Poem 260

This is influenced by Tarkovsky’s Stalker and also by the same Ray Bradbury short story I referenced in Poem 191 … some event has disrupted time, nipping an instant out of an ordinary day and changing everything … the real world corollary is something like an earthquake, perhaps a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles (happens every ten thousand years or so) but in fact we will all experience our own personal inexplicable event striking in a moment and irrevocably altering our experience of time and space – the true ‘X-Effekt’ I’m talking about here is death … 
… the title is spelt with a ‘k’ after the German Brechtian theatre term V-Effekt (Verfremdungseffekt) …

( I like the double meaning of grow still, the rhymes of stick/ticks/licks and ticking/licking/kicking, birdsong like a stuck record, reference to balsa wood gliders I flew as a kid, live cat turning into stuffed toy, the missing word which is also the narrator/reader surgically removed from the picture and the way the gap before the last line suggests the missing instant … )

X-Effekt

The flowers I left in the ground
grow still bright-painted
in the wilderness
                                the car left garaged
settles its black tyres
the birds I left singing stick
and repeat
the birds I left flying go stiff-winged on like balsa wood
the clock I left ticking showers out ticks
and long silences
the cat left licking licks on at that one place
until the seam splits into kapok
the washing I left kicking at the sky
has locked itself to a cloud
everything is the same
only a single word of a book
has disappeared

the word I was up to