the wound
There is a sickness in every spoken breath.
I cannot hold, your hands or otherwise.
Dear brother let me tell you about
The empty sea, sailed on through
A tiny wooden boat, carved with
Words I left, behind the door
Never whispered
You will say “Don't open the door, don’t put on a smile, evil is everywhere”, that “stars are reminders of life inflicted upon us”. You know what you’ve done, but what can I? We speak, we can’t, in between the two, ever blinking arms slowly crawling, to shoulders, which are now a lot smaller than yours.
I am sitting next to this photograph, flowers and your face, drawing on a timid smile.
How am I?
I am standing at the edge of a Well
Pouring water
And waiting for
The sparkles to burst
My ankles in four,
Hit me, hit me, hit me
do it again
To meet Martha and Eva, to pick up flowers in their garden, to ask “The Snow, How’s she?”
Roots are meant to be plucked away.
This house is filled with paper clips and empty sheets. Nothing else can be done, it is not walking upon wires, oblivion staring under me, it is only a gentle forgetting of how to be.
Going out, buying a shirt can be such an eventful thing:
“Does it fit, does it fit me?”
“We can see your bones underneath” She doesn’t like it
“I like the shades it gives to your skin” spoken like a casual glance, she is bored
“See? i'm going to buy it, it’s going to be so great I think. I want you to see them, I want you to tie my bones so harshly they break, I want you to put your hand wrist deep in my mouth, I want you to stop being ever so bored”
“We should head back”
“All you do is head back, you know I can't. Eventually everything, all burns out so why won’t you? I hate you, I hate you so much sometimes, sometimes you are so ugly I want to scream and tear your face away from my sight, I hate the way you breath and you whisper and the way you walk and the way you talk to the neighbors and every day, I wake up next to you and it’s awful and I want you dead. But whenever I catch a glimpse of your heels, or your left leg or your ears I want them, I want to hold them, I want to carry them forward, just once, forward.”
There is,
a brief utterance in every name, a song of spilled sweat and aching limbs. As in mine, which twists and turns and weighs on my neckline, each time its sound rings upon my left ear.
I have started writing, for it is
useless and frail.
For I have nothing to scream that words
could speak
As for when my cheeks
feel the gentle hand of
The first sun beams and
Before me, stands glorious
the cruel acceptance that
Language is still only but
Language
There is,
a sickness in every spoken breath, it is heavy and kind, a fever rising high, brushing every last strand of hair. Face against a pillow, it comes and undoes me from inside. I am seeing things that might have happened, or not, here cannot be now, it is crushed by what was and what will.
All that is kept
safe, in a tiny locket
will stay shared secrets
Between you and me
But mostly.
Between I and the bruises
On the skin
Amar Dayan Ndiaye
Intention:
I see my writing like a patchwork of conversations I have with people, strangers I hear on the streets, and anything else that catches my ears, I keep in a notebook all that struck me. For me The Wound was a reflection on our mutilated relationship with The Other and the world. Around these vignettes, small moments of life I wrote down, I wanted to create some kind of abstract, stream of consciousness narrative. A woman sending a letter to her brother, she has something important to say to him, to talk about, an event which lies beyond the limits of her language, so she struggles, she fights, she tells him of her life as she speaks it, a fragmented testimony of her life, which has permanently been altered by events she finds herself unable to speak of.
