O Lord of the Unswept Road

by Séamas Carraher

O Lord of the unswept road
O unwashed Lord of the broken brick
and the graffiti wall
where something needs to be said
but never is,
i have little care left
living in a leaking house
where the warmth and the heart and
the soul
have been bled
drop by drop
little by little
on rent day
and bin-tax day and
in the long nights when the faces
around me sleep
and what could be beautiful is troubled.
O Lord of the heart that is numb
and the angry faces,
O Lord of the life that is half finished
yet unlived,
O Lord of love where only fear
reigns and
the only hope there is
sits warming its hands round the television
and the children litter the streets
like weeds
unwashed and unloved.
O Lord of the silence
when this strong man sits and talks
and watches it all leave
in sickness and pain
and the darkness without grief
pins your eyelids open
for the hurt and the fear.
O Lord of all the unwashed streets
in these places without name,
Lord of ghetto and police siren,
Lord of the ineffective
where words have their wings broken
and even the streetsigns snarl.
O Lord of the hurt when
everyone now sleeps
in the womb of what never is:
this song like a prayer
for what will rise
in the Easter-time
of unloved lives…

This cry of the wretched.

ME SELF SO FALLS THE SOVIET UNION

by Séamas Carraher

There's a knife
sharpens on me shadows
cold as an orphan's photograph,
sharpens words that know no mouth
(cruel as a parent in the ignorant
dark, all dirty with dictators!)
- like killing, and, my love.
And i eat and eat with
no swallowing
me head in bits for boxes,
O this world of loss, all lovely in soviets,
them square things and hard things
(i called them love in this dirty dark
and shout and shout
the likes of me!)
That sharpens on a shadow
calls that waster names
who eats in bites that cannibal his heart,
my world of loss, for this world all lies
and love on strings, both guillotine and hangman.
My calling but no answer
(and the day breeds their dark
all its beginning and end of time,
my waving, and loving, so stabbed!)
And sisters my sun in sponges
and mother and father who wanted me dead,
this brother in my arming
whose night like a knife
saying words like
"no" and "not" and "don't".
Who it's down here?  But not alone
(that other kid boxed into bits!
And the one done thundered!
And the one too hanging,
O all my sickness, weak without weeping!).
That shadow must be sharp as a spike
with crust hidden in front of suns,
(crazy for their mothering, them
murderers and thieves
rolling in their headless ways
all east in our falling like
leaves over Russia).
O sun and saintness in this war, wording,
like mine and yours
with no one home.
O love, in littling, and kept our
secret,
who buried and were battered
in towns much like another,
and you and me, (alone in blows
and knowing its scream
roots like clay
in all our homeless.)
But nowhere and never.
My house and yours now falling down.
My house in our never, still erect in rottenness.
So i call the sharpening silence
(and root on root my unbending mind.)
And the silence calls me knife
though their eating must all grey,
though they call you darkness
who are sinking (in your rising)
and them drowning in you, my light.
O shadow, (as i wave farewell)
if i had a sister, a small pretty
Jewish girl
and she called me home, helloing
them words and this eager mouth,
(that lovely love who sits
and must sighing)
all flying, brother, and unfurling in certainly.
O all, my life (not yet!)
O all my working class and soviet, still,
O all our ever. And up.
The brightness!

Work 3

by Séamas Carraher

Mention now these
in their unredeemable stares
who swear with their sweat
worked long and harder
as cold as ice cut fog
into their chests
for these precious minutes
nailed like Hegel’s mask on
the cover of a book;
how we slaved and saved
each of these oddments.
You, who would give everything
but the meditation of ruin
leaving your ghost
to God
and your children to damp clay.
A book, a mothtorn cloth
of Engels facing a  vase of dead
flowers
rich in their assorted ruin
as if such trivia in the
unmentionable heart of our
insignificance
could wake history
a minute too soon,
believing in the quiet and
careless desperation
of dying men
(that it had all mattered):
a light pulled from its opaque
source
as also this, our antithesis
in these cheap and gaudy images
for us,
who are all men labouring
with their own despair.

Dole Day

by Séamas Carraher

Butchered and emptied of closeness
as we are,
the breath holds.
There is no need to abstract it
as claw and fur,
to move it, shuddering, into the
cold and damp of January.

As gutted and absent of closeness
as we are, enough is enough.
Shit! Even now
the day drizzles.

