Nicolas Greenwood

Inorganic Matter

A scent of grass in the air!
Quietness, and a steady breeze
the ring of a bicycle and a man’s shout
from another one’s place and another one’s life.

The head leans against a window and ponders life
and the existence of itself, and this pane of glass
preventing it from falling, and a woman’s grasp
cold skin and the rushing of blood.

In us there is the animal, the vital, the unaware;
the sunlit neck moistened with sweat and unrestrained dream;
the thin black eyebrow and the fiery eye
and the delirium of conscious sleep.

Your face escapes me, and I see nothing but
the rims of eyelids, up close, in the sun
and your gentle voice calling me in the darkness of night
echoing away until I open my eyes.

My memory is the stone, and your face is the fossil;
I see atoms in your eyes, and your very own skin
has suddenly hardened, and lost its life,
and heat, and touch, and radiance.

You are bliss, and immortal; unconscious, like nature.
Chemistry, and the bitter salt in my tears.
A rearrangement of atoms so sweet, so lovely;
you are breath and life, and inorganic matter.

Inorganic Matter

About This Poem

Inorganic Matter is my best attempt at describing that painful, but somehow strangely pleasant feeling of trying to remember what someone you loved was like, but entirely failing each time.

There was a kind of fear that came over you when you met them, but it’s a euphoric, captivating fear. It’s the kind that makes you almost dread the prospect of being in their presence, but when you are, you cherish every moment, and the hands on the clock circle faster than you ever imagined possible.

There is a kind of shame that comes over you when you think of them, but it’s a sweet shame. It’s the kind that makes you lean over a puddle and stare at your reflection until a smile appears on your face.

As years go by since you last met them and saw their face, a strange thing begins to happen inside your head. Memory is an unsettlingly sensitive thing. Hours of thought chisels them into someone perhaps more similar to how you would like to remember them rather than how they really were. Your memory of them and who they were gradually deviates from reality and morphs into someone new—or perhaps, something new.

In your mind their face, their voice, and their very personality fossilize into a new, imaginary person that only exists inside your own mind. This person is in no way more or less real than the person you once knew and loved. It is only another version of them, the one time would’ve shaped them to be if they had really only lived for all that time up there, inside your head.

This is the message of Inorganic Matter: that existence is so much more than observation through an organic body. It is the ultimate declaration of love.

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