And all your thoughts end in Oedipus:
Life passes
The way the traffic does –
For a child in the back of her parents car,
For a bored, stoned,
Long-boned
Teen Magician,
Looking down at the highway from an
Suburban overpass;
Stretching his dreams beyond fandom and towards flight.
In the end,
Everything disappears
Like clock-time and
Like Sunday afternoon;
Like small victories
And soccer-balls: perfectly translated
From one graceful, straining leg to another; beautifully arranged
(Like the toy soldiers in an Aspergic’s garage)
In the name of a purpose, which is also an end
Where I come from we call this sort of thing a:
(Shout it out with gusto and a thick Yorkshire accent, children –)
Goooooo –oooooooooooooooo-oooooooo- aaaaaaal
…bowl, soul,
“Oh, indeed: very droll,
Oscar: so very like you too…
Epigrammatic, what?”
Watch it roll
Merrily along, now,
Down and further down
Around and around
(Its feet unbound)
To where the dream takes you:
Breaks you,
Makes you, unwittingly, its catcher
In-the-rye
Smiles on lovers:
(Nothing dolorous about a willing slave)
Last, loyal daughter
Of the Old King.
Devoted and diminished you are destined to become
Its accountant and its taxidermist
Martyr and stalker,
The fair-weather Facebook friend
Of all that you won’t quite remember.
Today, with our super-sized doses of Oneirine
We are (now and always) both the Giant and the Jellyfish,
Paragon and Prisoner:
Our nights are the kindling of the world:
Our days are the embers of its forgotten flags.
Our hopes the encouraging exhalations, made asthmatic, now, by time and by defeat.
II
Watch, now, as the crowd gasps itself back into life,
In stadiums and living rooms:
Everyone stops
And then,
Breathless, we start to shout
And as we do so,
We
Snap.freeze.time.
In this slow, new, rock-like, mud-textured dimension
The ball surges, somehow,
Improbably, into the net, which:
Infinite as an uncharted ocean –
Becomes that by which we baptise
All those tenuous connections between words and things,
By which we summarily engender
The precarious tonality of a world.
Things word and words thing.
They do so by way of a lure which is also
Us,
We are a mesh,
A means, a dream of words, a mean wish,
A maimed witch with which
We switch lives and raid hives,
Without anger and without gratitude:
We’re striving always to captivate the sad-eyed animal beyond our words,
And in our slaughterhouses:
Its freedom (panther, or mantis, bird or dog, owl or crow)
Blinds us:
You can look through the mirror, but still can’t meet its gaze:
Night-black
Sky-blooming,
Thunder-booming:
If you look carefully,
You’ll see it scurry from the tomb
Escape through the mouse-hole
To this Nocturnal, nebulous neverland
It is the smooth magic of Dummheit:
Silence and darkness, you told me,
Tremble
At the edges of our words,
I think I caught them doing this once,
Shaking through a whole Christmas morning
Gesticulating “wildly” around fantasies
That might have been mine if they were anyone’s.
But hope
Infuses every utterance:
Profound, of course:
But still dumb.
And life knows all of this:
It knows it all without thinking:
It eludes everything
While alluding, obnoxiously, to everything else:
It cuts and it perforates, it breeds and it seethes
Even and especially when it seems to miss the mark:
The Real expands beneath our clumsy, groping touch:
And the whole teeming, streaming, not-quite-seeming universe
Arises out of
This
From this and for this,
We are the leftover echo
Of a single flirtatious, “come-hither” glance into the unborn future,
A shy salutation from the Many to the One
And back again
(Hello!),
Infused with the unknowable and the ‘not’,
With the traces of an encomium for someone not present:
Someone who,
Like all of us
Was born
Lost
But found drowned,
Appointed to occupy
The fringes of memory,
But to dream perpetually of the abandoned centre,
Where we still fancy ourselves sentinels
And shamans:
Old, long vanished travellers who will be welcomed home:
By our families and our dogs.
We are destined to be tortured
By doubt, at least,
And by the remorse
Which afflicts
Every Creator I’ve ever known
Except you
To spend our nights on the merry-go-round,
And in the night-clubs.L
Drunk with what might-have-been and what was:
Nourished on nothingness and on syllables made radiant
By time and by the
After-glow of reverence long ago disavowed.
