I.

Things are not things, but occurrences; what
Happened there and then never was meant.
The furnace of the real is forever spent. We
Have drank it all. The water. The water.

And childhood is certainly greater than reality,
For it tests us in numberless ways,
And meaninglessly.

And memory, that deep-blue abyss,
With its alleyways, its dilapidated gallerias,
Its scent of reheated soup.

We are in this desert bloated by consumption,
We haven’t seen each other in a lifetime, and so
We pass the hours trading grains of sand, happy and
Fatalistic like two old lost lovers.

Above and below us there are many flowers
Whose name we’ll never know, and we both
Have eyes and ligaments without name.

We don’t talk much but prefer to breathe beside.
Our wish is to rejoin a childhood in the first world,
But that stench of salt from our bowels…

O world o
Grand revolting branch of sob and suckle

Stay a while till I have learned to sing,
Stay while I sing

This coarse, bridled tongue, with its pronouns
And its symbols and its systems, with its whimsical
Verbs and its genocidal reproduction of thought;

Stay a while till I have sung this tongue,
Stay while I sing.

II.

Twice in the same river. Thrice in total.
Once with me. Once together. The third
The river into itself. Us, and the river.
One, two times. Two, three times.
Seven parts of null, seventeens of nine.
Seven teens the age of nine, vitalistic,
Frantic and timeless, also apt and urgent,
Gloating and conquering all down London,
The great London with the big tits, and
The impervious silhouettes, London
Blistering with pride and black plagues;
All seven of them, the age of nine, down London
Seven parts of null, seventeens of nine,
Down in the nurturing Thames, underwater.
Gloating and conquering, spitting and fiddling
Down in the Thames underwater. And we
Have drank it all. The water.
Seven of the age of nine underwater.
Twice in the same water. Thrice in total.
Once with me, once together. The third

(Stay while I sing. Stay a while
Till I have learned to sing. Underwater)

With their eyes chewed about and their mouths
Ripped whole, and trying to sing.

What is the voiceless sound? Here, hear. Hear
Here, here, here, now. What is the aim of sing?
What is its convey? 

O world o
Sing while I stay a while, sing!

Jason saw it first. Did he set sail and land
With the same ship? All that mindless tar,
The wooden planks massacred by sea-termites,
The rotten oars. Until the day when the mighty
Argo returned; not a single piece had returned.
All new pieces, the same tar, the same oars
With the same inscriptions, the same wooden planks.
Not a single had returned. The same ship.

And Jason died and his eyes with him,
Undership. Longing for water.

And Jason saw them sing, deep in the black bay
With their language and their words of water
Which sang: things are not things, but occurrences.

Of all the riches and the gold, of all the scathing
Passages, of all the lands and peoples, of all the
Incantations, of all the wounds and triumphs,
It is the song he chose to carry across. 

 

III.

Desire stretches that far: till Death, and unto it.
And also before, in living on Earth and under
That sun shade, awhile in the light of day,

During a cold winter morn in Kus Tba.
We were walking beside each other,
Counting our breaths, in the frozen unmade road

Sliding upon the icy body of water.
I was searching for your hand, catching
Your words in mid-air, and at the fiftieth breath

You stepped and sighed— leaning in on the glacial ground
To seize a stone which then you threw vigorously
Towards the plane. But it broke

Upon impact with the ice, and shattered.
And I was thinking of how a ring would hug your finger,
How I longed to extend this sense to your mind,

To reify this warmth and kindle it through time.
You were a validation that World and Life are one,
And my self a trail of bread crumbs

With which to feed my wits
In stale droplets of reason monolithic.
Of where we ended up, I recollect nothing

Nor the places nor the attempts
At minuting each breath logged into moment.
Yet behind this four-letter-pretence at wordplay,

After death, life, and the gentle sting of a sun ray,
I knew the first thought would be to see you
So I could inhabit each breath within your chest. 

 

IV.

Why cannot we be like we used to be? And why
Cannot we become what we are as of now? True,
What we are cannot be known, and what we were
Cannot be located, while what will become of us
Exists already, takes hold already, ramifies.
Time tomorrow is waging a war against time today,
And winning every centimetre of this battlefield,
Our bodies. Out there where time yesterday is still looped,
Where that old song (of which we remember only
pieces) plays
Stands a solitary, sunless day.

Within this day, which has no hour nor clock
To beat the time, which houses no orphan
Of events and facts,

Within this day, time probable and time possible
Idly pass, back and forth, a token of love
That withered on a morning that once was.

And of the could have been, and of the should have
In a drowsy litany of intent and bland passivity,
(A waning breath’s vapour on a wintry street,
Threatening to crawl within the fixtures)
Nothing remains but the cosmic relic radiation.

Indeed most of what becomes is wasted—
And it is from this acknowledgment
That a mind’s conscience sets sail.

If our awareness is the acceptance of this entropy,
This impossibility for every thing to become thing,
All begins and ends nowhere,

And the song that we remember, the rhythm buried
In its face, is not to mark the time or space,
But to recoil the appetite
of its nature.

What to make then of the metallurgy of interplay?
Forces weld and bodies wed in terrible congress,
These are not things, but occurrences, and yet

What is real is real again, in eternal recurrence.
There is no greater answer. Things are not things,
But occurrences. And desire stirs both ways:
The time invited to join, and the space
created to welcome it.

I sing because the song needs be remembered,
Needs be affixed to every sunless day. It is this
May be that stings me to music: I hear it clear
at times, some times
I hear it asound.

 

V.

That the end of language coincides with
The end of the world, and that at world’s end
No word is there to speak or record;

That at word’s death only a game of words
Can bring about meaning; and that
The word World can only be true
As long as the world of Word is tied to it.

I’d rather follow the Worldword unward
From this image of thought onto the next,
With a whirlwind path affixed to me. 

(From Triptych)