...Salvation...

The expression 

goes something like, 

“It makes my skin crawl 

just to think about it.” 

And yea, so I try to visualize 

   just this “it”. 

You know… 

Skin crawling. 

Not my own.   No. 

Someone   else’s   flesh.

And this said psoriatic skin 

could be an entire foot, 

   heel to toe, to toe 

   attached toe total. 

Could be a segment of 

forehead, forearm or    foreskin. 

Perhaps one complete bulge o’ buttock. 

And the set premise and comprehension 

of one lone individual standing there 

with only that skin of one cheek crawling… 

well, that itself makes myskin crawl. 

To suffer the slingshot and 

projectile vomit oration of 

another’s outrageous misfortune. 

To titillate torment by 

taunt of tarantula touch.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat 

and yet, no matter the ample selections, 

not a single variation 

will pass the cat’s approval. 

I myself have grown rather attached 

to this issue of epidermis 

and contrary to my past notoriety, 

there remains a defined limit as to 

just how far I will denude myself. 

That my inner visceral being 

contain its intestinal self by way 

of a goo retaining sheath 

is really for the best of all 

   visually concerned. 

That the most beautiful woman 

this world has ever known 

is somehow deemed the lesser  

because her skin has been removed 

seems nothing more than 

   base misogyny. 

And here, pending the weight 

of one’s carnal coital decorum, 

the skin at the edge of one’s mouth 

will crawl up, 

or adverse sag down. 

Sad sad frown. Woe,

a grimace of grievous demeanor. 

And here I feel compelled 

to express the somber fact 

that my mother     was dying. 

She with total renal relapse. 

She of chronic kidney collapse. 

And she? 

She would choose to deny dialysis and 

the discomfort of its fluid redemption. 

Oh, her soul, yes. 

Her soul of course. 

But not that of her flesh. 

No maintenance of her mind. 

These she would decline. 

Her soul defined sublime, 

whilst her thought 

confined to rot. 

She in degrees of degradation. 

Her soma now gone sump. 

There in some previous moment 

    of cognitive clarity, 

this woman in whole my mother, 

had of sound mind decided 

she would not submit to the pain 

which is the process of kidney dialysis. 

And there with that decision… 

Her submission… 

Her admission to the end, 

she within this self-ordained 

sentence of psychosis,

relents to this tsunami of sewer sepsis 

which becomes the 

harrowed her in whole. 

And though the rising tide of toxins 

manifest as insatiable itch, 

it is the toxic terminal taint 

within her cesspooled cerebellum 

which soon festers as dank delirium. 

And she there begins to hallucinate. 

And those visions born of psychosis 

come to coalesce around 

her most intense sensation: 

the crawling of her skin. 

And there in her eyes, 

what does she behold but 

a vision of both spiders and centipedes 

scurrying to and fro, and up and down 

the length of her arms and legs. 

There in her fetid meld of mind, 

abides a horror of which I as loving son 

am powerless to combat. 

Salvation.

She within an entire lifetime 

of Catholic devotion, 

yet she must wait until 

the pending moment of death 

to receive her extreme unction. 

And I… 

I want this loving god 

of which she so adored 

to grant her salvation now, 

yet what is she but biologic? 

What is she but 

defective flesh and blood? 

And the hospice nurse tells me 

that for the failure of my mother’s kidneys 

there is no known drug of which 

might bring her blessed redemption. 

No psychotropic of any sort 

which might convert this crawl 

of spider and centipede unto 

an anointment of winged cherub 

and the flutter of angelic seraphim. 

Lo but said god so long revered 

bequeaths upon her sentient skin 

a plague of pestilence. 

Indeed here upon arrival 

at life’s lingering denouement, 

he bestows a infestation 

of skittering insect hell.

A divinely anointed hell from which 

its rancid release at moment of death, 

I would therein define as heaven. 

And that this is the way 

a blessed life is 

divinely decreed to end,  

in turn makes my skin crawl.

Ó2019 Jack David Hubbell