Photography © Chad Parenteau

 

Canto XXII of A War Papyrus

There are times when sensitivity to negativity
Is heightened, and the formidable barriers
Imposed against those even less fortunate
Erode as the seal of repression so useful
In desensitizing, if not dehumanizing,
So as to focus on the survival of self,
Ruptures.

Then, stumbling or clambering
Over the phlegmatic fellow- fallen
Sleeping on every sidewalk
Half-alive, semi-supine
(Individuals desperate and defeated,
Who, heretofore, were considered
Encumbrances nigh,
Especially after having
Drunk some cheap wine),

With each disparate pile
Of cells seeming then
Like the dead in gory battles vile
That, in blasts from projectiles both
Ethereal and terrestrial ,
One needed to leap over
In the frenetic will to survive;

But now in this rupture, these myriad
Recumbent rumps,
These sullied, soddened slabs are
Resuscitated and restored
As human beings, with
The pain of the homeless,
Products largely of this war, and
On every street corner of this city,
Percolating and permeating so frenetically
Into one’s own,

Or at least, when finally allowed to settle,
Are imbued into my own,
In part as I was, until recently, one of them,
In part, as I would be one of them still
Were there no vices of veteran infatuations,
No fringe freak slam-the-ham fetishes
For soldered soldiers
Amongst some of the
More deviant masses here–

Here in this motherland
That is the catalyst
Of Russian civilization,
Albeit a mother largely devoured
By that offspring now.
Like this planet when Theia
Collided into her
Leaving molten debris
Of the aggressor
In her mantle,
So with any impact,
Giant Impact Hypothesis
Or otherwise,
The perverse penetrator, the impactor,
Perverts the impacted.
Thanks be to God.

Empathy, of course, no more wanted
Than an appendectomy, and yet
There it is nonetheless with
Each mound of flesh being
Perspicaciously perceived,
As a unique and precious alloy smelted
And welded by odd intricacies
Of circumstances,
Variables wrought
In the rot of war,
With the clamor of it all
Unbearable.

And it is in such times, the empath that I then am,
Imbibing pain of others vicariously
The way normal men imbibe vodka,
The atheist that I have always been,
Unwilling to exonerate God or the gods from
What I deem their wrongs–
All of God’s human creatures
So filial to ascribe this putative being as the source of life
And so wary of imputing him as the source
Of predation, wars, misery, and devastation,
By default, I, blasphemer, am their adjudicator,
But do not shirk the role
(I hereby sentence thee, oh gods, into exile
But then, as they never were,
They have always been in exile
To all but the imagination of the human mind),
Seek out another Ukrainian Orthodox Church
For more than respite and procurement–
One that does not outwardly bar
The unseemly from attending.

Food less the objective and more the pretext, it is
Confession that I suppose the
Hustler that I am, having
Much to confess, should hunger for
But don’t, and continue prostituting myself as I do,
And do so in part for “Little Baby,”
The puerile-hearted fellow-veteran
Of lesser resilience,
The vulnerable lachrymose being
Whom I, the cardinal sinner, befriended
Took in, feed and console, even now,
To defy inherent realities,
Mechanisms of the universe
With its universal law
Of survival of the fittest
And, counterintuitively, for fruition
Or some degree of equilibrium,
By attempts at gentleness
In the pugnacious
And the brutal, for
Some limited meaning
After submission to bodily ravages.

How unbearable it all is without
Some mercy and gentleness,
As much as it militates
Against pragmatic realities;
But then, we can never evolve into better
Beings, unless defiant against
The real world, and so
Those seeking inception and impetus
For a better race
Must attempt to stand
With one foot on the clouds
As an early prototype of an ideal
That might eventually become real.

