march 2016
(i)
...I am the creature with a million eyes
a million acetylene eyes
each one a bright-cutting conscience
glaring down the void
a light overtaking even death
yet of myself I see nothing
my soul is sealed
a mystic scrap of verbiage
though, I suppose, there is my hapless magic
my confusing sleight-of-hand
that swells and bursts with zeros
therefore there is nothing invisible to me
I can see the passwords of the dead
the generations that never were
the tricks of the killer cells
the unravelling nuclei, the plasma
even the haemorrhaging of ideas
yet, of myself, I can see nothing
my soul is strangely mute
a midnight void
sealed with a million eyes...
(ii)
...each day, eyes wide, I walk on
deeper into a perilous cave
it is my own personal labyrinth
a confused act of terror
which, unknowingly, has become my life
this obsession with forcing back the blindness
of running my tongue along the walls
desperate to express a subterranean birth
my belly swollen with lava
my breasts rising to meet my lover’s mouth
the cave kissing me through the darkness
and so the days passed, one by one
a collage of haphazard tenderness
that soon became the first ten years
then the crumpled tissues beside the bed
scented with fresh semen
became the next
moving, of course, always deeper into my narrowing cave
while above, far across the earth,
humanity threw itself back into the dirt
its pious dementia
like brittle prayers trying to shatter the truth
mensch, hominid, fossil
the passion to live
an obsession turning lethal...
(iii)
...behind these metamorphic smiles
a disease moves
the hooded moon squeezes through
bullys its drama further into the heart
an anger so intense
so surgical
it forces the blood inside
to rhyme with the words for bastard
these venereal messiahs
who drag their genitals
from mouth to mouth
who use our children’s bodies as pillows
the unclean miasma
that hammers laughter to the walls
that can, even from the air,
distil the fascist sweetness for war
poor child, moon child
in-the-black sand-face-down-child
love did not love you enough
too soon did the hooded moon enter your eyes
these sages and priests
injecting infanticide
the app of apps
the hit of all hits
the cocaine foetus
conqueror of this so virtuous, so stellar world
then again the disease moves
smiles become metamorphic
and the miasma drags
our children by the hair
across the black sand
down to the sea
and on into the unclean drama...
(iv)
...but then why this nothing, nowhere music
this irritable melody
that burns the ground beneath my feet
my blackened, smouldering footprints
all that is left of my existence
pages of spluttering, uninhabited words
holding a queer resonance
an odd, muted testimony
to the final overthrow of risk
the nowhere music an ice-flow
the ice-flow a disturbing emblem
the emblem a black crown
a nowhere fanfare
echoing down the corridors
the odd resonance
history’s terse homeland
an immoveable page set in concrete
all that is left of existence
the will to make some sense of
the crowns, the footprints, the risks...