The Lily Livered Recluse

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Dear Unknown,


My eyelids are heavy and weary, yet too timid to embrace each other. Autumn whispers shyly through the netted window. This damp, dismal night is lit only by the sickly glow of flickering neon letters perched atop a preening building, screaming in shades of electric red and yellow. But it is in this horrid limelight that I speak tonight, to an audience of famished trees, elusive crickets and the anaemic winds of October. 


Through half open eyes I watch this vulgar vista contort itself into hypnotising swirls in the murky puddles that litter the construction site below. In the haziness of a sleepless reverie I could see a reflection of myself in them. These puddles were cowards too, skulking behind a veil of unintelligible obscurity, distorting anything that remotely cared to pry beyond the surface. 


I think back to the drivel that I have spilled on these pages. Brutish brushstrokes I have smeared canvases with. All those stuffy verses and crude colours never stood a chance did they? Smited too soon by cowardice masquerading as abstraction, never to be heard or perceived.  


But as the ashes of extinguished expression fall so gracefully around me, what can I do but revel in its utterly meaningless, apocalyptic beauty? 


I draw the blinds to make sure I don’t veer off on yet another pretty chain of elaborate, empty verses about the changing seasons, the inevitability of time, or the flowers that had bloomed too early on the nondescript tree in the compound. Triviality shan't save me this time. 


Why was I writing today? I hadn’t the remotest inkling, but that was usually the case. Why then, were the past few weeks wrought with the gnawing itch that one gets when words are left unsaid? Now that I’m here gazing vacantly at a dusty screen, its ghostly white glow stares back coldly, intruding my sporadic thoughts. 


But then it dawned on me. This itch that I had mistaken for a bout of inspiration was nothing but the beckoning of yet another item on yet another list of tasks to slovenly ‘execute’. Unbeknownst to me, it seems I may have ritualised my passions. Relegated even the unbidden parts of life to feeble bits of an unspoken schedule - like timed chemical reactions in an oddly assembled machine that functions simply to function, in solemn servitude to itself. 


Having solved the case of the insidious itch, I’m met yet again by the unsettling gaze of an empty page, peering from the bottom of the screen, waiting to pounce. Silence ensues. The walls have nothing to say. My art that hung on them, so pompously framed, somehow said even less. 


I clatter the blinds open in a hurry, foraging for something to latch my thoughts on to. As the vapid night hoves into view, I see everything with stubborn clarity. The horizon is no longer a distant shimmer that I could lose myself in. The sky is always pallid with lifeless clouds carelessly strewn about. The mynahs no longer stop by to shriek about their worldly worries, and the wind no longer sings. Sharp focus slices through obscurity, revealing existence in plain view. Clarity always cuts deep. 


Despite all this definition, I’m drifting away, slowly sinking to the depths of this stiflingly silent midnight. My mechanistic self rebelled against this disorder by prying my eyes open. The ritual says that I must complete these thoughts and tie it off with a neat little bow before letting myself drown. The ritual must be heeded.


For now I speak to you from a place between places,

Frozen in viscous indifference that oozes between moments.

Drowned in cheap brews, in stained cups, stirred in haste,

The days digress, erasing past selves that I chased.

It is in the short stillness between breaths,

That I hear the echoes of words I left unsaid.

Penned with passion, sealed shut, left to bleed on ageing pages,

A chorus crooned timidly, hidden between hollow verses.



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