The Missing Man
Personal Homeopathy
Yes it’s me down here. Can you not hear, if not my breath, my mumblings at least? But you’ve confused me with the rock again. Instead of smashing it apart to find me, you continue to mine the ore. Eventually, your pick axes will strike my iron but I’ll have no life in me by then.
All this research for and against homeopathy, it’s time I chipped in my own. So: I take a photo of you and stare and stare at until my eyes – the water – absorb it, and play out all the scenes associated with the image until my mind is a park made of us, the swings my stomach as I waited outside the train station hidden in the long grass of my sunglasses, the roundabout almost anything – me in your presence, something sexual I could never render sweet enough with words, the thrill of all our days together in that they’re magical but rooted in reality – and the slide is the joyful vertigo I get every time I think of you. And then I put it away, feeling I’ve been on a journey, albeit one that is killing time rather than the filling of you and I. My conclusion: this has nothing to do with homeopathy.
And I’m at the bottom of the ocean. Send your divers down. Let them forget the hideous coral for a moment, the circling sand sharks, the rusty anchor dug into the bed. I’m drowning and awaiting rescue. All I ask is a lungful of oxygen and a ride to the surface. Please, don’t wait until I’m nothing but driftwood. And I’m in the jungle swallowed by snakes, I’m out in the desert somewhere, dying of thirst while tourists stare at yellow buttes. I’m underneath the floorboards but, even the ones who polish them so ferociously, lack the instinct to lift one. And I’m six feet under and people are so dumb around here, they think that flowers dropped by my gravesite are root enough for me to pull myself up on. Yes, it’s me, everywhere you’re not looking. I’m bricked in. I’m walled up. I’m cemented hard as hearts. Doesn’t anyone any time listen for the sounds beyond their hearing. I haven’t been heard from in a thousand years. Sure, I was loved once. But who would think to find me there.
Australian born poet, US resident since the late seventies, John Grey works as a financial systems analyst. Recently published in Connecticut Review, Kestrel and Writer’s Bloc with work upcoming in Pennsylvania English, Alimentum and the Great American Poetry Show.
Joshua Jones is currently studying English Literature and Creative Writing at UEA. His poetry has previously appeared in Succour and Gists and Piths. He edits the new online journal and blog Etcetera (www.etceterart.blogspot.com)