| House of the Dead |
[Aug. 8th, 2023|10:00 pm] |
Hiding, for age-old reasons, I see his figure carrying piss and blood in wine glasses in a hospitable stance in the hospital.
I scamper home ahead of him through old Avotu made Miera with youngish people doing youngish things in the face of the stupid ones with their Opinions: all more-or-less an act of self-conscious differentiation.
On heading into the old building, disintegrating like an old tooth in the skull of the city, she exits into the shadowed courtyard and smiles at me: ages in the widening of knowing eyes, and in the spirit that raises her sad face like tired wet sails, a sudden wind gusting from some swell of the invisible. All over so quick, it hurts. She is dead, after all.
I hold the door for him. ‘Did you see her?’ I ask him in the stairwell. ‘Was it her sister?’
He shakes his head, but I had seen him look, stand, and stare at her retreating form “Does she have a double?” I badger him, or myself, or both of us.
We climb the stairs in the dead house to a balcony, where, one floor above, I see myself - domestically - through a window. No privacy - like a digitally-fed recording of thought and action played in real-time to anyone who had nothing better to do: like this - a curtain opened of my own free conceit.
I shouldn’t be able to watch myself, I tell him: it is not a mirror. He absorbs my revelation but doesn’t pause his organisation of the bodily fluids on he table for the sitting.
“So we can’t be here, you see? So she isn’t here.
None of us are here.”
Like some tribal souls caught in the snatch of photography and then resuscitated in the fields of thoughts, and then rising in what, at least, from here in the House of Dead are clearly idiot stances: faces traduced by some second, third-hand blithered Opinions that you could trace, if you were to scamper back through some swipe of time, to some almost mundane black magic absorbed in solitude in a bar in a quiet street of the living. |
|
|
