Staring out of a train window
As it hurtles through the countryside,
One knows that life eludes all taxonomies
Can never be reduced to diagrams.
You raise your face to the breeze,
Life’s essence passes through you
And seeps into the bones.
Where is the river’s source?
Is it on Mt Abnoba?In Hesperia?
In the land of the Hyperboreans?
This is the zone of hybrids and metamorphoses.
In a small dip in the hillside the Breg
Bubbles up from underground;the meadow
Is steeped in water,sodden and flooded
By countless rivulets...
Once the primeval Danube flowed
Into the Gulf of Thetis,into the Sarmatic Sea,
Its mouth where Vienna now stands.
In the Clock Museum at Furtwanger,
Timepieces by the thousand tick off the hours
In a dream of perpetual motion,pendulums
And cogwheels dividing eternity
Into mathematical units,while life
Flies up and down and in and out
And all around...The relief of science,
Distracting us from our inner torment,
Turning our gaze to the world outside!
Perhaps ths way we will keep our heads,
Discover a world secure and structured,
A home for the self-tormented spirit.
Stations I pass through,words I write...
The struggle to fill in the blank spaces,
Annul the nullity, escape from insignificance...
Why did it all turn out as it did-myself
And the world-from the beginning till now?
Keep moving bravely forward,do not rest.
The mystery of the Hapsburg Empire
Draws me in,through paradox and oxymoron,
The irreconcilable contradiction,the puzzle
Never to be solved,too many pieces missing,
The synthesis that cannot be achieved.
This is my future,forever postponed,
My mind,like a Klein bottle.
Must one believe in God to have faith in the world?
Very early I began to doubt priests’ words
And see in their rites mere theatre.
One must love the created world,all the same,
Be it underwritten by the heavens
Or by ourselves alone.
The Danube is, with no need of affirmation,
Promising nothing,flowing on, oblivious;
I will bridge and ford it however I can,
Accept my destiny as the seasons determine.
A parasite on the hide of Europe,
A parasite feeding on the ideas and emotions
Of the living and the dead,I mime a life
Inside a carapace of rhetoric.
Am I Roman or barbarian? I am drawn
To the empire’s crumbled stone frontier,
Dividing and defining all the way to the Black Sea.
In Ulm, the sparrow’s nest,the shrine
Of Ahasuerus’s shoe,German law and custom
Bless the sad clerks at their desks,
Their hidden passions distorted by convention,
Rendered pitiful and grotesque.
Close,so close to perdition,I dig into the black roots
Of a language I cannot speak,a culture
Far from my birth,and maunder on,
Sure,at least,of desire’s ordeal,
That binds me to the indescribable beloved,
That face,those hips, those shoulders...
Triple-rivered Passau,floating and flowing
Away on the current,gold and carnation marble
Palaces and churches ,streets winding beneath
Arches,domes and colonnades-a cosmos
Of curves,spheres,circles and ellipses-
The nearest is the furthest away,
The simplest is the most mysterious,
As we seek a home on earth, a hearth
To tend with care and hope,
Discovering grace before nothingness.
Smell of snow in Linz,the hills and river
Heraldic in the still-the imperial AEIOU
Spells infinitely receding possibility
To the heart.To break out
Of this landlocked desolation and reach
The sea!-There we might be happy
As humans, as animals,as gods.
Ochre and orange buildings fade
Into the evening’s watercolour,
In Artstetten Castle crypt,they lie,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Sophie,
Their idiocies annulled by martyrdom.
The old Europe died in their arms,
As they died in each other’s,
Pulling the whole world down with them
Into the bottomless wishing well,
Keeping forever their lovers’ secrets
Deadlier than bullets or bombs.
The first blood flowed out onto his blue tunic,
From the sleeve and chest,as his hat
With huge green feathers fell unharmed.
In Vienna’s Cemetery of the Nameless,
Treading over the Danube’s sacrificial victims,
I watch big crows rise on the wing,
Inhale the simple joy of morning.
