labyrinthitis

A friend asked why I haven't posted more of my own poems on Ictus. Good point. This is one that appeared on Nth Position last year:

LABYRINTHITIS

As Jonah is said to have lived inside the whale
an ant lives inside me, lost in the coiled Underworld
of my interior, struggling for release. He tunnelled


down my earhole as I slumbered through
the nightshift; tiny explorer bent on expanding
the territories of Antdom, and claim lebensraum


for the coming swarms. My ear-drum
suffered no perforation,I dreamed some new slang utterance
was entering my vocabulary, relaying its urgent echo

towards my brain: he tinkers on the ossicles
in passing, clanging the anvil with bone-hammer;
he helter-skelters the slippery cochlea,


crash-lands in the maze of the inner ear,
bearings dizzily lost. Three days and three nights now
he has haunted my polluted canals, his lamentations


a tinnitus in my skull: what else
could this restlessness be, this whisper
that breaks my focus in whatever I attempt


and has me ranging these night streets myself
an ant, an ant inside a whale, seeking an exit, a
way through: to crawl inside your sleeping ear and speak