Anaesthesis

I couldn’t have pushed him that hard - I was walking fairly slowly, carefully squeezing my way through the vertical bodies - and so I chose not to apologise, and sat at the back of the coach. I repel the remnants of discomfort by re-enacting the incident in my mind, replacing the sounds of industrial civility with that of a nocturne in F-sharp major. Now I’m sat at the back, glad I have found the antidote to modern sociality’s spasms. I look at everything. Alas - how many Winters fit into a single Spring? I walked in holding someone’s hand, but we were never able to agree on where to get off. I suppose I’ll have to wait for spring to pass, but August has arrived, and the cold is still unbearable. Beyond the window my eyes accumulate fragments of lives, always cropped in accordance with the engine’s speed. I notice everything. A dull canvas of disorder composed of estrangement and a well-mannered paroxysm.  These are the works of rationality’s diseased womb - inter-class envy and intra-class brutality. A portrait with no face, an impassionate grotesquery composed of meta-divisions that prevent any big explosion, but multiply the bruises on a woman’s body; or the kids in custody; or the hands leaning on a wall at 4 a.m., struggling to support a body that trembles at withdrawal’s whip. And I am sat here, at the back of this steel sarcophagus, observing silently, and mourning behind death’s back, trapped within the simulated, inhaling the liminal, being sculpted by the amorphous, that which can only be defined negatively, only with reference to what it lacks, and to what it deprives me from. The coach is suddenly filled with spectres: next to a woman putting on some make-up, an encyclopédiste slits the throat of his enlightened vision while he looks away, and over there, a Suffragette is punching her vagina while she cries and curses at her comrades, who are gathered a few seats away, sucking on the fingers of a bodybuilder. And so I must turn my head the other way in order for my eyes not to betray how moist my repulsion is. A red horizon under my jumper has started to fade - familiar itch. And as a tide of desperation overwhelms my iris and then disappears into my beard, I recall fire. The time where claims to the eternal, the infinite, the impenetrably beautiful, would be catapulted in the universe, echoed on the stratosphere and returned back to me, to us, this time in the fatherly voice of Cronus, only to caress our ears and help us get out of bed and make coffee. And I recall a long deceased ontology - upheld as a universal law, a dictum that used to point to a path beyond our beheaded egos - that one night ordered me to say the following: “Buried alive and face down, with wet, heavy soil holding my eyelids shut, and with the earth’s saddest creatures slowly digging a whole on the back of skull, feeling everything that is there to be felt during those moments, while my lungs contract and every muscle is stiff but motionless, in a night with no moon, I will love you”. The coach has stopped. I remember everything. Here, affection is deemed parasitic, and is only allowed to exist upon the froth of an anaesthetic self-restraint, consisting of dictated smiles and tranquilisers; marketised propriety and domestic violence; freshly groomed charm and elixirs of vomit and tears; linguistic prudery and a groping at a funeral. And with a filter clenched between my lips, I pompously but quietly exclaim: “The history of all my hitherto existing Eros is the history of a seed that rots, every time, a few moments after it’s been covered with the soft soil of hope”.

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

You must be a reader. Your poetry filled with story, tale and thoughts.
“The history of all my hitherto existing Eros is the history of a seed that rots, every time, a few moments after it’s been covered with the soft soil of hope”.
The above line was very good. Eros, left us with many stories to be told. Thank you for sharing the excellent poetry. I liked this one.
Coyote