The Imposter Syndrome

The Equation of Desire. Martin Soto Climent. Mousse Publishing.

He would always sit ahead of us

In his citric orange T-shirt

Sultry

Against the abandoned air-conditioned classrooms

Made by the Japanese and

Maintained by the miniature birds,

Who often get trapped in lecture-hall limbos.

 

I cannot write him

He’s a plant that does not germinate

Into wishful thinking

Of infatuated hearts, struck by poverty

Of lack.

A lack that begins to define you,

Your illegitimate parent.

 

But here’s a trick, 

Chance a find

you have to look.

Glance upon his quivery brow

Or

the rickety case of criss-crossed legs

That dares to announce

—If just for a second—

The same lack as you

And your

Out-of-the-league desires. 

The dragon’s tail

When Freya was little, her mother was always upset because she knew she would not get to be a part of her future. Not because of any physical ailment, but simply because she knew she would try and she would not be allowed to do so. Like swimming an up-tide.

Of her marriage, her mother could not even picture her own drawing room. It was her aunt’s. An opening hallway. Some guests passing around turmeric-colored rice. Rhythmic plate music. An audience of irregular desert dunes sitting at every piece of flat surface they could find. And whenever she saw herself in this place of future, her sadness was rather pictorial—her mouth turned in an upside-down U, at the sheer in-credulousness of strangeness of her daughter. Of people suddenly deciding to wear their clothes the other way around one day; as if Freya came out of some communal womb, up from the discolored sky. Do babies just fall after all?

She thinks about the word ‘daughter’ that the world created for her mouth to take up. She had not even remotely contributed to its invention. A daughter, because the world says so. But if the world gave it to her, the world can take it back too.

Freya married a painter anyway, in a place with mules circling around the leaking smell of the City trying to push in. Freya’s mother was upset. But then, she was already upset before.

It was as if the mother lived in a non-linear sad-time. Of knowing. Then, living. Of introspecting whether her knowing caused the living. And at last, if it was worth an ounce to give a shit about Freya at all.

She could have gone to business school.

*

In November, it snowed with a smell of woolen hats, florescent lights and falling men.

Trekkahum was a village of smiling eyes. Every second week of November, they stood at the other side of bridge (or whatever was left of it after the yearly slaps of winter-storms), cheering in their brown-velvet clothes and caps. It was a work of art—the whole view around the village—making me wish I was a painter rather than a writer. But here I am your writer in any case, and at the other side of the bridge stood a row of old men with some very rigid shoulder lines. Their silhouettes were dark against the white of snowy winds that blushed white at the normal symmetry of landscapes. It was as if someone had chafed the bridge with the lick of their wet thumb like rainy skies do to the autumn moon. 

Those who stood at the left, their dark contours roughly overlapped upon the distant village-night, in a much more humane bloom. A faint remote planet, it was as I f night was a phenomenon created by spaces between the people. A domestic darkness where snow is ceremoniously cleaned off. But that was the village. Where it was not, an ominous silent stood at the other side of the bridge. It was inconsiderate of human divisions of both night and day, hour or seconds. If you could be here–where I stand, you would have believed  me. The wind was louder than a village full of people.

They fought in the war. Old men of the ‘November Ceremony’ (termed thus for you and me because translations are often appalling) But none of them really understood what it meant. But then, did they knew what war itself meant? Ah, I cannot possibly answer that.  As far as they care, it is the general’s command. A school rhyme.

‘Old men cross the bridge/ Old men cross the bridge when the winter is nigh.’

The bridge was not rickety, as most people are force-fed to imagine. It was a long rock solid boulder. Cement. Originally a pathway for a pipeline. The snow reigned it now. Little hills of snow dunes conspiring to push away the bag of flours that men had lain to let this ceremony pass without any death. Under it, a raging height. Most people think of the heights as empty. Stagnant. But the air at heights have veins, they pop like an athlete’s leg. Each man who stepped on the bridge, stepped on the wind too. It had its cheeks full of ice. Fingers crick. Eyes bat.

And so the men cross.

Cheered by a crowd of people that sounded like a blown-away candle against the magnanimity of mountains that towered above their village.

And so the men cross.

A Ritual.  

After gulping down sips of some rice-wine, they joke. They joke about each other’s death. Cracked skull. Funny shaped limbs. Blood on ice. Winter crackling upon their bald heads. And when some of them do die, they drink some more and wait for the next November to come.

A Gamble.

*

May. Trekkahum. Freya and her painter. It had to be May; Painters color well in a writer’s writing in the summer season.

