Your chronic discontent:
A painful goad
Is lodged bone-deep.
An ancient rasping shrapnel grates:
The biologic spur.

All urgency assuaged:
The family fed
Beneath safe roof.
A smooth and easy groove inworn,
Yoked to your duty’s course

But somehow still you chafe
Against your polished seat.
Dream-reach for apple’s glint, tip-toed
A top rung ladder stretch
Wobbling unstayed in tree-top breeze
Deep swaying canyons yawning underneath

The gnawing urge beckons
And penetrates your sleep.
Awake with jolt to pale blue eye,
Limbs wrapped in twisted sheets.
Compelled from bed, on haunted quest
To wasteland glen, conjure a new conquest

Look down to see the wrinkled sky:
Dense midnight curds, splay silver-edged,
Reclusive moon imbued,
Creep o’er the seething surface, cauldron brew.

Black, massive bulbous iron squats
On bloodshot coals. Bare wisps of smoke
Curl in the pre-dawn chill:
The hoarded incubating heat betrayed.

And then a glimpse from deep within
The potion’s dregs, cracked bones and sludge,
Gleams gold through viscous scum.
Behold the glowing bulge your spell invoked.

With fascination, stare into the pot:
Upheaving orb of crackling crust,
Distending cinder plates
Crack fractal seams,
Release the molten fury bound within.

Time was, you’d square to any daunting threat.
But with your incantation loose,
Tumescence run rampant,
Implacable,
You quail against indomitable brunt

Slow motion surge impacts, peels back your skin,
Strips off your flesh. You’re whittled down
To glowing filament.
The swell rolls past,
You stand, rejuvenated in dawn’s light.