by Janice Sim
“Two souls, alas, are
dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to
forsake its brother.”
Goethe’s Faust, Part 1
Demonic possession
is nine-tenths of the law,
is not, any, incidental flaw.
Pirouette, possessions are
everywhere! Things, bodies, spaces
even nature possess legal
statuses, belonging to
and belongings of,
as commodities for appetites –
yours and mine. It is not
unimaginable that the road to Hell
is overlaid with well-meaning plans.
After all, we live, walk and eat
as if possessed, by our smart phones,
sushi and our hard-earned cash,
bent eyes glazed, hunched like
Tolkien’s Gollum
ravenous for gold, handling pride
with venom filling up from inside,
scratch marks on the outside, long
quivering wails into the night,
dancing
with the demons that dress Prada,
sprout Gucci, own a mortgage or
several, buy mountains, forests
and even oceans – as if, dying
to save this world from hunger,
greed and excess consumption.
As if to save ourselves, we seek
to own, satiate, to create, we write
possession in the law, to house
our texts, mark our bodies, to worship,
metamorphosise as unhealthy obsessions,
transfixation – breathe life into
matter, oh fine darkness as I adorn
white and rose gold, stand jealously
on guard, like a woman, mad,
haunted in all the rooms of
her memories filled with a love
for the dead – by title, by name
and by deed. I no longer wonder
if all we think about are our things
and people left behind, or
the way Judgment takes up
a-tenth of, while our possessives
make up the rest…
am I not also one of them, hungry, here
clawing, at the doors to stake claim, on
some semblance of living,
after death.
About the poem
The poem explores the ways hunger as a theme is understood in layered ways through the law and its conceptualisations around the meaning of ownership, property and sovereignty in ways that are intricately tied to an imperial thirst for, and embodying Christian allegories, as well as the ways in which our possessives and possessions seek to possess us.
- Janice Sim
About the Writer
Janice Sim am a sessional academic and emerging writer living on the Gold Coast in Australia with h husband and three boisterous children. She writes in the spaces between work, cooking and children. She has been published in the Fahmidan Journal, Lavender Lime Literary, Spellbinder A Quarterly Literary and Art Magazine and Native Skin Literary Magazine.
Twitter: @lishen_sim