“Memory of Deceased Brother and Comrade” © Sketchman Boris

 

Canto VII

Brothers, phantoms of the deceased,
My own brother included,
Their haunt of mind never ceasing,
Especially, in this place
Of moaning and wailing, this
Hospital of sorts, but any place,
Any venue whatsoever,
As mind goes, unfortunately, where body goes.

But even if, unlike me, unscathed physically,
(Carrying a tattered body along, the bodily travail magnifying
And exacerbating travails of mind inevitably),
There can be no such thing as emotional healing – –
Just this everlasting constructing
Of new neurological corridors to the present,
As dark and uncertain as that might be.

Brother gone–mind still not able
To fathom it, let alone reckon with it,
Not that any who stay now, those who still are, are.
These liquefied fluid men,
Myself included–not that there really is a me,
And Parmenides stating that that which really is
Is forever, whether that be God,
Electromagnetic matter, or something
More mechanical, more elementary yet– don’t really exist,
And this pseudo or quasi-existence that is
Is easily totally liquefied (the ending like never having been born ultimately),
As hard as it is to fathom that as well.

I grapple, seeking that which was
Once whole in memory
Of him who is gone, but it too in little time
Is dissipated like smoke, or
Like crushed bits of leaves blown asunder like dust.
Unsurprisingly, memory engraved in ever dying and ever
Born and emerging neurological pathways
Becomes fated as faded faulty copies;

Memory liquefied, and strewn,
Ripped to bits like bodies in flying shrapnel
Expedited to return faster than what they would otherwise
To fancy water and carbon molecules of proteins and lipids,
And of carbohydrates, nucleic acids, and other trace elements ,
Becomes equivalent to the imagined, and the fanciful.

And there are, in these times, these uncertain moments
With a certain inexorable categorical grief, that the dead
Are fully alive in the mind and floating
In the living fluid stuff of a quasi or putative me, who is
Not only man of little substance,
But of no substance whatsoever, or,
M=MC2, close to that.

And it is from that that I find myself falling, the weight
Of “self” breaking the shallow ice of consciousness
Of a tenuous construction of a “me,” as it were
To a perennial fall the way someday
Health will fall and fail entirely,
And the corporeal will decompose to elements.

But now with the breaking of the mental seal and this
Incessant sense of falling with energy dissolving,
There is this sense of loss of self
And an inclination toward insanity,
Prematurely assessing its domain as more serene.
This notwithstanding, I sense a self
Percolating, somewhat reemerging,
Even when not wanting it to return.

We languish here on what is more like
Hospital gurneys than beds–
Here where there is lack of food
For the weak, and where the feckless
Are like superfluous nestlings
Denied parental rations
(Only the strongest,
Given that of substance).
We are emaciated frames
To be ravaged by disease
And then to eventually become
The fodder of predators,
Like most species of birds.

Each singular, each discrete life form
So sui generis, so anatomically, psychologically,
Biographically distinct, and yet,
Specialization notwithstanding,
So inconsequential in the fecundity of life
On this plane of savage rapine
For consumption for survival,
Whirling violently in space

And me barely hovering above
The Bermuda Triangle of madness,
Barely able to brush aside this fly–
This fly hovering and landing on
This sweaty, oily countenance with
Maggots already in the infected
Bits that remain of the leg
Or so I think, but what do I know when
Not able to distinguish
Reality and the imaginary

Or is it even a fly, which leads
To the greater question of what
Constitutes a fly, or could it not be
A figure skater waltz jumping or toe looping
On a slice of ice needing resurfacing?

So is that it? What delusionally
I thought as a “me” is merely
A slushy slice of ice, a rink needing resurfacing;
But, says an antithetical thought,
Ice skaters don’t stay in mid-air so
It’s a fly, with flies having
No artistic sensibilities
That are known of.

I try to regain an “I” the way England tried
To regain English when imputed as the language
Of illiterate farmers, or the way Russia
Regained Russian after it was relegated
To peasants under Catherine the Great–
I relegated to minutes of madness
Before being subsumed, maybe
Equally as momentarily.

I a slab of ice and
That slab of ice
Am I that still?

My brother, my brothers,
Tortured sinews, tortured bones
In mass graves, hands tied
Behind their backs,
And yet, cryptic to reason, nay,
For no apparent reason whatsoever,
I made it out alive when they didn’t, and
For no apparent reason.

Everything is random, and it is that randomness
That impels sane minds to madness.
Corpses of sons of god (So says the Russian/Ukrainian
Orthodox Church) decompose like trash.
Successful gestation, or ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage,
Mothers who abort, or those who bear it all, are all
Occurences of random chance.

It is all random chance: this machine gun firing
Of sperm cells, live ammunition, at a distant target.
Whether successfully gestated and birthed,
Whether passing through the first years of childhood,
With the stay seeming more certain, more preordained,
With passing years, this being born is
Not borne out with any guaranties
(Aeschylus dying purportedly from tortoise
In eagle’s talon falling on his head).

One’s entirety of life could be just be a day,
Just be a moment. It could be
Decades of auspicious existence
Of a life leading to some culminating moment
That becomes catalyst of one’s demise–
Everything destined to nothing
But pulverizing change.

And then there was that morning in which
I and my brother woke up to plans that
We had concocted, hatched
From the incubators of our brains.
The parents having gone to work
And feigned sickness no longer necessary,
The malingerers, my brother and I, at last
Tossed off the blankets and
Got out of beds, got on bicycles,
School and paper routes
Dispersed to the winds
And for twenty kilometres or more
On gravel roads we rode
Resting at times under
Pine, birch, and oaks, their
Mushy seeds, and
Twigs and grasses
All smashed between our toes,
As we ate our peanut butter
Sandwiches in the shade
They provided. Then
To grandmother’s house
My brother and I, we, rode.

The rain continually pounds the roof of this makeshift hospital,
This shed or tent, throughout nightish days
And dayish nights; and yet untouched by it,
It has no effect on me. Good and evil after all are
Figments of the imagination like both sides,
The Ukrainians and Russians, believing in this war respectively
From social conditioning and personal experiences, ideas
Constantly construed and disabused, endlessly reinterpreted,
Evermore in creation and destruction and reconstruction once again.
Little food for days–lack of food and strength so
Barely able to brush it, the fly, aside. Or is it even a fly
But an ice skater, and this thing, sometimes called a “me,”
A slab of ice needing resurfacing.

 

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 the guilt of surviving when one’s brother and comrades have fallen

Sketchman Boris is a cartoonist who lives in Bangkok Thailand and is the founder of Bkk Unzine.