People are Like Pages

People are like pages. I flick those glossy pages, with lively people wrapped in turn around cloths that shout out colours to the silence of the Ganges, with-holy cow, Holy Cows standing in the distance, sharp boned and starving in their holiness; brown dancing Zulu, with their painted warrior faces; and womanly women proudly jutting breasts, seeming to promise a pagey promise or two; Dyacs of Borneo still hunting head, wandering through the ghosts of trees chopped chipped and chiselled into Japanese building site out of sight ply wood: why would wood make you think of death? An Inuit here and China man there, a Texan, a Frenchman, and Gypsy girl too, German man, Latvian lady, some shrouded fellow from Turin. Those exotic faces and out of reach places: hypnotic eyes that capture your soul; sad souls that capture your eye. And the familiar too. Mostly the familiar too. I flick those pages. Faces and faces and traces of faces, sometimes some text, explaining their graces or greed or things that they need. But then I stop that turning of pages. I stop and I stare. I gasp a breath. I stare. Of all those pages of abstract beauty, of torturous terror, of far away feeling, the much thumbed page of someone seeming close . . . to home, stops  my wandering eye. Her image, in all its photographic dog eared glory, examined by many more than I, fondled in it two dimensions, imagined in movement, worshipped in glossy goddess glory, ripped from library volumes and taken quietly home, stops me sitting still. Unlike so many others, this is a picture with text. I read. I revel. I take glory from her sayings. Her words dance from the page, they seem to sing, they seem to bring a chance of a possibility of a hope of a dream of a chance. I am lost in the possibility. People are like pages. So all I can do is wait. She too, in the privacy of some private place, is glancing, flipping, turning, leafing through those self same pages. Where will she stop? Will she skip past my page, skip past the text with barely a glance, only wondering who comes next . . . or before? Looking for someone, looking for distance, a foreign face, fare and fine and most definitely not mine? So I sit and watch her turning of pages, for ages and ages and ages and ages. The book of pages is a thick book of ages; but look: see that ragged thing, right by the spine? See that ragged remains of a ripping deranged? See all that is left of my own bloody page? Torn out, screwed into a ball, tossed away into the giant dustbin of humanity. I am no more. People like pages can turn all they want, but I, at least, will be seen no more; my text never read: no-one will know who I am what I said. I feel like screaming and shouting and demanding: Which bastard bastard  monster ripped out my page? I think of ex-lover-could it be her? I'm fooling myself. I'm playing games with my self. I'm playing with myself. I tore it out myself.

 

30 November 94