HUMAN NEED

by Séamas Carraher

i see you see me
in a trick of the light
between
Karl’s chapter
“The Fetishism of Commodities” (1867)

and the short dressed girl
all in black on Merrion Road.
In all these illusions
in time unfolding
the most beautiful of all is desire.
The most basic
my heart bursting between
its lips your slow caress
and between the two
the sunlight igniting your dancing eyes
with the theory of endless revolution.
Now is the time, love, for us to be born!
But here is the proof.
Marx’s first thesis
on Feuerbach:
“Since, of course, idealism doesn’t know
real sensuous activity as such”
  1:     I met you mediated by
          the price of a pizza,
          you call me master
          and yet in my soul,
          in the seat of this sensuousness
          I am only a servant
          to a love that’s still-(un)-born.
  2:     Only in this ghostlike place
          between your eyes and my own
          have we met and this “active side”
          could be dangerous:
          you – the shadow of this silent assassin
          that killed a small child’s soul
          and this I! The one who killed love
          for a romantic theory like war
          or revolution.
  And 3:    
          in revolutionising practice
          i cannot answer
          between this desire of my body
          that lights its soft wings
          with the journey
          i must cross
          or the unspoken night
          of a dead man
          on a butcher’s slab,
and all between
(both flesh and spirit)
my soul, love!
And the earth so far away

and so we sleep
and in our dreams?
One more slogan:
this language not yet born
not yet-no longer human!

i need you.