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Poems by Jakob Zaaiman on Medium
Moon Tower Ton
A contemporary poem
An uncertain drink — Advocaat. I don’t
know, very sweet honestly — but Abigail said
she liked it, so we had to drink the stuff, a
whole sickly bottle, well on into the night; though
our conversation stayed okay — normal — anchored
perhaps by the presence of her boringly normally
okay brother; but I didn’t think Abbie as a person
was unsteady or unstable or loony; and I don’t
remember sensing lunacy, but I do well remember
Abbie’s extreme skinniness and her skinny
arms and skinny legs and very skinny taught face,
brought well –to-life with those dark brown eyes
set in black shadow-rimmed sunken sockets. And
in her flimsy one-piece patterned dress, she
looked a bit like a kind of dream figure; more
to the point, a naughty devil fairy.
And okay yes yes her aristocratic mother
suffered from constant bouts of explosive mental
illness, suddenly wailing and screaming when
something absurdly ordinary and boringly normal
wasn’t — as she saw it — quite right, and so
everything suddenly became very wrong and
uncanny and worth screaming about and wailing
up to the gods and back, and unsettling us all.
And as an uncertain guest in their house, I felt
these sudden breakdowns were definitely
something to do with me; with me messing
up Abbie’s mother’s sense of what was
normally and decently ordinary; and all
these many years much later I’m sure I did
have something to do with a bad episode one
night; not with the mental illness — no not with
that — but with the introduction of an
unexpected and uncalled-for uncertainty
into the fragile and supposedly tedious
okay household normality. And into the
tedious household okay equilibrium,
if you prefer. So my very presence
had fucked everything well up.
(And then well down again, if
you prefer it that way round.)