They sit under the dark cavern. It’s ugly as if full of blisters and bird-shit. Yet ‘they’ wouldn’t be the right term to use. They are divided at the moment. She sings at the opening of the cave like an ancient bird. He sits right in front of her, cross-legged, with his papers and paints hungry for the slanting rays of the giant sun that almost burns his hand. Naturally, he is employing more reds today.

She loves the smell of the damp. She thinks it gives her the tangy-ness of an acoustic song, much more than the bubble-like stomach of the cave that cannot taste her music as she does. It is so very dark, she muses…it could be anything. A wolf’s eye. Endless dark fur of a giant black bear. A star in its deathbed. The viper’s widening jaw. Time.

She senses some movement. She stares and stares. The painter looks up and is irritated by all the staring. He goes back to his work, his hands should not cease.

A man in a grey suit and a woolen fedora hat comes out of the dark of the cave as if it is the most normal thing in the world.

He has a crooked smile. He pays no attention to the painter and sits near the girl. The painter hates his presence but he keeps sitting nonetheless, like a little child who does not know what to do when his mother stops near the billing counter to converse with her neighborhood friend. He puts on his disinterested demeanor and continues to toy with his paints.

The fedora hat man claims to be a magician.Freya is charmed like a little red-cheeked girl. He praises her music and gives her a coin. It is not a roadside-tip. The coin is magnificently worked upon. The painter looks up. It is silver. Moon. It also looks like a dragon that is trying to eat his own tail. The painter had never seen something like this ever before. And he was certain, what he saw, only he could see.

For days, the painter tries to copy this design; he is so obsessed with it. His hands are rummaged with all the stress. His fingers don’t bend well anymore. And one final day it starts, the dragon starts appearing all over the village. Every hut. Under a tree’s rolling chin. In the moon. In the sky. It is beautiful but it is not what the Fedora hat man showed her. The villagers do not like it. But he keeps painting it. He has abandoned all the mountains. The bridge. The falling men. Her eyes. Everything but the fedora hat man’s design.

Somewhere in the mind of some reader appears the caricature of poor Sisyphus. Is it me? Is it you?

And they say, every day he sits in the black-blistered cave and paint one dragon on each blister of this dark space. If you happen to pass by Trekkahum, you will find him closer to the original than I did. He is turning blind but it is no harm because colors come like instinct to him now. His hands move on their own accord. But even still, he cannot perfect the original. And I suspect he already knows that.

A dragon eating his own tail.

*

 

Set of words

Let me read you
 the opposite of poetry.

I pull out a letter knife 
And toy with red-lettered words
Till I no longer have a thirst for the apple juice
Or the Antarctic sky.

Whatever comes up
The blood or blues
I gulp it down with white wine
Until my feet are cold, enough for sleep,
I dream 

And then I weep in poetry. 

Family and friends

The heels sound different in the afternoon. Upon the road that looks like old skin, or the pattern that shows up when she closes her eyes in the night. The sound is not absorbed by anyone. The crowd eats noises until everything is blown-up-white screen. She does not like that.

So is she walking in the naked sun to hear the cluck of her heels? Yes and no.

He was hungry. He had to be fed.

She could have gone in the morning, however. They expect her to wake up in the morning. But afternoon is better. Not just because of absence of crowds but something else.

Oh don’t look at me—I’m not your omniscient narrator. I do not know everything. Sorry for giving out the mysterious-girl protagonist vibe. Well in any case, for you, I do know some things and I do know that she likes the sound of her heels in the afternoon sun. So she chooses the days and does it when she knows the power will go out (I would hire her as my secretary—that good of a planner). But she sees the pattern and it is not hard for her to guess that men in municipal divisions have light bulbs for lunch.

She walks near the pavement; it is elevated till her knees. A lot of shops have their shutters down, they remind her of Japanese fans. I never thought they can look like the Japanese fans. Grace got some imagination. And she is walking so much faster now. She climbs up upon the pavement—better watch out those heels—and enters a dark stairway. Time runs like a sideway canal in here. The stairs look like the stairs they may have for bad people to stay, when they die before their time. A limbo. Damp—not the good damp. A decay. An itch in the walls as if painted with the blood of blown-up yellow bulbs that no one bothers to replace on time. Or at all.

She walks out and inhales so sharp, the woman in the plastic chair raises her eyebrows. Her sister looks at her with an equal concentration.

‘They very well feel like under the sea.’

