Polly Atkin
Bethany posted this amazing Polly Atkin poem today and it is perfect for the day.
Colony Collapse Disorder
When I lived in the city I knew where I was, what being there was. I knew I breathed under a film of constant light, that electricity was life. It moved in my body, which I knew was an atom of the city, and kept us twitching in unity. I felt information bloom in my blood. It sang in my cells as though it had always been there. I knew without it I had no structure.
To leave the city was to leave one’s memory. Outside was a garden gone wild. Stars were night-flowers in a mossy dome, opening their dazzling mouths to amaze, spreading exponentially the further from the city I went. I knew nothing. What nothing meant. I feared the dark and the space between things: space needs filling. I’d cry for the city, its order. To be let back in was to regain the future.
Now I live elsewhere the systems reversed. The city is a picture from a book I once read and nothing to do with me. Life is a movement between dirt and sky. I see this clearly. The stars are generators. Without them we’d fail. Going back to the city is to speed myself up to a drawn out buzz that I know is killing me. Going anywhere other than elsewhere is rehearsing this end: the shut-down of travelling energy.
All those years living inside weakened me. Taken away from elsewhere I dim. Friends visit and tell me that elsewhere is death and the sky cannot feed me. Not indefinitely. Their eyes are blown bulbs. They rattle. I smell honey on their skin and know how it is. When they move I hear humming like a swarm at a distance. When they speak I hear their voices, and under the city quietly droning. Polly Atkin