One



Recovery that is almost a violation. Revival aired with betrayal. Delight that is scented with disgust. Vomit and caresses. Expectoration. Enfolding. The monstrous kindness. Monotonous recovery.




The past is read as a dream. Read in a dream. Mis-read in a dream as merely a dream. A stage-set that can be taken on tour around the provinces of the mind. Out to the edges of an empire. Circling back to the capital. The flaky omphallos. Dreamt again as dream.




The story has a future. A threat. Also a past. Will threaten in the future. The new courthouse the old railway. Not given the whole building. Not as in Perec the book. The vanished decorative plaster. A single effect. Amid the stale cleanliness of the stairs

bleach

the invisible Others who inhabit




This brittle scene. It had little give. It was neither given nor taken. There was little exchange here. Just a matter of how old you were. Which mattered. At that age. A generation apart in voluptuousness. Schoolboy word. What you saw was a body inhabited by the body. What could be thought here. Caught there. Under the curves of her petticoat. Doesn't matter. It cannot be thought.




The question of desire is raised off the sick bed. A fever. The question of decision is dropped on her doorstep. If ever. Step over it. Is that it?




bitten scream

Black Milk




At the centre stands Philosophy. A household goddess. Coal-black allegory. Not philosophising as a lacteous activity. A tangle of concepts that could never empty the cat's litter tray or sniff eroticism on another's collar. The Other. His ringed capital. O. A gaping mouth of cupidity. Read as stupidity.




Idiocy! The naked bus conductress. The naked scholar. They possess each other. Asymmetrical embrace. She gives tickets. Takes pleasure. He takes a ticket to pleasure. Stamped with her name. We have their numbers. We are given to their lives. We shall know less about ourselves than the little we shall take from them.




Begin with sadness. In the future. End. With happiness in the past. He learns German history. Steps into the shower with lustful ease. The past is faceless. Isn't faced. Evinces few responsibilities. The future is the story he will read tomorrow. Each episode a prelude. Don't even ask why I hate tattoos.




The lovers' tiff is a rehearsal for history. A dry run in a rickety tram. For the past. The nightmare. Recriminations reparations guilt. False guilt. Innocence false innocence. Played out in a cooling bath. She could not read. The indictment. The affadavit. The confession.




Happy to be happy. The report also reports. Glad to be unhappy

Looking at a map a menu a note. Also notes. Is not reading

The mad face on the old brown stamp. The gleam of the green Chevrolet. Too large to cut the country corners

Unreadable. Juggling pronouns above handlebars. Around the axis 'love'




The involution of pure lies and impure consumption. The bribe to execute a lie. Stolen. His gift is theft. He has annexed her moments and consumes each. For us. Whatever wherever we are. Space and Time pure intuitions. Infinities. That can fill with her image. Whenever wherever he desires. Slave to his will. A chained illiterate rubbing his fingertips over the embossed statute of her mastery. His mistress' body. A statue. Cold as a clippie's dawn.




Classroom arrangements bring Golden Hair closer to his confident charm. He translates. Reads aloud. Orchestrates his own Sirens. Grows forgetful as a swine in Circe's detention.




She is the False Penelope to whom he glides. The analogy is false. History demands that we read another date into the plots. Tolstoy's. Schiller's. Schlink's. Yours. Mine. Not this one. Like a horse. Twitching. Under Napoleon's rump. 'Like a nonentity' at the centre of an Epic.




I read 'We were freezing' and I am. Two days away. The house will not warm. Fish at the bottom of the tank. Shut down. We clutch a radiator all evening.
            This morning the cars are coated with crisp snow. The few patches of ice that remain have melted. Frozen again. Treacherous.
            'We were freezing' is the last sentence in the world I want to read. But I may not disavow it. I must vow to my hearing this saying




Or that which is read. Closing an act of reading. She is the text he tries to read. Experiencing her flesh. Trying to follow her mood-swings. Lost in the hermeneutics of her motivation. There are no accidentals. Entropics. No mistakes in their world. No flashes of chance that seem to mean and yet do not. And then they do because they don't. A final snapshot. As consciousness. Not conscience. As powerful as thought. Or its lack.




She leaves everything but that doesn't mean. She leaves with nothing. He is left with nothing. Or its lack . He is more responsible. We are. In the lack of their faces' final confrontation. Through that. Act. Every. Thing. Else. Ever.