Here is a small place democratically,
already this diminished.
We are small:
administered, theoretically, surgically,
in proportion to our scarcity.
In this way the landlord calls.

We are small, common!
Existing like a sack
without brain or body
heroic entity without sustenance
neither more nor less, with a name,
a roof without walls,
hurrying like a registration
to a belief with no beginning.

This then in our most grudging existence
this is our pittance,
this hole is our love,
our mouths here is mined like a battle.
This is that dumbness torn skin from skin.
Her articulation, my heart,
is more like a puncture

2

This then like any holiday,
any mass to move in our bulk,
short of feet, short of breath.
Its brevity, burden, your pose,
your method, your analysis.
Articulated again!
You, maybe, like us, is destitute at breakfast.

Here is a hand the length of rage
nailed to my clockface.
Here we live as if history could cease.
Here, mute despair, its chest drowned in drink.
Suddenly your hands are gripped to his face
in both my loneliness.

Here must be the voyage where we live,
both man and wife,
equally clerical in our molested organs,
here we hesitate before all wealth. Such mystery!

3

Such squalor celebrates the grip of eyes.
Here love is cold and counts in calories
here is the kitchen, the abattoir of dreams
here is the present, overflowing,
a miracle of economy in our transition,
the unmentionable breakfast, like blood
on the floor.

4

Emptied to each other, as we are,
each day, the same day, twice.
The cat’s tyranny on the landing like
a neighbour,
your hands between fingers fall from my face.
This is the edge of the wind, you said it.
It was too late,
this edge of the wind – will not feed us!

5

Butchered and emptied of each other
as we are,
the wet of the pencil blunts your cold lips,
now as if rising in love, your
replica crosses the street.
“I could have been a factory worker,” shouting,
somewhere never far away, without justice:
the empty terror of it all.

6

Emptied almost of life, like an extraction,
it is that simple, comrade.
Such hunger, like our paralysis,
more like an offering to fall from her arms.
Here where i invoke you, (who tells me i’m free.)
It is that simple: to be scalded with love,
and descending in its path, like a tin can
in a breeze.

It is so simple. The streets ventilating with rage.
It is still simple,
as simple as the coins falling from the meter,
like voices in this room, opening out your head.

Holding the truth for a moment. To be emptied
like wind or dust,
all other commerce, consumptive, diseased.

7

Emptied to each other as we live. Here
even the floors consume us all,
we are swallowed, slavelike, epileptic,
in each convulsion of furniture,
our poverty’s blisters
now solid as your hand, his hand held
to yours,
burning.

8

And here you have dared call me human,
a second ago
in your blindness like an unmovable plea
curled like the chairs in an angle where the window was.

Now, finally, emptied of corners as our coupling is,
both military and terrorist,
of plastic packets and torn cartons
in all empty rooms where your love was
as if it was the concrete of nothing:
“you could have been a commissar” you call,
all my being, three foot high, my becoming
one minute ago, almost as useful as the armchair, these curtains

“eat this if you can.” Shouting
as you recede
pregnant with both our exile, our geography as
strategic as any occupation
in such desolate space,
as easy as these lies we tell
each other.

The Corpse’s Birthday

by Séamas Carraher

Savage fatherland,
brute in this peace, industrial in hypnosis,
both more and less our own impersonations:
still, with all them educated accents
up comes that voice!

To be dead at the beginning then,
time after time. To be so much corpse,
to know our place, knowing these limits,
their entrance and exit already worked
out

then there is no change. With all these
answers (and not a single question), with
all them suffocating silences, religious
and civilised,
with all them personalities, them celebrities,
all salvage and rubble,
even the freedom to lie – unattainable!

So prolific is our courage in whiskey,
our children in the future tense,
such is a desire, born on one breath
dead on the next
(O practical convulsion, that i don’t
swallow your tongue, tied as it is
to these old men in chairs!)

So solid is the site of our crimes,
our savage motherland,
so solid is our suppression, our situation,
our censorship, then another
explosion:
courage! (to have such a thought!)

This ordinary day, like any other
begins the same, these
weak legs kicking in air,
here is our Long March, unstoppable, suspended,
both motion and withdrawal, our departure and entry,
its ascent and deficiency, fortress and sentry,
all criminal and trespass our transition.
Here, we storm heaven, returning.

