I awoke one night
to a quietness and stillness
I had never known before
the pigeons in the balcony
were not stirring,
the night-guard's cane on ground
did not crackle,
the roaches did not come and go,
and even the ghosts
I had shared the room with
slept in silence.
It was at such a time
I had imagined
I would slip away to freedom,
a time when all the world
had their heads turned
the other way
I peeked out
contemplating winking stars
in clear part of the sky
they were supposed to
guide me away
how ready I had been,
at ease, legs powerful,
heart desperate to stop
under another moon.
My eyes scurried into
the filth of the cavity,
drew something out,
something on life,
I wasn't looking for life,
I was after extinction,
I shoved it back.
Death seemed to have
its own life
so much life that
it could come down,
walked over
and placed itself
over my body
fastening itself.
Death in its melancholic
regal cloak, laughing
exactly resembled life
I had witnessed in
great trench of weeping.
I had found my death,
not the illusory land of
error and miscalculation,
but the real and true.
I had a zest for
enlightened extermination
No wonder I touched
the glory of my wounds.
This feeling, it came to me one afternoon,
I was caught in, the manacles of language
there was no theater but our ingrown proscenium
my ears secret labyrinths, your eyes secretive,
your velvety touch weightless, lit by
a tiny jewel in my annualry, treading phantomlike,
leaping from its tender perch
into the dusky corridor of my lips
tunneling deeper and deeper
until I sank into the darkness of your mind
I wasn't watchful. I wasn't suspicious.
I wanted your hands to keep close to me
the soft translucent web-skin between your fingers
to fondle . I wouldn't name what.
Aptly naming, is knowing what it is
exorcising and possessing, all at once.
All masks sunder or else all sport masks
In a bristling of remembrance and representations,
the past was the present, the present was past,
the meaning of one thing, was the meaning of other,
all meanings were one and into this cauldron of all-ness
a recognized evil burst, wearing the mask of you
behind it a cavalcade of upheavals unmasked,
a torn scarlet dress, dead dreams, soot
the lover who was not a lover.
And you; always you.
Invader usurper thief. All one.
An odorless odor, a fume adrift aslant
inside me, fiercely rotating lost runaways,
swallowed by oblivion like whiskey in the throat.
Merely another bruise in the house of bruises
This is even better…..
