Why do I do what I do? The ceaseless injection of lethal pain killer designed to numb my soul to the future; the feeling in my hand will be gone in five minutes; will I love my hand that much more when it will not feel like a hand? Not quite a part of me, another extension of flesh not quite me. Not entirely what I expected. Five minutes to go.
I am trying to be part of a minority; I cannot be black, or Jewish, or a woman, or an alien — this is my only alternative. All I want is to look from the outside in without leaving the comfort of my room.
My room’s wallpaper has flowers and between them naked men and women cavort. Both bodies and flowers dissolve upon closer inspection into dots of colour. The world dissolves into a spoon. I dissolve into a glass of water. Five minutes is long gone.
The molecules in a glass of water contain enough space to encompass the future light of an eternity of digression, equivocation and substantiation of a formula so obvious, so simple, that the arcane and hopelessly sophisticated must try it; it must be sampled—if only to say you have done it;
and then you have done it. And done it again. Again. Another done it. Like notches in a glass of water. Slicing into a future of impossible light cone and rod and a spherical song that knows no wrong. Simply goes on, over and over. Until light fades in a glass with a spoon that reflects this moon that lies between all the space in all the molecules in this universe that goes into keeping that glass of water right where this is.
Illusion is the great seductress; the wall is a mirror that allows us to examine the cracks; the curtain rises on the stage, or the world.
And the war? this unexplained…rigorous manifestation of our toxicity?
Our febrile senses,
deluded imaginations,
rotted souls,
so tired, so exact.
Measurement is all I know.
Peterborough Poets 