How hard it is to tell the real from the unreal,
Fact from feeling,life from death.
In the Museum of Medicine,among
Anatomical models sectioned to reveal
The madness of muscles,organs,arteries
And nerves,I stop before a beautiful
Colourless male head,the lips drawn
Into the smile of a kouros,the skull
Exposing,in median sagittal section,
The cerebellum’s tree of life.
A woman with abdominal walls removed
To lay the genital organs open
Lies serenely prone,in a blonde wig,
A necklace round her waxen throat.
Plump white hands of Hungarian princes,
Earthen hands of Slovakian peasants;
Renaissance palaces winged like griffins,
Hovels made from straw and dung;
Only the trees and stones know
The lives that have gone into this soil.
Wave on wave of invasions, superimposed
Upon one another, have steeped
The earth with Eurasian dreams.
Solitude is their birthright,these souls
Abandoned to the horsemen’s plains,
Forever,even in victory,defeated.
In an open-air cafe in Budapest,I spoon
Icecream into my lying mouth,and watch
The Danube run beneath titanic bridges,
To some unseen horizon,which the spirit,
Fed on books and pictures,can reach for
But never,to its anguish,attain.
Powerless in a marginal province,
One hears the muffled cries of lives
Unknown, destinies arbitrated elsewhere.
Sunflowers and maize cover Mohács field,
Wooden statues planted in the ground
To mark the battle,men and horses.
Faces contorted with ferocious agony,
Crosses and crescents opposed;
The day when the olive tree at Pécs
Turned barren,and King Louis II,
Egged on by his nobles,shrugged
And gave the accursed order for battle.
Like Gaius Scribonius,unwilling
To advance his army into the dark forests
On the other shore,clinging to the pure
And noble Latin tongue as his shield,
I plot strategic victories of speech.
In Bulgaria,-no man’s land of heretics,
Among late nations half-mapped
By Western arrogance,where the dark
Vowels of Old Church Slavonic swung
Their bronze bells in high towers,-
I spy on a church wall an anathema
Against the Bogomils,the peasants’ friends,
Who denounced the satanic princes
Of the earth, its irredeemable evil
Perpetuated through human lust.
Forward the Thracian horseman
Charges,serene in the face of death,
Cloak-wings flying out in the wind.
At the gibbeted crossroads,in the path
Of evil,Romania lures me in where many
Gods have been created then sacrificed.
Only the most fallen, the most corrupt
Can long so for redemption,-
The swarming world,condemned
By sensual delusion,staggers
Under its own desire’s burden.
The delta ravels its secrets before me:
Stream on stream,ramified rivulets
Feeding the great dissolution,
The terminus of death and rebirth.
Nature’s bass note booms through me,
Amid the vast jungle of land and water
Merged,the cavernous shadows
Of overhanging trees, the deep bays
Where time moors,like the Argo returning.
Loosen,release,abandon to the flow!-
Gulls and herons crowd the evening air,
Shouting madly to the sea’s horizon.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
Mesopotamia
Between two rivers, between drought and flood,
Alluvial civilisation accretes.
Mudtowns obliterated by disaster:
The wind piles sand against their ruins,
Filling in their streets,while the rain
Smooths forlorn heaps into mammary mounds.
Ur lies in ruins,its people dispersed,
Wife abandoned,daughter abandoned,
Walls broken,houses burnt down,
The dead like potsherds scattered
And turning to sand.
In Uruk,home of Anu and Inanna,
Temple cone-mosaic facades
Gleam red,white and black in the glare.
Hunched Sumerian scribes etch pictograms
Into clay tablets,agglutinative thought
Made flesh.They are heaven’s liege-men
On this flat disc surrounded by mountains,
Floating ensphered on a sweetwater ocean,
The terrifying Netherworld groaning below.
Here,where a sudden blinding cloudburst
Turns dusty plain to malebolge,
And a sandstorm candevastate the brightest day,
What should men do but placate the gods
And labour to win their goodwill?
