

enlightenment.

But not even such holy intellectual transubstantiation could save his brain now. It was too busy exploding nerves into a spiral of colors. He knew this would happen one day. They had told him it would, at that clinic where he had gone to get free condoms and got conned into eye tests. He didn't care now, for he was sliding in and out of reality, watching Fourth of July fireworks against the red stone plateaus on the second of May. This was the finale, this was feeling; 

he felt notes of cool music 

picking apart the nerves of his backbone,

He once wondered what death would smell like. Would it smell like 

an empty box, 

negative matter, 

like blackholes

in the cruel extremities of vast

space?

Would he come to a bitter end?

He didn't want to find out. He picked up his book, his delicious book, and set it inches from his swelling pupils. His eyes started going out like television in a storm, fucking up one small fleck at a time. The ants started coming alive now, swirling, jumping on top of each other, bending over backwards, and breaking apart at the middle. God, all he wanted was for death to taste like strawberries in that mountain field and tree roots. The ants had multiplied, mated rapidly, until they covered all of his eyes with their dark bodies. He lay back, under the blinds of his beloved, succulent words. 

The book dropped from his right hand, falling, struggling to fly in the cold winds. It turned out that death didn't taste like an 

empty box or 

negative matter or anything. 

It turned out death didn't taste. 

Or sound, or smell, or feel 

at all.