“The Communication of the Society of Ants” © Sketchman Boris

 

Canto III

Activities of a janitor
At this time seeming
My only diversion
To the pain and monotony
Of the eternity of minutes

That go by so slowly, so incessantly–

I witnessing her actions
From my bed
Positioned near the toilet
In this veterans’ hospital:
The sponge she uses on
The tiled lower part of the wall,
And the composite of the asphyxiating,
The drowning, and the crushing of
These more vulnerable entities.

The larger brutes, of course, subjugate and/or efface
The smaller brutes through exploitation of those deemed useful
And by cleansing of those deemed a nuisance.
It is most natural; and yet, what is nature, what is she,
If not a war criminal in her own right.

With so many lost–vastly more important men,
Much more worthy men–
For whatever inexplicable reason,
My memory is fixated on him.
What he, the deceased was
To me I am not sure —
Friend, of sorts, this fiend, for
In this war, in these hostilities, he being
The only one who knew my name, called me by name,
If nothing else but to scoff at that name
For the fear of killing, of being killed
That this name represented.

Sometimes he asked
Me how I was when no one else did–
Yes a friend of sorts, as sordid as that word is
When nearly everyone applied it to anyone
Who might do him a favor, and
When any fiend mirroring the self of the other
By calling out his name, could offer
An illusion of deliverance
From the impersonal wasteland
That one’s place in the world really was.

He, this captious friend, this sardonic, belligerent fiend
On methamphetamine, would be willing, eager, even, he said,
To perpetrate chemical warfare, if given a chance,
On all Russian-speaking residents in Luhansk
Irrespective of nearly all being Ukrainians or
Whether any Russian unit had
A firm hold on the city

Now he, if it is at all reasonable
To be called such,
Was an erstwhile being,
Now as though never having been,
His essence as much as a fiction
Imagined more as an
Overlapping of faces, more a
Composite of men I killed,
And yet, non-entity that he is,
He still slides into that trench of memory
Where I am, wedging himself into life and mind,
Disturbing thought.

With her ammonia drenched sponge
Pressed onto the two lines
Of ants in tandem, she, this janitor, cleanses the toilet
Heedless that these ants,
Intruders that they might be,
Are also communal beings no different
Than their human counterpart intruders
Of this venue, this domain, Ukraine

And although individual heads of their respective lines
Feel each other with antennas, and it is
Pheromones being exchanged, not ideas,
They are messages nonetheless, just as
This killing of the ants
Is an ethnic cleansing of sorts, for
Even those who haven’t engaged in war
Are war criminals, for such is the state
Of the human race.

The pungent smell of ammonia
Fumes into the room.
I wish she would close the door
But powerless at exerting my will
From a hospital bed,
I say nothing.

 

Steven David Justin Sills is a literary writer living in Bangkok Thailand. His book of poetry is in many libraries in the United States and a copy of one book owned by a library was scanned by the Internet Archive. Sills’ work can also be found on the Online Book Page at the University of Pennsylvania. Sills finished his last literary novel The Three Hour Lady a year ago, and since that time he has been devoting himself to writing a long war poem about what is happening in Ukraine. This poem equates the cleansing of a toilet to ethnic cleansing in the protagonist’s mind.

Sketchman Boris is a cartoonist who organizes art events in Bangkok, Thailand to bring people together while trying to make Comics and run an art magazine with friends to create a platform outside of the social media algorithms.