To the gods the ziggurats extend
An invitation to descend;men they command
To shed their shells and ascend.
The temple doors are opened:
The gods gilded statue shines forth
In the shrine’s semi-darkness,
Washed,anointed,perfumed,dressed and fed,
Incense and flowers at his feet.
The air vibrates with music and incantation,
Bread,cakes,butter,fruit and honey on the altar,
The smoke of roasting flesh commingled
With cedarwood and cypress fumes.
Whisper the prayer through a reed tube
In Sumerian into the bull’s right ear,
In Akkadian into the left.
The king lives in harmony.His palace is harmonious,
The sun-gloried courtyard paved with gypsum slabs,
And,inside,the long proud flight of steps
To the throne-room, to the dais
Where His Majesty sits,
His justice as simple as a handful of flour and dates.
In the narrow dusty rubbish-clogged streets,
Pedlars and shoppers walk in the walls’ shade
And a crowd gathers at the crossroads
To hear a storyteller recite “Gilgamesh”.
Ashurnasirpal, King of Assyria,
No pity,no piety in his beaked image,
The straight-staring eyes of total power,
Proclaims: “I built a pillar and covered it
With the skins of rebellious chiefs I had flayed.
Some I walled up inside the pillar,
Some I impaled upon the pillar.
Others I had bound to stakes around it.”
Returning in triumph from campaigns of conquest,
He brings with him strange beasts in cages
And unknown seeds to plant in his gardens.
At Nineveh the omens are reported;
Mathematicians and astronomers plot the heavens
And some already wake from horrible dreams,
Having witnessed the seat of the gods in flames.
In Babylon the New Year’s Festival commences.
A priest unlocks the Temple gate,
Opening the courtyard for prayer.
Purify the precinct with Tigris water,
Smear the walls with cedar resin.
The ceremonial slaughterer with dripping hands
Casts the decapitated sheep into the river
And the old year’s sins are carried away.
The penitent king surrenders his insignia,
The priest strikes his cheek and he bows to the god,
“I did not sin, I protected Babylon.
Neither did I neglect the rites
Or punish without reason.”
Then he rises,purged and blessed,
And once more puts authority on,
Heaven’s chosen Lord of Men.
Alluvial civilisation accretes.
Mudtowns obliterated by disaster:
The wind piles sand against their ruins,
Filling in their streets,while the rain
Smooths forlorn heaps into mammary mounds.
Ur lies in ruins,its people dispersed,
Wife abandoned,daughter abandoned,
Walls broken,houses burnt down,
The dead like potsherds scattered
And turning to sand.
In Uruk,home of Anu and Inanna,
Temple cone-mosaic facades
Gleam red,white and black in the glare.
Hunched Sumerian scribes etch pictograms
Into clay tablets,agglutinative thought
Made flesh.They are heaven’s liege-men
On this flat disc surrounded by mountains,
Floating ensphered on a sweetwater ocean,
The terrifying Netherworld groaning below.
Here,where a sudden blinding cloudburst
Turns dusty plain to malebolge,
And a sandstorm candevastate the brightest day,
What should men do but placate the gods
And labour to win their goodwill?
To the gods the ziggurats extend
An invitation to descend;men they command
To shed their shells and ascend.
The temple doors are opened:
The gods gilded statue shines forth
In the shrine’s semi-darkness,
Washed,anointed,perfumed,dressed and fed,
Incense and flowers at his feet.
The air vibrates with music and incantation,
Bread,cakes,butter,fruit and honey on the altar,
The smoke of roasting flesh commingled
With cedarwood and cypress fumes.
Whisper the prayer through a reed tube
In Sumerian into the bull’s right ear,
In Akkadian into the left.
The king lives in harmony.His palace is harmonious,
The sun-gloried courtyard paved with gypsum slabs,
And,inside,the long proud flight of steps
To the throne-room, to the dais
Where His Majesty sits,
His justice as simple as a handful of flour and dates.
