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Clare Saponia
The Optimists
A long while before,
when they were silent
for the first time;
when disorder was precise
and regime obedient
to the point of pedantry,
dawn still crept in
at the end of a night,
like a spy.
Like a hero.
Faithful Silence
In an episode like ours,
counting tree after tree
and looking for symbolism;
in a country like ours
that’s losing it, strip for strip,
a pendulum of dripping culture
in a society like ours, we’ve formed
short and quaint interpretations
that sign, seal and do not deliver
in a secret like ours,
dignity lies down; it gets bitten
by painful whispers.
In an empty place, I stay hidden
sometimes all the more
to keep it empty. And think.
In a collective thought like ours
that rarely comes together
except in times of tragedy,
the loyal keep their lips shut.
Small
I feel the size of the room is out to get
me. When you
shut the door,
there’s an intrepid sense of smallness
and you’re a part of it. I lie
there and think
about blowing smoke
amongst a hundred things
which remain unordered.
Buddha tells me that’s okay.
I stop trying to order them
and the ninety-nine other
things rejoin me an hour
later for coffee. They
remove their caps and duffels,
dip into my line of view
to ask, and so very humbly, if
the seats about me
are taken.
They don’t wait for an
answer. Their forwardness
upsets me. Buddha tells me
to renounce
the superiority complex.
And I note how easily I’m
bullied into guilt; the face
of charity on shift-system, the
telephone call you make that
passes me by
without a message. Why
did you phone?
I eradicate.
I leave you alone with Nietzsche
and the day you’ve now won,
although maybe you haven’t
noticed just yet. For you, we’re
still dancing in shared socks. I
recall your long naked toes as a
final caption this morning
on treading backwards
in that one reclaimed stocking
trying not to wake you
before fitting the other. You were
covered by everything belonging
to you, half of your face too,
and I wanted to take a photo
of your peaceful entirety
in miniscule snippets.
But had to go.
You see, Buddha tells me not to
crave. Not to possess you as a
moment in my time
although devil and angel
fight over the proximity
of your otherness
and I vacate the caption
in order to win the day.
Buddha asks me what I have won.
The Dutiful
Marching in.
You walk past amputations.
You pass a crowd of diarrhoea
and wailings.
You are a soldier
with nothing to report.
C’est la vie you must think.
C’est la vie you are told to feel:
you are a moodless machine
and immune to any event,
especially the ones you yourself
got involved in.
Reality irritates you, you find.
It carries a stench that runs
deeper than ideology;
ideology you follow
but do not understand. There
are levels of preparedness for it,
should you take up the gauntlet:
you ask yourself once, twice,
nine hundred and twenty-two times
and still you are not ready. Though,
what it boils down to, I guess, is:
do you want to be?
Ours
In between,
the archetypes for this and that
gel without confluence. It is
a marmalade stitched together
with the peelings of civilization.
As I take a spoon, I pull against
them,
neat,
unqualified,
hoping for coherence;
hoping they will share
a glint of their difference.
There are eight hundred and forty-
nine scars in my marmalade; I have
counted. They have simplified,
almost uniform,
each with a tale among the scramble,
each intrinsically akin to the next.
Each alone before severance
with his lacerations. And one day
all the marmalade will be gone.
the day fear died
One day, whilst the scaremongers were
stamping down with their morals and
phobia, an arcane unity seemed to take
root. Pale. Serene.
Organically. Rising
as a mutant yeast
with sweat and hope
and presumption,
and dissolving step by step
the tethers of gooseflesh,
until the bogyman became
merely a bogy.
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