The Glassblower
What I mean when I say “back pain”…
while I slept
a glassblower carved out the muscles at the base of my spine–
tossed them into a furnace and pulled them out with a blowpipe,
spinning my obliques and lumbar into a gently glowing gob.
with a calibrated wrist
he tilted my molten muscles just right,
melting the gob back towards me in a snakelike swirl,
like the sun itself was dripping slowly to the Earth
forming a single extended spiral that faded from orange to yellow as it cooled.
when I stirred
he slid my muscles back in their pocket against the pelvis–
the giant gob of hardened muscle resting on a single spiral,
like an icicle expected to support snowpack.
of course it snapped.
casting shards of a star to plummet into tissue,
with the hardened heat of a thousand burning missiles,
which is what I felt upon waking.
