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By: Jehangir Saleh
Written: November 9, 2005
My friend Marie in Sweden is dying
Tubes invading her veins, drugs numbing her body
Until it feels like that forgotten mound of clay
That the artist practiced on until it was so deformed
He used it as a paperweight
She has been waiting for a new pair of fish
Healthy ones
To replace the rotten grouper carcass through which she
Currently has to breath
Her lungs beat madly against her rib cage on inhale
And give up on exhale
I don’t blame them
They are tired
She is tired
Sometimes I believe she hopes that soon she will die
But this story isn’t about my friend Marie. It is about me.
Or so it was when thought about writing it.
That’s a very unpoetic line but right now I don’t care about poetics or trying to be literary.
I feel I even don’t deserve the ground; it should be reserved for things that grow, not things that decay.
I decay
I am decaying right now
When I was younger
I was obsessed with the notion of time
I loved how no matter how bad things got
Now matter how much weight that pressed upon my being
Time carried me into the future
It made me run to catch up with it
Time is linear – it persists, pushes on
And by this, it encourages us to move with it
2.this next part of the poem is at first going to appear totally unrelated to the first part of the poem. I am just writing now so I can’t promise it will relate, except to say that everything contains words, and all words essentially come from the same place.
Right now I imagine that I am poor – much poorer than I am now – somewhere in India. I am watching a young girl pour the drinking water that her mother has given her into the ocean.
“Don’t do that”, I tell her. “Your mother gave you that water. You don’t have very much. The ocean is already full of water, it doesn’t need anymore.”
The little girl looks at me. I see war in her eyes. She pauses, comfortable with silence in a way only the naïve or young could be. She continues, clasping the well water which sits in a rusty metal bucket, then lowering her hands to the giant ocean before her. How greedy the ocean looks. It is so full of the potential to give life while the population dehydrates and dies.
There is war in her eyes. She will be killed just like her father, fighting for a cause she never understood but was given no option to ever think about.
She will never get the chance to be something greater. She only has this time, where she feeds the only water she has back to the ocean. Back to something bigger, greater than herself.
3. That was poorly written but I like that image.
In the beginning of this evening
I was scared because the numbers