To the affect, she does cough repetitively and hold on to her waist. But here, the word we are looking for is ‘intrusion’. Both of us. Grace senses it and grows extremely awkward about it. Tries her forced smile with touching-teeth. Their reaction does not change. It is as if they can’t speak.

They sit in an open balcony, like the ones they have in villages where the floor can absorb running water. The door behind them is open but everything inside is really dark. There is no shade over their heads. They sit out in loose floral trousers and their heads just looked too heavy on their heads. There is a newspaper in one of the sister’s hand to wave off the houseflies. Both of their faces look…intruded. But Grace is not here for faces. She has someone to feed. So she does what she always does.

She picks up a scorpion from under their chair. Then a beetle. Geotrupidae. And at last, a grasshopper.

Oh was I giving out the mysterious-girl protagonist again? Well I’ll tell you what, Grace is absolutely disgusted. So much that she screams a little. Then to cover that scream, she jumps to her heels and pretends to loosen her shoes, which she can’t because her hands are full. So she just bends with her palms outstretched as if begging an apology.

‘They must be biting her feet’ one sister explains the other, nodding.

And while she is almost squatting on her knees, she looks under the chair once again and thinks to herself the following line:

There is a snake under the chair. Is it a fucking rabbit hat?

What a line to say to someone, if she could. But the sisters will just laugh. That is, if they can. But Grace is scared out of her wits and I’m disgusted too. I’m disgusted at her capability to hold a scorpion, a beetle and a grasshopper without crushing them to death. But she has a husband to feed. And so it is now her duty.

So she fidgets around with them and stares at the sisters. It is as if she has forgotten what to do with them. For a millisecond, there appears the usual doubt. ‘What the fuck Grace’. But then she remembers to smile. She smiles and asks one of the sisters to drag out the plastic seal-up bag from her purse. The one they usually sell home-made candies in.

It is blue in colour. Somehow they all look more repelling to her in a plastic bag. But there is always empathy in her. Like she would think, would they be getting any oxygen? They clearly aren’t. They are running inside the bag like a PacMan game. How can she put this in her purse? Carry her upon her shoulders? Walk the road? They are all going to die inside her purse very soon.

But she does. She lightly slaps the plastic bag so they settle down and traces her steps back to her home.

She has to cook the lunch and he likes them fresh.

*

The yellow hut-shaped bungalow on the rolling hill. The road wore it like a crown. It looked like a dollhouse. There were waving woods behind it and a misty smell. Towards it left, there was a cluster of blue-sheet slum. They clustered near the streetlight. They made the ground dark. Muddy. As if the woman in the slum who sweeps at people’s houses, carries all their dust into her make-shift home. She has a broken hand but it is plastered. And if you go close, there are sketchpen marks on it.

Grace walks out of the front door but you never see her, it is as if she came from some curving corner. Popping right up on the road. She has a lot of work to do today but her memory and mind makes everything a traffic-accident wreck. Two cars—one way, and causalities. Sometimes more.

She walks near the streetlight into the opposite end, carrying an arm-length stuffed doll. You know the drill. Blonde woollen hair and polka dot skirt. But then she looks at the women with her broken arm and her little girl. She walks over to her and tries to talk to her, not sure if she is old enough to talk. But she surely can because she had sketched a

‘Help

Others.’

With a poorly shaped star, on her mother’s hand. The woman is wearing a green saree and a golden nose ring.

‘Do you go to school?’

The little girl does not say anything and Grace looks at her own hand in amazement, finding in them, the doll that she was carrying without a purpose. She hands over the doll to the girl as if finally, pushing in the last piece of the puzzle. Oh it makes sense, doesn’t it now forgetful Grace?

‘My mother’s sister told me to.’

Grace doesn’t understand a thing the child says. Her mother sways her in her arms and tells Grace that she is young and she only says what she feels like.

It is absurd to Grace. The child. The woman. The woman and the child. The relationship. The little girl cries now. Grace just smiles awkwardly. The woman sways her child some more, she has an indifferent air. She couldn’t care less about Grace. But she stands, airing the child. And Grace cannot understand it. The woman and the little girl. Poor forgetful Grace.

It is absurd, even more when Grace’s son climbs up the street to find her near the streetlight. He looks at her and laughs a theatrical laugh with flared nostrils. It is bizarrely loud. There is rage in his laughter. Bursting out of his forehead, out heavy on the shoulder of his friend where he had collapsed laughing. Grace smiles at him but does not know how to approach him anymore. But then there is her daughter. Like a placard, she appears too. Her face drips with the need. Her mouth stays open as if air could never reach inside it without doing that. But the look on her face is not surprise, it is need. She squats near the old beggar passing right by her mother as if she is no one. A subtle wind that passes by the hilltop, maybe. She is that. But Grace’s daughter barely remembers the color of the house she walks in every day, and here I am romanticising her in the wind. 