Tell me another story, schoolmaster,
while i beat my own head into timber.

Look what you left us, father, and proud,
(here in this hospital we call home,)
the small pieces of your life left unravelled,
your socks and prayerbooks, sealed up in
a drawer,
all utter death without dreaming,
now abandoned by its boss,
equal and immutable,
these dead things in chains still
awaiting permission.

Look what you left us?

And somewhere there are people no one owns.
There, we are rocked by winds, our speech
like a sea, both wind and water in speech
in our most murderous articulation
(another explosion! to have such a thought!
to taste it, touching its tongue to her lips).

And this homeland is full of such whispering,
this homeland more like an eviction,
here we are heroic, we are numb, it is this crowd,
this is each need and its surplus
in our mute actions
this voice with 2 heads
crying to be i.

Here is where your lips got burned, and here
is where your charity burned others,
but this is no more than a murmur, unspeakable,
to be battered by love in its kindness,
to be chained by its loss, by its lack.

Then there is still no change. Like a nail.
Struggling like a nail in hard wood.
Not even the savagery of faith left to lose,
my conscience in code like your own,
this is what it means: eat your heart out.

Like a nail in labour
i am like a nail in labour,
to imagine the impossible,
her wild working of limbs and brain.

Here is where we have come
to be here all the time!

This country is cruel.
Brutal in its stones
and loud in its empty promises,
both more and less our own blind lies,
our fierce collusion.

This is how we have come nowhere. Listen
to it. Listen carefully.

Here is a place in a language not all theirs,
here is an empty place, not anywhere.
this is a point of departure, like a nail,
here is where we leave from, and always
guttural, spontaneous, forced, silence.
(In this populace mass all mortal function,
like its inversion,
its torture and interrogation)
here is where we are free, tomorrow, carefully,
ungovernable, irrepressible, raging.
Here we are rocked by winds not ours, both wind
and water in speech, our speech like a sea.

Drown in it. Twice! And again, comrade!

César, 50 years after your delirium,
and now no more than 5,000 miles away
there is this movement to be made,
as if a nail could have brains.

Listen:
in the dead stillness of your corpse
there is more to this than meets the eye,
there is more to this than the uncertainty
of contradiction
there is more to this than all their dead noise,
(our rippling, murmuring, agitated,)
and there is more to this than my mother’s voice
(savage in its praying! to love our assassins!)

There is more to this world than its
solid nature, its impregnable politics,
there is more to the brutality than its law.
Here is each history in our hesitation,
this is where we are suspended, in this
womblike paroxysm where we all wait.

And there is more to this outside of this
and there is more to this out of it
as there is in it,
and there is more to this eye than
its mirror
and there is more to this “no more than this”.

This is where we hesitate
in our nail
in here
where we are sealed labouring in such cold savage speech
(so savage is this love, Mother, that i may capitulate before i destroy!)

And finally, lords,
there is more to this than eternal longing,
than the mystery of god,
than all these closed doors,
there is more to this than vowels
and consonants,
there is more to this than all them
microphones.

Finally, brothers, in our mutilation,
there is more to this than all our speechlessness,
there is more than this flood, we imagine.

There is much more.

On the death of Jesús María Valle JaramilloAssassinated, Medellin, Colombia, February 1998

by Séamas Carraher

Jesus, Signor María,
i'm sitting and the moon bursts
like an unhinged angel
through these cold holes
in the sunlight of your head.
Then they are shaped
into streets
and i'm walking on wings
between the dead and the undead
with little difference
seldom in-between.

How fragile this place called life!

With the moon in its mysterious flowers
washing your almost-human blood
from the debris of furniture
they've thrown into the street.

We are listening
to these
somehow-never-to-be-spoken words
whisper:
"it's not so bad to be this forever dead...
It seems somehow
we are all falling endlessly
across the galaxy
on the monsoon of a dream."

Jesus, Signor María,
I could almost believe you.

But all that's left
is the bursting of the moon
this beautiful moon,
and your hands, your lovely hands
hold its shining pieces
like a sad sad angel...

And then it is raining.
And we are dreaming.

We dream endlessly,
of life and death
and all our falling
in-between.

