Displacement
By Jess Ruby
Displaced:
this place is the humming current
of different tongues.
It is the residue of old smoke
stuck in the corridors of lungs from years before.
It is another, and another, closing door.
Free coffee and fleeting chat instead of sleep,
chunks of love that you play with but cannot keep,
laptop screens, phones, blank documents and scrunched-up paper notes –
Combing through the un-homed hours
with last night’s dreams still caught thickly in your throat.
Throwing beer-smattered cheer around yourself like a winter coat
stacking words for journals that you never wrote –
a hole in the soul; loud voices do not elapse your sense of lacking.
But get home, get dressed, get paid, get laid, get stressed,
No time to wait, just remember caffei-nate-nate-nate
or soon be slacking.
Displaced:
this place is not outside me or inside me
it is both. Trying to love these fellow humans like a sister and a brother
gets harder while feeling other.
Disgraced for being lazy, crazy, gaze too hazy to fall into place
in the rapid steps of a rattled race full of rattlesnakes
cloaked in illusions of thick ripe grass.
Another fresh then tired face, eyes searching for something kinder…
Another reminder: ‘this too shall pass’.
Displacement is a word count of no finite amount
that beats in the back of my skull like a drum.
It is pumped up with pills that render you numb
but negating to slump, bodies of plastic into which nothing overspills,
loading up landfill sites
while dreaming of flying kites around country hills.
Mapping out words on a palm in self-isolation,
I still get chills from hearing treetops’ susurrations.
We displace ourselves day in day out
in the gap between what is felt and what is spoken
each suspecting that they are somehow broken…
pockets collecting consumerism’s tokens.
Force of wholeness never ceases
but only reaches us in pieces
so it seems like in a blink you miss it
Speeches thrown like cast stones, branches leaning in the breeze,
meaning always implicit.
You’ll survive this place today
with the sunshine on its way
doing far better than you think
at your own fantastic pace:
Different, dissident, ever less socially distant.
Disgraced
with grace,
perfectly placed
to soar rather than sink.
Now, shall we have a drink?