Fentanyl Landscape by Dennis Moriarty

The first incision plunders the depths
Of despair.
A scalpel of wind slicing my head,
Lifting the flat of my skull,
Peeling it back, a flash of blade illuminating
The darkness within.
My thoughts become roadkill, exposed
To cruel beaks
And crueller aspirations of the crows.
They grip me
In a headlock of claws, my heart pounds,
Roaring like a river in full spate,
My body twitches like an amphetamine junkie
Coming down.
Each in incursion is brief and brutal, flesh
Stripped from my thoughts,
Slithers of lesser meaning swallowed
Without chewing,
Morsels of a wider phycology devoured
Without tasting.
I awake to a fire burning in my head where
My brain used to be,
See through a gap in the curtains a murder
Of crows,
Dozing, plump and sated in a tree, the bones
Of my thoughts
Pecked clean and scattered across the Fentanyl
Landscape of my mind.

Dennis Moriarty was born in London, England and now lives in Wales. Married with five grown up offspring Dennis likes walking the dog in the mountains, reading and writing.

In 2017 he won the Blackwater poetry competition and went to county Cork in Ireland to read his work at the international poetry festival. Dennis has had poems featured in many publications including Blue nib, Our poetry archive, Setu bilingual, The passage between and others.