Emporium
Page 4
high-pitched shrieks.
JOAN MIRÓ
MAN AND WOMAN IN FRONT OF A PILE OF EXCREMENT
A turd like a curious
cobra or pagan idol, inwardly
trembling, knows this man and woman
of old. It is watching and waiting to see
if they are going to worship it or
destroy it. It would like to assume an air of
insouciance. We should worship it,
she says. Worship a turd?
Preposterous! says he, waving a tiny
pick-axe hand, his red snake fixing
its one eye on her fingers, aching to be
stroked and choked but
she is too busy holding up the sky.
IT TAKES A MAN
It takes a man in all he might be
heavy twisted rope of consequence
of no consequence
weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Not a man but a twister.
Outside the mob demanding: ‘Who comes?
Who is it now dares speak for us,
for our lives?’
The virtues work
through us. They do not
indwell. They do not
inhere. They are not
in here. There are no
virtuous people
only good acts,
always virtue and its opposite –
the virtues working through us.
It takes a man to unmake
his masculinity, to unmake
the man they made him.
We are come to this. Coming
here in all innocence, willing to hear,
willing to be made and unmade
and taught the virtue of checking
our facts, consistency, avoidance of error,
making a life appear reliable,
a narrative, a story we tell others:
My name is … I live at … I am …
I have … I want to … with you
that they may understand who it is
speaks to them today,
and who they are every day of their lives
until there are no more days.
Someone will come after me and say:
‘This poem was said once, as I am saying it
now,
as others will say of me:
“He breathed – he spoke – he stood
in the garden at midnight and wondered
at the wonder of a mortal brain
coming to consciousness, the cruelty of a mortal brain
coming to consciousness,
the birth and death
of individual consciousness.”’
Living appeals, as you appeal
to me, as I appeal to the gods – those crazy imaginary gods –
as I appeal to the soldiers
beating on my door
The great Emathian conqueror did spare
The house of Pindarus …
But in wartime
Husbands dragged from wives
Sons from mothers.
At Rodez once
the Nazis in retreat
shot thirty maquisards,
smashed in their skulls with stones
to finish it. At Rodez in August 1944
the day before the town was liberated.
At Rodez, the wind out of Rodez,
whipping the hill, whipping the old asylum
carrying the cries of the mad
to the townsfolk, the benighted townsfolk,
the cries of Antonin Artaud,
still awaiting liberation
at the psychiatric hospital
with its garden and little chapel,
the asylum where he grew his hair
and was visited nightly there
by his daughters of the heart.
EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT ANTONIN ARTAUD
Everywhere I go
People are talking about Antonin Artaud.
Turn on the radio
Radio 2
And it’s Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu.
Everywhere I go
People are talking about Antonin Artaud.
Turn on the theatre of cruelty
(I mean the TV)
And the housemates are in the garden discussing Van Gogh,
the man suicided by society.
And there’s nothing the man in the street doesn’t know
About Artaud le Momô
Because everywhere I go
People are talking about
People are delirious about Antonin Artaud.
THE WASP AND THE ORCHID
… and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid …
A THOUSAND PLATEAUS
Hiding its one
terrible testicle
underground it rises
Venus-like, immodest
bloom, complete with eyes,
antennae and wings,
its prominent labellum
(‘covered in long dense,
lustrous reddish hairs’)
‘similar in colour and structure
to the female wasp’s
abdomen’. It even
smells the same: ‘a floral
scent that imitates
the sex pheromone’.
Suckered by this
counterfeit come-on, it
attempts copulation
(properly ‘pseudo-
copulation’) – mounting
the labellum ‘with
vigorous waving of
wings and abdominal
probing’, ‘the genital
claspers at the tip of
the abdomen partially
open’. The wasp becomes
a part of the orchid’s
reproductive apparatus.
A becoming-wasp of the orchid.
A becoming-orchid of the wasp.
. . .
Having plucked
its rose it rests, horns of pollinia
on its head, before flying
on to the next false female.
ARMAGEDDON
The boy in the white nightgown
has escaped again. These woods
are damp. I am invisible.
Sincerely I believe in
the Society of Blood,
the Sick People and
the Mountain. I am still
listening to the sea,
still repeating myself. Something
has happened to my right hand.
It won’t be polite to
the authorities, it won’t
make a fist in the air.
Women always make
an impression. You
were tender beyond
compare. The memory
of the two of us does not
console. Your face, a
glowing coal.
I am weary of being
examined. I prophesy:
a wilderness is essential
to humankind, an indifferent
wildness, full of varied
shapes and colours, loves and
sympathies, and incapable
of guilt. Perhaps a violent
storm overnight could transform
this mute material,
shape it, as I never could.
Without the strictures of
a plot the results are
as we find them:
the crash of a statue
in the dark. I tried to
remember where I was going
and what it was you wanted
me to do. You always told me
I would die alone,
My Night Apple,
my little former friend.
BLACK JELLY BABY
‘… and there is no reason to demand
that immigrants should renounce
their nationalitarian belonging
or the cultural traits that cling
to the
ir very being,’
says Guattari in The Three Ecologies,
but don’t try explaining this
to your friends down
the pub late one
evening after
work over
a few pints or
first the one will
denounce you:
RACIST!
