Animal

Photo by Levi Midnight on Unsplash

It is late at night.

Silence shrouds the streets

like a thin soft coffin.

Silence?

I try to listen —

for a motorbike or a car whizzing by,

but nothing;

not a scrap of sound from the flat next to me

infiltrating the thin walls

(sometimes, a woman wails and screams at her husband alternatively,

who then cajoles and beats her alternatively too);

no screeching whistles from the night watchman;

no airplane zipping overhead— no;

not even a water drop

gathering weight

at the mouth of the bathroom tap,

and then falling to the floor like a bomb in the dead of the night;

Nothing! Not a thing.

I like it when it gets this quiet.

When the outside dies down, the inside opens up

says Osho

I have returned to my private isolation

the lights in the room are out.

In the cavernous darkness is just me

looking,

searching for less imperfect words to thread less imperfect thoughts ..

but there is darkness inside me as well,

hanging,

unmoving and bleak,

it won’t melt and flow into thoughts

it won’t sublimate and drift into words,

but it is not barren or desolate —

I know something stirs there in its black recesses

an animal unshackled,

which flashes his existence at will.

Cruel and hateful,

deranged and mad,

he charges and tears at my civilized mask

with his bloody claws;

he rips and shreds the curtains of my social theater

with his yellow fangs bared;

a flux of fury,

his primal scream reverberates through my every pore.

Then it gets quieter

as he leaps back

into the same gloomy depths as before.

Is he the rage?

Is he the mortal fear —

the growing panic of old age?

and death?

Is he the wounded ego

fidgeting sans fulfilment

wanting catharsis?

Is he the soul,

stranded in the wasteland of time,

sick of all the half measures —

the trope of hope,

the private suffering,

and the public masquerading

of individuality,

and the self expression in art —

searching only for salvation?

Kafka writes:

Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.

Is he that point closing in?

A mosquito is buzzing near me

I flail at it

and it flies away.

A few seconds pass,

and I hear the buzz again.