January Exam

Not quite prose, not quite poetry.

My mind is a washing machine. I’ve got Woolf and dungarees and the colour green on a fast spin-cycle, shaking all that’s below and above and around. Or is it a vacuum? A space in which exists nothing but potential for anything?

I am calling up my witnesses one-by-one, and dropping pennies in a well. I am delivering my evidence, and I am wishing to see a face that tells me anything but how long I have. I can see it in the creases of his eyes. They’ve got darkness flaunting in the pastel greys of their folds. It is the absence of light and colour that is most telling. He doesn’t think I can do it.

I sit with two feet lined-up to the over-lacquered tiles of wood beneath them, and an elbow rested aimlessly on the desk. I am tapping a pen. I can’t think of anything. There is nothing there.

It must be a vacuum.

Perhaps if I inhale and exhale deep enough-- contract and swell my modest lungs enough-- I will breathe in something other than the image of the weathered crest of his head as he pets the ground with his leathered feet, or the sound of anything but the pigeon in the rafters, cooing for refuge, cooing for company. Or, perhaps, I’ll breathe in oxygen.

If only poetry was air. I’ve got Atwood, Plath, and Rilke either side and opposite me. Ginsberg is probably in the corner, sobbing into his wine. He wasn’t invited. This is my mind’s tea party, and I’ll invite who I like.

This isn’t in my question.

I don’t have time for tea parties. I am a rabbit and his watch. Yes, that is exactly who I am. And now I’m drawing ears on the punch-holes in my margin. Wake up. Readjust. Cross your feet and undress your pen.

But the time is gawping at me, mouth or hour open wide.

Why do they examine us in January? It is far too cold. At least Winter is warmer than silence. I cough. The pigeon coos. The invigilator soars over the floor, skimming it like a bird of prey, his stride whispering to his jacket tail. Swoosssh. The sole of a shoe and hard, polished wood converse percussively. Clop clop? Clap, clop. My pen says nothing; it listens. The time stalks on.