There is so much forgetfulness everywhere.

They make conversation. The beggar and the daughter. The old man’s voice is heavy with the sudden knowledge of how trade still dances upon his hand. She needs. She needs. He makes. He gives.

There are incredulous lines on the Grace’s forehead. She smiles some more. There is no one behind her eyes.

 

 

 

 

Camouflage

Yoshitoshi Kanemaki’s Sculptures

Asphyxiation. The town is clean as a chalk. It is the men, the rodents of the empire that roam around on their regal horses in an anachronism, something that just makes my breath itch. Tyrants, however jewelled up, are tyrants. They retard everything in the vicinity. We have some sleeping hut houses here. All their colours faded into a metallic uniformity. But truth be told, we were always dreaming here—that’s how they got us. This was one of those parts of the world where people go to escape their identities. Fucking wishful thinking and a load of crap, that’s what I say.

The blue men on the horses are out on patrol. It feels like they are walking on my neck. My steps pick up their pace even though my age no longer allows it. The curving street seems to shield me. From here the slope rises up. I am near the stairway now—it is a hill covered in stairs. I hold onto the roaring gales when my back breaks. They howl above the town where the silence is no more ringing. But I don’t bother about it. I feel like I can finally breathe. Down in the colony, they had roped up the sun too it seems. It balms my face here at the twirling angle of the stairhill. Probably a bad idea to stick out like a sore thumb. If I can see them, they can see me too. But I think I see some of our own now. No, there is nothing to think, I can see the very lines on their faces. I know for a fact they are our own as if their horses were trotting in a different rhythm. Our kitchen song.

But I do not understand it. If they had to confront the blue men after all, why are they dressed like them? Well if they fucking wanted to intimidate them with all the horses, they still look like they’ve pissed their pants. Two of them stand facing the curving street. They are hiding their faces, but from where I stand, I can see them. One man takes courage and trots to the centre. Him against five blue men who stand in the shade—their horses rocking gently, shifting their weight from one leg to another.

‘Do you have the medicine?’

‘Sir, we would request you to step down from your horse.’

Without losing a moment, the leader of this gang swirls his horse around and run to his waiting men. One of them is a teenage boy. He is crying, but cursing. They all run as blues prepare a chase. Just as they do, the copper haired man on the pastel brown, whistles his officers back. He knows it is a stage. The ship is a set. The waves are made up of third market mist fans. Turbulence. Rebellion. Drama. He wipes his brow and move out of his shade into the impotent sun.

He waits. He whistles.

Footsteps. The teenager from before. He must’ve run all the way back from wherever his friends were hiding. He is no longer wearing the regal blue. An oversized pastel brown T-shirt. Tousled mud like hair. Wind-eaten. The face same as before—crying-cursing. The copper haired man steps down from his horse and goes up-close to study his face. He has to slightly tilt his head to reach the boy’s height. There is a mocking in his manner. He is testing the meat before putting it up on the pan. The teen stretches his left arm out, his jaws locked in submission to the incoming pain.

‘Willy, bring me my kit’, the blue chief has his nostrils all flared up.

Will trots off to the left. Despite the elevation, I can’t see him no more. He is back in minutes though.

‘Thank you Will’, the blue chief exhales like he could finally breathe.

I despise hospitals. But yet I’m familiar with how the doctors go about their routine. Will they be doctors if they are stripped away from their coats and hand-sanitizer odour? I mean it would freak me out to be cut open in a random tailor’s shop. It was indeed a scareshop. The crossroads they all stood must have folded like a cup and all I could see was that man trying to find the right vein to push his injections into the boy. The boy’s lip quivered and before you are pausing for breath, this fucking devil is putting in another one.

‘What colour do you like boy? I have chocolate.’

The third one now. Three injections dripping into the boy’s arm, taped with a black ribbon tape—the ones that athletes used to wear to rebel some wrong.

Seconds trickle like blood. I become the boy. I am as frozen as him. But my jaws are still locked. He is sobbing. It should be over now. But the man has a last trick up his sleeve.

Some kind of screw driver is the only way to describe it. A drilling machine for human flesh. But the boy has stopped sobbing. Perhaps, he is relieved that there will be nothing harsher than this. Certainty is good. Or is it?

