Clare Saponia The Optimists A long while before, when they were silent for the first time; when disorder was precise and regime obedient to the point of pedantry, dawn still crept in at the end of a night, like a spy. Like a hero. Faithful Silence In an episode like ours, counting tree after tree and looking for symbolism; in a country like ours that’s losing it, strip for strip, a pendulum of dripping culture in a society like ours, we’ve formed short and quaint interpretations that sign, seal and do not deliver in a secret like ours, dignity lies down; it gets bitten by painful whispers. In an empty place, I stay hidden sometimes all the more to keep it empty. And think. In a collective thought like ours that rarely comes together except in times of tragedy, the loyal keep their lips shut. Small I feel the size of the room is out to get me. When you shut the door, there’s an intrepid sense of smallness and you’re a part of it. I lie there and think about blowing smoke amongst a hundred things which remain unordered. Buddha tells me that’s okay. I stop trying to order them and the ninety-nine other things rejoin me an hour later for coffee. They remove their caps and duffels, dip into my line of view to ask, and so very humbly, if the seats about me are taken. They don’t wait for an answer. Their forwardness upsets me. Buddha tells me to renounce the superiority complex. And I note how easily I’m bullied into guilt; the face of charity on shift-system, the telephone call you make that passes me by without a message. Why did you phone? I eradicate. I leave you alone with Nietzsche and the day you’ve now won, although maybe you haven’t noticed just yet. For you, we’re still dancing in shared socks. I recall your long naked toes as a final caption this morning on treading backwards in that one reclaimed stocking trying not to wake you before fitting the other. You were covered by everything belonging to you, half of your face too, and I wanted to take a photo of your peaceful entirety in miniscule snippets. But had to go. You see, Buddha tells me not to crave. Not to possess you as a moment in my time although devil and angel fight over the proximity of your otherness and I vacate the caption in order to win the day. Buddha asks me what I have won. The Dutiful Marching in. You walk past amputations. You pass a crowd of diarrhoea and wailings. You are a soldier with nothing to report. C’est la vie you must think. C’est la vie you are told to feel: you are a moodless machine and immune to any event, especially the ones you yourself got involved in. Reality irritates you, you find. It carries a stench that runs deeper than ideology; ideology you follow but do not understand. There are levels of preparedness for it, should you take up the gauntlet: you ask yourself once, twice, nine hundred and twenty-two times and still you are not ready. Though, what it boils down to, I guess, is: do you want to be? Ours In between, the archetypes for this and that gel without confluence. It is a marmalade stitched together with the peelings of civilization. As I take a spoon, I pull against them, neat, unqualified, hoping for coherence; hoping they will share a glint of their difference. There are eight hundred and forty- nine scars in my marmalade; I have counted. They have simplified, almost uniform, each with a tale among the scramble, each intrinsically akin to the next. Each alone before severance with his lacerations. And one day all the marmalade will be gone. the day fear died One day, whilst the scaremongers were stamping down with their morals and phobia, an arcane unity seemed to take root. Pale. Serene. Organically. Rising as a mutant yeast with sweat and hope and presumption, and dissolving step by step the tethers of gooseflesh, until the bogyman became merely a bogy. Page Up / Poems | 
