On Malice
Page 3
loaded, loaded and heaving my new bliss
into a child.
My spruced-up finery a gloss on sensation, again,
the voluptuous all,
the holiday beds seem to wear coats, the candy
from the machine, the machine
giving the red and yellow wavelengths a pass.
Tall broad purple eyes,
round gold cake and the ‘they’ buzzing into
the data emitted by sunflowers.
A run on poppies in the hot wilderness, eviction,
lists, and the pink
seed of order all ranged with funereal lilies
in the sugared heat. A faint
border gravelled into thickness. A roadside can.
Grown in a box,
the painter of confections walks past creams in the sky
right into a clot.
They think they’ve seen him vanish – look how the now
of thinking sparkles.
No description of matter, no description matters
as data. They
might think least of returning, again and again,
to the All,
the plots and the observed plots flowering out
of the Since.
Borrowed first from the garden of suburbs, delight
seems
stolen, one innocent scion slipped from the bed again
into the burnished hood, manners darling’d
out of another child on into memory,
after the eye has derived from our years some perfume
for after.
I felt within pleasure the first sigh, the indigo
breathe on the heart,
the first ‘if’ within pleasure flowering into ‘I have,
I have,’ a kitchen
of reason seeing row upon row of implants
and discoloured cabbage.
When I think those used ones are coming I’m up
immediately,
evening out the day’s water so carefully the task
saws through the hanging pain and is done when I droop.
Or it droops.
The child again, down under their Never, leaves
at morning
but pulls with it a thing, a kit in which his unassembled
life elbows the twinge in the flutter of a watched
life. He
palpates with a string my own used-up rose. Feel it?
It rose
in the tower, towered over us as the cloud, hoping,
among our little cargo
of parts, it might own its made-up fear and ascend
higher
still, a distillate of appearances like some it-consciousness.
So it does.
Young creature in its play-element – mating with the young,
with the elements.
An enlarged recollection of being born early, with one
etiolated twin
subjected to treatments that amused them, to the extent
they now hunt
with toys. Their indicators of wellness papered over
to produce
more shops, endogenous shops at the insistence
of the virtual polis. More of it
imitates the genius of imitation daily. ‘And’ agrees only
with ‘and,’ and only in passing.
We can claim indifference but that only makes us into
a bargain.
Remembrance sometimes smells longer
than a chain of visible servers.
To be in nature, they reason, is to
catch rare, intermittent sight of objects
in succession. Before us there were hard drives
out in the open between any given eye
and a thousand imprecise recurrences, time
like a hood stamps its impress
on the vigilant brain. The other so active, so
often playing with the example of an ear, but
noise in the court breaks that sound.
Silent mind, for this I sink into durability.
More reason, then, to present certain
sounds as mere taste. Because they have images
where frequencies are worn down to the original,
any two interposed nothings
seem parts of distance. Time naturally
touches each call in full. Forms call to a new
force behind barbed distraction. Competition
without severity. During snow, North Americans
hang out in my mouth. I have a winter interval.
Others met with no years. All time
senses itself by its remains, almost like
indiscriminate colour, mixed berries
among many others. Distinguish ‘should’
from its carriers, evidence in the brick kiln
from peculiar identities. Neither identity
is more unpleasant. More brick dust
on the commons. More contrast with others
keeps flesh colour distinct. Say ‘not
perfect human’ more, more in that voice
hearing complexity pictured
in a well-known something – voice? It is
indeed meeting a face, and striking it.
Because more may be so familiar
the other takes on that voice:
that we speak by means of certain
inaccurate ideas, by well-made
visible feelings, those mean feelings
belong to accidents in other organs.
Sounds, separated and kept,
owe their effect to good
principles. Would they were constant
in their disrespect and indifference. May we become
noises. No more after a time. Situate
pity for the blind far to the left
of snuff – excepting that stunned
villain deafened by his own spear.
It suggests its own passage over a plain, the passage
of nations
into another’s occupied daytime, lovers
of the one cause
face only night, they face night and can distinguish
each sound
as a voice. Others, though I now know this voice,
know how it is
broken into hearing, so silence crumples over
a distant herd.
• • • • •
My essential charm airs out the late light banging
down off the moon,
I’ve heard a trembling in their mountain-goat accents.
Leave
peace mingled in their whispers and hopping foot
to foot, a terse
breathing lifted from the soft storm of pulsations,
wings
of a ceased Heaven, a fancy nowhere turning
what we see of the charmed herd into an it.
Undersea piping, pastoral cables, a reedy
‘why’ heard
in the deep packet din. Picture our ears evened
out over pictures
of the streaming long margin, the willowy trolling
along the skirts,
the edges, the low valleys buried on a lower coast.
Those shelters
formed chapels where aged forms of the implants
monked out
in built cells, little churchy cells that perished
or grew plain,
quivering and hidden from sight under alders. When all
elms
startled, and peeled from the continent as one organ,
I was
nearby, an accompanying ear. The village rose
then rusted,
enriching its children, exhaling a deed to the land.
Made rich
by the dew distilled into fumes as per the thousand
gathered silences. In its soft years it spoke
like the calm caught in the heart of death. The beauty
came
later, mounted on a sound that filled the skies,
the valley
chanting, ‘it swells, it swells,’ the still mist
and an endless
trance of noise drowning the ear in a warped
golden tumult.
• • • • •
Their interests are but curiosities now
compared to the
external visions in the mirror of distinctions.
The Other
shall descend into a fearful consciousness, trying
and trying
to form sense from a shrinking common. Rhapsodizing
the plain little nothing, observing again how reason
left out of vision necessitates more than untruth,
a gross durability vivified by the ideal. More
proceeds, more given in support of the illustrious
number. One position says,
Standing here not in advance
of doubt, thinking a man favours sight
that he forget objects, the visible many object
before he tastes a mature will.