Song of My Collective Self

by Séamas Carraher

With my self who he knows not,
me! most mother of a storm,
(under stones and hard ground
and relative to the dead).
All this tearing and grinding
that claws in your softness
for these dictators and time,
all christens in my birthing
with airraids and allies; and
no rest in these exploding bones,
this city of the self
like a mask shapeless in carbombs.

My brain here beats its heart
into shreds.

i exclude in
my circumference
both beast and child
with no legs to multiply in crippling
our illegible history.
(This scholar sinking in speeches
and disowns with books this burning child!)
And all
the swallowing lights of a town
long ago
gone out, and out
(O all my cheapness in mealtimes and sex,)
that not in my nothing-birth, this i! and
all my collective selves
of air and dust and debris
and all our simple journeys
to the stomach,
my groaning workman and my love
all ghettoed between these empty faces.

O you're shy,
with touching time, with body
disembodied
and all this whispering spirit.

Then save me, too late, in my softness,
commissar-with-your-gun
who punctuates my freedom in noughts,
and who, now, i celebrate in collisions,
in grief, and shells and echo.
As if in both battlehour and conversation
we have not lost all greater part.

This coming in our waves,
like a people unfit into being.
Here are the dead still singing.
Our dead, like a scattering,
buried deep in their difference,
unrepentant!
Here is life in an endless loudness.
Here's a self that sings in its travelling
all blessing in our being, a miracle!
still bending in the rain.

But then this pitiful face.
Him pleading in our unravelling
that both our hunger erects in its barricades
his spirit bursting into storms
in all this cold fathering weather,
to call me a home and hands, and all,
now estimated, my poverty,
in this savage way
of war, and debt and dying.

It is better, love, in this downward time,
it is better,
and our hollowness of heart,
to own nothing.

Comrade, it is better,
that all the world,
this mighty with their machines,
(their grinding and tearing in
my simple selves)
be born another time in coming.

On this day in hours,
my self unlocks the sun,
her softness sprinkles in its showers of skin
and all these lights unwind
in their wandering dead.

We ache this much, forward!
our future convulses in reverse
and in this working weather
like a tree encircles my armless self,
that at the closing of that time, surprised,
this we and me, all stillness still,
at life, and O, (despite all)
our endless
surge
and
hallowing.

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.

The Eyes of a Child, their Eloquence, Width & Weaponry

by Séamas Carraher

Something startled that child. Breaking its run into a knot.
Not to name it, in its furious strategies.

Behold a street, warm as my own, so
emptied of its compulsion in
transport
its mastery in mechanics,
a street, cold as my own, emptied like a hollow barrel
in a hollow time, her wide-eyed recognition
like a war.

Something resurrected this child, like wind
breaking out in voices,
unnamed in my other cruelty
of mother and father,
much like the untarmacadamed choice of being
other.

So is our great coming in futures.
Its being is the shortest distance between two wars.
To be limbs must be the heresy of wages, to translate,
not to name it in its losses, like
a hunger in our civilian conflicts.

Mother, then love me in their cruel killing.
To be child in all rainfall and invisible bureaucracy,
to be lit like a sniper in her unprotected love
to be plastic-and-bulleted in our remains.

All abstraction and lie is chissled
with sweat and years work
from the unformed mass
that is ours here in our dirty silence,
all air to this blood, to be muted
and full.

Such is our machinelike production,
These contradictions of love.

Not to name it in our crippling, creator, clay.
Something startled that child
broke with furious families.
Behold it, straight in its zygote, worker, human.
See it, body. It surrounds your terror at its own creation.
Always a great synthesis in contradiction. Of past and future.
And of other lies.

Accept this birth, as easy as her
plough furrows corpses (past and future,
thought in her unthinking present).

Children of the world’s proletariat!
Sons and daughters of steel and poverty.
Infant of mortal statistics, malformed in theology,
your mouth like an equation or a crime.
Accept nothing!

All this toil has born produce, dry mother,
like a gambler in my absence
i could give you a vision.
It is like a tumour in your core fat with reason.
It is like a myth in our sickness, see it
spin with the grace of a tractor,
also the inevitable, like a cement mixer.

Accept nothing!
Yet your lacking in self.
Like this to the right
we censor ourselves,
like this, both right and left,
all time here is the hell of our choice.

i can’t name it in my guilt
that eats its dead
buried like a self possessed with memory.
Something startled that child. It breaks.
Its face emptied like the wind.

