Ernie Cordell's blog: "Verse"

I walk the broken bottles on bare feet,
The throbbing splinters of shin by my belt are bound,
Through some stinking urban alley to a narrow street,
They pierce shattered, swollen ankles with a wrenching sound.
Knees carved with crushing pressure clawed at bone beneath
Snapped sinews held by muscle rigor made the pieces meet
And hips too huge to carry tore at large grinding joints
Where blood from fleshy tears mixed with bilious leaks.
What would have been vomit on a better day
Gave a pungent scent to bits of bowel exposed.
From gut to tortured spine broken ribs ripped their track
The lurching sway shooting pain like lightning down my back.
In a laboring heart, burdened rythmns searing oozing wounds squeezed
Fluids through the bleary eyes in a gelatin that once was face
To the chest where burning lungs in squeaking gasps wheezed
Through broken nasal cartilage where humours trickled at a steady pace.
Broken shards of tooth sliced through tumescent rings of punctured lip
And a splotchy ruby trail splattered dirty cardboard in a metered drip.  
A herniating brain pounded at a palate with no impulse for a spew
From a gullet blocked by gagging masses of a bloated tongue.
When I say I suffered longer than an hour, a day, a week, 
You look on in disbelief, but I know wherefrom I speak, 
It was longer than a month, a year, a decade or a score.
Piecemeal were organs assaulted by the rounds of Mercury's chariot
But with unyielding passion and a fervent faith I struggled more
In each step on the torturous, winding route to seek that grail
I watched the goal grow ever distant and my energies exhaust
Until love stumbled on the path where I saw all efforts fail
In the moment when the fates took you from me and hope was lost.