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1
I
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Behind my walls are my Cats. And behind my Cats is a Peacock singing to me of my death and yours. I said to her "In the silence of an eye, I shall smile and arise, and see someone I used to know sleeping; in her room in her bed in her body I was in Paradise." I am awake in the sound of roses and a young girl's voice. We are drowning in the approaching shadows. I am dreaming and cannot hold it. I have seen.
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(Dear Christ: the silence and the loss; we are born and fall. Dear Christ, you too are broken and lost and hanging like a Roman standard over us all.)
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II
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Behind the line of my skull that hides behind my hair and skin, I see the selfsame skull of my father, and beyond the skull of my father, the skull of my grandfather, and the skull of my great grandfather, whom I never knew. And so on this line unto the alpha and omega point at infinity. With my eye - this fire, this fly, that sees everything and smiles, and comprehends nothing, and dies - I see all around my head and that end. I have invented myself; I have created myself; I am just a form of dream English, words stretched with skin and fear. From my eyes in my skull my father observes this immense and kaleidoscopic dream. By birth I am other than this. The mosquitoes rejoice in my skin. The lizard is on the ceiling above me. The shallow water pots deny the ants routes to food. There is no silence ever. The cicadas are omnipotent sound. The kampong is dark and still. I am not what I thought I was. I am not what I seem. Most of all, I am not what I am. I thought it was the news rushing down the wires, happy in death and fashion, spinning yo-yos and clacking its jaw, raising its eyes, mimicking dogs at play. The sun shuts down, and erases birdlight. And in this stunted eclipse I saw myself, some darkness at last tenously visible, love as the sweetest thing. Al Bowlly, Jack Buchanan, sing on, dreaming of the lamps and the beautiful ladies, bowed lips packed with blood, the staged kisses trembling under the placid stars, the coffee taken with cream and scones under the Viennese Moon; whilst we are weighed, we are judged, and twist in this storm like birds over sails.
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III
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I have caught the dead again: I click my eyes
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And there they are, mercurial ghosts, formed
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And moving; so the dead do move, and shout,
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And pray, and cry, and suffer
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And the eye click on and one: the one shut
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Catches the dead. The clouds pass by.
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God hovers over us and shrieks
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We don't hear the slightest crackle
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Can't see the slightest smiles
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And we blur into our death and the second great death
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Whilst we chase chicks and dream of a paradise without wings or sorrow, Christ's tears fall over Jerusalem. The curtains are groggy with damp, and the rails, and the tracks and the tacks, and the black and the bats, and the shrivelled shrill lights trip and laugh over the weeds and the blossoms, and throats open shut and sigh. I am the moon and the sun, the rising and the setting, the first and final breaths, and the product of the stars. I am some immortal and pointless dust.
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Two bodies lie in bed for their brief moment together in eternity; the memory holds still; we watch the fireflies kiss the night and turn their backs on the Milky Way forever, as our eyes shower sweetness upon each other.
