Tuesday 24 July 2012

Murmer

I stand outside in the slim rain, the low static of my brain blending seamlessly with the grey murmur of the slipping air.

I am on the verge of becoming part of their pattern - when I discover this envelope with my hands.

I notice knuckles under rain drops; finger skin on paper angles.

Against the white noise of my placid thoughts I hear something beating inside it.

Why do I get the feeling of having forgotten my own name?

All closed up there is a language inside this envelope that I made, but that I didn’t write down: I never spoke out loud.

Instead kind and un-named doctors have excavated this primal tongue from my body with electrodes and sanitised hands.

I remember now. The scholars of the people’s body were mouthing long worn phrases at me:

‘Are you scared? Are you the kind that prays?’

‘No, no, thank you – I don’t believe in god, and I do not fear the pain.’

Frankenstein, they say, Frankenstein is why some people scream and cry – I imagine them, wringing their hands like incoherent mothers at the side of crosses.

‘B movies have a lot to answer for, but as you can see there is nothing horrifying here.’

Yes, you’re right, there is nothing here. No electrocution, no sickness, no death, ever. Not here. This is just a house of waiting rooms and lifts going up. A palace of synthetic noise – where a whirring whirring King lives out his days as a fridge-hum – content to conquer me by leaving me my eyes but making my mind dumb.

So I lie down: a complaisant plank on hospital blue.

A clock ticks gently in the hall: dull, dull, dull yourself gently down the stream.

A nurse-o-matic walks past me out of the room, leaving me with a grey octopus.

The octopus wakes up and slowly stretching out, it lays its tentacles on my skin and starts suck -sucking on my chest – harvesting beats to build a map of my inside for the envelope.

Line, line, cross reference, aVL, Caucasian, co-ordinates, -4, 0, -5, V4.

The octopus purrs. I don’t understand what it’s mouthing.

Confused I close my eyes, only to find myself outside in the rain – standing there with an envelope addressed to someone else.

A whole institution between me and my heart.

Because I couldn’t possibly understand. I could never understand this dead language that only lives in me.