ShadowMe, prose poem by Johannes S.H. Bjerg (My Meta-morphosis Series)

ShadowMe
by Johannes S.H. Bjerg

Day 1:
Had this sinking feeling like being dragged down on the inside of my body whiles it was still standing. At the soles of my feet I leaked out as some kind of fluid and found myself lying flat across the meat counter at the super market feeling comfortably light.

This was how I turned into my own shadow.

Day 2:
Funny. It has no taste, the meat counter. Neither does asphalt, concrete, bread; the objects I float across as my body-body plods through its homey world are tasteless. Cars, bikes, windows even dog shit doesn’t taste of anything.

Day 3:
It’s no use yelling at my body-body, my former abode. It can’t hear me. I stick to my old body by the feet and is thus taken where ever “I,” my body-body, now controlled and manoeuvred by a will unknown to me, wants to go. I don’t think “I” even notice what “I” am dragging me across. As shadow I’m totally ignorable.

Day 4:
Power-out! Suddenly I’m nowhere and everywhere and see the future of the universe! I’m formless and omnipresent as I merge with the World Shadow. There’s a constant whispering of a gazillion tongues inside it. Scary. Never really gave it much thought, that World Shadow . . .

Day 5:
I don’t feel fatigue. My shadow-body doesn’t feel anything. I cannot even feel whether I have a body or not. My mucus glands aren’t irritated by pollen. I don’t even think I have mucus glands. Do I? I try to force a sneeze. Impossible.

How I miss the taste and satisfaction of good coffee and strong tobacco. Not to mention the relief of emptying a full bladder . . .

Day 6:
So that’s what it’s like being a byproduct of living in the proximity of a star, being a negative projection, an area of lesser light, phenomenon without notable mass and having absolutely no influence on anything. Bereft of a free will (in as far as free will exists) and only having a faintly continuous existence because of artificial light.

Day 7:
I found them, the tiny holes the soles of the feet through which I leaked as a fluid. My body-body slept without a cover and its feet were lit by the second-hand light from the moon. They, the holes, shone with a faint cold blue light like secret portals. I got this rising feeling and rose back into my body-body and it felt like home. I noticed “I” dreamed I was being transformed into an insect.

IMAGE: “Self-Portrait in Profile,” collage by Marcel Duchamp (1958).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Johannes S. H. Bjerg is a Dane who writes in Danish and English simultaneously and mainly haiku and haiku-related forms. He is one of the three editors of Bones:  Journal for contemporary haiku (www.bonesjournal.com), and sole editor of the other bunny – for the other kind of haibun (theotherbunny.wordpress.com). He has published 12 books — find out more here: http://january-stones.blogspot.dk/p/books.html.