Ill-Calm

The shadows fall back
allowing a glimpse
through the now-clear partition
at the seething as sharply focused
as if below a microscope:
the anger, the unrest, the anxiety
that, when pushed in
as a balloon can be pushed in,
billows out somewhere else.

The pills subdue.
A certain directness,
rapacious freshness of first-hand hell
making of the need to smile
a whistling past the graveyard
where undead things don’t even sleep,
but creep in waiting.
Buried in one grave they crawl upward,
burrowing in soil and sod of dreamscape.

Pill-calm is ill-calm.
This tic-ing of the eye
was not there before,
or the spasms of the bicep,
or the twitching of the thigh.
The beast must have air
and so surfaces for it
in one way or another
usurping what it demands
from my precious, meager supply.