It is all words and less.  Like poverty.
A dead weed that grows in the gutter.
It is all words and emptied like faith.
In its hand it is like a light.
It is like a light shining.
It is shining like a light
striking her face

before the sky falls down.
Them weapons in peacetime.

It is still not named. Not finance, tax,
pension book, poorhouse.
This is the corpse’s history, wordless, like a grin,
like a great hunger in the mind. And
dead on its feet.

Accept nothing. First!

The charity of objects transfix you, child,
in your lessons on democracy, like the Fall,
(this hunger unforgiven)
in this corporation of your false tenure
(this hunger half forgotten)
i can’t name it:
bank clerk, labourer, streetsweeper, academic!

Something startled the child. Like the boredom of an
explosion. In our amnesia.
Startled by grace in your dying,
by grace in each enigma of growth, (husband in its
brilliant filth, strong muscle, tumour, potato blight),
who now, mother in your depression, wraps the street
in a frugal mystery,
mother with no mouth for death:

here is a supermarket carpark,
this is a wall of cracked plaster and
beside these slum walls of red brick,
unlike our prisons the sky still opens
(alternating history’s nightmare with dreams).

i tell you now, in
my human and political rigour,
in my sacklike children, and broken heads,
all these ghettoes are wars,
all wrapped now, in mercy, unsayable,
to be the choice of discovery, to vomit this question
in the dark. Like a dinner.

It is hidden to be a nothing in these revelations.
Then this thing startling (much better than a flag),
O, this human child, in its furious winds
(also broken at birth of its immortal)
and all our humble exclusion,
and these needs if its lungs find air,
and here and unnamed
in these other cruelties, of master and wife,

not nameless, no,
the first word, here, now, crawling
in desperation, like from crumbling brick
from all our ghettoes
of who you once were, child, in
my mere epoch ago, then
it was like yesterday, as
now, startled, in brilliant being.

Almost like a weapon.

O, All My Life

by Séamas Carraher

 

Alguien pasa contando con sus dedos.

Cómo hablar del no-yó sin dar un grito?

Someone walks by counting on his fingers.

How speak of the not-I without crying out?

Cesar Vallejo, Poemas Humanos. (5 noviembre 1937)

translated by Clayton Eshleman (1968)

O, all my life, in its

bottomless bits,

who shaking our flag

was shook by the chest,

how all headless men shout

this calling with no answers

(and animal in bones

to bite his own heart).

And so fell the world

with its arms all futile

and wonder in knots

for a man with no feet.

O, once upon a time

he was, (i found him)

lost among seasons,

(his minutes sharp and mean)

for change that could not change him,

and raw with working

(O all this class!)

for countless days and still the dark,

solid yet so full of veins,

who struggles yet seen it dead,

and absent in places

(and him more thing that

wrench the soul,

that build these men

and break them)

and sad and stifled,

andnobody in names

these lips and lovers

without love.

O all our life, large with its louts

and a nameless man

who screams in dread,

and all his sky so full of richness

(and then these children starving!)

Such sight inside his sightless brain:

and guns.

And bombs.

All killing dead.

And nothing said.

All saying sung.

And nothing done.

O, all his life with its fire

lit with fuses!

For these eyes a crutch!

A heart for that leg!

And lungs and voice

to bewilder it back.

(This beast-in-power

looks like a man!)

O all that life,

lousy in its dregs,

who dreamed the most but better.

i shook him! And pitied him,

(promised him bread, a slice a mouth)

and the waking parts were beautiful,

but the rest, rags and rotted.

i cried with him

but his mouth was stone.

i nursed him,

and cursed him

(to despair this bad)

then cursed them all,

whose heart was this?

And there was a place

with no single

song left,

and no mouth to shout its end.

 
O all our life, in its futile flags

and all, and everywhere

this rotten siege,

these church bells, and guards,

their spies and things.

i called him commissar

and shouted him books,

(this empty laugh with

its throat all cut)

blew wind

and watered him

sealess,

cried in secrets

for his shame that bad,

was god and mother that could

love him not.

O all that world, that wordless world!

And man, like child, who drowns

in our darkness,

and empties bare the last

of these shouts.

If only i could sing, he thinks

(grave as a tomorrow with your hand in mine)

of all this life in loss and loudness,

our silence grim,

it aches and utters.

No home or rest in this war

full of butchers,

no walk or flight will fix

this stone.

