Upside Down and Inside Out

This poem was written in response to the Rattle® Poetry Ekphrastic Challenge for August 2022 and was ultimately not selected. You can find more information here.

https://www.rattle.com/ekphrastic/

Upside Down and Inside Out

I gaze upon this peculiarity

A sketch garnered from an interesting mind

An imagination allowed to run wild, to float free

I muse over it, pour over its lines

Trying to find a meaning

-

And gather from its image

The great wheel of metamorphosis

A transformation and transfiguration

Of creation, of living, of reproducing, of dying

The journey all living things must make

And suddenly I am faced with my own mortality

My own finite existence and the fate that will befall me

-

I turn the image over

Hmm, I must have had it upside down

Right side up, I see a different thing

My head it pounds from this new thinking

I see, in strange detail, a monstrous creature

A worm stuck up a fish’s ass

Vomiting out a mushroom

-

I don’t know

Perhaps I am halfway dreaming

Or hallucinating

Maybe I am drunk on hard liquor

And should lay off the bottle tonight

Submitted under MRB