BROWSE Columns
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Your oesophagus is a jelly fish floating on oily water. Its tendrils burrow north to your brain and south to your intestines. You clutch dislocated vertebrae as they scree-slide. You dream of a promontory, vertebrae pinned to stilts, sunk in sand-flesh, lapped by tidal flows. The dream is your body, fluid and camouflaged in fibrous skin. The water roils inside you with each dream step.
There are no colours in this dream, just a vague blueness.
Your stomach is viscously ectoplasmic. It is, maybe, the pouch in which the water swirls and slops. It’s connected to your brain by scars. You’re unsure of this because the scars wriggle like sea-slugs and don’t seem to have a sense of direction. Your eyes spread over the whole of your body like ulcers. They blink sluggishly, fish lips, slow-bursting furuncles.
You’re aware that nails are planted between your eyes, and that on them hang clocks. You don’t know when this happened, but you know that you speak on time. Blood oozes around the nails. It pools in sentences that are difficult to grasp, strings of erupting blisters seeping along your spine. Each syllable is an arterial spurt, an endless final splash from the promontory.
Each syllable swallows its predecessor, tumour ingesting tumour. They’re covered with shards of iron. They’re raw nerves burrowing through your closed eyes, splinters needling through the aqueous humour. They’re pocked anvils, haloed with explosions of sparks. They tunnel through your arteries, blood spiders, weavers of stone, unanchored nomads.
Some syllables are made of marble and vibrate, whispering on your tongue, like tears sizzling on embers, pulpy stone eyes, closed yet open. Others are caves, waiting for echoes. You don’t understand this pulse between hard and soft. You fail to settle between them. There’s just an irregular shuttling, a train lost between two destinations.
Your heart beats arrhythmically. Its fissures spread to the rest of your body. Cracks form with every breath. Around you, the invisible disasters of the wind.
You long for desiccation. You wait, ready to blind yourself.
Your limbs tumble in the whiteness of time. You try to salvage your body, floating just beyond the promontory. You struggle to haul it back. With each tug your tendons lose their grip on your spine. They are ragged uncurling tendrils.
You etch syllables into your skin. You do this to capture their meaning, even though you know that there can never be meaning, only uncertainty. Each syllable is a pulsating fissure, a hair rooted in the ocular nerves, puncturing your eyes, covering your body with hair that drifts like sargassum. You’re attracted to the oleaginous nature of the drift, oil clumps clustering soundlessly. You’re inexplicably both on the edge of promontory, attached to the last remaining cervical, and yet adrift on the tide, sucked down to an invisible vortex.
Your eyes swell. They spit out sparks, the muffled silence of ataractic seizures, gripping your pelvic muscles, spasming the psoas and the sartorius. You’re paralysed. You don’t know whether this is temporary or permanent. All you know is that you want more. Your legs uncouple from your hips. Formless meteors slide and crash against the walls of your skull, panicking in the ephemeral ligatures of the synapses. When this happens there are no syllables, just the twitching shudder of wind.
You begin to think of the wind as perfectly formed sentences which you will never understand. Howls crouch in your veins as raw nerves grate and scratch. Your body swells with the spongy wood of flotsam. Its pulpy flesh erupts in salts and schists. A network of several transparent layers begins to crawl along your arteries. They’re molluscs slowly sloughing their shells. A path tunnels between these layers, vibrating as the shells fracture and scour. Your remaining limbs convulse.
Your body detaches from its skin, leaking half-formed syllables, slithering shale.
Your brain is a wheel turning at full speed while moving slowly sideways, relentlessly, drifting behind the rails and spokes of your eyes. Its slumps and shifts suffocate you with each breath. Each clackety-clack of the mechanism feels like a sentence which has lost its punctuation.
Your fingers clutch your skin as it crumbles. Between each particle of flesh clings a snail with a monstrous mouth drilling through your arteries. Its shell constantly fissures and shatters, and is immediately reconstituted, held together by a thickness of blood and congealing serum.
There’s still no colour, just shades of grey. Slate, charcoal, lead, ash. You know that you could go on with this list and that it would comfort you. Comfort is not what you seek. The only sound is a faint whistling of the wind and the grinding in your oesophagus. You cling to your viscera as they slip and wrestle through your stammer, syllabic amoebas.
You try to polish the syllables to razor edges, to pare away the wasted flesh, the blackening half-formed adjectives. They cling to you like limpets. Your skin flaps raggedly in the wind. You’re thinner but no sharper.
You try again. In this place, there are no maps, only alien hieroglyphs and cryptic codes. The syllables bulging in your throat have cauterised. You sense that words are scars, charred syllables, clumped smoulder.
Your nerves are heavy as they push and pull, their shimmering tentacles stumbling into shellshock. Your veins turn inside out, deceiving your body, their magnetic diagrams clinging, briefly, to the capillaries. Your dry limbs are frozen, as if liquid nitrogen has seeped down from the sky. Ink shots trace cyclones through rust and bone, tracking marrow through gaps, sucking your bones to the surface, bleached bas-reliefs in new topographies.
Light shards score your eyes. Pins of light turn your memories into sashimi-thin slivers. Your brain-weeds shrivel beside the sea's lazy eyes, blinking slowly, popping like spiral wrack. Your limbs are fronds, softening scales and leaking bracts. Blood mixes with seawater in your veins. Acid-red droplets wriggle from your pores, spattering to the unexplained horizon. Your feet tread on broken glass. You slowly remove each shard, but the wounds seep wind rather than blood.
You’re on your knees. You see your face in a puddle. It is made of granulating laminations of warped fractals. You follow your face with your fingertips as it slithers across a flat crab pool. Your skin is nipped, but the wounds have healed in scales. Your hands and feet gradually turn into claws as you shuffle sideways.
There's no shell. You long for a numbing eclipse, a primal syllable.
Around you, the invisible disasters of the wind.
Phil Powrie is Emeritus Professor of Cinema Studies. Bilingual in English and French, he writes in both languages. His poems in French have been published in the journals L’Altérité, Hélas, Lichen and Luna Rossa. His poems in English have been published in Blue Unicorn, Ink Sweat and Tears, Lotus Eater, October Hill, The Poetry Porch, Pulsar, Shot Glass Journal, South.