Why have I come to this church
When not giving a damn
About the free food?
It can’t be the fellowship
Of the homeless.
I sit. I eat. I say nothing.
Food endowments, an inconsequential
Humiliation for one
Acclimated to mutilation,
I accept it, albeit a piece of bread to be dipped
In and out of some viscous mush,
A vomity bit of gruel in a styrofoam cup;
And whether it be breakfast for the hapless
Or in general letting the course of events
Drag me as they will
From the back of a galloping horse
I cannot ride, I will not hide
But allow it, fate, to do with me

Not as it wills, as it is not
A conscious calculating entity,
But arbitrarily toss, if not overtly dispense
Of this thing I label as me. It’s much easier
Just to accept what one is
And what one is in,
If not so horrific that there is
No conscious thought at all, but
Reflexes, panic, and adrenaline rushes
In the rush to sustain life
in all the blasts of shrapnel,
And in all the falling debris.

And as for the Ukrainian state, we have fallen,
Fallen from the state of international consciousness,
Fallen from thought as the more novel, the more immediate,
And the more horrific of life’s horrors in Gaza
Is now overshadowing our plight
Just as what precipitated this unrestrained
Response–the paragliding militants
Amongst others, invading Israel in this overtly
Unprovoked Palestinian offensive is forgotten–
One horror of now overtaking another
Less immediate horror of now with
Palestinian parents in Gaza penning names of their children
Multiple times on their bodies to make them readily identifiable
After a blast (Trust as they might in Allah,
Empirical realities cannot be ignored).
We, the Ukrainian people, are now ignored.
We have, by measurement of news, fallen into obscure shadows
No different than the homeless.

Having left some food for “Little Baby”
Before coming here, I can’t claim
My coming is from being all that destitute.
Maybe subconsciously I need to confess something
(If nothing else, confessing
That, in part, the inability to tolerate anymore
Crying episodes of “Little Baby”
After another of his nightmares
Of being on the battlefields drove me here),
But confessing earthly sins to earthly sources
Seems futile. And it is nice
To be allowed entrance and
To be treated as a guest,
At least one evening each week,
To feel less shunned.
It is nice not to be the blight
Staining their stained-glass
Like insects inadvertently
Crushed onto a paper in which
The written word should be.
I am here because by being
In the shadows long enough
One becomes the shadows;
In having no material possessions
One becomes immaterial,
The specter of the vanquished
Banished so fully as to vanish and
To be as though never were,
Which in a hundred years’ time
Happens to all
But rarely so when alive.

And for those who lost all things from apartment buildings
And businesses bombed and burning in this war
And receive nothing but platitudes–
Platitudes that they are fortunate to be alive
And that material things do not matter–
They should be allowed to grieve them.
People being the substance of matter, their
Things do matter
As the mass of tissue
That constitutes one of their limbs.

To recognize that the family album
That held images of their deceased son
And daughter has also been burnt to cinders,
The eyeglasses that would have been worn
To see them has gone up into the atmosphere as a gas,
That the coffee pot on the counter that they reach for, for
Brewing and sipping memories from the viewing upon waking,
Is all gone, their rooms and all that was in them
Is no longer there. Thus, coming into the church
Is not an act of a yearning for the ethereal,
But of the terrestrial. It can be imagined as
A home of sorts, and a priest seemingly concerned
About every veteran of life, veterans included,
Is a nice touch, not the usual aversion of the poor and
Especially the disfigured, as though such maladies
Were a contagion, although becoming specter
In one’s own life when the material is not real
And yet as real as life gets, can happen to anyone,
And it is unbearable.

 

Steven David Justin Sills is an American poet and novelist whose first book, An American Papyrus, was published by the New Poets Series in 1990. The book is in various libraries and a scanned copy is in the Internet Archive. After completing his last novel, The Three Hour Lady, the Russo-Ukrainian War began and he decided to return to the art of poetry as the best means of conveying the trauma of war and the struggle for and the struggles of human existence. This particular canto of the long poem, “A War Papyrus” examines, amongst other themes, how much the loss of possessions affects us despite the platitudes that suggest otherwise.

Chad Parenteau is Associate Editor of Oddball Magazine.