BY JOHN GREY
Trigger warning: May cause distress. Copyright is held by the author.
The body of knowledge is not yours.
So there’ll be suffering but no studying.
Your eyes open wide.
Some men in robes shuffle to the socket’s edge.
Yes, you can write in your diary.
So gather up the sadness, the failures —
those empty pages have a place for them.
You’ve lost touch with everyone and everything.
Even the flowers on your sill.
And bird song. The words to “Some Enchanted Evening.”
Besides, your spring is all dried up.
And your senses were cut up badly
on that wire fence of the world’s vulgarity.
That’s why you’re sitting in your room alone.
And all of voices hail from somewhere down the street.
You press a time-release capsule against your tongue.
As if it can see into the future, heal when it gets there.
You know that you’ll be so much worse by then.
Meanwhile, you choke on the changes to your body.
Those explosions in your chest can’t be doing you any good.
And, when you smell yourself, the odour is of time,
death even, and that stiff nightcap of decay that follows.
The body of knowledge keeps being added to.
There are chapters recently written that do not know your name.
And that body grows higher. You shrink.
It attracts a lot of visitors. You have none.
So go on. Cry for a while. Taste tears on your tongue.
That’s the urine of the saints right there.