“And so it was i entered the broken world…”

I am not here.

Green isn’t a color its a world.  The air glitters with a perfume comprised of both magic and decay.  I greedily inhale and try to identify what it is about this uncanny fragrance that is so familiar.  Beauty without tragedy is unnerving in its falsity.  This is not false.  Walking through the saturated streets, I am aware of the rain’s singular purpose – to drown me.  ”You bring the rain,” he said.  Why?  What is it rinsing away? 

There is nothing more real than 2am.  More precisely, 2am in worn heels and smeared makeup with all the wind and the rain whispering gently, “you know nothing.”  And I am enveloped by this rain and this heavy air which is thick with sex and tragedy.  I walk with my beauty broken down and with my small, chipped-polish, school-girl hands I offer my vulnerability to this city like a sadistic lover.  ”Babydoll,” I hear, “Butterfly,” “Girl of fire and dead roses.”  And i believe in the secrets and the bewitching beauty of all that is broken.  Please don’t ask me to tell you who I am.  Please don’t ask me to prove myself.  Now it is just me and the rain and my heart still broken.

Dream Song 29

-John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart

so heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

Henry could not make good.

Starts again always in Henry’s ears

the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind

like a grave Sienese face a thousand years

would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,

with open eyes. he attends, blind.

All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;

thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,

end anyone and hacks her body up

and hide the pieces, where they may be found.

He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.

Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.

Nobody is ever missing. 

  

    

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W.H. Auden

Because we too will die…

the world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

-Levertov

Sleepers, awaken to life!  Indulge the senses.  Seek pleasure and pain.  Do not wait to pluck the fruit…

photo by Halston Bruce

When The Glass Of My Body Broke

Oh mother of sex,
lady of the staggering cuddle,
where do these hands come from?
A man, a Moby Dick of a man,
a swimmer going up and down in his brain,
the gentleness of wine in his fingertips,
where do these hands come from?
I was born a glass baby and nobody picked me up
except to wash the dust off me.
He has picked me up and licked me alive.

Hands
growing like ivy over me,
hands growing out of me like hair,
yet turning into fire grass,
planting an iris in my mouth,
spinning and blue,
the nipples turning into wings,
the lips turning into days that would not give birth,
days that would not hold us in their house,
days that would not wrap us in their secret lap,
and yet hands, hands growing out of pictures,
hands crawling out of walls,
hands that excite oblivion,
like a wind,
a strange wind
from somewhere tropic
making a storm between my blind legs,
letting me lift the mask of the child from my face,
while all the toy villages fall
and I sink softly into
the heartland.

-Anne Sexton

Love and pain; tenderness and violence – the neccessities of a life of texture.   I want my glass to shatter.  The shards cut but shimmer beautifully…the blood from my wounds is proof that I am alive.  How wonderful is this mingling of blood in the plush, blue night…