Lotte L.S.
Not abandonment
but faces on a wall. This is where our history begins.
At the dark room’s darkest edge, cascading
lilies are your constituents your constituents are
pets: useless creatures,
we have since shaped them into strange humans.
If understanding a thing is finding a familiarising metaphor for it
— to use our consciousness to ‘see’ into the consciousness of others —
then the agony of the tail end is our agony, not the worm’s.
This tenderness is half envious.
And the cleft in the cave wall (the little cave within a cave)
I meant it to trigger a ‘reality check’ to be able to say it
(or at least « think » it)
in the darkest room in the darkest corner at the darkest sea’s edge.
Or so I have imagined that. Before, not now, long ago,
a lifetime, a journey, an eternity, a whole fucking forever ago
“we met”. In the warm pockets of the Ice Age, the thunder of woolly rhinos running past.
Ferns splayed their arms out
as if to mimic synchronised swimming dancers.
All these years I had assumed life could be sweeter, if I could just remember:
the song you would sing as to send me to sleep.
But what is a rock face —a cave— for the masters of The Louvre?
Lullaby of Ninja airfryer, lullaby of Little Chef, lullaby of the ceiling
at [ ], where I would occasionally look up and see the stars
poking through the damp plasterboard, cascading lilies at the hospital waiting room
blooming while she [ ] gave birth. (Is ‘merging’ the right word here? snarling? swarming? writhing? The way an earthworm does from the tail end of a razorblade.)
There is not much we can do about metaphors, except to state that that is precisely what they are.
At night the states of being drag their ankles, the awful laughable parody
of the world, this world becomes indigestible. I’ve met the new masters,
I’ve seen their tools: they call them ‘sleep,’
they call them ‘dream,’
they call them ‘forgetfulness’.
Against the long opposite wall sang a live canary in its cage.
Still, it’s hard enough to find words
to specify the various kinds of containment:
you could decide to live like an animal, without a watch,
you could find yourself ‘a family’ trapped inside a car, coming along the road suddenly,
you could wake up dead in a small hotel — or maybe a Little Chef, or a ‘family-run’ stock exchange
(beasts enjoying their cave
within a cave). The two may already be colliding.
They may even have turned on each other
« these users of language 37,000 years ago »
may have thought and felt language was trapped
inside the crevice of a rock. It could have been a tree. Their weapons were bronze,
they lived in bronze houses, drank from bronze cups, and pissed in bronze pots.
The marks left by their hands fill the animal’s body. We had only just found out what society was —
with its stars, superstitions, toothaches, reality checks.
History lay ahead. No, it came out of the barrel of a larynx.
Or a hunter thinking about love.