The Banquet
At the banquet sat the magicians, with their emptied spells,
the alchemists and their formulas of wayward hope,
the philosophers, inert before their own questions,
and the murderers sharing bread with their forgotten victims.
All conversed among themselves, as if existence were dialogue.
Though none had waited for me, I came.
I arrived with the lateness proper to those who never belong.
I sat in the armchair of ancient thorns — now soft as habit.
I sat with my depersonalized pain.
With a weary soul and an irremediable gaze,
I observed the remains, the crumbs of ideas,
glasses of empty intentions, bottles of spilled promises.
Where once hearts had pulsed, there were only vestiges of affection.
In the glances, the tepid veneer of hidden judgment.
My cries for help dissolved into the air
like the last echo of a will that no longer belongs to me.
They were lost among the verses of a distant poet,
who recited to no one
and yet was present.
He recited as if time were his accomplice
and did not notice that, in the most uninhabited corner of the table,
I sat not whole but still present.
Those verses, once warmed by glimpses of being,
slowly turned into a space of absence:
the colors withered like the leaves of an ontological autumn,
my flesh dissolved into irrelevance,
and all that remained of me was the skeleton a gaze,
tragically lucid.
Left behind were
the magicians and their weary illusions,
the alchemists and their sublime errors,
the philosophers and their unfinished labyrinths,
the murderers and the complicit silence of their victims.
– Painting credits: “The Banquet” by Joshua Flint, 2016.