Then the other
(closer to your heart):
RACIST!
white faces of anger and indignation.
Racist, they’ll call you
racist and you’ll try to
explain but they’ll
call you racist
and storm out
into the night, and you’ll sit
there many eyes upon
you and smoke another
cigarette with trembling
hand, then walk
home alone to your crappy
flat and wonder
what all that was about.
And the next day your
friends will send you
an email calling you
Enoch Powell
but lunchtime will bring
a bag of jelly babies by way of
a peace offering
and you’ll take
one and one of them
will say: ‘It’s a black
one! It’s a black one!’
and you’re not sure if
you should eat a black
baby but you
eat it and they are
happy and you
chew the jelly baby
chew it all
up
and swallow it.
KISSING
On our last day
when I kissed you so
passionately, you had every right
to bite off my tongue and spit it out.
Instead you cried. I cried two
days later, listening to a Jew
on the radio describe
how he survived Auschwitz
by the skin of his teeth.
The skin.
The teeth.
DUST
For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
GENESIS 3:19
Tout cela se résume finalement, pour reprendre Duchamp, à un «élevage de poussière».
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Dust over
everything. Nothing
but incomplete
exposures and
obscured views.
The ambiguity
of moving parts
never seen
in toto
and never explained.
Motionless pennants
and the heart
of a machine
beating, crystalline,
housed in an underwater
cavern, visited by
defeated characters
after dark
half-dressed and
curious, half-alive,
who die
if awoken,
before they can
touch
the beating heart that isn’t a heart
but a natural formation in the rock
and there is no machine.
LOON
A STUDY IN HYGIENE
I
Lo!
Loon is
Loon was
alone and never alone
being in the world.
II
No!
Loon has
no past
no future
being in the present.
III
Loon forgets
everything. Also:
Loon forgets
everything.
(Memory is
unhygienic.)
IV
Loon has no
interior.
(This poem, too, is all
exterior.)
V
Loon was
Loon is
at the mercy of
encounters
events
sympathies
antipathies.
He flees
the sad
the anxious
neurotic
paranoid.
Sadness is
contagious.
A slave logic.
VI
Loon has experienced more than once a revelation, though seldom any sense of levitation, being bound by the laws of gravitation, occasioned by his inclination to inebriation, to which must also be attributed his tendency to profanation and the occasional eructation, through the incautious potation of liquids created by an ancient process of fermentation and whose stimulation is generally held to be the ruination of many a fine soul whose life ends in dissipation. But far from making this a cause for lamentation, as would many who find Loon a source of extreme irritation and look upon his irregular ambulation as a cause for disapprobation or even condemnation or at the very least grounds for the confiscation, in accordance with the relevant legislation, of what he fondly and without hesitation calls his medication and only consolation, resulting in a confrontation with those who would subject him to interrogation, using insult and intimidation, with a view to his immediate transportation or deportation, or who would at the very least, adopting a sombre and serious intonation, call for his reformation, regarding him as a blight upon the nation, we offer no explanation, other than to point out the obvious correlation between Loon’s desolation and his exaltation.
VII
Illness narrows Loon’s
possibilities.
(Skip this part
if it tires you.)
VIII
Loon is
USELESS,
rejecting the capitalist values of production and exchange.
IX
In death did Loon transcend
in some inscrutable way
the matter of which he was composed?
X
He did not.
SILENT SPECTRES
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour … It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.
MAXIM GORKY ON FIRST SEEING A MOVING PICTURE
Sound is superfluous in
death’s realm, in
faded prints.
Narrative lost, morbid
radiance,
shimmering
liquid tremor. They shudder
and blur, shift and
bulge as in
a funhouse mirror. Scuffed
snapshots of
reality passing,
most beautiful when
their strength is least
assured.
These shadows posturing
resemble dimly,
dimly recall
the duration of
bodies,
the ancient forms
empirical, action
reaction.
Is it still life
at 18 frames a second?
Is life only a question
of speed?
THE RAINY DAY MURDERS
Bring the girl into the basement,
The sophomore, and cast her down
On the bloodstained and mouldy mattress.
Let the Doberman Pinschers above bark
As you tie her to the wall, and let the wind
Through the broken window
Move the hooks descending,
Then everything goes into reverse and a happy ending.
Listen to her breathing,
Missing the people she trusts, the camper van
On the beach where she spent her last night,
The rain erasing all sign of a struggle.
If she has stopped hoping it is because
Your mouth is at her ear, so close
There can be no more pretending,
Then everything goes into rever
se and a happy ending.
AN ACCIDENT IN SOHO
Your third marriage collapsed like an old barn.
The crash of it silenced the saloon-bar chatter
like the cry of a newborn.
You never expected to stumble and shatter
like a fumbled glass, or drown
among strangers in a bar.
On sunny days, the curtains drawn,
Pernod on tap but no beer,
the décor emerald green and gold,
your early promise unfulfilled,
you hid away from the world,
certain you had failed.
Your looks dropped away with the years
and the people you knew.
The son you stopped talking to cried real tears
at your funeral, but not for you.
LOST
lost in living
making love
and a little money
the heart
grieving
lost
attention
inattention