Artwork: An Inconceivable Terror by Bill Wolak

Never Better
Donna Hooley

I get absorbed by the event:
Even as I agonize,
My lungs strive to breathe in
The quicksand of it.
I feel it climb toward my forehead,
First up over my tilted chin,
Then my mouth,
My eyes all wild, darting side to side.
It closes over my head,
Negating me,
As if I were not still there,
Entombed alive,
Like Stapleton in the Grimpen Mire
Or the Mummy in his winding-clothes.