Скачать или смотреть Visiting Hour by Chris Kelso

(Originally published at The Scottish Poetry Library 2020)

The world opens its eyes,
Breathes in acrid chemical.
Light enters in a burning slingshot of negative mass and energy.
**
Quantum slipstream subsides.
Sight adjusts
The world looks around, absorbs the sterile room.
Sees IV tubing connecting the world to apparatus.
A heart monitor connecting it to machine.
The pumping hydraulics of an oxygen tank in its left ear connecting the world to the industrial soundscape of a futile rebuilding process.
A sigh that shakes the Congo
***
The world remembers how it got here.
And with that memory comes a sharp pain in the left temple of the world
Instinct compels it to raise a hand to the skull to nurse the wound,
But neurons fire to dead limbs.
The world cannot move.
A lumpen, lead heap of trans-planetary matter.
****
So, the world buries its fears in a deep silent place
where decades of pain rests obese and dormant.
A mother’s shame, a plugged duct,
A wasted nipple
*****
The world drags its gaze to the ceiling and tries to communicate to its enucleated children,
It burns the stare into something telekinetic.
A concentrated refrain travels through the air and to the collective conscious.
A mercy plead from victim to perpetrator
Mother to typhlotic son
******
The world asks, ‘when are visiting hours anyway?’
No one replies
Visiting hours are over
No children bothered to come by.