Japhy is a bipolar author, coming to creative writing from a journalism background in London and the Middle East. His fiction work can be found in publications including English Bay Review, Emerge 19 and Blake Jones Review. He is currently working on a novel about a high-risk deal with the devil set in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
japhyryder.net
Ritual for Shiva No. 1
we don’t always know it’s a ritual
until it’s gone
walking out of the psych ward
there is nothing left
except a door marked Hotel Amnesia
slamming behind me
everything I used to do
the trace of an arcane routine
rules of which have disappeared
inventing a way to live
hard to do on the fly
from first principles
which no longer have anything to give them shape
now that the practices have gone
it’s a circular mirage
salmon fight upstream
they know how to return home
know it in their bones
but I must begin with nothing
I light a candle
hold my finger to the flame
dead to the pain
I hold my finger to the flame
until it blisters
then begins to char
the smell of burning flesh
sweet like pork
but this pig is not so smart
this pig doesn’t know what it’s doing
this is not a sacrament
this is something I just made up
this is not something I learned
from my grandmother Blanche Jordan
nor is it some rite passed down
carried in the tired bones
of the Middlesex peasant
toiling neath the English sun
the most of them consumed in the trenches
swallowing gas at Passchendaele and Ypres
and a hundred other hellholes across the water
many of the rest fell on the beaches
our faith erased in a hail of lead
a part of Kent called Calais
my father taught me to say that
he made it through
he must’ve
or I wouldn’t be here to tell of it
this English custom we observe
whether rite or rhythm I don’t know
we call it fucking
it’s yielded me a son
just like my father
and his father
and his father before
but that’s all that made it through
despite the British
in British Columbia
there’s precious little left in me
it’s been beat out
by the relentless threshing of emigration
of visits not made
phone calls not spoken
birthdays forgotten
presents not given
only one ritual remains on my shelf of practices
one ceremony that has survived
a dozen countries
one hundred continents
one thousand dwellings
one million broken connections
that one ceremony
a solemnization of departure
the farewell prayer:
dear lord
thank you for the time I have spent here
but unlike the salmon I have no rite of return
no rhythm to steer me homewards
it’s in the nature of the bipolar
to forever move on
goodbye
a ritual is anything that happens more than once
it doesn’t happen often