Room with a View I. The cage of my room I pace between the door and tomorrow – a moving mark on my time-string, short like a noose tying me to an oxygen machine in the corner. At times I take a world tour scanning lithographs on four walls – Goya, Renoir, Al-Greco, Rodos, Paris, Jaffa – mute memorial to past travels erected in my final claustrophobic confinement. II. A window’s sliding glass as half-closed eyes warily let sun sieve into a comely room reflecting in parquet and mirror. Melancholy of the Albinony’s adagio fills the calm coffer up to the rim brushes the past off paintings hanging by thin threads of memory. A flat skillet of the yellow lackluster wall of the building across the ground strip, narrow like a prison yard, loads the entire square of the view, rising to the edge of sun’s pancake. The room idles away languorous hours, abiding to the space limitation between the window and the opposite drugged domicile. At night the outside blackness bears the illusion of vast green pastures, shores, licked by tongues of warm sea, metropolises peopled with travelers. Then dawn cracks through curtains soon enough, and nightly hallucinations vanish. Again the insipid yellow wall looms before the window with frightening nearness – it may move closer and block the light, and the room will die from suffocation, quietly expire without a sound of complaint. The Cause of Death will state: lack of air and laughter.

Unhappiness, neatly knitted from feelings and memories in lone, ill stitches, clings to my body – difficult to breath. I’ll slide it off like a latex glove and leave this tainted epidermis under a bench for no one to pick it up by mistake. I search through my nakedness for a few dancing lines, a handful of contentment, a pinch of happiness. When at the end of days I’ll lie with hands on my chest; and not the back of my head a few come to see, but my face. And a smile will rest comfortably on my closed eyes.

I Don’t Wish or Dream or Hope I don’t let a hiss of Hope camp in my pragmatic heart. She lowers my guard and raises tents for an untimely celebration. I don’t want anxiety of expectation to weaken my resistance to the falls. I let her fly into the other eyes and fill them with ephemeral joy. Whatever comes – it comes. Bizarre that I, an ungodly skeptic, pronounce words of fatalistic faith embodied in a looming doctor’s verdict. A cure may return my normal life of ocean, and strolls, and trees. Or twist of fate may snap my breathing chain of days; and its loose end of a lifeless wire will shiftily snake on the bare ground. I keep the door agape, not for Ezra or Jeremiah, but to apostasy of affecting fate – slender Panacea in flamboyant clothes or lanky Lilith in a white tunic. * * * No dream, or hope, or wish to wait. I have to choose between two evils – two wicked witches driving horses’ carriages. They grin and chuckle at my confusion of illness’ pressure. On stage, before the audience of friends my life unfolds and quietly expires. At a stage door, two coaches await. Which discomfort is less? Which trip is shorter? A reckless, chance-taker, I’ve never feared to take a rugged road into the unknown danger – to risk and breathe and die. But I shed my nature on a stage like a costume from the final act. Flowers, applause. The curtain falls, and light is dimmed. I change into a plain travel dress and choose a heavy carriage with a sturdy frame and stable wheels for an airless and slow ride.