Crunch a grape between your teeth.
This is the sound of an eye bursting.
I should know; I heard it in my head
Once. Do you know how it is,
When the needle draws ever closer
To your eye, and you try to blink it away,
But he has fixed your eye open,
And a giant eats a grape inside your head.
"If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out."
I felt it deflate in its emptying socket,
And later he came with a spoon of some sort,
And scooped out what looked to me
Like an empty white bag, with oozing pus
Inside it. "Look," he said.
"This is your eye. Now you are blind."
Did he know? My other eye remains,
Fixed narrow in its socket,
Anticipating another needle, and later another spoon.
The empty socket ached for a while,
Pining away for lost eye and lost completeness.
Eventually I acquired a false eye,
And the empty socket no longer pains me
So badly as it did, excepting rainy days.
Tonight I will go to sleep and wake later,
My hand will be pressed to that empty socket in a memory of pain.
Do they know? Do they know?
((Note: This is part of a semi-series of poems, mostly centering around Muraki. So far there are two: this one and t' other one, which may be found through my profile; it's the most recent story below this one.
((These poems are my attempt to venture back into poetry. Unfortunately/fortunately, insanity is an exceedingly good subject for poetry. Before you intimate that I have some kind of ... 'thing' for him, I say, "Yes, I'm a sick bastard. However, it's not like that."
((A for effort on my part -- I wrote this while ostensibly working on an essay. Yay effort.))