 

O all our li

fe

(this funeral life!)

Its love now loss,

and all this endless wartime,

sinking now

into your nearly

deadness.

 

i ACCUSE

by Séamas Carraher

i accuse the dead
for living rent free
in the rooms of my bones
for longer than i can remember.
i accuse the walls and the furniture,
sister and brother to my thingness,
for being the ground of silence
from which i have detached
and fled
like a bird of prey
picking at its own corpse.
i accuse these lawyers and doctors and gravediggers
for their surgical incisions
which conceal my wounds and our wounds
and this wound called life!
We have all come at daybreak to the impossibility of light.
i have come, my bones unfurled like a graveyard
over this house of the dead,
this house called life!
From here i accuse all these eyes for
looking inwards,
abstracted, for their solidity
in paper and concept, their
confusion in food and profit, their pleading
with the mouth to unstitch its nerves
one more time: “not so!  not so!”.
This endless lament without body or grief.
i accuse the mouth for its slyness,
its cunning saliva, its grinning with the skull.
It is all emptiness and we are standing here
like a bird poised for flight.
i accuse the skull for its talking,
all this ruthless talking within which
i cannot hear myself.
And History, the loudmouth, its arrogance
in facts that are full of ghosts,
its removal of the flesh from the skin,
the skin from the bones,
and now look how it flees
down the long corridor of these empty mansions
crying: "not now! Not here! Not me!"
i accuse the shoe for pretending
it is the foot
the mask, the face.
Finally, i accuse you
from the skeleton of this small being i was
on that road from Hanoi or Phnom Penh,
i accuse your eyes
and your sweating hands
and the light you allowed go out
your belt whistling through the air,
O my secret fascist!
How our skin drops
like naphalm
from
the
trees.

THROWING LIGHT AT THE DARKNESS

by Séamas Carraher

Throwing light at the darkness that
seems more bright
lit with loudness like bones cracking,
throwing light like bread at birds
and light in its love, breaking,
his head in this prison hanging
(this head with no price),
now all the night in its religion
beats bellies into my wounds.

Throwing light at the darkness
this freezing darkness, its foreign light,
its arms broken with embracing
its skin calloused with caresses
its mouth washed clean and its teeth heartbroken,
throwing light like water at fire,
and light violent at this dead field
(with its chest in medals,
all its father fat with generals)
and this field which is home
to these dogs feet
and throwing light on the deafness
and light on these heads with their tongues removed
finally, in this birth half lit with life,
throwing light at the moon
with its anger in cancers
that grow like all sisters in his net,
throwing light away, useless
in its nutrition,
creased with these crumbs and democratic in dregs.
It has all stuck like a sermon in her throat
on this dull day weathered with employment.

Here is one without a name, random, mouthless,
without measurement:
entrance for a hospital?
textbook for an engine?
suffering for these angels with their covers like sex,
another inquisition for the holy fathers
another murder for life!
additional light for the dark, with no
lament for the dead,

here is a dog's life half lit by the dark
for this one here
who is neither pat nor joe
who is as we was
and half as bright.

And here are walls extended by the thumb
and hearts hit daily by their hammer
here is a belly who grieves silently
with its light sodden and bit with parts.
Here is our hunger.
Like a fat man burning
with fuel.
Here is a sad man masked,
more naked, and
weathered with unemployment.

And here is meaning. On the hour.  Impenetrable in its factions
with its spokes steel as nerves
with its brain bursting
here are all answers with my question in chains.
And in this hole i lie down and dig
coming from beneath to where the past has no shape.
Here the morning grieves and the bottles weep.
Here the children throw their fangs at the sun
brightening the day with their torn copybooks.
Here is their bible, its economy in silence,
and the stock exchange proud,
its budget and construction in corpses.
Here, equally virus and infection
is another meaning,
like a message in a bottle
this bright spark carved into a head
and chattering with teeth
for throwing light all these long years
like coins
at. all. them. dead. eyes.

