Last Year In Marienbad

there’s no going back. and no point.

By

photo of trees
Photo by Luban Tvaroh on Unsplash

i

there’s no going back. and no point. i have already proven myself unworthy and my task is accomplished. there should be some form of celebration awaiting. a prize or trophy or at least applause.

there is nothing. i can hear the night and my breaths. i can follow the trail of oxygen as it moves in my veins like a pale, viscid vapour. almost like rain clouds in august.

an approaching rain is all that constitutes me. the viscous grey of thought in its liquid form.

ii

tobacco, the unfiltered essence of a bomb. i’m in my thrifted jean jacket blue like the exterior of a gauloises brunes. wherein war is the expression of desire, there are rituals unspeakable. something more riveting than sound. the voices echo one another and eventually weave into a quilt, light and silky. i can hear them but i cannot respond.

i was shrouded, therefore i sleep. sounds are like ghosts to me. in the flickering of lights, there are images shifting silhouettes and shadows casted

on the wall—

a mural is merely a splatter of thoughts. the pigments saturate and subside like the sequence of a dream. in a milky quantum of light

the eye shutters, shuts and reopens—

the scene, the whole thing, is very much like a dream. or perhaps memories. it is confusing sometimes because viscerally they have the same texture, like dull, intense silence.

in silence, i am involved by breaths alone.

iii

lovers longing for recognition or the response to their innate craving for madness. clusters of words. strange syllables. strings of thoughts unravel into a silence that sounds like prayer. and how i held you in my wandering eye. in the extended perimeters of peripheral vision everything mingles just like in heavy rain everything blurs. the accumulation of stimulus is dense and implosive.

in the longing for release we speak.

in the exchanging of breaths there is a noise, an intensifying and soundless sound, alarmingly disarming.

iv

i am experiencing the ecstasy of saint teresa but my devotion is to another form of faith. wherever i immerse myself, i leave behind a clue, an opaque opening through which one can enter and encounter. a space raw and austere.

i can remember every dream because the dip into another consciousness requires concentration.

in moments of total submission to the subconscious, i abandon myself to be possessed by a thousand ghosts.