In the narrow dusty rubbish-clogged streets,
Pedlars and shoppers walk in the walls’ shade
And a crowd gathers at the crossroads
To hear a storyteller recite “Gilgamesh”.
Ashurnasirpal, King of Assyria,
No pity,no piety in his beaked image,
The straight-staring eyes of total power,
Proclaims: “I built a pillar and covered it
With the skins of rebellious chiefs I had flayed.
Some I walled up inside the pillar,
Some I impaled upon the pillar.
Others I had bound to stakes around it.”
Returning in triumph from campaigns of conquest,
He brings with him strange beasts in cages
And unknown seeds to plant in his gardens.
At Nineveh the omens are reported;
Mathematicians and astronomers plot the heavens
And some already wake from horrible dreams,
Having witnessed the seat of the gods in flames.
In Babylon the New Year’s Festival commences.
A priest unlocks the Temple gate,
Opening the courtyard for prayer.
Purify the precinct with Tigris water,
Smear the walls with cedar resin.
The ceremonial slaughterer with dripping hands
Casts the decapitated sheep into the river
And the old year’s sins are carried away.
The penitent king surrenders his insignia,
The priest strikes his cheek and he bows to the god,
“I did not sin, I protected Babylon.
Neither did I neglect the rites
Or punish without reason.”
Then he rises,purged and blessed,
And once more puts authority on,
Heaven’s chosen Lord of Men.
Catch Me Before I Kill Again
The panic in my veins is the chaos on the streets.
Repetition.My black muse.My love.
Do you fear the wolf? I do. His terrifying grace.
The news is full of menace and alarm,
The same old decadence about to receive
Its comeuppance,as the evil omens accumulate.
God help me, I live among cannibals and beasts
Who cannot control themselves,cannot stop
Doing the same things over and over,committing
The same accursed mistakes,to no purpose,
In love with their own nameless demons.
Protestant sermons and Catholic rituals
Bedevil my solitude.How we need our monsters!
Dear God, control me,control us,keep order
On earth; all this free will is killing me.
Repetition.My black muse.My love.
Do you fear the wolf? I do. His terrifying grace.
The news is full of menace and alarm,
The same old decadence about to receive
Its comeuppance,as the evil omens accumulate.
God help me, I live among cannibals and beasts
Who cannot control themselves,cannot stop
Doing the same things over and over,committing
The same accursed mistakes,to no purpose,
In love with their own nameless demons.
Protestant sermons and Catholic rituals
Bedevil my solitude.How we need our monsters!
Dear God, control me,control us,keep order
On earth; all this free will is killing me.
Mourning
My death has already taken place,
Somewhere out there, in the future,
While , here,I haunt myself and mourn myself.
I am human technology,
The melancholy android,unsure of its place
Among all the exquisite objects in the universe.
Graphs, flow charts and probabilities
Replace imagination among the elect,
Desperate to manage every detail, every illusion.
Our science is, in truth, science fiction.
Save me,cries the soul,that mad machine,
Superbly engineered by demons and angels
All knowledge is glorified uncertainty
I find;no two testimonies completely agree;
Belief itself is all I can believe in.
Somewhere out there, in the future,
While , here,I haunt myself and mourn myself.
I am human technology,
The melancholy android,unsure of its place
Among all the exquisite objects in the universe.
Graphs, flow charts and probabilities
Replace imagination among the elect,
Desperate to manage every detail, every illusion.
Our science is, in truth, science fiction.
Save me,cries the soul,that mad machine,
Superbly engineered by demons and angels
All knowledge is glorified uncertainty
I find;no two testimonies completely agree;
Belief itself is all I can believe in.
Angler
Out from the house, the slim quick supple wand
Tremulous with anticipation in your hand,
You hurry down by dandelions to the lake,
Summer’s idle prince coming into his kingdom.
