Monday, March 14, 2011

promotheus (self-inflicted)

Emotion spills, gushes and congeals in corners, in clumps like tumours. I could - instead of my usual constructed arguments and careful blend of personal and social anecdote - throw out words like blood spatters, emptying out my too-painful entrails so that I would no longer need to bear the weight of them moving in my breast. They would make chaotic violent spatters, pulpy and odorous, sticky to the touch deeply and almost ridiculously red. How can I tell where one emotion begins and my thoughts end? Perhaps I will pull too much out by mistake, perhaps cause an explosion. My central skeleton would shatter, sharp fragments of bone thrown outwards to embed themselves in the page, the soft tissue of my lungs indistinguishable from the bloody mass. I would be left not only free of the pain but unable to breathe, a ghost unaware of the terrible, fibrous hole between the breastplate and the pelvis.

But by the time the words are read they would be the mundane colour of rust, dried out and flaking off. Crawling creatures in need of such vital sustenance will have consumed the more substantial clots, only a sour smell and something metaphorically insidious and intangible would remain.

I cannot feel whether it would be a relief to be rid it (how can it be qualified) or whether my internal organs would grow back in the night, excruciating and raw, ready to be torn out and mounted once again for display.

2 comments:

  1. Writing can be as visceral and painful as surgery, and if it isn't sometimes the hardest thing in the world to write it down, you're doing it wrong.

    Continue being brave, fair Clea!

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  2. I am left utterly breathless at this masterpiece that has brilliantly resonated with my soul...

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