Caravaggio

By Matthew Lee

And again, today, I look, a frenzy, wasted breaths that mouthed civilities and ersatz pastiches of backslapping to elevate the atomic consistency of the air, and remembering that to others, against the vitreous backdrop of the drawing room, we are simply caricatures laying out platitudes to Chet Baker, and Davis now, and we must be equally as animated, and I look at each pair of eyes in staccato and bebop palsies, and there, an empty space, an empty moment, and I withdraw between the shadow cast by the lamp and the record player, and now Etta James, and the powerful voice that I once loved swallows me into its suffocating glissandos, and I fall deeper into that chiaroscuro, a Caravaggio —

Matthew Lee lives in Melbourne, Australia. He has published short stories and poems in the Farrago Magazine of the University of Melbourne as well as online publications such as Literally Stories and Five on the Fifth.