A woodpecker beats time in a treetop,
Frankincense languor seeps through the pores,
Moody water overhung with alders and willows,
Where the tall float’s quizzical antenna drifts
And bobs, pricking at a sotto voce omen.
Thrilling through refractions, the rudd
Come plunging and fighting to the net,
Gilt flanks minted in the evening gleam.
Time and again, the spry float dashes
Across black meniscus in hesitant trickles.
Discreetly abundant,a Gioconda moon
Perches, approving,in an old ash tree.
Wending home, holy Lord of Animals,
You breathe the dew-spongeing lane and smile.
Tremulous with anticipation in your hand,
You hurry down by dandelions to the lake,
Summer’s idle prince coming into his kingdom.
A woodpecker beats time in a treetop,
Frankincense languor seeps through the pores,
Moody water overhung with alders and willows,
Where the tall float’s quizzical antenna drifts
And bobs, pricking at a sotto voce omen.
Thrilling through refractions, the rudd
Come plunging and fighting to the net,
Gilt flanks minted in the evening gleam.
Time and again, the spry float dashes
Across black meniscus in hesitant trickles.
Discreetly abundant,a Gioconda moon
Perches, approving,in an old ash tree.
Wending home, holy Lord of Animals,
You breathe the dew-spongeing lane and smile.
African Dream
War-drums are beating...
Red sun rises in the bush of ghosts...
War-drums are beating...
A knife cuts the black goat’s neck.
Blood flows on the breathless dust.
The chant moves slowly through the trees.
It stirs the bones, our ancestors,
Joins them together till they rise
And dance for the moon’s delight.
The wells are poisoned, there is nowhere to go.
Bullet holes in village walls
Gape like starving children’s mouths.
Emaciated earth has no breath to gasp.
Bibles and Korans fall from the sky.
Round and round a madman dances,
Crying like a strangled chicken.
Here come the bankers in black suits,
Undertakers to bury the living,
Cannibals with shiny shoes and small lifeless eyes.
The weapons have been chosen:
Pencils and rulers, drawing lines on a map;
Bullets tipped with promises and lies.
Through the Great Rift Valley they walked,
The first human beings,under the blue cones
Of a thousand volcanic peaks,
Their minds drifting like the herds of elands and zebra,
Their hands as busy as the monkeys’ and baboons’.
No-one had told them this was Eden.
They cooked their words over night fires.
Red sun rises in the bush of ghosts...
War-drums are beating...
A knife cuts the black goat’s neck.
Blood flows on the breathless dust.
The chant moves slowly through the trees.
It stirs the bones, our ancestors,
Joins them together till they rise
And dance for the moon’s delight.
The wells are poisoned, there is nowhere to go.
Bullet holes in village walls
Gape like starving children’s mouths.
Emaciated earth has no breath to gasp.
Bibles and Korans fall from the sky.
Round and round a madman dances,
Crying like a strangled chicken.
Here come the bankers in black suits,
Undertakers to bury the living,
Cannibals with shiny shoes and small lifeless eyes.
The weapons have been chosen:
Pencils and rulers, drawing lines on a map;
Bullets tipped with promises and lies.
Through the Great Rift Valley they walked,
The first human beings,under the blue cones
Of a thousand volcanic peaks,
Their minds drifting like the herds of elands and zebra,
Their hands as busy as the monkeys’ and baboons’.
No-one had told them this was Eden.
They cooked their words over night fires.
Wild Swimming
Pagan me, wild water’s lover-worshipper,
Taking the cold deep inside me
To feel like an animal-god.
Celebrate in the shivering skin,
Plunging into another nervous dimension,
Where you scoop out revelations
With hands turning into flippers.
There is always this moment’s dithering
On the edge,goosebumped flesh
And brain,asking “Am I crazy?”-then the rush,
The fall, the surrender-a memory of birth.
Life stares through me,dark as a seal’s eye.
Taking the cold deep inside me
To feel like an animal-god.