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IV
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I caught a glimpse of your eyes
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Last night in a restless dream
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Awaking out of green field blue seas stars
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Your eyes arose like the spectres of flowers
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I turned out the light and clicked fast the door
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The book fell
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I had so many thoughts, so many signs
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I made sense of nothing at all
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This green dream was unreal; the crickets sing
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Across deserts and plains the lost feast
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Whose shimmering teeth are marking the passing of time
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A cloud falls; a bird shivers and sings, its beak stained with night
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Pure gold: the dark is waiting, the darkness is hungry,
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The deep is angry, and the telephone rings on
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A film screen descends, and the silent movies play
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Buster Keaton falls and rots, as Big Ben sings and boils
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On an endless swamp; the silence is treacle thick
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And calls us to prayer: paint God with your blood
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And fill haunted women with knives and kites
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And gauges and valves and make them weep long hymns
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To gaseous and clumsy mortality whilst fish descend
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Remember, remember the burning ember
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Embedded in your chest: the soul watches TV
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And gorges itself on blood and popcorn
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Now that's what I call decay decline and hard times
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Hard times, very hard times, Mr. Lindsay,
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Hard times and winter so croool: you have stopped my watch
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At the stroke of three and call for the police
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But there's a time for tea and a time for expiring
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And the notice to quit is in the post:
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And you should know: your
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Little cow and calf is gonna die
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V
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I was awake, dreaming
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Of new dystopias to run to and hide within
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And new faces to wear
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And new bodies to inhabit
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And new lies to guzzle
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And how I loved
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The moon, and its sheets of seeds
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The moon tiding in your body
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The smell of your blood breathing
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And its taste in the sea in the south shining my feet
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Till it seemed as if they were made of dew
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With pearls of huge beauty
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Whilst your mouselike breath was
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The hand upon my clock
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And one each breath I came nearer
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To my silly and shining end
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VI
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All long summer long
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Under the fly-dance and the thumbthick twilight
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The thought of you smiling
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And laughing with children
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Crippled me
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Typecast and forlorn
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Smudged ghost gorgeous:
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There is a love so profound
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So broken and risen:
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Torment, black valley
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Slumbering between our lips
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And the lies we thoughtlessly wove
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I knew your essence once
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At our time when the sunset and I touched you
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In the slanting room, just south of the past
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Between your belly and thighs:
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This was a temporary deceitful paradise.
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Lost as we created it
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And destroyed in tasting
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So much blood is lacking now
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I dreamt for your bit lips, haunted like waves
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In the ecstatic arch of evening:
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You and the night, you and the mountain
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You and tomorrow, you and the tomorrow:
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Stay away: stay away: stay away:
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What we want we cannot have
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And wanting all the more
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I slept on words and lines and texts
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Of useless want, staring at the time
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And finally lost you finally finally lost you finally
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As the moon swept down and wept.
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VII
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Good morning: How are you?
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I have called to say
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I saw you dreaming of conquests
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Of large wars, bigger walls:
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But:
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I am pleased to say:
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Your houses are dead
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Your children are full of flame
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The horses are dead and the butterflies fall
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God is abroad
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The wind is in the air
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And from the depths
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I point at us all
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Good morning
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The clouds of smoke arise
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Arise arise full of eyes of eyes
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Your sons are suffocating their sisters
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And painting eyes on the walls
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With tongues dipped in blood
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Arise arise full of eyes of eyes
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And from the depths
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I call to us all
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Good morning
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I have seen the face that lies
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I have seen the lips that smile
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With false smiles arise arise
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Look look: I have read a book a book
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That has spelt out the future
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And from the depths
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I see a king arise arise
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With on his forehead many eyes eyes
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And he is on a horse a horse a horse
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With a train of smoke behind its hooves
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And I must say from my depths
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I have seen a story emerge from a cloud of wings
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Arise arise from eyes from eyes
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And a number is sss6een is sss6een is sss6een
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From the depths beauty
