Two whites
The immaculate and aggressive wall,
The dull and sallow skin.
Obviously, death was imminent.
Her pale body wrapped in a virgin-white sheet would join the others under
the basement's fluorescent lights. On a visit there, the lights blinded
her. The corpses captivated her as she waited, and she came over and over
to see them in their silent temple.
Calming,
The morgue, with its white body-clothes:
The center piece of the hospital's minimalist aesthetics.
None of the wards' clutter,
But pure monochrome geometry.
Stark shapes, shades of color carefully absent:
The secret joy of winning coldness.
Let place be an object:
Starched, rectangular, light beams, aseptic.
The hospital's most perfect room:
The final vision of its logic
Nothing human,
Too much of this world here where time is not.
Bodies soiled by life's breath cannot rest here:
Inertness obligatory.
The shroud uniforms the erosion away.
Life alone could disrupt the balance and the alchemy.
Her heartbeat,
The caterwaul of revolt in this corpse archive:
Its logic refused.
Tomorrow, she would be here for her first show:
- Post mortem -
She thought until sublime, then remembered doleful,
And shook, and whispered:
"Hold onto life, show our imperfection."
About to return to her patient cell,
A silhouette in the bright light.
Pale and morbid,
A face of symmetry.
Harmony,
Reassurance, then fear.
Absent coloring:
No whisper of life,
Neither in the ears, nor in the cheeks.
Concretely,
A monochord worry
Lacking intonation:
"Hello, ma'am", said the metronome,
Meaning nothing.
Inutterable terror.
An abyss: "Hello,doctor."
Said her voice, other from his,
Tired - Stammering-alive.
"Have you lost someone?"
Without feeling, mere rhetorical,
No answer needed:
Dialogue made impossible.
A soliloquy.
Hostility stood there, the murmur of revolt could now not be heard. All of a
sudden, she felt desperately alone: fine tears roped silently under red
eyes, she looked away, turned her wheelchair and rolled back to her
anonymous room.
Obviously, death was imminent.