Monday, April 10, 2006

paranoid landscapes

Passed the ruined avenues
again, where the pale fingers
rest now on the broken glass,

while the curtains
through moonlight
flow endlessly away...

The thin American closed his eyes
as though crippled by some
disease of motion,
which has this need of the morning...

As for the fixity of powers,
to salient genitals abundantly
turns the residential night,

and with the attempt at smell,
our lady of a thousand bleeding eyes
might not fail to classify the influence of morning.

It shall come to pass
there fell upon the gentle disassembly
by shades a desperate stillness assailed,

by some bastard wisdom for an orphan prayer brought upon

this gradual damage, unanimous once again, where
pale fingers rest now against the broken glass...

The thin American closed his eyes,
stricken with some vulgar predilection to motion:

as for the fixity of powers,
neither the mutilated genitals
of banking institutions,

nor gently compared the residential night
should but fail to classify the influence of the morning.

Yet to admit only shadow, the thin
American dreaming closed her eyes while thinking
against the plenum echoes of defeated names:

rusting iron shackles and
crumbling marble statues
of men who have died
hungry tired poor and
alone...

Description remains, partial to pushing in
the narrow leaf. If some respite remaining
for this desperate stillness,

with neither need nor reason,
but a violent symmetry assailed...

The dreamer as though
ignorant of his own
perverse violence, which

beneath the burning rivers assailed
by arms to split open factories
and set fire to sea,

wanting only this one consolation:
to listen at the soft disorder.

So reconciled to the phantom traumas
of oxygen and light,

hours passed thus beneath
the burning rivers. While Henry
Kissinger, in love and tender,

dreaming in desperate stillness,
by moonlight when first
broke through the human silence

a subsequent hunger, assuaged
until the residential nightfall should
fail to classify the influence of morning...

And whole days spent in shadow, as shadow
(if I was awake or dreaming)

while reflected in windows along empty streets
at dusk, the blue glow of endless day

and the tangled bowels of machinery
torn from the bleeding wall.

1 comment:

  1. david, i really like your writing. you know... i 've said as much before. i am glad to read the nonfiction essay here, i am somewhat unaquainted with this aspect of your writing. but also your other writing is really good, really pleasing and beautiful to me. like this poem. i can't say what you were going through in this period of last year, really, but it seems less important as i read your postings. it's clear that you were utterly productive in that time, and that seems crucial to me. i too am often most driven to create when i am most ravaged by internal strife. see you soon buddy.
    -d

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