This is something different.
I sit, but do not wait.
There is too much to wait for,
I must have something now.
I worked constantly,
I loved constantly,
all constantly past.
Now I worry,
also constantly.
I have precariously:
house, children, some of wife,
job, surprisingly,
more an anchor than a living:
festering catastrophe.
I lose by not gaining,
by letting acquisition slip away.
I have much to save of me:
that which I’ve become
from someone I have left behind
begetting who I never was,
a new creation: Me.
I cannot afford the loss of all I am
in gamble to conserve my core.
To safeguard my best
I risk losing most of me.
You can lose
what you’ve never had securely,
also its future memory,
This thing I’ve made at last, what is it?
It will remain with you, a teasing
unlikely to escape your mind,
or burrow too far in.
It is a question that will torment,
whose answer I’ll take with me
to my destination: silence.
Lest you think too well of me,
I’ll take the question, too.
Life gnaws at my stomach
like George Orwell’s rats,
survival bites;
my fingers seem prison bars
pressed upon my face.
Numbness is a blank screen
upon which nervous spasms
are projected, also tics,
cramps and twitches,
aches and sores
ascending into serious pain,
but deadness is a barrier to suffering,
impervious also to dreams
and hopes and wishes,
so before you build that wall
or permit it to be built,
tell your architect
that you want doors
and windows in it.
Unexplored -
National Geographically -
my well-worn street
might be antipode
across the world from me,
for all the comfort here.
Australia one way,
up or down another,
no one-way ticket punched,
if round trip, ‘twas imagined
or in the twinkling of an eye
for I’m still stuck in place
Whatever former guaranteed,
latter reneged upon.
Warranty’s integrity is in foreign hands
forging signatures in translation.
Because of wartime rationing,
what countries do I want to own
besides the one I barely have?
There is something in a scent
to trigger vivid memory
that photograph or art can’t conjure.
If this were image of a knife,
be careful: it can cut you.
Let us construe the use of it,
concoct it from surrounding air.
I could not support my life,
and it would not sustain me.
I was factory without a product,
so now the doors are closed
the labor force is shiftless.
I dissolve in vacuum leaving nothing
for my will’s bequeathment,
no pen, no hand to sign
no final testimony.
This thing I’ve made,
this resolute creation,
residue at the bottom of my pot
after lifelong distillation,
is obviously not still me -
I’m gone.
Millenium 15 -- Tigran Tsitoghdzyan
