Private Hauntings

You recited this poem for me once, as eloquently as you weaved your fictions(read lies). You told the story well, you told the story before you lived it. You are a linguist; I'm a somnambulist: its only natural that I fall for your lies. Private terrors are but fables. They are half-dreamed and half-lived. How else can one go on living these terrors without believing that they are mostly fables? Fiction can be soothing. The fractured seek out the fractured; the depraved seek out the depraved. There is solidarity to be found in a queue of sunken faces and broken spirits. This sort of solidarity even the politicians find hard to manufacture. Does anybody ever question a man who devours his own heart? Do they ever call him a cannibal? No. As long as it is his own heart, nobody cares, and it isn't much of a loss either.


To stand

To stand, in the shadow
of a scar in the air.

Stand-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you
alone.

With all that has room within it,
even without
language.

-Paul Celan