Revolution is no fun.

*

She squats on her legs and plays with her hairclip. She is smiling. He had placed a small box on her head and left. The box had this hairclip. 24 carat gold.

The sky is dead as usual and an eagle circles it. Behind her is the open-gapped fence they put outside garbage pits. She plays around with her hair for a moment, daydreaming. Makes two pigtails out of them and roll both of them in a bun, tying them around with the golden hairclip. Gold hairclip.

But there is no time to fix your hair, wash your face or even sleep, these long-long days. They don’t need calendars in this part of the world. Everyday, people like her remember everyday. No time for amnesia or numbness. Short term quickness. On your toes. Cat like—wild-cat like. Sometimes you hunt, sometimes you get hunted.

Or just sleep and die—it’s not that bad, some days she would think. That’s what people used to do here. Sleep and die.

Not today though. Thursday. You have to keep things in motion. 11:45. She was never late. 19^th Block. The building that looked like muck. She learnt some maps. Blonde haired man. As if all the rain fell on only one spot in the town. 11^th floor. Why did she choose the stairs? Black Jacket.

Black Jacket. That’s what they called him. She was going to meet him for the first time. For some reason she put her clip back in her pocket and let her pigtails fall.

‘Black Jacket?’

It really felt absurd when she said it. The girl with the pigtails talking in secret code names. But he just opened the door and stared at her. His apartment looked handsome from what she could see. But she couldn’t see it for long. There was some sort of hunger in his eyes. His teeth were sharp, she knew and he didn’t even smile. But she knew. And she had a job. She had to go through this.

‘Not now.’

He closed the door.

There was ruckus outside the lobby window. The sounds from the road came up as if travelling through tunnel. It felt like listening through a wall, she thought. It was a woman. She was wailing. They had killed her son. Overdose. There had been more than 40 cases of this and they call themselves civilized—the blues? “Vessels for medicines”. How cruelty breaks in some men’s bones, she had no idea.

Black Jacket must be tackling this. When this happens, they personally come to meet the relatives. Often the relatives get violent. The result is predictable.

This is what was going to happen now. The boy had two siblings. Teens. But in times like these, you become a soldier pretty early on. Things were in motion. But unplanned. Unplanned was never good. That is why they had people like Black Jacket, people to govern the outbreaks. Though whatever he was doing wasn’t going to prevent the immediate massacre that could happen. She had to be quick. Cat-like.

She used elevator this time.

The power went out.

*

‘Threy Oceane?’

‘Black Jacket. Yes?’

‘There was bloodshed. That lady. She lived in your building. Thursday? Did you see a girl? Dark hair. Brown coat. Golden clip?’

‘Oh YES. I had fever that day. But of course we can’t have the luxury of that. I did negotiate and saved what I could. But I told her to reschedule. This was before Marcel Red come trotting by.’

‘I see. Sorry for taking your time. I mean I’ve heard a lot about your work…man. You have saved so many lives. I better leave now.’

Black Jacket walks back to his house.

‘Oh and use the elevator.’

He smiles. He does have sharp teeth.

*

Natal

There walked the light into the mist. Intruding. A deep mustard shade—they put hatching babies under those. They glint every night in the nurse’s eyes. Behind her, a dark window. The windows are most silent and the nights always darker in a hospital. It is a night like this. It must be getting weaker, the streetlight under which I walked. The mist nestles around it. It looks like a phantom beehive. An old man’s beard. I walk into the violet color of the night that has dropped to the road. I am under it. I am above it. And if I turn my head back, there it will be again, the light being smothered. Am I a moth?

I am most certainly not. I am a curious girl and there are very busy men in front of me. These are the photographers. Sure they wear Paparazzi hats and raincoats, but they are not your regular ones. These are disciplined. They respect the night; they are the simple stars with twinkling flashlights. An elaborate machine, a pyramid. Each man with a camera covering his face. Anonymous. Inhuman. They face a cardboard door. One they put up at school annual days. I always wanted to go to an annual-day. Can I?

‘No. No women allowed.’

It is not an annual day. They have men inside the hall being not-men. Did you know that French used to have a grand carnival where they let out criminals and madmen and prostitutes. What does a carnival for men without their male society will look like? Nothing they would let me see.

I circle around. Waiting.

