The Suffering
A poem by Ivan de Monbrison

The Suffering

At night, there is still the shadow that keeps following me. You or someone else, it’s the same. There are only a few crumbs of you left on the table like breadcrumbs, and then the other chair slightly pushed back, where you were sitting just before, and finally a half-finished glass of water. What will I do now? I just keep standing there, alone like an idiot, staring into the void. The window is open, I take a cigarette, I light it, I smoke, I look outside, I also look inside myself, but there is nothing. Everything is lost. Everything has gone to hell, what I thought that could have come to be good, true, has suddenly collapsed, like a sand castle under the effect of the tide; when the sea rises, and, surreptitiously, as the sun sets, in the evening, and the holidaymakers have already deserted the beach, then finally the sun sinks into the sea. The water nibbles the sand and, little by little, engulfs the castle entirely, which disintegrates in the dark. I crush my cigarette in the ashtray. I light another one, I pour myself a glass of whisky, it’s strong, it smells bad, but what difference does it make, after all, whether I drink it or not, it won’t change anything. It’s late. I close my eyes, I see myself as a child, my father has just come back from the gallery where he works every day, and sits down in an armchair, someone pours him a glass of whisky on the rocks, he lights up and smokes a big cigar, and stares into the void speechless, not uttering a word. He has taken off his tie in the meantime, he’s not smiling, he never smiles, at least when I am around. He has spent the whole day with his brother in their art gallery, or he has spent the whole day with his mother in the same gallery, he has spent his day surrounded by art stuff, which he tries to sell there, with his brother. But I don’t fully grasp that very well then, as he usually never says anything about it to me. All I know is that he is not looking at me right now, that I don’t exist in his eyes. It felt somehow a bit like right now, as I find myself sitting on a chair alone once again, but more than forty years later, by a table, with a glass of the same alcohol in my hand. The hell with it! I pick up a third cigarette. I Iight it, look up, I don’t see you around. I can’t find you. I don’t see you anymore, just as you have never been able to see me.

About the Author:

Ivan de Monbrison is a schizoid writer and artist from Paris, born in 1969, from an Egyptian mother and a French father with Jewish Russian roots.

He has published his poems globally in various languages. 

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