Celebrate in the shivering skin,
Plunging into another nervous dimension,
Where you scoop out revelations
With hands turning into flippers.
There is always this moment’s dithering
On the edge,goosebumped flesh
And brain,asking “Am I crazy?”-then the rush,
The fall, the surrender-a memory of birth.
Life stares through me,dark as a seal’s eye.
Black Pearls
Not order, not measure, but the wild and subtle arguments
Of wistful minds, impossible explorers,
Whose geometry is unorthodox, whose theses
Are exotic, esoteric, prone to the vast diverse panorama....
The soul’s academy drives them to plutonic dialogues,
Theologians of their own imagined deaths,
Wagering all they are on salvation, in an age
Of exile and destruction, divided against itself.
Of wistful minds, impossible explorers,
Whose geometry is unorthodox, whose theses
Are exotic, esoteric, prone to the vast diverse panorama....
The soul’s academy drives them to plutonic dialogues,
Theologians of their own imagined deaths,
Wagering all they are on salvation, in an age
Of exile and destruction, divided against itself.
Skimming Stones
A flat round stone will serve you best.
With a sidearm toss and a flick of the wrist
The trick is to hit the surface
At twenty degrees precisely.
The force from the water
Is proportional to the squared speed of the stone.
A game of ducks and drakes
Is what draws me to the shore,
A practised squanderer wondering
How many bounces I will manage this time.
There is always this stillness
When I am throwing my stones.
A mathematical formula
To describe my life has not yet been found,
Although it may exist.From what I read,
Numbers are capable of limitless feats.
Meanwhile,it’s back to the seashore for me,
And practise,practise,practise.
With a sidearm toss and a flick of the wrist
The trick is to hit the surface
At twenty degrees precisely.
The force from the water
Is proportional to the squared speed of the stone.
A game of ducks and drakes
Is what draws me to the shore,
A practised squanderer wondering
How many bounces I will manage this time.
There is always this stillness
When I am throwing my stones.
A mathematical formula
To describe my life has not yet been found,
Although it may exist.From what I read,
Numbers are capable of limitless feats.
Meanwhile,it’s back to the seashore for me,
And practise,practise,practise.
Cruelty
We are the cruel;in cruelty is our truth,
The ingenuity of the self-despising,
Born needlessly into difficult flesh
To suffer and make others suffer.
We busy ourselves with dark accounts:
One must balance the books somehow.
“God is love” they taught us in church,
Shadowed by priests’ black wings.
Sanctioned by deliberate reason,
An ordinary man goes about his work,
Eviscerating the enemy,the scapegoat,
With infinite pleasure and disgust.
The fiendish other is always there,
Projecting the evil eye upon us,
Innocents ill-used by life and fate,
Overcoming only by delicious revenge.
The warring actions of my brain
Poise fury and love in the scales;
Mad calculus chases the infinite
Through the bones of the condemned.
Fatal unfathomable mind –vortex
Of countless precise events
From the womb to this wild minute-
Drives every cell in my body;
Keeps Hell’s bureaucracy at work
Classifying and justifying;
Adds skull to skull upon a pile
Joining earth and heaven.
The ingenuity of the self-despising,
Born needlessly into difficult flesh
To suffer and make others suffer.
We busy ourselves with dark accounts:
One must balance the books somehow.
“God is love” they taught us in church,
Shadowed by priests’ black wings.
Sanctioned by deliberate reason,
An ordinary man goes about his work,
Eviscerating the enemy,the scapegoat,
With infinite pleasure and disgust.
The fiendish other is always there,
Projecting the evil eye upon us,
Innocents ill-used by life and fate,
Overcoming only by delicious revenge.
The warring actions of my brain
Poise fury and love in the scales;
Mad calculus chases the infinite
Through the bones of the condemned.
Fatal unfathomable mind –vortex
Of countless precise events
From the womb to this wild minute-
Drives every cell in my body;
Keeps Hell’s bureaucracy at work
Classifying and justifying;
Adds skull to skull upon a pile
Joining earth and heaven.
