Activator-Inhibitor

Rooms.I live in rooms.Different rooms.

Each with its character and function.


Sinister technologies are ours to practise.

Time, spiralling, folding and pleating,

Compressing and rarefying,

Works me over with its torsion.

Change and chance are the ventures I invest in;


Meticulous Masorete of my own Bible,

I eke out letters with agonized love.


Unhappy and defiant,

Restless for God knows what,

I thrash about through anxious days,

Wondering what it all adds up to,

And what the balance sheet will read in the end.

Diffidence and indifference

Are the lead in my shoes.


I find entrances to Hell

On ordinary streets,

Rusty old doors, open pipes and manholes,

Fence-holes and disused wells

Cemetery crypts and grafittied city walls…-

Their secret names cry out to me,

Their powers lead me in.


And when you die

People will ask: how did you live?

With what spirit and passion and pride?