when i walked into the
sun, someone told me
to look at it as if it
were a simile,
because likening an
object to a shadow of itself
makes the object less
human--less painful,
less turgid; it draws
the taste of copper
from your tongue even as
blood repaints
your teeth. it gnashes
the stars
into particles of
themselves,
and turns misery into
art: spontaneous, sudden,
and as easily forgotten
as it is felt.
but who says that
likenesses cannot be felt?
who says that walking
into the sun
is like walking into a
dead man's cellar? and who says
that apathy is not a
feeling, but devoid of any?
i feel it.
i feel it with all the
trepidation of hangmen walking into church,
the ghosts of their past
selves clinging to their necks
like lost lovers drowned
in oxygen. i feel it
every time i exhale,
every time i struggle
to pinch words together
like a pince-nez
to the collarbone of a
coherent sentence. i feel it
broiling in my veins
like a tempest; i swear
there is apathy in my bones--solid,
unfeeling, like a subcutaneous layer of skin
beneath skin, beneath skin, a mantle
that shifts and shakes that roars and rumbles and quakes until i feel--
i feel nothing.
i feel nothing like an
empty box enclosed within itself,
like thick fog curdling
on my tongue
and tired puffs of air
spilling from parted lungways.
nothing feels like it
will never stop. sometimes, i think,
nothing has stopped,
halted as i walked into my sun, halted
and taken my hand,
halted as it led me into this mineshaft
filled with rotting
heartcrumbs and mouldy bread.
because somebody once
told me, when i was younger,
that nothing feels like
the sun on a cloudy day,
and to look up at my sun
whenever it came--or suns,
'because there might be
several, you know, maybe at different times,
maybe at the same, like
red-walled wells turned karez.
so hold your shoes
tight,
laces looped around
fingers in figure-eights,
alternate nooses to
remind you that wherever you look forward to,
it will never be
home.'
and they told me to
picture my veins as rivers tumbling downhill,
and to know that if the
sun burnt me up,
my veins would
extinguish what it made me feel.
but my veins, i say,
have seas broiling within them;
there is no calm, and
there are no storms
to assuage me.
i am walking into my
sun, i say;
it is cloudy;
my tongue is made of
fog.
and apathy holds me
responsible
for the burning of my
own soul.
Points: 4
Reviews: 80
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