Either his smell is moderated by
the hood, or time in any
distant region, coursing through various
severed happenings, has eaten two different
things. These never before or since;
pleasant but scarce, pleasant because scarce.
We altered much to have reason to
taste the impulse of the singular, though
repeating such certainty in servers
is decidedly a taste seen in things. Things
have a precision, a more visual memory
of once having been here only once.
In Holland they can smell
the peculiar city of Now. These odours
place ideas of I in the vivid remainder.
With interest, they repeat the forms of sensation:
a mere twenty took the isle of Jamaica.
Perhaps now the fruit of certainty
is added to periodic ideas
of visual retention, losses proven
in time’s distant objective, various
delicate families during years
sensation used hands to know itself,
conveying the effects of boys trying
to call out for light. I cannot be several
left in a weak man’s shade.
Better they survey what they can;
war an actuality they refer to as proof.
To retain certainty, after
the smell of scarcity and persuasion,
feels less like distinction than obscurity –
show the correct model for twenty.
Model each time as a different
feature of truth. They considered
you an exception they could correct, not
mere chance, a correction in the architecture
any ordinary person felt as cause, as
the structural interests view an ordinary person.
Here we remember not to feel reason
correcting our neighbours from overhead.
Many persons overheard trees ask
that the indicator itself become church.
That many cannot be found, and this case
of what passes for the cause, the church,
be every individual’s past in the gliding stream.
Various interests engrossed in some other ‘is.’
How does it enter the known?
Vague reception in a friend’s apartment?
Different visibilities, possible finds, but on what
wavelengths come the telling percepts?
Added furniture of the ornamental, a removal
or cut our friend meant to part with
as appearance makes alterations
in whatever we have no time for.
We weren’t certain how sight posited its own
copy. If not copies, the especially exact
human complexes, such that the figure
we’re convinced will not countenance voice
excels inside a painted can.
More likenesses from memory, more
conspicuous visual inaccuracies. It is
the art of taking, the practised effort
of the strict object, counting likenesses of the human
among present cases where flattery
finds the best void. We still produce life,
though likenesses join in the attempt.
Persons who find it all very ordinary,
drawing on some knowledge, can afford
to sketch a curtain of tolerability over
the pattern. Either the pattern is his gown
or irregular prisons in the ether
have the character of wine. ‘Yesterday’
now an object in the desert compounds.
I don’t observe beyond a day in May,
cannot habituate to the particular mind,
have no certainty in duration, seconds.
Cannot ably place two simple
contact patterns within a consciousness.
That a subject can be observed, under its own
volition saying, ‘I
am with persons unfamiliar with difference. I
differ more
from things than from those places that effect
distance.’ At one remove from the latter, we have
to back
them, their interests biting into former gains,
being back
in a home stripped of nature and thus full
of the art of the ill.
Very seldom are reports raised, or any
imaginings of present
disappointments, great estimates by individuals
high
on malice, constantly juiced on malice. We are
what
ignorance makes of a defective reality, out
beyond
actual monsters and all their quaint little bugs.
It bears
out that hearsay is a thing, too, like matter,
that hearing
people as irritable conjecture, or abstractions, is
a particular quality of action to some. Acts
against ourselves
are not where we dislike the concrete. Existence
as arbitrary names, arbitrary nicks in the nominal,
innumerable
sides to the qualified good, other indifferences
of the damned.
Our features fill up the portrait. We caricatures
who know enough to hate scarcity, anyone
can, and has previously.
To whom should the observed up and complain?
An acute
wish to spite the moment, to let it see him,
his particular
enmity, to sit down disarmed and go some way
toward disarming
circumstance, if he can view it, quartered
in its unforeseen
neutrality, like any other supposed adversary. Respect
for like men
might turn as the ugly eye turns, not balked at
but put out.
He is an abstracted object, not in the way
of expected
disagreements; he and his distance are an implacable
disgust,
hatred in a long room where the same person is
a face with no nose and a general to man. He found
you alone with your diversions, your sympathies, alone
he seems contemptuous, he has nothing, and says
stupidity
conceived him over a laugh. You heard something laughing
as he laughed.
Unranked subjects talked and talked, knowing
you’d torn
into the party hoping to find some virulent
strain, find a writer
tamed by some animal’s cough. The sort who bites himself.
That
’s him, in shorts, making nothing of opposites, even in
company he is balanced in a vice. Another expert
may be one
lime cordial away from dull hatred but you try
him for that also,
for that and other offences you merely wished
were somewhere given.
Before learning to earn, you acquainted yourself
with the nearest
fool. It is as well he’s forgiven your other hand,
as your other hand
is profligate with secrets milled from the public, characters
shaken out of the given heart and spoken to kindly,
handed
parts of their mothers and fathers as sport, as an aged
politics
hauling its personable carbuncle of fellowship. You are
a person
who has been told. You are sallow from all the ocular
proof of a face
on the ghost. Ghost mending this blue in the blunt
matter.
Your dignity held up against ridicule is one edge
of the edited lie. He has invented from scotch tape
and
fondness, the anonymous just. Where you were not
just, so am I
not the author of a moment. The moment can be known
critically,
or learned, even as it comes out of an unsatisfied well.
Is it only the mask man dreads, and do we only
hate disguise
if a human in shorts dredges the something for notions
concerning himself?
Distance entertains us only partially, and people
entertain
compounded simplicities then work out guesses
in answer to nothing derived from reality. We drive
those ideas
into experience, mixing up the only true
general with models
abstracted from naked ones and zeros. The perfect