The man sits at one of the
cafes in the hypothetical ghetto. He writes
postcards because breathing prevents him
from writing the poems he’d like to write. I
mean: free poems, no extra tax. His eyes
retain a vision of naked bodies coming slowly
out of the sea. Then all that’s left is
emptiness. “Waiters walking along the beach”
… “The evening light dismantles our sense of
the wind” …
from Antwerp, chapter 2, “The fullness of the wind”, by Roberto Bolaño
I
The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street-
corner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves
laden with all the hues of deep spoil, laden with
things unlikely and desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals,
of things half given away, half withheld,
of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act
that way, I tell you.
The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds
and odd ends: some hated friends to chat
with, music for dreams, and the smoking of
bitter ashes. The things my hungry heart
has no use for.
The big wave brought you.
Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily
and incessantly beautiful. We talked and you
have forgotten the words.
The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street
of my city.
Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to
make your name, the lilt of your laughter:
these are the illustrious toys you have left me.
I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find
them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and
to the few stray stars of the dawn.
Your dark rich life …
I must get at you, somehow; I put away those
illustrious toys you have left me, I want your
hidden look, your real smile — that lonely,
mocking smile your cool mirror knows.
II
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
that living men have honoured in bronze:
my father’s father killed in the frontier of
Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
the hide of a cow; my mother’s grandfather
–just twentyfour– heading a charge of
three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
been loyal.
Image Andres Serrano
Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, —
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood’s obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.
it’s like tetris, when the shapes are raining down, apocollapse from the sky, and you have the wrong shape for the chasm you need to fill and it blocks the hole and then the right one comes along and shit shit shit it has nowhere to go and it touches the ceiling and you’re dead.
it is a smile
sleeping in the folds
of a dimple
it is you
swathed in a blanket
of absences
it is my prayers
dressed in a coat
of silences.
I
The taste of your mouth and the color of your skin,
skin, mouth, fruit of these swift days,
tell me, were they always beside you
through years and journeys and moons and suns
and earth and weeping and rain and joy
or is it only now that
they come from your roots,
only as water brings to the dry earth
burgeonings that it did not know,
or as to the lips of the forgotten jug
the taste of the earth rises in the water?
I don’t know, don’t tell me, you don’t know.
Nobody knows these things.
But bringing all my senses close
to the light of your skin, you disappear,
you melt like the acid
aroma of a fruit
and the heat of a road,
and the smell of corn being stripped,
the honeysuckle of the pure afternoon,
the names of the dusty earth,
the infinite perfume of our country:
magnolia and thicket, blood and flour,
the gallop of horses,
the village’s dusty moon,
newborn bread:
ah from your skin everything comes back to my mouth,
comes back to my heart, comes back to my body,
and with you I become again
the earth that you are:
you are deep spring in me:
in you I know again how I am born.
2
Years of yours that I should have felt
growing near me like clusters
until you had seen how the sun and the earth
had destined you for my hands of stone,
until grape by grape you had made
the wine sing in my veins.
The wind or the horse
swerving were able
to make me pass through your childhood,
you have seen the same sky each day,
the same dark winter mud,
the endless branching of the plum trees
and their dark-purple sweetness.
Only a few miles of night,
the drenched distances
of the country dawn,
a handful of earth separated us, the transparent
walls
that we did not cross, so that life,
afterward, could put all
the seas and the earth
between us, and we could come together
in spite of space,
step by step seeking each other,
from one ocean to another,
until I saw that the sky was aflame
and your hair was flying in the light
and you came to my kisses with the fire
of an unchained meteor
and as you melted in my blood, the sweetness
of the wild plum
of our childhood I received in my mouth,
and I clutched you to my breast as
if I were regaining earth and life.
3
My wild girl, we have had
to regain time
and march backward, in the distance
of our lives, kiss after kiss,
gathering from one place what we gave
without joy, discovering in another
the secret road
that gradually brought your feet close to mine,
and so beneath my mouth
you see again the unfulfilled plant
of your life putting out its roots
toward my heart that was waiting for you.
And one by one the nights
between our separated cities
are joined to the night that unites us.
The light of each day,
its flame or its repose,
they deliver to us, taking them from time,
and so our treasure
is disinterred in shadow or light,
and so our kisses kiss life:
all love is enclosed in our love:
all thirst ends in our embrace.
Here we are at last face to face,
we have met,
we have lost nothing.
We have felt each other lip to lip,
we have changed a thousand times
between us death and life,
all that we were bringing
like dead medals
we threw to the bottom of the sea,
all that we learned
was of no use to us:
we begin again,
we end again
death and life.
