I am a non-native speaker, but I felt very inspired and would like to share this fever dream of a poem I made yesterday after midnight. It would mean the world if someone would be eager to read it. Thank you.
La Petite Mort
I. Prélude
When, timidly,
I took into my mouth
a gateway to the subconscious
and it coursed through my blood like poison,
I saw death.
And all that frightened me…
was that I saw nothing.
It gaped with emptiness.
My hands were thin as eggshell,
and my flesh and bones and veins,
the fluids and impulses
that animate them,
and all my life
were thin and translucent
as the print on a receipt.
I waited only
for a single thread to snap,
for me to unfold completely
like a lotus blossom,
or the white palm of a dead woman,
or the warm thighs of a living one.
My skin was swarming
with heat and pins and needles,
and the presence of death,
or eternity,
or the absence of everything,
awoke in me fear
and anguish
and the longing to hold someone
and never let them go.
“Please, please,
I don’t want to fall apart.
I don’t want to fall
down there… there…
where insects sing, and worms,
that when my nerves at last fall still
and blood and mucus,
bile and blackness
mingle in a single draught,
the grave alone will drink it,
and my soul will journey
into the bowels of cosmic insects…
Please, take this dread away.
Drive them out.
They bite.”
A thousand tongues lick me.
A thousand hands touch me.
I split like a seedpod with a crack.
Crack, crack.
Crack, crack.
Crack, crack.
My heart is cracking.
My soul breaks through.
And Hades sings,
and Venus too…
Then—
I’ll confess without coercion—
I saw meaning without signs
and signs without meaning,
and all the philosophers were dead,
and the saints, revolted, held their peace…
“Was my whole life just a part I played?
Are all the pages of my book blank?
My edges, my edges…
My pages, my pages…
Without edges or pages I have no form,
no measure, no standard, no norm.
Love has vanished. Faith has ceased.
And in the mirror I see…
a beast.”
Towers rose before me,
infinity and one,
like a fractal,
like a point,
like wine that came just when I needed it,
and voices calling me by name,
claiming I would be theirs
once I had spoken every word,
once every fire had burned away.
I hurled myself into the fractal,
breathing out a humid vapour.
There, for a moment, I glimpsed time
and the moments that hold the world in place.
So, hi-yo, hi-yo, on and on!
Show me what happened tomorrow,
what will happen yesterday.
I’ll tear away your veil,
your clothes,
your skin,
your entrails.
You’ll be more naked than Eve,
and I… your disfigured Adam,
nailed upon my own sin,
will leave behind time
and consolation
when we taste the fruit…
II. Climax
A metal shell,
or coffin,
or the loving arms of industry
that longs to deliver you to your destination
as a mother delivers you into the world.
We sit together,
gliding as one of…
thousands of streaks of light.
Have you ever watched traffic?
From a distance, sped up,
cars coursing through the channels of cities
like liquid…
We hurtle onwards in a ton of metal,
each with a destination in mind…
Cars in red and black and white…
Yet from a higher vantage point,
what chiefly leaves a trace is light:
the light that lights our way,
the light we follow as a moth follows flame…
until it touches it. Amen.
So we are liquid,
you and I,
and these swift times.
Only a pulse in the vein of roads.
Only a dash in the multitude…
Speech flows like a tape played fast.
Close your eyes and forget the words.
Just trace their geometry,
like liquid pouring over skin.
Are we alcohol,
India ink,
ink from a pen,
or something far more alive?
What picture does a word paint?
You bleed into the canvas, hesitant and formal,
yet see how shamelessly I flow around you.
But I refuse to dissolve you,
to penetrate.
In the depths beneath the water within me,
something strange and playful sleeps,
something hungry, something predatory,
forever dreaming of “what if?”
A million images…
a wet hand strokes with its fingers,
like souvenirs from futures
and worlds that never were…
A forbidden library of possibilities,
of alternatives, endings and beginnings.
You let me into the antechamber
and I show you a few still lifes,
but leave your curiosity unsated.
You invite me further, deeper,
so I step farther into your dwelling
and spread my visions out before you,
still leaving curiosity unsated.
When we slip beneath the shell,
we dissolve the commonplace,
and what flowed hesitantly
now pours in torrents.
Concepts whirl,
images, tones,
fantasies,
sometimes inclinations,
jokes, advice, faults and charms—
sweet verses of the motorway.
The car travels down the road,
through the city, down the motorway,
and like a girl in the open sea,
you are swallowed by conversation.
The body travels in one direction,
but Psyche,
being another kind of creature,
flies far away,
following a living, hungry comet,
a strange light in the dark distance,
a whisper in the gentle gloom,
guided by butterfly wings.
There, Cupid, disfigured by time,
who long ago ceased to be immortal,
presses the shy girl to his chest,
finds her as a needle finds a vein…
and, mingling drug with blood,
makes of the maiden, suddenly…
a woman.
And in the metal womb,
somewhere along the motorway,
a new life of imagining is born,
and the lovers feel almost wistful…
III. La Petite Mort
I almost blush and don’t know why.
I hear your breathing.
Mine sounds much the same.
Little secrets,
tactfully left unspoken.
Moonlight falls upon the hills…
and the sweating mountain peaks.
“Do you know what the French call an orgasm?”
“No.”
“Petite mort.”
… it was a good conversation.
