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The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst

#1

I want my last words to be
“Please switch off the lights.”
I want to die a slow whisper like death.
I want grief to finally engulf me enough to pass away.
I want to die on a bed with blankets and pillows that stink of sorrow.
Cold hands and feet slowly cracking as my blood rusts away nerve by nerve.
I want to look at the ceiling as if it’s a see-through window and say “I’m coming”.

When I die concrete would be the last thing I’d want
I want to bury myself completely naked in the dark woods with wet soil all over my body and ants to find their way in me.

I want someone to stumble past my dead body and feel less isolated before dying.
This is just a death song telling me I want my death to be as miserable as my life.
When death takes me i’ll just say
“you took so long but I’m glad that you’re finally here”

#2

What do you call a conversation that only consists of silence?
Is it called talking if whatever is said isn’t heard in return?
I don’t know if it’s loneliness or madness or an urge to hear a voice?
An urge to hear a voice, yes.
To hear a voice.
A voice.
A voice, not a sound.
I do hear sounds,
Sound of me punching the walls around me, hoping to break either the wall or my fist.
Sound of my heartbeat, it sounds and feels like someone hammering a nail in a piece of wood.
Sound of me taking in what is left of air in my breaths.
Sound of me filling myself with water which I am not sure why sounds like blood spurting out.
Sound of caged air like you hear in underground tunnels or when you put an empty bottle near your ear.
I know there are people with their faces pressed to the glass,shouting
wakeup wakeup wakeup
I can’t hear them but I know what they’re saying because I know all this is an illusion, a dream maybe, this cannot be my reality.
This cannot be real.
This isn’t real.
This silence that is there needs to be broken.
I want to hear a voice.
Someone’s voice.
So I let it be my own.
It has to be my own.
I say, “Open your eyes, just this once more,these walls will lift like the curtains on the stage before a play begins.
Just try and open your eyes,darling.
You can open your eyes.
You can lift the walls up.”

illustration shark 2 — The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst

#3

/Dead Words/

The first time I discovered what a poem could do I was twelve sitting in my bed alone one night, crying. I started writing on the last page of my physics book. /Ma,the pain you suffered to bring me into this world, will not go in vain, I promise/

Next morning I wrote the whole thing on fresh paper and kept it near the tulsi plant in our veranda for her to read.
She never got to read it.
It had rained and the water had dissolved the words into nothing.
On the days like those I sit there
drowning in my tears
I tell myself that this water does not support life or words.
When you write words on a paper and the paper is burned or crushed or crumpled or torn or erased or recycled
Where do the words go?
If words can vanish how do poems become immortal?
I don’t know how to end this poem or any poem for that matter.
When is a poem said to be complete?
When the one who wrote finally writes it on the lips of the one he wrote for?
Or the one who once wrote decides to write no more?
Or simply when the words abandon the one who gave birth to them?
Like so?

illustration ahrak — The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst

#4

There’s so much. There’s SO much out there (or in there if we will)
There are countries, continents, oceans, sky with a gazillion stars and planets and galaxies and things we have yet to name.
There’s so much,think about it. and it’s just impossible to see it all. No matter how we try to break it down- from planets to galaxies from continents to cities from people to families it’s still SO much.

It’s crazy how you can never know everything about anything,be it as small as your city or even your house or Andromeda. Everything is infinitely small and yet so complex or should I say detailed?

And I think that’s why they came up with the idea of soulmates.
You can’t know the universe but isn’t the whole universe there in you and me? We all are just bodies full of the universe. Just like the universe keeps on growing and getting disintegrated at the same time, so do our bodies.

We needed something to hold us to life,so we decided on soulmates and we tried to see,know, love everything about that one person. When we find them we no longer feel the need to go looking for what’s out there because we’ve already got our share of the universe.

#5

(i) Laughter feels like a foreign forgotten language that I’m still learning,
so I laugh a broken laugh.
(ii) Chained smiles try to break free from my lips like scared kittens trying to get out of their home without being seen.
(iii) I have held back more than I have ever said because everything I say feels like I’m revealing something about myself which will end up making me more vulnerable.
(iv) I have always pictured different feelings as smoke of different colors so when they cut open my throat there would be a rainbow of smoke rising up in the sky.
(v) The rain doesn’t cry with me anymore. The moon doesn’t answer me anymore.
You don’t love me anymore.

How do I remain sa(m/n)e?