Biographies of Hitler
So I sit reading biographies of Hitler,
All the crazy confused verdicts in my head,
Fretting at history’s Mephistophelean games,
Solemn and absurd turned inside out.
The carnival dead survive us all,
Reborn to baffle,seduce and damn,
Their minds escape with their bodies,
Leaving empty skulls in our hands.
Rumour,legend,myth and deceit:
Conflicting testimonies map the vertiginous
Terra incognita where scholars wander,
Shades in purgatory,abandoned to pain;
Nothing is settled, all conclusions vex;
May, might and could run the masquerade;
Back and forth horned questions hunt us,
Scorning this guilty lust to explain.
All the crazy confused verdicts in my head,
Fretting at history’s Mephistophelean games,
Solemn and absurd turned inside out.
The carnival dead survive us all,
Reborn to baffle,seduce and damn,
Their minds escape with their bodies,
Leaving empty skulls in our hands.
Rumour,legend,myth and deceit:
Conflicting testimonies map the vertiginous
Terra incognita where scholars wander,
Shades in purgatory,abandoned to pain;
Nothing is settled, all conclusions vex;
May, might and could run the masquerade;
Back and forth horned questions hunt us,
Scorning this guilty lust to explain.
Pythagoras Alone
Pythagoras sits tuning his seven-stringed lyre,-
The little boy who climbed the forested mountains of Samos,
The merchant seaman’s son born from the waves,
The wanderer who surveyed the stars from Egyptian temple roofs-
And arranges pebbles into triangles and squares on the ground
As the sun tracks across the sky.
Now he knows the object of science is joy;
He is building his pyramid of life and death
To ascend beyond calculation and feeling.
The little boy who climbed the forested mountains of Samos,
The merchant seaman’s son born from the waves,
The wanderer who surveyed the stars from Egyptian temple roofs-
And arranges pebbles into triangles and squares on the ground
As the sun tracks across the sky.
Now he knows the object of science is joy;
He is building his pyramid of life and death
To ascend beyond calculation and feeling.
Albatrosses
Bones, muscles, feathers and wind;
They glide for hundreds of miles without a flap,
Wings locked wide, catching the sky
And sailing upwards, then hugging gravity
To plane seaward, in effortless undulations.
Never touching earth for months on end,
They hurtle up, or weave downwind,
Catch the crosswind and head for the sun
Then turn down into the veering breeze,
Riding out tempests and blizzards, undaunted,
They glide for hundreds of miles without a flap,
Wings locked wide, catching the sky
And sailing upwards, then hugging gravity
To plane seaward, in effortless undulations.
Never touching earth for months on end,
They hurtle up, or weave downwind,
Catch the crosswind and head for the sun
Then turn down into the veering breeze,
Riding out tempests and blizzards, undaunted,
The Innocent
Sitting in Liverpool Street Station,befuddled by hubbub,the toing and froing of anonymous bodies in suspension,strange flesh and alien consciousness blurring into chaos and occasionally resolving itself into harmonies and patterns,I drift in a fog,benumbed,inhuman.
Walking through rain,I am invisible,absorbed into the plangent puddle streets.When will the hidden be uncovered? When will suffering be redeemed? I have pawned my days in the backstreets of the mind,with no hope of recovery.
Glance from a girl on a tube train sparks through Babylonian darkness,excites cruel fantasies.Insular under a clean white shirt and well-pressed suit, my plump white flesh quivers with embarrassed pride.
Walking through rain,I am invisible,absorbed into the plangent puddle streets.When will the hidden be uncovered? When will suffering be redeemed? I have pawned my days in the backstreets of the mind,with no hope of recovery.
Glance from a girl on a tube train sparks through Babylonian darkness,excites cruel fantasies.Insular under a clean white shirt and well-pressed suit, my plump white flesh quivers with embarrassed pride.
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