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And from the depths loss
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From the depths from the depths
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I have called and added and have seen you all
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Your children are dead and waiting for you
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VIII
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The sun has already just set
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You said
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And behind it the moondfaced disc
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Blue; pearl; white: opaline mouth
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Sack of hopes, of dreams, of fur
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Catching the moths that
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Trail dust in the dusk
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Caused you to open alone and sign
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Goodbye to us all in the white room
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In the eyewhite, skullwhite room
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In the bed,
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Amongst the dead:
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Santa Rita, ora pro nobis
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I looked at you
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And touched the earth
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Hid under concrete and cruelty
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Credo quia impossibile est
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That the dead rise, rise, rise
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And in the blink, in the twink
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Of your eye, Santa Rita,
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I saw you dart, dark as an eclipse
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Whilst the twilight made a rainbow
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All around your passing
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And I saw and was saved
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IX
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In dream:
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You are there
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As the tip of the tongue collapses towards the teeth
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And the waters of dream mass around
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You are there: You are there
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Suddenly and silently
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You are the force of the wave
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And birds, all birds, reel in the distance
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Their face at dawn
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Where profound and terrible armies surge
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And foreign towns collapse under the weight of prophesied terrors
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All the dead advance, great armies,
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Martyrs for the Blood, the Sign, the Wound
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And time
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The animals all sorted Fishes too
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I have eaten judge me at
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God's right hand
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And the cats that arise from the dirt and the filth
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And the starving and the scabby
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The tortured the tortured the tortured
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I see them at night before I drift
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During my sleep they gambol and play
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And chase Balls or Children or Giants
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They play cards and click their eyes
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They laugh, and take tea at six
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They laugh as they tumble
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And have TEETH the size of cloudbursts
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And grip us and take us down to the Deep
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And we sigh and expire and
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seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
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silenceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
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sssssssssmilliiiiiiiiiiiiinggggggggggggggg
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I cannot bear this all any more. Not enough silence. But in the desert I sometimes see ships and hear the black diamond express near the station before mine. Caesar: where are you going? He said to me, grinning:
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You will reach the Kingdom
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With a bow and a sweep
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You will reach the Kingdom
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I have caught and tortured Time
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And I ARISE
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We are surrounded for the last 2000 years by a VAST EMPIRE OF DEATH and EMPIRE OF BLOOD: this was all after the Crucifixion:
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i uflow tou yeou: plhrhw xaritow kai elhyeiaw.
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So try to remove whatever may dream or spill or seed or spread on your breath:
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Or your silence will seep into the something you wished to avoid
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It will be seen some fine day, all right, yes, all right:
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"I will make you mine,", just you and I, whilst our breaths pass between us and spiral off to mausoleums of desires and hopes.
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When my friends pass into the great goodbye before my eyes
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And I too move with them: without sound, just words
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Left floating through the streets, and the ears:
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And the souls of the people who were with me: I was in them
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And they were in me. And off they go, a pint in their hands,
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A glint in their eye, and I see tambourines drearily clapping out
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The pavine carnival march: "now you see'em, now you don't"
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I did not want the world to stop; and I have seen it rush past me
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As a ferocious fury, but such angelic fury, and I was taking the Temperature of a thousand changes of mind: I might take you now, but perhaps I shall wait till the postman comes for toast and - With notes of the obsequies at 12 -
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With your teeth on edge at the faint sound of the swans charging at the trees that you built swings on and killed under and dreamt under
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With your beloved in that first and last virginal Summer
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When you entered this world of blood and belief
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And coupled under the Tropical Sun
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And gave birth to children in your cries
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I am born to die.
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I am born to die.
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I am born to die.
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"Jesus snorted; he was moved to his guts;" and the dust was everywhere, and Pilate arose in his fury. You have a boat waiting, friend, and it is time to board: all aboard, all aboard. "We don't save the living here." (The cyclamen opens at evening, and the world was gentle tonight; summery, hints of rose and rouge in the sky in the north over the dome of the glassgreenhouse.) Pilate arose. And washed his hands. I washed my hands; I cleared dust of them; I can see specks of blood laughing upon them. Pilate washes his hands. He arose and washed his hands. And the sword fell.
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Meanwhile, in the house with nothing at home: in the cafe with plates of liver and kidneys and offal; in the slaughterhouse near the schoolyard; in the damaged rooms of the schoold ma'am at rest; in the fallen arches of the brilliant silence, coloured at dawn, and twilit by the twittering of birds; in the moon shining down on the shrew on my step; at the freshly cut grass; at the sound of the bell making toast or tea or time buzz by with loud whoops of shouting "I am here I am there; catch me if you can, catch me if you dare". At all th4ese moments, and all these daydreams, and all our breaths which dream idly into deaths, deaths: at all these deaths, I remember you beautiful with love and fear with swooping hair biting the words our of your mind, and delivering them to me hating to pass the time, which swept by, as proud as a ghost, whilst we tossed coins to see who would disappear first.
current 93 Hypnagogue
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