You lean in close to examine your specimen-
for this fascination in bodies would let you know
how your own works.
And where we differ.
He lays there, spread out across the table
in a pose that suggested he was eternal,
but you’ll find yourself none the more enlightened
as he lay there;
a dead, grey thing.
“Who was he?” a voice from nowhere had asked.
“Does it matter?” you replied, tracing a gloveless finger
across his arm. A timid curiosity maybe,
that you’d push a vein and he’d wake in a start.
“He must have lived,” started the voice.
“He did,” you whisper, “though he’s gone now.”
You look at his tag.
“A poet. That’s what he was,” you confirmed.
“A waste,” replied the voice.
“Maybe.”
You looked at his eyes first.
Seeing how the timid fire in the light of them
has long since been snuffed out.
The eyes that were a faded
milky white from the melted wax
from the candles that once flickered.
Make no mistake in confusing them for cataracts.
You held a scalpel, unsteady in your hands,
as if it was your first time all over again.
The skin was thick, but composed of silk,
a velvet colouring underneath.
But you had to make the effort to look out
and not accidentally cut into tender bone-
bone that had the intention of holding up the world,
but the potential to barely keep itself standing.
The skin was much too like a canvas,
and you paint with an edge to it;
delicate at first
where the skin parted like the seas,
which then gave way to narrow fissures on a frozen lake-
a crack and a horrid tear from hide to dermis,
and what was skin melted into the ash it was forged from.
You barely had to cut.
He lays open.
A morbid gift on Christmas.
But you drew in close.
Looking at him like he was a book of poetry
flipped open to your favourite passage.
His pages lined with blood as thick as ink,
and his insides a viscera of working beauty.
He looked like something out of a Van Gogh painting.
All colours on the inside, a palette of organs mixed
in every which way.
His ears were as sharp as the whispers they heard,
and with a nose that accustomed to picking up the scents
of creatures far less animal
than he.
His hair was the colour of crow feathers,
and he liked it when it drooped down to his sore shoulders
so that he could hide the scars
from the past of a self
that was never him.
His hands were flat,
but he didn’t have ordinary lines.
No, the hands looked like they had wires
woven from every which way;
a swamp of electricity surged
through his palms.
A message from nirvana
of a life praised of idealism,
but hands etched in soot and grime
was the one that faintly delivered it.
Check his fingernails,
and it’s a shock to find dried blood
of a dead lover
from clawing away at her back
You shift uncomfortably.
And there’s the remains of
ink smudged on his finger tips
of all the words that he never got to write.
His own blood.
Traveling up his hand you find broken wrists
from all the guilt and remorse
he could not carry;
his hands painted black from climbing
to higher heights
all in some hope that he could just
get away.
The insides of his hands were no more merciful
as ligaments and planages from the bones of his fingers
were stained blue from trying to grab a hold of lady winter
for night and day. He always did say he liked the cold.
You’d never think it to be the end of him.
Liver, intestines, pancreas, stomach, gallbladder…
It’s all there, you wonder. But it was off.
Granted they were oddly shaped and miscoloured
in various indigos, greens, oranges, and blues.
You brush away at the cobwebs and the dust
That glimmered off the sides of the organs.
Clearly, these instruments have not been used
in a long time….
So what did he eat?
You take your scalpel again for another
surgical plunge only to find
more dust and surprisingly
echoes
of lost ideas that never got to be consumed
before his time was up.
He survived off of the bread crumbs
of dead poets and forbidden fruits
from the trees of Eden.
And you just now noticed
the faint sparks and hums
of fireflies roaming around and about
his blood vessels;
the messengers of muses.
His ribcage was most peculiar
in the way that its bones,
brittle as they were, falling apart
at the seams,
were arranged in a way that it looked like a chest
that needed a key to open.
Designed not so much to keep things in,
but rather to keep things out.
A vault of secrets.
And inside there was a spiral staircase
leading down into an abyss
either of treasures
or horrors.
Perhaps both.
Down to his legs,
Slim but raging with vigour-
built off the urge to whiz past forests
and skim the unsteady tidings of oceans
that he had no quarrel in drowning himself in.
But the joints at the knees looked so pained
and bloodied from having to be broken backwards
so he’d be able to pounce like a wolf,
and snapped back
so he could climb like an ape.
Anything from being compared to the likes of man.
But his feet.
Oh, his feet!
Ashen were they.
Seared and scarred and scorched
right down to the bone from his heel to his toes.
Black and burned from having to walk
in the blazes that he paved for himself
because it’s easier to be alight
than it is to let yourself be seen.
You go back to the head
to find where he bled.
The Galea Aponeurotica being the muscle
of the face that controls expression –
what’s most peculiar though, is instead of muscle
he simply shelters layers of plastic.
A series of doll masks
to relay emotion
when it’s just so difficult
to pick
what to feel.
And picking away at the frontal bone
you’ll find his brain.
Remarkably still alive!
Remarkably still pulsing with paints
under smoky trails of electricity.
It flashed with passion and bursted
at the skull, continuously painting the hollow spaces
with colour.
All except for…
The amygdala.
Responsible for emotion.
The only part of his brain that was discoloured and grey.
There was a thin rope, however –
A thin rope leading from it
that could have been easily missed.
You follow it.
Down the esophagus that had less trouble
swallowing poison than swallowing pride.
Beside the crooked spinal cord
composed of glass and crimson cracks.
Down to the thoracic cavity
where you’ll find the rope leading to his heart.
But the thin rope was
so tightly abused around the little heart
as if it were the leash
to a badly behaved dog.
You untie the leash
only to jump
from what sprouted underneath.
A pair of raven’s wings protruded
from ventricle to ventricle.
One wing was stained red,
the other was white.
An aching conflict of desire
from the avians that he spoke to.
You pick up his heart-
The bruised and bloodless with wings.
You try to see what’s inside.
Not so much a difficult task to do
when his heart had been the victim of
endless patchwork of needles and thread
that grew intensively sloppier
as the years passed by.
And inside
his heart
you’ll come to find
a scared soul hounding to be released
from his cage.
The soul that burned from the essence of unkindled fires.
A soul that was
half-bad,
half-wild,
and a little half-lost….
“What was he?” the voice asked again.
Just a grey boy
who wrote the most colourful poetry.
Sajan Ray Dhaliwal – Hopeless Opus