Does everybody get that thing?
Clench the eyes tight shut
And start to see, not in the mind,
But truly see,
A vortexing kaleidoscope of tiny sepia
And burnt umber squares and stars and rhomboids
Palladianing down a tunnel whose fixed point of exit
Lies at the dead centre of
The whole field of non-vision?
For decades I imagined that
This tenebrous firework display, although
A thing, an aspect of palpable reality
And not simply the ragged scrap of a dream’s edge that
Had poked through from deeper expanses of my clear and hidden thinking,
That this must be some thing between
A glimpse of the atomic structure lying in wait in everything
And some sort of membrane that divides
Internal from external worlds.
It turns out that I’m wrong on both those counts.
These lights are called phosphenes, and what one sees -
Or what I see, because these words
Might sound like mad Sanskrit screamed
Into a cushion to anybody else but me -
Is simply the vestigial light remaining
In my eyeballs, still compelled to bounce against
Their rods and cones and rendered into sparks my brain
Displays as dirty stars and suns in the total darkness.
It doesn’t really matter either way
Even if, deep from back inside early childhood nights,
I’ve liked imagining the swirling lightshow is a curtain
I can twitch and thus check out what’s up on either side,
Particularly this year, this sabbatical from ecocide,
This failed correction, one more flawed exercise
In albeit brutal biocontrol, though now,
Accompanied by a crescendo of deadly Doppler chords of clawing back normality
The Juggernaut slips with a crunch of bones back in to gear
And on we blithely writhe, hang out the torn up shrouds as bunting
In a fresh fiesta for the Heist Christ, still led on by bumptious, loud class clowns
Whose names grace blistering boards in old school halls and, if they’re blessed,
One day a cracking cul de sac that leads to bricked up depots full of loot
Between catacombs of bedsits, where petrifying certainties sedimenting in their skulls
Squeeze people’s minds out through blocked ears to sizzle for a second
as opinions pass for politics and tantrums for debate
With extermination for dissent remaining a distinct option
As they plop onto the curling lino.
For over half a year I’ve Cartier-Bressoned all of that,
Strait-jacketing my instant take, like this, both in and out.
All that unstinting witnessing, of Death, cranked cranks, the crooks and all that
Embarrassingly gauche gratitude for just the meagrest dollop of what’s-next-might-not-be- quite-so-bad
Reminds me to get back inside and hunker round the richly glowing embers
And watch you smile, then look down to the knitting on your lap,
And laugh. That does for now, forever, so I’m drawing back the curtain
And ignoring for a bit the killing constantly begetting killing. Though remember:
However much you hate them, viruses are people too.