And dance upon the surface of the moon
…And dance upon the surface of the moon
Feigning Fathomlessness,
We look past each other,
Away from each other,
Towards the Interior:–
Towards that place where the Wild Things aren’t.
Do you promise not to eat each other
If one of you dies first
In the snow?
I know I did, but then my promises
(Especially when I’m walking through
Permafrost,
Dreaming
My heavy, frostbite dreams)
Are like the ashes of a newspaper:
Easily scattered by the wind
The embers extinguish themselves in an
Esoteric sequence
One by one
Like the lights over Europe,
On the cusp of war,
Outwards now –
(Stories of the city, stories of the snow)
I watch her, watching you,
We pose for the camera before we’ve noticed its presence
We peer through glass
So translucent that it obscures everything
Your gaze
Turns
Towards those
Deep sea-ruins of
Experience –
Unsalvageable.
You’re cold now.
Each mile feels heavier
Than the last:
Don’t stop now, we’re almost there.
Don’t breathe, he’ll hear you — probably hit you.
Don’t say what you mean or you might offend them.
And, anyway, isn’t your special brand of not-offending-people
(Or at least the right-sort-of-people)
What you call (preposterously) “your politics?”
In the same way that you call your vague desire for visibility: “Love”?,
The hope that people will be forced to listen to you
“Art”, or “Life”, or something equally sanctimonious,
The casual psychopathy of which might
Rouse even a cluster bomb to outrage?
It’s here.
Under the ice and
Under the water.
This.
Place.
This.
Cave.
This is where we lost
Eurydice, isn’t it? –
And with her –
The meaning of all this music:
We were young, I think, in an obvious,
Gratuitous sort of way
I still had training-wheels on my bicycle
And a tail like a salamander
And wonder
We mistook the concentration camp,
For the sun-kissed world.
We can still make the world weep, darling,
Or so I’ve heard,
But, today, so much
Speech is like bronze
Turned green
And implacable with time
And the unctuous
Callous belief we have
In fate,
Merit,
And immortality.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that:
I want you to go out with me
(In the seediest possible sense
Of each of those words.)
But then I also want
To see the great
Civilisation Under the Sea
Before I die,
I want to dream the dreams
Of those crystalline beings,
Whose cities are ordered by
Alien geometries
As unintelligible as ballet,
As brutal as the rules of attraction.
I want to ride
On the back of the Leviathan,
Break bread with the
Prophet and stroke his beard,
Touch his protruding
Ribs,
I want to release every prisoner
And every slave,
To speak up for Job, and explain why his friends are
Such Jerks,
And why everyone is wrong about everything
Except maybe
Ernst Bloch:
And me.
I want to see you leap between skyscrapers made of mirrors and
Eat marshmallows for every meal,
I want to steal a goblet from the dragon’s hoard,
Fill it with the waters of life,
And then raise it to the lips of the Dead,
I want to offer you and even that other guy,
A pension and a more-than-fair
(Justice is nothing if it’s not an excess)
Wage.
I want us to Go On Adventures with
Our Animal Companions,
And for all of the toys of your childhood,
To explode into life at the stroke of my pencil
I want you to remember,
Not so much your ”dreams”
(Jesus Christ, are we Americans?!)
But the ragged, forgotten, impossible preposterous
Gleefully anthropophagic
Glory of everything
Bright enough,
Brave enough,
To remain
(Pitilessly)
Indifferent
To you and me and everyone we know.
