Green Rot
the empty house of an absent soul
Green Rot
the empty house of an absent soul
Once I knew a cold and green chill, sad like a neon light in a gas station at 3 a.m. One day I heard the seven-headed dragon roaring from hell at a child frozen in fear. One day I made love to a piece of salami, or a dead and cold hen. She was drunk, and maybe it would have been better to make love to a plank than to a cold, naked hen.
I remember poverty, but not the normal poverty of lacking money. Rather the poverty of lacking sun, lacking oxygen, lacking joy. Everything was gray in the houses where the shadow of alcohol blocked any glimmer of optimism. Tragedy took the form of corrosive asceticism.
Skin on bones.
Mineral nakedness.
My uncle with half a stomach who couldn’t walk straight. My uncle with half a mind who could only sell the family TV for a glass of wine. My neighbor from the ditch, the father of my friends from the third floor. They skinny from hunger, he skinny from thirst. Translucent hacks walking toward the darkness at the end of the tunnel.
Tragedy, tragedy.
“A-lcohoole.” Ya’ can’t even funny spell this shit.
The green rot is just a memory of human misery. Some can escape but a lot cannot. Some will sublimate this like Bukovsky or Verlaine; most will not. Misery has a thousand faces, but the saddest one is the overtly destructive addiction, while one even sadder is the fight nobody knows about, alone with the demon in your head.
Some people are empty shells; the rot has taken their minds while they are appearing flawless to the outside world. They carry a dead soul, a heart that cannot beat anymore, for good or for bad.
Those are the real ghosts we should fear to become like: being a caricature of a living human just carrying on but deaf to the music of life, blind to the light of other eyes, insensible to suffering.
21, 25, 19, 35, 43, 59; all dead souls in a silent misery, but tricking the world that they are still alive;
dehumanised dolls who still carry a colourless misery of the absent soul.