CW: blood and death.
not a metaphor for social decay,
or the collapse of the modern family,
or the domestic transformed to dread,
i mean it, there is blood running down
a line across the ceiling, the bedroom
smells thickly of iron, blood dripping
to the floor for who knows how long
overnight and instead of screaming
i think—how are we going to get this out
and shake you awake and confirm
that i am not making it up in my head,
that there really is blood seeping through
like an omen, like a warning, like
we have started the descent of
a breathless climax to the very end
and then i finally start to shriek,
and we run for buckets and towels
to catch the drippings, and you call
the police while i film the way it oozes
and gathers into drops before splashing
down—more surreal arthouse film
than evidence for insurers, and i am
mesmerised even as i think about the
ruined rug, every horror movie girl
who stays, mouth agape, fingers
stretched out wide before the
jump scare of monster reaching in
(and we do not learn until later
after the police break down the door
of our upstairs neighbour
and tell us that she must have been dead
for days now, passed away peacefully
in her sleep, and it was the heat wave
we’d had the last few days, putrefying
her body until its fluids seeped through
the thin mattress she slept on for twenty years
through the cracks on the floor the floor
churning—a living carpet of maggots—
to make its way down to our bedroom)
but instead, it is our cat who strolls
into the room to sniff at the bucket,
already brimming with liquid
who begins to keen.
Author’s note:
I wrote this piece because last year there was a spate of articles about elderly people dying alone in their flats and not being discovered until after the putrefied remains from their bodies ran down the ceiling (here is one) and I just thought it was such a gruesome image. Given Singapore’s ageing population and steadily increasingly hot weather, it is also something that will keep occurring. I wanted to write a poem that would be fun to read aloud at an open mic, and which also would capture my love for horror movies, but also the heaviness of that realisation for the reader or listener when they realise it’s not a ghost or special effects, but a real human being who did not have anyone to check up on them.