But surely, you protest, when it comes to this:
Self-citation on such a scale
Takes stones:
Breaks bones,
Shakes thrones,
Makes mewling midnight moans
That turn you on
Like the central heating systems in
Respectable Houses.
(Safe is the new sexy, or so I’m told)
But even here you can see life
Triumph
In the midst of its own
Perpetual
Self-defeat.
How else does anything manage to exist, after all
Given that to do so, so unmistakably defies
The house-style of every reputable journal on your top 10 list?
“I don’t know exactly, but it strikes me as a task for the censor
Or the chief of police:
For Miss Marple and for Hercule Poirot
Together at last in some Super-hero Super-group
With Sherlock Holmes and…I don’t know..
A charmingly idiosyncratic selection of X-Men
In skintight jumpsuits
“I suppose, if we had to:
We could offer him a teaching position of some sort
But he’s scarcely suitable for research.”
“Caspar David Friedrich!”
She exclaimed obscenely,
“I want this. I want all of those sultry, shiny things,
At once, and without delay.”
I know, I see, I was there when the first fires started to fall.
When the first fits were raised to the newly formed heavens,
At the exact moment
Before they were forcibly opened (palms up)
To flail futilely at the first flies.
All I want is for you to see me as I’ve always seen you.
Bereft of nothing, and
Bathed in the infinite grace of
Those who can reach out to another person’s shoulder,
Without fear or self-doubt:
Impossible, of course
Like everything towards which our hearts strain,
Like those space-ports of the soul
You run out of fuel before you get there.
In the end, it’s like any of those things that we make,
Tentative and bemused
From each other’s spare soul-parts,
Dizzy-dream things all,
Remnants of the animals whose
Throats you slit for the altar:
Reality-shrouded,
Now harsh, bright, overly speculative, fragile things:
Drawn carefully from the well of language,
The water still overflows the edges.
They have transmogrified
Become, over aeons, precious stones,
Carefully removed
From the bellies of our architects:
A blind man’s bluff (the double-binds are rough)
It’s the great, glass-bead game
Which declares music the food of love
And plays on:
When you were younger, you promised that
You’d remember.
You didn’t, of course,
For we are destined to forget.
But, you, Tiresias,
Who have been all things:
Foretold all things,
Been shown all things:
But who (like the rest of us) have not love
And are, therefore, nothing:
You, old friend, reproach me, now, with winter coming?
The stores empty, and the fields fallow
The raiders buckling on their armour?
The light fading.
We’re like an old
Married couple, now, aren’t we, old friend?
Finishing each others sentences and scouring
Each other for vulnerabilities,
Incisions made from dim affection and by visible futility.
Do you think this means we could resolve our
Arguments
Four moves in advance like
Master-chess players?
Become spiteful and smug
With the partial clairvoyance of supreme logic
And servile cunning.
We’re lovers in a very, very abstract and, er, slightly made-up sense of the term:
Friends, technically, but without benefits
But between us there is also,
Hauntingly
Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters:
Friends, yes.
In the end we will find ourselves looking into the same stained mirror:
We’ll die clinging to the same crumbling mast.
III
Eyeless, I am without pity.
Pitiless, I see clearly before the end.
You brought her back to me, cruel and capricious gods:
Just when you’d thought I’d lost everything:
Your small mercies are, of course, the hardest of all to bear:
I never imagined it would be like this:
Her, suddenly being-there, here
Beside me at the last:
Steady hands to guide my faltering, swollen-footed step,
I’d already died twice, when she found me.
And I know the crueller fate you had laid out for her :
She led me (sweet thing) to the place where I could wish/wash/wrench away
The crime of my existence:
And though my iniquities threatened to blot out the sun.
They made me holy then, fools and worse than fools:
Called me Pater, and Tryannos,
More wonderful and terrible than the totality,
Or its gaping hole:
It ends now:
Which is to say that I do:
The old, blind, King, radiant and
Defiant to the last,
Stalking in holy destitution
The sacred grove
Like a tiger who knows the lock on his cage
Will break before another sun has set.
In this place of restitution, I will say the last words,
Without apology or regret.
I will fiercely face the destitution of my being:
With these, my last words,
The family curse which moves me
And us all:
Becomes immortal.
O, my daughter:
We dream of waking every day, and when we wake from these dreams:
There is an effulgence even in the emptiness:
The rocks reverberate with our song.
