Back Poem by Mary X

Movement does not take place here. Amidst the dust, through the window, is the outside world ready to act in constant reprise. Still air. There are no wailing babies, no shouting mouths; there is no love and no apathy. There is a void of which one stares down deep into its mangled intestine. On the edge of a cliff. Hanging from a window. Flesh-becoming the great seals that finish the deal with the future. Fleas hop about on my bed as though it no longer belongs to me. Every movement throws up dust, the reminder of entropy. Yes, that movement does not take place here other than into the ground upon which the place stands. Do I blame myself? Or do I blame some transcendent god or other? I suppose that regression is my own doing and partly things out of my control. I can clean the dust. I can’t move out of here. Immobility exists as Zeno of Elea proposed. Without movement, one stays still, on the spot, looking down at the battered feet that wear muddy shoes, reaching into one’s gut to pull out meat; then one immediately, without a milli-second of recognition, begins to deteriorate. And behind the wrinkles of those old people lie a set of glass eyes, still wrapped up with the language, still engaged in repetition, circular passages that go on and on until this immobility, this constant regression – negative movement, reversed numbers scrawled across those glass eyes that look out onto the world without a clue as to how this happened — ask the questions: where did the dreams go, how did ambition get stuck in a 9 to 5 job, how comes I am — and always will be — a deteriorating invisibility of which not even my-self can ever know?