The Refolded Man
You are a refolded man. You are alone in the world. And no matter how it presses in on you and shouts in your ear and licks your face with its dogsbreath tongue there is only one of you and nothing will increase you and nothing will infect you other than dreadfully, and you are a refolded man.
And the people who claim to care for you are useless and deluded for their interest is only in this peculiar view of themselves that they see in relation to you, through you, in the perspective you give them, of themselves, in themselves, and it could be no other way, and they have no expertise or competence when it comes to your workings, and they try to love you like a child tries to know a bee by cutting it in half and watching. And they go.
You are a refolded man. And you will be left on the shore of a sea as the night comes in with no way home and the cold. And you will simmer in the midday of a foreign country where you understand nothing. You are stripped naked and regarded, you are the dead man of someone else’s story, you are the body in the field, the passer-by, the jostled bather, the wedding drunk, the murdered sailor, the second illiterate cook. You are the schoolboy with the open mouth. You are a lover in the blink of an eye. Any eye.
And you are always only one. You are the refolded man. Opened and read and folded over and folded again, and put aside.
And you will be punished for love.
