Kanagawa

After Hokusai

Rubber-gloved hands gagging a reservoir of feeling 

gasping for breath in its glass casket. Seen, but 

unseen: pixels, agoraphobic and adrift amid the 

electric New York air con. 

No one to hear the splash—just faces, hollow and blank and numb,

Seized by the shrieking ripples— 

Rippling, ripping across the stage, but on this 

stage they stay: rogue droplets unfelt, impotent to 

shatter their cage. The captor gnashes and 

writhes, jaws opened wide, 

Its leash trails behind: whipping clear 

tears into scintillating cerulean effigies that vacuum their voices. 

Sweet pills swallowed so rapaciously that 

overdose snatches the helm—organs shut down; 

Muscles spasm seismically; synapses snapping off; 

Crumbling, coughing, keeling, and—

Perhaps the splash is yet to come. 

So, they were wrong about suffering. 

Not simply spewed in a glossy ebullition of brilliance, but 

incarcerated and immortalised in 

throbbing mimeo-graphic echoes. 

A dormant cancer reborn again. 

And again. Gravity’s feeble puffs extinguished in the grinning meat grinder.

Perhaps not. Perhaps never. 

Suffering anaesthetised in inculcation, 

Denied sepulchral certainty: only 

cursory aesthetics spawned from the storm of 

Being.