Prologue
We were seated on the wrong side of the room. You could stare through him like glass and see the streets and women flow like arguments. He had the breath of chalk and soul of the yellow fog that rubs its tail in the sunlit breeze. You could feel him wound up like the soul of a bird in the yellow fog and slither out of smokeless chimneys into the city. He was at motion and rest as he filled the room like music...women with braceleted arms and bare breasts in lamplight, had golden hair and spoke like dust. The music flowed through trees, through empty streets and teaspoons of vanishing breath.
The universe panted...
the universe rubbed her breasts and arms
on the naked body of time,
the universe spat out a symphony
with golden hair and panting lips
across the slender, white fingers of the sea.
And then I measured time in teacups
as the universe, pinned to her dress
wriggled in pain.
Mon amour
Footmen with porcelain lust
lay sprawled along the body of the universe
squeezing it into the voice of time.
“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.”
I am not silence, I am not time, I just pretend. But then, I am almost you.
His speech came from hollowness and non-being. That he lived and loved,
that he sat across the table was enough. I and you can be you and I or just I.
A letter. A mask.
We shall wait, we shall wait
Phantom of motion,
Phantom of time.
We hide, I hide inside the mask of the universe. Soft, cold nothing. The
universe weeps.
Mask
-1-
Sunshine spilled like cold laughter on deserted streets,
black rain on the last fragment of song,
People walking in the lilac soul of rain, transparent.
Escape the salt and mist of rooms
built or imagined in after-thoughts,
and the ecstatic murmur of women
vanishing in clock and sunshine.
For the evening in a thin musk of sweat
between your breasts, smells like grass
and you are the child of sunsets.
We shall wait, we shall wait
like empty time on sand and slate
for our last July morning.
Splash the oil and paint across the windows,
where old men sit and dream in rain,
across the dust and breath of twisted sunsets,
the last empty mask of purple recompense.
-2-
And again, you sacrifice horses in glass
to smear their blood on window panes.
You draw curtains on cities on the shore of magic,
Memory of smoke fills the room with alienation,
the loneliness of the ninth symphony by the sea.
A few more words and it’s November almost,
what does silence mean?
-3-
Infinite, my love
infinite my lust for silence
as flesh penetrates flesh,
and metal penetrates the soft belly of light,
on that baked afternoon in Algiers.
We met by chance and kissed by accident,
our fate had the passivity of lover’s limbs.
-4-
She had salt in her eyes and silence on her lips.
Her soul was hyacinth, crumpled and wet
like forgotten paper.
She sliced the evenings with her convex lust
and smeared the petals on organs of the city.
She played Brahms and I read Brecht in the afternoons.
Her white body and breasts had the colour of silence,
like hot sun on the ocean at broken sunsets.
We shall wait, we shall wait
like empty time on sand and slate
for our last July morning.
Soft re-birth of the July sun, our palms are pressed;
do I have friends or enemies?
-5-
A lonely R by memory and sunset,
amongst the power and silence of the dying universe.
You are the eye, of motions and reflections,
the orange pulse of silent galaxies.
Do I lie, do I faint and collapse
if I doubt the silence and motion of your lips?
Gravity, women and traffic will lure
for mechanical points of harmony.
We shall wait, we shall wait
like empty time on sand and slate
for our last July morning.
-5-
Salt tang of tobacco sky
and principles of motion.
Two-thirds of time is time
and the rest is nothingness.
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