Being in a coma can play
havoc with your sense of time. It can
turn your eyes from brown to blue. It can
grow hair on your belly, it can get you lost
between bedroom and office. If you are to
live in extra innings, you’ll have to watch the corners,
step around bad things, ignore insults and welcome
loving hands that sculpt you in your chair. Being
refrigerated and put to sleep, dropping out of time,
you have to save your humor and guard it, a precious
trove to bring out as needed, white strips on the
road flying beneath your vehicle, eat them up, wake
to a busy underground world, where people in
body bags keep passing by, tilted toward you know where.
Where half the people in your life have gone, dissolving
your sense of time, which was never supposed to have
an end.
George Bowering (Canada, 1936) source, Poetry (April 2017), with an artwork by Edith Dekindt on show at Venice Art Biennale until Nov 26, 2017