I visit the leisure centre, three days
after discharge, to discharge from my body
a drugged abiding stillness, a dormancy I
can’t shake. Not even the roar of a stoked lawn mower, the hum of a fridge at
nighttime shakes it. Not even freedom. Yes the typeset of my house keys the
real back into me, but not my body’s proper
proclivities or the crowded fuselage of
mental orbit, not the energy I need to be alive.
And here the little legion of selves
scattered in the playpen do what no dumbbell can- the kids’ finger-paintings look
like masterpieces to me, they’re the seminal artworks of a memory begun afresh;
jar of buttons a treasure trove to a boy with long white hair, chided for
nearly leveling a girl jumping up and down for joy
on a sheet of egg foam. And balloon bundles
like massive genomes sit on shrunken seats the colour of polished bone, the
colour of the ward’s walls.
Wireless modem flashing purple sends the
women, drunk on lavender, into tickling paroxysms; they careen down backs and
up hairless legs, and all
the flags of the world are blown out of
their borders by crayon. I wake.
Long to be tickled. Those slight undulations
on the grassy path from the train station, detectable only in the ache proprioception
sent to my calves, the laughter I feel gestating now as the white-haired boy
laughs: are they not the root of my impunity, why everyone is so alarmed? Even
when I hurt myself I only watch as I am hurt. I am not an agent unto myself but
an agent of the universe; my actions no less causal than gravity’s grounding me.
I slake its sadistic thirsts.
That is and always has been my typeset.