Then Mrs. President, with your life lit with lips
in the dark dressed with suits
in the secret dark and
our light hid in bottles,
in this criminal time
with the sun measured in pesetas, in drachmas,
in deutschmarks and dollars,
and its calling in mothers, in mourning,
more shopkeepers! and thieves!
in a dog's life,
in a lousy life, with a stone for my name,
and a stone for a chest,
and dead as a rock,
and my truth for a cigarette, and our sun silenced,
with no place for these legs,
and no priest to absolve me
here we stand with our war much in ruins
and this multitude, our mass, and its eyes set in stone,
and our flag still in shrouds, with its hammers blunt,

here we stand legless, and stumplike,
with our tools in the dark
foreign to ourselves, like a shadow to the light
blinded by gold, and greedy like a machine
all that money imprisoned in their paws,
all grain, wheat, and produce, in their wallets,
murdering with their automobiles
more vaults, prisons, executions,
more factories and funerals,
these bulbs blinded with commerce
these ribs cracked open by that dark lie
raising these arms here, now
heir to my labourer, reverselike,
nailed in concrete,
sinking in clay, sinking in suns, drowning in air, infreedom,
in fear.
Like my corpse surprised in explosion,
who is already dead!

And this man, this nameless man
in an hour no longer content,
this man with a knife for a liver,
with his brain in guns
and his tongue in chains,
this rising man still sleeping,
and this sorrowful man, and
this man with his face no longer a mountain
and his furniture hard with rent
and his rooms investigated
and these bones, after all their surveillance,
indicted, censored, subverted
cracking like roofs, like veins, like hope,
all ruins
raining with light on his head
and these loud men and this envious man and this greedyman
and fearful of the light
calling the night day and the darkness light.

And it is dark, no matter what they tell me
and a train travels the length of
my artery
and i am travelling without a name
in all our forgetfulness
carrying the dead ones who are
as nameless as myself
going nowhere in all our digging.

And you there listening, with your ear to the dark.

This is the dog's life
and a song for the dog's life
and a bitterness broken and the light still
rationed
and the food is still stale and all this noise
and this still mysterious dark
and these weapons
and all of this
this is where we are sinking, who are civilised,
where we are rising in all our drowning.

This is the dog's life and here without a map
this is the wound walking legless,
this is what lights our longing,
this is terror!
and this longing like life in all
this blinding
and all these stones, and all their limits,
and these
cities and in this dark with its differences
like a tourist
this must be the terrorist life and the
surgeon's life
and these feet tied in circles, their ankles, and joints
like hinges to wood
in here the day is not even day,
the dark more dialectical in knives
our sickles sharp, and sickening
and always our hunting, and beating
and the one half eats
and the other watches.

And here is a song looking for life
strong as a stone, furious like a fist,
but then these swollen bellies!
these backs bent, these chests beating,
and nailed into their boxlike muscle
and soft and engined with these sacklike lungs
and lives singly like a moth, in pairs like a child,
multiplying like a face, emptied by the wind
and all the rot seeping from this officeblock
it looks like the world
is falling
for this light feeds no one.
Who else owns hunger?

And this crowd that gathers
its feet in ropes
and these sounds that are silenced in wood
and this ache chestlike
without a nationality
but diplomat in denial, with no brother to forgive me,
and no president and no absolution,
and no State and
here strangling in the dark, the invisible dark
full of helloes, and no healing
and it is all we are
all throwing good light after the bad.
It looks like, here, the rain will never stop.

And these sacks full of children
are too hard to carry
and these objects defy me in its shape and their size,
and this tongue is not even mine
and i do not have a name for this dead friend
nor a place to bury him we can call our own
and i can walk this way no longer
in the dark.
And always for us
the dark and more of it
travelling backward in search of a name.
Then this weight must be the dead.  The decent dead.
The forgotten dead.
Dying in the darkness
for want of the light.

And so it must always be sunday
and the children sleep
and the sour drink settles
and the moon lies dead
and the clock explodes
and the walls are no less prisons
and we are here ticking, we are drifting,
fuselike and patient,
and the war goes on
and the hungry groan
and no one knows how to say it, to speak it, emptying,
and the earth shifts swallowing our seed
and i have been dead a long time now
and the wheels no longer make revolution
and them priests steal the drink from our bottle
the blood dries to dust
and the time changes but we no longer change
and the old books bleed
and all our questions dry up
and with this almost life in continual ruins
and the wounding grows
in one hand here
i am throwing this light that cannot light the dark
i am throwing it away
and here
now is the last point of the dark
where my heart stabbed itself,
thinking there could be more
after all our digging.

She is throwing the light like
the end of all life,
in its beginning, like a lover
into the cold,
wordless.