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I LISTEN TO SOMEONE DIE
By Quentin Smith I
I hear someone gasping for help up above
It is a young woman I can tell
By the traces of the mother-call the self-pity
In the voice that has gone to deep now for crying
She can barely breath her chest is heaving more slowly
The hurt must be fatal in her it must be killing her
Was she raped stabbed did she fall or is she about to suicide
Or is it some terrible deadly sickness
It is a wild sob a cry
She can’t believe the world is really like this
Gradually she becomes weaker
She dies slowly on the hard floor
Above my room
I like awake all night with an open window
Listening to her slowly diminishing pleas
For someone to save her
She does not know that there is no one
That there is nothing at all that can save anybody
There are only stars burning slowly
In the frozen night
Only the heaviness
Of the dark sky leaning on the earth,
And the whine of the cold wind along
The endless concrete walls.
She dies in silence before dawn.
I I
I might have phoned an ambulance
stopped her bleeding
she might have been patched up
But I knew that a re-normalization
was not salvation
and that an unsaved normalicity
is no less futile than
a howling wind-front
attacking violently and without purpose
those endless concrete walls
Her life had no meaning
Neither did mine
She died that night
but I have been dying
a more horrible inner death
for the past forty years
I have been dying with the knowledge
that there is nothing, nobody, no stranger,
no garganticum, nothing divine,
no sublime inspiration for
the creation of other-worldly art,
that could come
and save us from this terrible place.
We are walking backwards
on the trails through the blackness
until we are gone
with the sudden success
of grouping fingers of death.
Absent perspectives are all
that is left when we vanish
in an instant
to where we were
long before we were conceived.
A nowhere that is infinitely distant
from every place.
We are taken back to the
unthinkable nothingness
without even a consciousness
and nothing can save us
from this second horror of fate
If she only knew that when she died
how she died how she lived
did not matter one whit
she would have known that
whether she died sobbing
or laughing, pleading or rejoicing,
would have made no difference
to the nothingness now seeping
through the holes in her eyes.
It is obvious that
Nothing important has happened.
Infected once again with tedium
I close my eyes
and return like a prodigal son
to the nearest thing to home,
a very long, thoughtless, dreamless sleep.
Written 1974 and 2005.
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