It begins. The photographers collapse. There is chaos. There are other people like me, circling around. I see my friend and she has to shout to make herself audible. How does it feel to be not behind your eyes? She makes me feel that way. Her hand is heavy on my neck. And the carnival inside is getting louder. There are all emotions present inside. Hysterical laughter, wailing, wrathful voices. But she must not let me see. There is blood inside. A pool of ketchup maybe, diluted with water. They are throwing it beyond the walls. It is flying in the air. She is saving me. Pushing me away. I want to fall it on me though. To wipe off the afternoon from me. It’s crashing. How can it crash? The spillage is heavy on our heads, as if from the sky. What are they doing? I scream.

‘They are enacting the womb’, someone says.

I stand in the night, no longer silent.

It is done.

There is only mirth inside the hall now. For the first time I can even see the barrier. They’ve dropped their curtains. They look like doctors after delivering a baby of a giant. There comes a man with blood dripping off like sweat, tailing under his hair. He is exceptionally charming. Awash. My friend knows him. They smile at each other in congratulations and stare at me. There are papers in his hand. He’s asking me for the toll. What toll I say?

‘For watching’

I am proud of understanding most things in my life. This was certainly not one. My friend accuses me of something I can no longer hear.

How do they win?

Through confusion.

 

I had to go. I had to go.

 

[Based on an actual dream]

Ebb

 

My father sleeps at the edge of the bed adjacent to a chair. Upon that chair, there sits a man with a dark horse-shoe jawline. His collars have little lilies, scattered across the cloth in some harmony. Whenever I visit the room to take out one cold water-bottle from the fridge—cool water is the lady of the night—I see this man with his inhuman straight back, staring right at me. I freeze for a second and then look at his unblinking eyes in the shimmering yellow light of the fridge. You may ask, what is new here? If you were to sleep next to an old shoddy window; sure you’ll see the nearby tree growing out a hand in the beating wind, too.

The difference between you and me, however, is that you get under the covers and say oh, but it is the mere wind, oh, it is the mere rain. I on the other hand, invite the monsters in. I move the refrigerator door just enough to let that tall man’s eye glint in the dark as he sit like he’s been sitting there from the beginning of time. There is an art in conjuring monsters from the nothing. After all the man in my father’s chair is nothing but my dead grandmother’s handbag—not there for sentimental purposes but mostly because things move around in my house with certain amnesia. And in the society we live in, I have become interested in things.

Either people eat them up or some nook drag them down where house-objects retire and dream till their owners are left to do the same in the graves until after all, someone new develops a fancy to these ghosts. Or worst, being munched into paper mache is one way to go. If your things are you, then you better hope you’re not getting picked up for that.

I do that sometimes. I imagine the life of objects fast forward to hundred years. What if there are more survivors than just cockroaches. All these inanimate things that have a sacred river in which they all flow, sometimes caressing each other or other times, singing campfire songs with joined hands. A blue handkerchief wiping off the sweat off a red wallet. Their masters despised each other when they were alive, but here we are.

Rivers into a sea.

A plethora of dead people’s objects. Enough to keep me awake in the dark.

Northern Winds

Jakub Schikaneder’s Snow (Twilight in Winter) 1899

Then

happened a soft autumn day

where I let my untamed foot fall

off the silk edge of my ordinary bed,

to let it fight with the tarnished wooden door

hunch-backed by a snoring inverter

when past the dust-coughing jail-skins,

there came a ruffle from the

dark of tall surmounting trees

necromanced

nodding outside,

breathing on my ankles,

in all oddity of the oncoming winter.

 

Then I had dug under the culture’s paws

Asked them, of what of the Winter gloom—

That gentleman

So languid upon my prickling skin,

In me,

He had protected life.

 

 

Now

There rests a diabolical caress

Of sandpaper bed-sheets

Till my feet are sore

From the coaling livers of the winter-verse.

Oh, to look for light switches in the dreadful dead-dark,

Paranoid chants that the curtains must not move—

All my sacred pathos intruded

Into the

Red demonstration of corpse-like darkness.

 

Do the old—as the Laker Poet once cried—must only lament what can no longer be felt?

 

Again

In my heart, I invite

The night

I had shut down my famished words

Again, a prayer

To be fertilized with meaning, I ink

I conjure up my sprite:

In the hearth of a breathing cold

The tepid haunt of a sea nymph

Misplaced

Upon one changing breeze of the earth

Colluding with mist,

Into a body of unknown

That I uncloak, even though I am dressed

In great perspiration

I try

Once again

to reclaim the night.

 

Author Notes

I had an epiphany just now. I actually had a dream about different models of ceiling fans today–funny that I must write a poem dictated by the winds.

‘Something watches and stirs in the dark, it is alive.’