The Pub

February Campaign

Subaas Gurung

It was a night rain —
Warm, on the late margin of February.
Such as to stir that old, symbiont Monsoon
That will always stalk, camouflaged,
The rustling of my bloodstream.
But the worms lie, naked to fate, on the sidewalk;
I walked in that night rain
And saw them there.

Here a darkish shape;
And I, thinking it a broken twig,
Thought child’s thoughts, to kick it, scuttling across the wet.
A primeval non-reason, a play instinct.
I tested gentle (the misgiving it were worm and no twig) —
But not gentle enough, aflutter in sudden knowing.
A soft body’s rupture under the heel.
I saw head and tail thrash,
Sections of limp trunk angled between.
They regenerate, I know, but I imagined the pain (do they feel pain?)
So again my shoe came down, driving soft body fragments
Into the sidewalk’s sandpaper teeth.
There swept an initial arc of brown dirt,
Like the stroke of a paintbrush.

No more pain: scouring away nerves, the raw tissue —
Now just mud to mud.
And something like fate surged me within-ribs —
Dies Irae in a trembling purge …Dona eis requiem.

February, years twice over. How far and how hard-fought since.
February.     was short after psychology and diagnosis —
A winter marked by the compulsions, by all I feared might damn me.
January I was diagnosed into ascent
And February crawled upward.
It is as always; I am drawn forward by the divine hand.
But I remember a time
When I thought the lithosphere crushed dull my shoulder-blades,
And all earth with its worms was mine to uphold.
Purple beneath the eyes recalled the long thunders of the night;
Friendships were streaks of chroma
— Smiles and locked eyes — across deep tonal dead-space.