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"The eye and the night" by Ivan de Monbrison



The sky falls to the ground it looks like small pieces of shattered glass a bit like water a bit like a broken lake of water you pick up the pieces you put them on a table you take them one after the other and you paste them on your wall like a map like a geographical map in the center of the map there is an eye it is the eye of the mirror it is the mirror the that sees you because the real mirror is not those bits of sky that you've just put on your wall the real mirror is your eye it's the only mirror it's the only way you have to see yourself you’re made but solely of flesh and bones not much with a bit of shit too and food in the end shit and piss mostly and necessarily a lot of piss because you are old and as you are old you piss yourself all the time you smell of piss most of the time and with age you're going to smell more but of shit and piss getting slowly decrepit it'll be your natural smell and then one day that smell will be replaced by that of the rot the rot eating you up alive the rot inside as one is still conscious the rot of death that itches us so often then will come the rot of the corpse and as you’re an old bachelor living by yourself like an idiot maybe you will die without anyone noticing it in your apartment located in the suburbs of Paris inside it your body will be lying on the ground and will smell more and more of the stench of the rot it will surely take some time maybe several weeks before this smell of rot reaches the staircase of the building and when one day a neighbor on his way home perhaps will realize that there is something rotten in there he will think well the old lunatic is surely gone on vacations and this idiot has left the meat to rot in his fridge and then one day the smell will be so strong that he will say to himself no there is something that is not normal so he will call the police and the police will come the police will break down the door and it will find a body finally what will be left of you half flesh half skeleton with a bit of luck there will be some skin and meat left on your head and one will only see your skull appear on the sides of it maybe you'll have that half mouth half skull weird smile partly made of scarce old teeth protruding out of the bones and on the other side rotten and green lips puffed up with worms and bacteria it will be a moment of great beauty you will have to take pictures of course maybe say a poem maybe do a drawing dance and party around the corpse in circles but nobody will be able to feast on it because it will be too rotten so they will have to bring hyenas bring vultures bring rats the hyenas the vultures the rats will perhaps eat the corpse because it takes a hell of a belly to digest a corpse and this rotten food this disgusting flesh the hyenas probably will have been brought from the zoological park next door this hideous zoo where you had no longer in your lifetime set a foot since your childhood it will be convenient nevertheless because it is really right next door in a small wood called Vincennes in short they will go get the hyenas those will eat your corpse it will save money no need to carry away the body no need to feed the hyenas everyone will be happy then one will have to burn the paintings that are in the apartment because they are useless one will have to throw away the books one will have to sell the apartment falling apart anyway and that will be it it will be all over and just the one and only thing that might be left in a corner after all this devastation could be those bits of sky still stuck like bits of mirror on a wall but these bits of sky turned into a mirror a long time ago will now be covered with dust and your eye will have totally disappeared, digested by the belly of a hyena , or maybe by the one of a lonely rat.




A word from the author: Ivan de Monbrison is a schizoid writer from France born in 1969 and affected by various types of mental disorders, he has published some poems in the past, he's mostly an autodidact

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