“Terrible Light” © Sketchman Boris

 

War Papyrus
Canto VIII

And, from beds, what, in the days, (nights,
With the Russian destruction of
Electric power plants, a national
Darkness thick as thin
Air in a pit),
But count, another time,
Sordid rain stains
On ceiling like tree rings,
Memorize, rememorize really,
The patterns of floor tiles–
These embedded
Images becoming the
Prototypes for the
Devouring shapes of nightmares, or
Feign, to oneself, this sense
Of not knowing
Of the corners of the room
That have cobwebs
To have
Some form of discovery,
Some sense of learning
To the wasted hours, days, and months,
Do any of the convalesced do
When having no stilted wands
Of ambulatory appendages,
To facilitate,
By the act of mere walking,
The magic, the parting, the disappearing acts
To all these oppressive
Baneful fixations of thought–
Thought, all respective thought, like a scratched record
Replaying on the player disrespectful,
All tortuous thought torturous replays when
The game of resilience and stoicism
Is only able to
Be played for so long, and so
We must be drunk on something;
Thus, we, alpha males
Imbibe the pain, sucking it into our breath
When we can.
There he is, spider, dear spider;
Crawl, now, my pet, over to the
Foot of the bed
With the missing foot.

Yes, many wistful souls in this room
No doubt like me, revert
To past events
As horrific as they might have been–
Childhood, abused as it usually was,
And the mad monkeys that we always were
Drunk on fermented fruit of thought,
Believing life to be
Scent and song of the present moment
There forever, and
Families a permanent fixture.
They, these patients, go there, into the past,
For some winsome solace
Especially when the mortars of shrieks in night
In this large room,
Are this loud (romance of candlelight
Tried before, but to no avail
But burned bunks and bunkers).

How in such devastation–
Ruins and debris this deep,
One once again
Becomes engaged
In the small connections
Of life (the taste of food that will be served,
How it will be cooked–
It will be cooked with the
Viands of the slaughtered hides of men,
That one can be sure of,
Russian and Ukrainian men, men;
The mellifluous voice of
The nurse’s assistant
When one is able to hear it,
When one can find it)
Is nothing short of a miracle.

Sometimes
When pills come
And one can briefly
Step outside of pain,
Nursing assistants,
Occasional nurses,
Creatures with hair in buns,
Cause us to salivate
Like hungry hounds
No different than Russians
Who would rape anything from 7 to 70
If given the chance.

Electricity needs conduit of wires,
Fire a dry carbon object as fuel,
But when the Russians blow up
Our nuclear plants
Or vaporize neighborhoods
With tactical nuclear weapons,
No spider web of circuitry would be needed
As conduit
When air itself was conduit enough.

When man so needed to be distracted
When thought so needed to be diffused–
Its air of noxious smoke
Its hot ashes
That shroud
The way those in Pompeii were shrouded
In hardening ash
What do we do
But awake, startled, by those tiled patterns
That in nightmares
Became the deceased in mass graves
Talking amongst themselves
Of the aesthetic qualities
Of fully decomposed
Noses or earlobes
Beginning to mold?

And in the days
(Death being the nights),
We count rain stained lines
Of a ceiling, or formulate
Inane questions to self like
What is dust?
Answering, “What is it if not
the decay of organic matter
Filling empty corners?”.

Fire a dry carbon object as fuel,
But when the Russians blow up
Our nuclear plants
Or vaporize neighborhoods
With tactical nuclear weapons,
No spider web of circuitry would be needed
As conduit
When air itself was conduit enough.
Forlorn, touch me, radiate me
To oblivion.

 

Steven David Justin Sills is a literary Writer whose book An American Papyrus is in numerous libraries.

Sketchman Boris is a cartoonist who does comic strips and aspires to create stories and publish more books than what he has published so far.