And here we survive,
pure, with the purity that we created,
broader than the earth that could not lead us astray,
eternal as the fire that will burn
as long as life endures.
this is why
i wander the wilderness
beyond the horizon
you meet me round the corner, down the road
that’s not who i am
some old dirty secret
some unclean spirit
cast out into darkness
it’s never been about possession
One day He
tipped His top hat
and walked
out of the room,
ending the argument.
He stomped off
saying:
I don’t give guarantees.
I was left
quite alone
using up the darkness
I rolled up
my sweater,
up in a ball,
and took it
to bed with me,
a kind of stand-in
for God,
that washerwoman
who walks out
when you’re clean
but not ironed.
When I woke up
the sweater
had turned to
bricks of gold.
I’d won the world
but like a
forsaken explorer,
I’d lost
my map.
This just in from English PEN:
We are delighted to announce the publication of CATECHISM: POEMS FOR PUSSY RIOT, edited by Mark Burnhope, Sarah Crewe & Sophie Mayer.
There will be ePUB, Kindle and PDF versions available on this page from 00:01hrs on Monday 1st October 2012.
The book is distributed on the ‘Pay What You Think It’s Worth’ model popularised by Radiohead and others. We recommend £5, but any amount is welcome. All revenue will go to the Pussy Riot Legal fund, and the English PEN Writers at Risk Programme.
Get it HERE!
FLEURMACH EDITOR’S NOTE: The e-book will contain a poem by Fleurmach contributor Michelle McGrane (Peony Moon).
my menstrual blood does not “run”.
it’s too viscous.
it builds up behind the bottleneck of my cervix until the weight of
sloughed-off lining gets too heavy to contain,
then it blurts out
in thick, slimy strands of not-baby,
a cosmic disappointment
smelling of fresh death.
sometimes crimson, still almost fecund,
sometimes older and blacker, a nauseating cousin of bile,
blended with albumen, like broken egg white, like frogspawn frustrated.
inside my insides,
god’s scraping a blunt teaspoon round and round,
clearing the walls of my womb for another hit-and-miss next month.
on a heavy day,
pulling out an incontinent tampon,
i sit there on the loo,
toilet paper wrapped round my fingers,
trying to abbreviate the sentence of clots
my lips are drooling into the toilet bowl water.
it’s not a lake, it’s a suspension,
a hanging paragraph of placental full-stops that goes on and on,
inexorable
and i wipe and shove in another wad of cotton to staunch the ooze for
another few hours of outer peace.
one day, sometime in my forties or fifties
i’ll be paroled,
retired from service.
god will give up on my body
and that will be the end of that.
it’s irrelevant what anyone else wants.
my cunt is me, but it’s also beyond me,
ordained for a purpose beyond my control,
just like your cock is you, but it’s also beyond you,
ordained for a purpose beyond your control.
mostly we are blasphemous.
the obsession with looking into cunts, like the obsession with hard cocks,
is an ontological obsession with discovering and controlling our cosmic origins,
an expression of our raging, impossible desire for omnipotence.
and indeed pornographic images ARE redundant in that they hold no
physical power to alter the workings of sex
those closeups of fucking are nothing more than flat reproductions of
ten centimetres of Life’s copy machine –
mostly they are over-man-ipulated and bear little resemblance to real
bodies interacting.
porn is the simulacral fantasy of ruling the universe.
Note
I wrote this in 2009 as a comment on this piece:
I bleed
I bleed and I wonder
“Will this be the last time?”
I bleed, therefore I am
“What will it be like?
This cessation of menses?”
The unequivocal end of child-bearing.
And my womb, though childless,
Will it feel the end of possibility?
Perhaps.
And then the unforeseen strength,
Promised by gender and age, will come.
The sureness, the wisdom,
The spirit to sing my songs.
I know this as all women before me have known.
We know this as we smile at the moon
“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters
that beak which grips her, she becomes.”
I accidentally opened two browsers, both playing this video. One started slightly before the other. Having two playing at once enhances the poetry beautifully.
Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916. Wearing a cardboard costume of blue, scarlet and gold, Hugo Ball is carried to the stage in darkness. As the lights go up, the audience of Swiss bourgeoisie, artists, intellectuals, and refugees from the carnage of WWI, is silent. Ball begins a priestly incantation: ‘gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini…’. The place to be, Spiegelgasse 1: simultaneous sound poems, noise music, ‘primitivist’ chants and drums, masked dancers, the absurd, the irrational, improvisation, chance, confrontation and cacophony. The lights dim. The audience responds with bewilderment and rage, and Ball disappears into the darkness. ‘It is necessary for poetry to discard language’, he writes, ‘as painting has discarded the object’.
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon – you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind –
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
*
from C.P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems, trs. Edmund Keeley
and Philip Sherrard (Hogarth Press, 1975)
guilt had it in for me
guilt got it out for me
i sucked at guilt
i went down
my leg
but
guilt never came
I
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;
Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
II
In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.
Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.
She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.
A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned —
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.
III
Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.
They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;
And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.
Anon, their lamps’ uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.
And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.
IV
Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.
Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.
Some insightful stuff written about this poem is to be found HERE.
I binge on loneliness
Mining a tantrum of meat
I binge on loneliness
My heels, the hollow drum
Going through the dirt
Swallowing dark
I binge on loneliness
A mole, a minor disruption
A blemish
A bore
I binge on loneliness
Anne Sexton with her band “Her kind”.
Watch out for power,
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.
Watch out for hate,
it can open its mouth and you’ll fling yourself out
to eat off your leg, an instant leper.
Watch out for friends,
because when you betray them,
as you will,
they will bury their heads in the toilet
and flush themselves away.
Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.
Watch out for games, the actor’s part,
the speech planned, known, given,
for they will give you away
and you will stand like a naked little boy,
pissing on your own child-bed.
Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes) ,
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won’t be heard
and none of your running will end.
Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can’t be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Special person,
if I were you I’d pay no attention
to admonitions from me,
made somewhat out of your words
and somewhat out of mine.
A collaboration.
I do not believe a word I have said,
except some, except I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you’ll root
and the real green thing will come.
Let go. Let go.
Oh special person,
possible leaves,
this typewriter likes you on the way to them,
but wants to break crystal glasses
in celebration,
for you,
when the dark crust is thrown off
and you float all around
like a happened balloon.
You were my death:
you I could hold
when all fell away from me.
Thinking of somebody else, somebody
Unique, like treasure I’ve yet to discover,
Step by step, and poppy by poppy,
I beheaded the garden, flower by flower.
Exactly thus, some dry summer, one day,
On the edge of the field where I’ll stand,
My own head will also be plucked away
By Death’s absent-minded hand.
“CATALYST” – masked dance movement piece
Helgé Janssen/Gisele Stafford, Durban beachfront, 1984
Photograph: Peter Hart-Davies
what stands between this and that?
what stands between this and that?
what stands between this and that?
a look?
a glance?
a second fact?
a psychology?
an ideology?
a whim?
a schism?
a hollow dream?
a friend who intervenes?
a plissé
that would rather be
ironed out flat?
what stands between this and that?
what stands between this and that?
what stands between this and that?
a denial?
a pyre?
a burning sphere?
a time?
a place?
a thwarted mess?
a second guess?
a stall for time
that saves you grace?
a space between
a furtive glimpse?
a risk not worth taking?
what stands between this and that?
what stands between this and that?
what stands between this and that?
life as a rehearsal?
a chance to forget?
another escape?
the art of make-up?
a drowning of sorrows?
an always tomorrow?
a never yesterday?
somebody’s off day?
the centre lost?
the plot in recess?
just another day
without redress?
is this a life or just a mistake?
is this a life or just a mistake?
is this a life or just a mistake?
Thanks to Helgé for sharing this poem. Keep abreast of what this multi-talented and influential Durban artist has up his next immaculately designed sleeve HERE.
It’s a piece of turd
On the corner of Plein
And Spin
It lounges there
having steamed once
When it was fresh.
Now, it’s a curly lump
Of brown
With corn flecks
Just a’ chilling on the sidewalk.
Whose shit is this?
In the middle of town?
Who shat here and left?
What did they wipe their ass with?
Who will clean this shit?
What will they eat after?
How many piles of city shit will they clean in their lifetime?
Who will honor them with an award?
Who gets the award, ‘most shitty city turds evicted’?
Who gives the award?
Who sits on the crappy panel judging who deserves the accolade?
What is the criteria?
How do those who do not get the award feel?
I should have run after more shitty city turds and made my family proud?
What runs through the winners’ mind?
“I’d like to thank my mother, God, my teachers for never letting me forget
that all I’d ever be worth was a pile of shit?”
see the winner shitty shuffle off stage
shame the winner for taking home,
a fecal-fashioned piece of wood.
The digital images fold as the TV screen tires
The cops, rifles in cabinet, past their third beer are edging towards bed
The night is quiet as the smelter has been closed,
the only music is of the wind on razor wire
the ears are too shut to hear the ancestral thuds on goatskin
humanity has somehow died in Marikana
who said what to whom remains a detailed trifle
the fury of the day has to congeal, the blood has to congeal
I reverse the footage bringing the miners back to life
in vain, the footage surges back and the first bullet
reappears and the next and the next and the next
and I reverse the footage in vain, again and again in vain
The image of the man in the green shroud endures
Who wove the blanket and what was his name?
