Yet Untitled 133 - Fears and Fevers

After a while, a poem.

Dearest Yet Untitler,

There’s a lot - a lot - that’s gone through my head this past week. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been great, with me coming out on top, mostly 💪🏼. But because it’s quite a complex matrix of thoughts and emotions that I’ve been carrying about, I chose to make this instalment a poem, to share my inner landscape with some Impressionism rather than the photorealistic verisimilitude.

The length may be only a few stanzas, but I was surprised by how much work I had to put in to arrive at as much, and how much I enjoyed doing it. ‘Nuff respect to all poets! I salute you 🩷. As Bono remarked of Leonard cohen, I went to work on it like a carpenter works on a door. It was engaging, obsessive and very satisfying. While the stanzas below aren’t exactly made of unicorns and rainbows, they seemed to carry me like a horned horse towards a big arch in the sky anyhow.

Excerpt from my WIP graphic novel “Long Walk at the Break of Day”

I hope you enjoy reading it. Tell me if you do. Tell me if you don’t. Either way, I love to hear from you.

Fears and Fevers

Fear sits on me like a heavy dew, infused with
Some noxious smog it's carried
From some inner place.
It reminds me of fevers I’ve had. I've had many!
A veteran of fevers and fears, I proclaim:
I don’t like having either near.

Fevers. Stuck in their unimaginative rut:
Folding over of running brain, puzzling speeding
Of a heart, pushing blood: all
Inconveniences that confound you.
Fear too has its repeating ways:
Suddenly too little air, a lying sense that sleep will solve 
Everything. Its jack-in-the-box habits, its unwelcome bed-fellowing;
I’ve come to know them all. And too well.

Fear’s not accommodating. It occupies. Making refugees of
Looking, deep breaths, healthy eating. Of reason.
Fever: another unreasonable tenant.
The kind whom dealing with is sapping - all the slowness, 
All the delirious napping. Moistened cloth on burning 
Forehead, a stuffy room. Haziness. Trapping.

The only thing I like about a fever is the feeling it leaves
When it’s gone. When my head is a cave, walls aglow
With the heat of a fever that’s no longer there, save 
A heart that's slow, blood that's down, fresh cold water dripping down.
The invader gone, women emerge, children abound.  

My fears are given to sticking around. I wish they were more 
Like my fevers here. Quick in, quick out of said compound. 
Like with my fevers, I like when my fears leave. 
A room where curtains sway gently to the breeze. 
An open window, framing trees. 

What gets them to leave, these fear-fevers that linger?
What balm, what poultice, what touch of what finger?
My fever crackles. 
Burning, I listen. 
Burning I shiver.
Deep in the fever’s flame, hidden in delirium, 
Is a rightening. 
Amidst the tightening and the undulation of its rhythm, 
Sickness dies 
And so does fever. 

My fear crackles. 
Burning, I listen. 
Burning, I shiver. 
Shivering, I venture - “you, my fear, are nothing but a fever. 
You may burn, but you won't forever.”

Thanks for listening!

Lots of love,

V

Two alchemists who can cure any fever. Mumbai, c. 2019