Dictatorship Poem by johannes lewinsky

You have disembowelled me
Piece by piecebetween you

Over seventeen months
Grabbed bits of me
And yanked them
Unceremoniously out

Till now there's nothing on the plate
To offer or donate

Nothing

But a gnawing gap

Where once was…something was
…..that now no longer is

call it peace
call it rest
call it an accommodation with
the self…..my self

a self which was
before you entered

And is now become
a collation
of images, recollections
and a disarray
of all that was….

Where did you come from….
Who offered you admittance?

Was it this self
this flailing self - surely not -
Not this self-same self
That only sought
a way to be

At home with itself
At home away from
from all distractions
away from life…..
the everyday ignominy of it….
yet sought a way
somehow to be
within it

a self that sought
the impossible and thought
on numerous occasions
to have found it
but always lost as soon as

A self caught up in
impossibly grandiose
notions of what it was
capable and always hit
the earth bouncing bruised
but bouncing

and now appears
to have come up against itself
flat


2

she brought with her a presence an insouciance
impossible to resist
a breath of the nature
of life I had been seeking
years and neither found
nor lost

A presence that drifted in then out
(I should have been alerted)
that always brought with it attended
light by more
than a hint of shadow

who would not be owned
but neither would she own
who engaged with all
and with no-one
who was her own
arbiter

herself to herself on principle
who gave of no admittance
to anyone in
to her own peculiarly bleak
And desolate universe

3

Games….i was initiated then
into a world of games
where nothing was
what it was for more
than the spur of a moment
where the rules were re-
written daily and nothing was
what it appeared to be
when first
the box was unwrapped

the inference being
her prerogative to dictate
the terms as and when
and how and what
she would or wouldn't (couldn't)
give

there are perhaps not many would (could)
accept such terms
and it is a measure
of the damage I'd permitted

that I acquiesced willingly
in the terms of this new and oh
so deceptively alluring
dictatorship

it being the essential
counter to the one
i'd been seeking to overcome

to the one had been
was being i was daily
allowing to be inflicted
from without

but equally pernicious