(W)hole

Picture by niphotography

A child.
Faces diffracted in the light.
Fragments of voices
enlarged by the echo
of worlds sealed behind the eyes.

I remember hands
before names.
Bracelets that chime
before sentences.
I remember scents
traversing empty rooms,
inanimate objects
containing entire souls.
A face effaced
by a pocket watch.

I loved the freaks,
those who bore
unrepeatable signatures.

Purple,
the neighbour’s daughter.
My brother-in-law of tobacco.
Scent of roses,
my cousin
and my mother’s sister.
Paper,
Arkadij Makarovič Dolgorukij.

By day I was a billiard ball.
Resonances of impact passed through me,
trajectories breaking on the cushions,
gazes written in an unknown code.

A green baize,
and upon that field my life took form.
I should have been the origin —
the cue, the white ball.
I should have been the origin —
the root, the force —
yet in the end,
I was the black eight ball.

Then came the night.
A dark window and a motionless bed.
A dog calling from afar.
A car cleaving through the road.
One sound at a time,
I existed.

“In America it is daytime,” I thought.
Awake with them,
across the oceans’ curve.
Outside my home,
inside the world.

I recognise myself
through what remains.
My memories
are made of fingerprints,
not of human beings.

I lower the light
when everything blinds me,
the darkness surrounds me
and the heart beats without a beat.

Joy and sorrow
in the same pocket.
The calm.
The void.
The weariness
of having crossed a storm,
without the memory of the lightning
or the thunder.

Then came the regret
for the moment lost.
For that precise second
when I should have been whole.

A part of me
upon the threshold of home,
one foot outside,
one foot of stone.

And still a child
before the night,
awaiting the sound that says:
you are here —
alive.

Thanks for reading.

The only thing an artist cannot do alone

is be found.

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