Sam Ledger

Russian Doll

Wholly it slips away, washing down a plug hole at the end of a bath. At the end of each day.  All the life I have inside of me, pink and livid flows quietly from here. How much of yourself must you lose before you are considered empty. The old massacre the young, pretending as they do so that it is for our own good, for our betterment. I was well before corruption tinged the edges of my skin with hues of ochre.

Devils wear headdresses on a Sunday morning, as sermons sound across stone floors and dusty windows. To sleep I listen to French radio, to wake from death I remove the nine volt battery and touch it to my tongue. There are different levels of torture, ones inflicted upon the self seem less justifiable, hold no measure to the force laid upon your body by better men. Or women. My (human) being rages under lust, rides a cresting wave that she says will recede into the distance.

You just breathe through it.

Sounds of gulls and water breaking over sedimentary rocks roll over mortality, immorally. We lay upon sand, digging feet into a myriad of grains. I have eaten each one, a sin, the body, the saviour. I am still uncertain why we walk the way we do, talk the way we have been taught. The cadence of generations, repeating. Lies stacked upon lies until we all believe the stories we have told. Someone knows the truth but we have buried her under the woodpile for the winter. Come spring we'll thaw her salve and salvage what we imagined our life should be. Gold weighs the same as earth, there is just more dirt to eat when it is the price we pay for life. Twenty one stones she collected in a bucket listened as each one fell into her pot.

We are pissing in the wind my darling, we are screaming into the wind. Our house was built two centuries ago, when things were so simple. These are the things we are taught when cross legged on machine woven rugs. No missing fingered infants fashioned these, we do not pray here. We do not pray at all.

Metaphors are reminders, captured under glass. Mariners went to sea to discover some promised land, but came back starved and black. We are not Jewish and no other fuckers would take the sickness embedded under their finger nails. Meandering as it does through a linage seized by low esteem. If you know the meaning of your name, you know where you have travelled from, yet I have moved no distance from beginning to end, This is a state of oscillation. Circles and circles. Under your own spell a young voice, unbroken diminishes after time. We age but we do not change.  Broken crockery is accidental; still it comes with blooded fingers and obscenities blueing the air.

There is so little air, she exhibits altitude sickness from her pedal stool. No one put her there to adore, more to exclude but they carry her down every night, to dance footsteps as a Russian doll, unpacking herself. Smaller and smaller, regressions until, broken, crushed between thumb and finger and pelvis.

Static hums from a radio, turning it up or down makes no difference to the sound. Emptiness of space has never seemed so large or small. It's all a matter of perspectives.