my feet are asleep
and my tongue has burst
into shards of words without
witticisms. destroy this
poem (it is not a poem).
the day sinks, it does one in.
the day always sinks!
we raise our faces - sorrow bent -
and call it quits. love has been
rummaged through by the
eye-filling night which stretches out,
grease-fingered, to remove
all heat.
we mumble prayers, unheard.
we amble through
the twilight of our times
with little language and only idle youth
which often slinks up the basement steps
and out the front door
while we are
still asleep.
staggering up the steps with all my poetic lines,
stealing away with vague confessions
and the hazy warmth of infatuation.
the night steals it all, quenches
its filthy hunger above the dust
of clouds, gluttonous
and self-satisfied.
and we will wake to the peak of ages,
stripped of language
or youth
or sensation in our tongues and limbs.
and in bed, digging ourselves out
of each other’s dilated eyes,
we’ll howl some indecipherable chant
a thousand times over
and sharpen what’s left of our tongues.
in the backyards where
sun-drenched boys paint in atavistic bliss,
where the cherry blossoms erupt in volcanic stillness,
where the symphony of spring collides
with the symphony of power saws,
where the air is pungent with a strange
combination of flowers and machinery,
we fall into a peculiar form of sleep.
our eyelids are languid and we wait
for our iridescence to seep out of our mouths,
to cover our skin like tribal paint.
we wait, undying, in sun -
half-conscious,
consuming our own art,
unafraid.
where have the people gone?
year-long exhalation
holding onto what is impossible
to be held onto.
we are untethered, eyes shut
persistently in the bath of cosmos.
just like the earth, our sore skin
mends itself the best it can.
i console myself with sophistry,
with the convincing elegance of language.
if i cannot close my eyes,
i would at least like to convince myself
i see what i do not see.
floating unstructured,
heavy exhalations extending past
the space between unnecessary words,
light inhibited by the
blank canvas of our eyelids.
my skin, rubbed raw by obstinance,
begins to rebind itself,
and suddenly i do not know
where the people have
gone.
raging delirium of
self-imposed silence:
trickling through the cracks
of mouths and eyes,
pulsating through cities
and countrysides where
cattle chew cud softly
to the intonations of the
electrical hums which keep
the babies up all night, cold with crying.
the alien eyes blinking
in the haze of cloud condensation
tower stoically in electric
sleeplessness, casting their ominous stare
over all the open-eyed and silent mothers
who wait for the sun to rise.
the waves swell subtly over the rocks
green with moss, while across the river,
the metallic landscape gleams, lonely and
unfathomable.
the scene:
unused harbour in a secret curve of river,
fenced-in and warning trespassers of
untold consequences.
my mind filters out the sounds of modernity
(the transport trucks crossing the bridge
extending across countries, the heavy boom
of raw materials dropping from dump trucks,
the steady hum of midday local traffic,
the grinding of a motorboat treading water)
and focuses only on the trills of birds
dipping somewhere into the trees,
the canadian geese sinking their heads
into cool turquoise water, the buzz
of low-flying insects manoeuvring
between rocks and blades of grass.
the unnatural sounds -
which originate from somewhere hidden,
unseen in the plot of paradisical land -
bury the last remnants of unaffected
wilderness which is lost somewhere
in the brilliance of frail memories.
(oh, parameters of easy sun-steeped bliss.)
i gravitate toward sun,
bare, extracted from all the multitudes
of eyes which lean toward me in inclemency.
i am one step away from the chaos,
and yet still, the shuddering day
has a never-ceasing noise that crackles
in the heat of the haunting myriads of light.
war-heavy, we sink
into vehement ache.
internally, we glisten
with gut-twined ooze.
these saddened, oiled
faces born into servitude -
all womb-sodden and
liquored - wink unintentionally
at all future devices,
sinking, sinking finally,
into something like sleep.
your eyes say:
subdued restlessness.
we are young. have you forgotten?
the night blankets us, shields us
from ourselves. we forget the question.
there is no language to elucidate
that look you give me as we lean
on the night - that weary look which says:
we are young. have you forgotten?
the corners of their mouths
twitched with words unsaid,
death itching it’s way outward.
escape in unheard fires:
black eyes, lungs collapsed.
what immeasurable meaning
in the dilated beyond wise.
they loosen themselves,
float freely with bent heads into
some sunken oblivion.
exhales provide an undeniable
attraction to the sweet and
negligent smoke, which circles
undulating and wavering
in passive escapist fog.
somewhere in a cupboard
in a house which i do not live in anymore,
there are letters left authorless,
smelling still of ambrosia
and the harshness of the past.
they linger like dark compliments,
damaged and with secret intent.
and still my tongue is covered
with the thick scent, devoured
by the broken, which is oddly implied
in the space between syllables.
somewhere to someone
there is an echo of my body
and your dying and the longing
and the lack of
shouting
to an unanswering
patience, and the echo rises
to an uneasy reverberation
of the elation of youth,
which seems to end only in apathy.
somewhere the erased lover
immortalizes the unwritten writing
with a flick of wine-soaked tongue
and whoever anyone anywhere finds
the sad monotone monologue
will find that the illusion of closeness
is always much easier to bear
than closeness itself.
the voices come from
a forgotten opposition,
an indecipherable bombardment
of senseless and intimate responses.
is language the answer?
our vocal cords have been dislocated.
(and besides, we have no desire to
become tense and dense with
obscure responses.)
