The air is eating the soft fruit of my lungs | and the stock market is falling
Slowly all the cities are connecting up by means of infinitesimal threads of quicksilver, and | I am in a mood
Autumn rests against my skin | the fine hairs on my arm rise a little against the cooler air || It will be vellum
She bites her lover and he spills tiny seeds | Small frills of his flesh tighten and loosen, he will run to the temple, where there are pictures of beautiful trees
Stars are forming all over the surface of her skin and her darkness is expanding, the small points of luminosity | drifting further and further apart
The books ache not to be books, and the words | chafe on their pages || they feel autumn coming, too | the damp, the fogs, the mildew
The long winter night of her kiss frightens him | the beautiful trees are letting fall | oranges | persimmons | pomegranates | lemons
Exquisite as a Persian miniature | his sorrow | is not really enough to make up grit sufficient for even | a single pearl
She doesn’t love him | although they are called “lovers” | There will be no more summers | Only the empty bourgeois walks in walloping galoshes across wet fields and woods where purpose runs out and will fails and his body grows as frail and as pointless as a child’s balloon | slipped from moist little fingers | given to the air’s indifference | blown and floating
When she cries, the tears are tiny wriggling caterpillars | They glisten and glitter | She never sees them take wing, and perhaps they never do?
The chemistry of grief is well known and the famous “next words” are written and read | and another of her kisses fills him with snow and delayed trains and she can’t leave her phone alone, in it is stored | all the devices of his irrelevance
She dines on her own heart, it no longer satisfies her | Why are happy people so contemptible?
They will never hear the clink of goat-bells again, the high pass in the dust and the rapture | They will never establish the basis of their relations | with other people
The crowd yearns for celebrity | The wedding dresses of her cells | unwind their long trains and the silk snaps and whistles | Always, the groom is changing!
Entire cities fall prey to storms of amnesia | When we find them again, they are ruins, their citizens | mummified in ash, their bus passes | no longer valid and their homes | hold no interest at all for anyone, surely?
The jewelled cannibal of her wristwatch nibbles away at her, the piranhas of instants school and glimmer | And light pours down through the trees scented with milk and nostalgia, weighted with the memories of November evenings when the light itself | has gone
I won’t come to this place again | I think | It is hateful and | the silence that follows it is always so very, very long…
from the series bliss point | angels of disorder
(open-ended, 2012–present)
(this poem: September, 2012)
