A rented room. This saggy mattress and assemble-it-yourself bookshelf. Yet, how sweet are those hardwood floors? And the sound of one’s own footfall in the silence.

when home is no longer : home

Kelly Sauvage Angel

Another six hours have passed. The nurse comes back with a new bag to hang up on the IV stand. She reconnects the cannula and a cold liquid invades unsuspecting veins. An alien invasion of personal space. A metallic taste. It doesn’t feel the same as last time.

fear of needles
finding a new bravado
in daydreams

Twenty minutes later. A different nurse. The bag is empty, and things are not what they were the last time, or the time before. That cold liquid felt mercury-like. It’s triggered a transformation, like Neo had, after swallowing the red pill. A perfusion of internal organs has caused irrevocable change. Flesh is now mimetic polyalloy. Will it affect consciousness? Maybe an updated imagination could create any personality it wants. Such power, such possibilities, yet still an overwhelming urge to sleep.

dry veins drifter
looking to hitch a ride
on a new nightmare

David J. Kelly

Winter’s cloak is tattered rags. The white counterpane wore away so quickly. All that’s left are isolated patches of moraine-encrusted glacier. Walking home, late at night, there’s a sense of suspended animation. Somehow this freezing space is freezing time. Still, incontestable imperatives propel the body onwards, comet-like, through cold emptiness, to describe another eccentric orbit.

castaway
watching Noah’s ark
crest the horizon

David J. Kelly

Lying discarded beneath some urban undergrowth, near a mulberry tree, a man is discovered bisecting a dream or an insect — it’s not clear which because the evidence suggests he may have hijacked his own unconscious mind.

rolling stone gathering no moss garden

Tim Murphy

The easel is a cello, why can this simple fact not be made clearer? And also, why is there ambiguity and doubt about the nature of spatulas? It’s still possible to come across people who deny that spatulas are used by painters in the same way and for the same reason that murderers sometimes use knives.

train journey
Sisyphus
on speed

Tim Murphy

A page is a map for when you are lost, which is always. Pre-existing maps can be of enormous assistance, but the ones you draw yourself are invariably of superior quality. The art of re-drawing either a pre-existing map or one of your own maps should be undertaken, if at all possible, using green ink.

cloudless
not running
on empty

Tim Murphy

The monk makes it all look plausible. His beatific smile is in itself an aspiration.

butterflies between the brows stillness darts

The mind makes notes of all the things that need letting go.

After five days, realisation dawns. Clinging looks appealing. Nirvana is best in small doses.

And anyway, from what he says, we all probably have a zillion lives before we can levitate.

morphine shots
halos behind
every tree

 

Shobhana Kumar