There are no subtitles under the clump of bodies, no names
stapled on their unformed skull
A mist of ignorance also endures, a winter fog
woven into the fabric of the kill
The loom endures too, the weaver is asleep
The land of the high winds will receive the man naked
The earth will eat the stitch back to a thread
What will remain is the image and I in vain
Reversing him back to life to lead the hill to song
In vain, the footage surges back
another Mpondo, another Nquza Hill, another Wonder Hill
the shooting quietens: another anthill
My love, did I not gift you a necklace with a wondrous bird
pure royal platinum to mark our bond?- was it not the work of the
most reckless angel of craft and ingenuity? Was it not pretty?
Didn’t the bird have an enticing beak of orange with green tint?
Throw it away quickly, tonight it will turn nasty and gouge
a shaft into your slender neck
And it will hurt because our metals are the hardest- gold, pig iron, manganese
yes, platinum
Humanity has somehow died in Marikana
What is that uMzimu staring back at us tonight?
Darken the mirrors
Switch off the moon
Asphalt the lakes
At dawn, the driveway to the Master’s mansion
Is aflame with flower, so radiant from the superphosphates
of bone
of surplus oxygen and cash,
such flames, such a raw sun
such mourning by the shacks that squat in sulphur’s bracken
and I wait for the storm, the torrent, the lava of restitution
the avenger spirits that blunt the helicopter blades in vain
these also endure: the game and trout fishing of their elective chores
the auctions of diamond, art and share
the prized stallions of their dreams
their supple fingers fingering oriental skins and their silver crystals
counting the scalps of politicians in their vault
The meerkat paces through the scent of blood
I want it to pace through the scent of blood,
she is the mascot, the living totem
of the mine’s deep rock,
the one who guards the clans from the night’s devil
she is there as the restless ghosts of ancestors
by the rock-face
feeding her sinew and pap
goading her on:
the women who have loved the dead alive
the homesteads that have earned their sweat and glands
impassive nature that has heard their songs
the miners of our daily wealth that still defy
the harsh landscape of new furies
the meerkat endures-
torn certainties of class endure
the weaver also endures: there-
green blankets of our shrouded dreams
humanity has died in Marikana
The strike is over
The dead must return
to work
*(after a tough two weeks and seeing Pitika’s miner sculpture with the
green corrugated iron blanket)
Thanks to Ari for sharing this poem.
(performed by David J, lyrics by Alan Moore)
They say that there’s a broken light for every heart on Broadway.
They say that life’s a game, then they take the board away.
They give you masks and costumes and an outline of the story
Then leave you all to improvise their vicious cabaret…
In no-longer-pretty cities there are fingers in kitties.
There are warrants, forms, and chitties and a jackboot on the stair.
Sex and death and human grime, in monochrome for one thin dime,
But at least the trains all run on time but they don’t go anywhere.
Facing their Responsibilities either on their backs or on their knees
There are ladies who just simply freeze and dare not turn away
And the widows who refuse to cry will be dressed in garter and bow-tie
And be taught to kick their legs up high in this vicious cabaret.
At last! The 1998 Show!
The ballet on the burning stage.
The documentary see
Upon the fractured screen
The dreadful poem scrawled upon the crumpled page…
There’s a policeman with an honest soul that has seen whose head is on the pole
And he grunts and fills his briar bowl with a feeling of unease.
But he briskly frisks the torn remains for a fingerprint or crimson stains
And endeavours to ignore the chins that he walks in to his knees.
while his master in the dark nearby inspects the hands, with a brutal eye,
That have never brushed a lover’s thigh but have squeezed a nation’s threat.
But he hungers in his secret dreams for the harsh embrace of cruel machines
But his lover is not what she seems and she will not leave a note.
At last! The 1998 Show!
The Situation Tragedy
Grand Opera slick with soap
Cliffhangers with no hope
The water-colour in the flooded gallery…
There’s a girl who’ll push but not shove and is desperate for her father’s love
She believes the hand beneath the glove maybe one she needs to hold.
Though she doubts her hosts moralities she decides she is more at ease
In the Land Of Doing What You Please than outside in the cold.
But the backdrop’s peel and the sets give way and the cast gets eaten by the play
There’s a murderer at the Matinee, there are dead men in the aisles
And the patrons and actors too are uncertain if the show is through
And with side-long looks await their cue but the frozen mask just smiles.
At last! The 1998 Show!
The torch-song no one ever sings
The curfew chorus line
The comedy divine
The bulging eyes of puppets strangled by their strings
There’s thrills and chills and girls galore, sing-songs and surprises
There’s something hear for everyone (reserve your seat today)
There’s mischief and malarkies but no queers or yids or darkies
Within this bastard’s carnival, this vicious cabaret.
Read more about Alan Moore on record here
fleurmach 