Small boy bites into burger
with his stare on.
The scan: I'm a 6 ft monster now.
Give a smile but
there's no smile back.
He turns to Mum and Dad
with their long noses,
patient near-angelic eyes.
Subject to one another. Clicking in.
The boy to me again
pulls hat over face
to be not looking.
City Road soon and time.
"Subject to one another..."
ReplyDeleteNo room for anyone else in this picture.
This projects an idea of contemporary society as a series of nested subjects, each a fragment contained within its shell, each atomized, separate, and distinct.
("B-b-but... there's the family unit," submits a voice from the bridge of the sinking ship.)
Who can forget this snippet from an interview given to Woman's Own in 1987?:
ReplyDelete"And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families."
Surely she was a prophet in her own private wilderness. And lo, that privileged place has burgeoned and grown, so that now many a monad might well be tempted, for lack of any other non-technological signification, to call it home.
ReplyDelete(Must confess to feeling absolutely monadic on the night buses, must be a terminal symptom, I'm rarely aboard them any more... and the most recent memories of the horrifying day buses are marked by hallucinatory images of unruly, noisy, aggressive small children performing their tiny pantomimes of End Times even while the comfortably passive accompanying parents gaze off into space, out the window, into the bad air and urban grime and commercial phantasmagoria -- and doubtless also into the prospect of the continuing sacrosanct defensive singularity of the culturally-approved "family unit".)
There are times when being windowless is for the best.
ReplyDeleteOnce sown, isn’t there always room for one’s own plot against his “own"?
ReplyDeleteI like your line of thought, Vassilis. Almost makes me wish I had some wooden progeny about.
ReplyDeletetransitory moments..imperfect..like life
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sandra
ReplyDeleteI hope in this series to hold on to some of those transitory moments. And perfection always gave me the heebie jeebies.
"heebie jeebies"...:)that expression is new to me...!
ReplyDelete