a word in your ear (epithalamion for weekdays)
words like electric lightbulbs
shift aside the curtains, say ...no not that one but the thigh of the lips, not where hands flock, there to flutter, softly soft upon shadow deemed skin. A mere silent gesture is more than this. Slighter than a sole bacterium yet somehow firmer, fuller than the flesh; every touch of time or collapse of space into sense is present and yet more. Still though, in speaking of this substantial warmth imagined such coldness raises that of warmth abandoned all things seem cold. Parish of the flesh oblige, prayers shall not invoke this body, the pass of palms do not make the curtains meet (why them? is the sun so that a dusty window may let in, or allow out, meekest light?).
1 is the palpable figure of determination, the numerical patriarch; it condemns the dust of fraction to a neccessarily fractured relationship with zero.
deathproud - his lips vacuum packed to his finely pared front-teeth, the skin wrapping round the incisors, like plastic round a freezedried product. His nose stood proud and erect, the skin of his nostrils collapsed in toward the cartilege.
homoeroticism, pace your breathing "they pass the saxophone round, each take a turn on it, cheeks puffed out, their skin turning red. all red. the white guys - their skin turned red. the black guys - blood through the black in their cheeks, under the tight curls of dark stubble - red. their sweaty fingers on the keys, their lungs in the music. When it came round to me i took it, handled it, felt the metal damp and cold in my hands. The guys were laughing and clapping and smoking. I put it to my lips as if it were a gun, it tasted of gun - all the leaded taste in tobacco, the currency of a thousand coughs in this agora, in their saliva, all of them on the flute, i could taste them all, so bittersweet - their blood on my tongue as music"
a river of one rainfall that washes quickly leaving smoothest, shallowest channels upon the face of the earth:
a man in green anorak stands ankledeep in mud, his arm outstretched and holding a stick to measure depth, flow, the fixture of the sediment. The rain moves cleanly down his anorak and over his outsretched arm, only his hands (reaching beyond the measure of the material) become wet, that is - fingers, palms, wrists - the delicate extremities; more fragile than arms yet more capable of work. at various points down the river he will stand - arm outstretched, the mud up over his ankles - to measure. he says he feels the pressure of the stick upon his fingers for the flow. for the rest a watermark, or stain, shall suffice (just hold it to the light, mark it off with a pencil). At home, in the dark, he cleans himself. He measures with his hands his skin, the features of his face, the fixture of his beating heart beyond his steady set of ribs. In the dark he comes to himself; the immeasurable shade turns him inwards to feel his pulse tapping at his bones for the millionth time, deftly reminding him that not life washes into the night, which is not of face, or earth, the river or light.
the paper catches fire, catches flame - the irresistable lover i shall consume.
the dark girl moves through the pale crowd - in a bedsit in bethnal green a throat shudders with ecstasy.
Esteban is a drum of taut skin. The loudest in a group he sounds but only by others. When alone the skin across his chest tightens, and he is silent. One day (his crown of hair fixed firmly) as he is pattering the roof of his mouth with his tongue something across him will break. He awaits this noise at once with silent trepidation, twice with great tattoo.
shift aside the curtains, say ...no not that one but the thigh of the lips, not where hands flock, there to flutter, softly soft upon shadow deemed skin. A mere silent gesture is more than this. Slighter than a sole bacterium yet somehow firmer, fuller than the flesh; every touch of time or collapse of space into sense is present and yet more. Still though, in speaking of this substantial warmth imagined such coldness raises that of warmth abandoned all things seem cold. Parish of the flesh oblige, prayers shall not invoke this body, the pass of palms do not make the curtains meet (why them? is the sun so that a dusty window may let in, or allow out, meekest light?).
1 is the palpable figure of determination, the numerical patriarch; it condemns the dust of fraction to a neccessarily fractured relationship with zero.
deathproud - his lips vacuum packed to his finely pared front-teeth, the skin wrapping round the incisors, like plastic round a freezedried product. His nose stood proud and erect, the skin of his nostrils collapsed in toward the cartilege.
homoeroticism, pace your breathing "they pass the saxophone round, each take a turn on it, cheeks puffed out, their skin turning red. all red. the white guys - their skin turned red. the black guys - blood through the black in their cheeks, under the tight curls of dark stubble - red. their sweaty fingers on the keys, their lungs in the music. When it came round to me i took it, handled it, felt the metal damp and cold in my hands. The guys were laughing and clapping and smoking. I put it to my lips as if it were a gun, it tasted of gun - all the leaded taste in tobacco, the currency of a thousand coughs in this agora, in their saliva, all of them on the flute, i could taste them all, so bittersweet - their blood on my tongue as music"
a river of one rainfall that washes quickly leaving smoothest, shallowest channels upon the face of the earth:
a man in green anorak stands ankledeep in mud, his arm outstretched and holding a stick to measure depth, flow, the fixture of the sediment. The rain moves cleanly down his anorak and over his outsretched arm, only his hands (reaching beyond the measure of the material) become wet, that is - fingers, palms, wrists - the delicate extremities; more fragile than arms yet more capable of work. at various points down the river he will stand - arm outstretched, the mud up over his ankles - to measure. he says he feels the pressure of the stick upon his fingers for the flow. for the rest a watermark, or stain, shall suffice (just hold it to the light, mark it off with a pencil). At home, in the dark, he cleans himself. He measures with his hands his skin, the features of his face, the fixture of his beating heart beyond his steady set of ribs. In the dark he comes to himself; the immeasurable shade turns him inwards to feel his pulse tapping at his bones for the millionth time, deftly reminding him that not life washes into the night, which is not of face, or earth, the river or light.
the paper catches fire, catches flame - the irresistable lover i shall consume.
the dark girl moves through the pale crowd - in a bedsit in bethnal green a throat shudders with ecstasy.
Esteban is a drum of taut skin. The loudest in a group he sounds but only by others. When alone the skin across his chest tightens, and he is silent. One day (his crown of hair fixed firmly) as he is pattering the roof of his mouth with his tongue something across him will break. He awaits this noise at once with silent trepidation, twice with great tattoo.