(and besides, desire creates a hole in
the static, a lucid disentanglement
from previous disinterestedness.)
self-construed polymorphism with
an adequate amount of social order,
moral code, and soundless content
or else: the pluralities of syntax,
the complexities,
get the best of us,
and suddenly we have the desire
to involve ourselves in the representation
of our raw and timeless
emotional preconceptions,
all conceptualized and unable to be spoken.
too haphazard, stick to the static.
the stylized response,
abstract and self-consciousness,
proves to be too perverse
so we break our diction
and keep our vowels
to ourselves.
pure wild-eyed women
stalking, prowling
through sad darkened alleyways,
buying cough drops in the
shadows of all the looming buildings
of decadent downtown.
in the inflamed faces of
the quiet eager poets
who watch their reflection
in the bottomless skies,
the post-modern tributes
form a triumphant arch
in the glittering moonlight.
idleness inflamed.
poetry obscure.
dog barks.
music intones.
dreaded depth of light.
plunged into self-exile,
i recline my machine parts
to record the untamed hair of the men
slipping between cracks of the sidewalk
where all of the weeds grow unheeded.
the paranoia of the sore-throated
resounds like phlegmatic coughing
throughout the pre-war suburban labyrinth,
muffled under the cover of darkness.
sunday nights are the quietest,
when you can hear your own
incessant heartbeat mingling
with the all the industrial hums
of the fenced-in factories where
the electric sleeplessness
is all too familiar.
a lonesome footstep
past the real - the real which is
too real to ever really be recorded -
and the night begins to crumble
(always the
night)
the women animal-eyed
and steeped in darkness,
wringing their hands underneath
the indigo roof that crackles
with all the city’s unseen electricity
which wails and whines, homeless, all night,
ask me who i think i am,
some aficionado of the city’s darkest places?
some insatiable thief of all the nocturnal dread
which only crawls out, dirty and sallow,
when the reprieve of twilight
descends lazily on the streets strewn
with cigarette butts and paper coffee cups?
stomach gurgles.
dog growls in overgrown backyard.
helicopter drifts between glass-walled condos.
short-breathing nostrils wheeze.
cars lurch at stop signs.
i do not answer questions,
my throat too sore, too raw, too dry.
i watch, masticated by
never-ceasing sound,
as the city, fenced in
and paradox-stricken,
mutters until dawn.
a reckless
grinding disgrace, slight intention
stationing empty length with a body
that neglected colour.
elegant consequences monstrous.
arrangements staring at sudden
circular necessity, not actually aching.
winningly sullen: it’s there that
nothing narrow suggests plain.
the table there, there reddening.
considered clearly, there’s that thing
which looks like everything trembling:
imitation,
gurgle of imitation.
increase the coffee, the music half-noisy;
reasons decline a little grainy,
formerly charming.
the nervous elevation was temporary.
it is just summer - a light likeness
to light
that used to be there.
behind the nothing-coloured
genuine preparation, the white bands’
singing and redness
the same as not the same
as a washed, brighter nothing.
discoloured room colouring sullenness and
it rushes to the bottom of reason
in reckless likeness.
i. a beginning. feverish newness. i stare at the page, somewhat nervously. i mumble, toothlessly, “today i will be honest.” i am calm. i am as calm as the pulse on a corpse in the midst of a torrential black night. i am clear. i am as clear as a hallucination. my brain is softened as i amble through the fluorescence of such a bright age. too bright, maybe. too bright. i cannot see. my eyes cannot adjust so quickly. i am eternity’s hostage. we are eternity’s hostage. somehow we have begun to enjoy the frivolities of our imprisonment. we are endlessly inflamed in light, so much so that we must cover our eyes against our reflection. see how calm i am? i look at myself with a hundred eyes, from centuries ago. i am as calm as the pulse on a corpse in the midst of a snowstorm, in the midst of a torrential, white dostoevsky night. a beginning. this is a beginning.
ii. sinewy hands hold a small, milky body. the wrinkled mouth mumbles, toothlessly, “i only want your body.” two hands extend, snatch the newborn. the hands, with rivers of varicose veins running down the translucent fingers, drop quietly. the body goes to sleep, to wait for death.
iii. a baby cries. the light burns. it does not understand. it mumbles, toothlessly, something beyond comprehension. two hands extend, snatch the newborn. the mouth, with trickles of saliva falling, unconstrained, down the little milky chin, closes quietly. the body goes to sleep, to dream feverishly of its new world.
iv. a beginning. perpetual beginning. eternity looks at us with a hundred eyes, holds us down with a hundred fingertips like a lepidopterist displays the wings of a butterfly with a hundred pins.
v. our hands drop quietly, our mouths close quietly. we sleep, to wait for a beginning.
there was a thrift store.
you played an accordion
while i immersed myself in
the shelves of dusty soft-cover books.
last summer, i used to see a boy
my age ride a unicycle everywhere.
he had a balance i could never achieve.
last night i had a dream that
my mother bought a trumpet.
i played because i did not know how to.
in that same dream we were prisms of light,
instruments of the whole.
we made sounds, such beautiful sounds,
for such a complex machine.
they were on the fast track to
super continental bliss:
some outlandish, multi-coloured caricature
of transgressive transportation.
really, the only things to get away
from were the radio static and
all the cries of all the grandmothers saying:
“for godsakes, take the butter and leave!”
other than that, technological
revelations were spouting from
the mouths of television prophets
everywhere, and it didn’t really
matter where there were headed,
they’d only ever end up in the midst
of cheap familiarity.
