TWO



This is not guilt but grief

From now on she will be in quotation marks

She emptied herself out with good reason

He is left empty for no reason good or ill. Reading

her absence as a presence he bears witness

His testimony is as blank as an orphan's. His testament is frozen sweat in solid steam




The blade is winched up the engine of justice/Mind is a portion of atrocity/Speech is turned to writing/Read again for motive — motivation/The imagination alone furnishes images of action/If the universe is infinite its parts infinitely mutable/How can there be universal laws/He spreads guilt liberally/Lustily/A trial tries the law




But confession will never be tested in court (He is the stenographer with dirty hands. The last word in recording. The final say. She is a prisoner of War

A light aircraft plunges into the Bank of America (The neurologically atypical with their confused confessions

So you mean what you are trying to say. Finally

Keep the judgement clean (the last word rises to a question




Anaesthetic functionary keeping the word he is the link with the incomprehensible/Prehensile technicians fidget around the incomparable/In this parable the victims betray him/An aesthetic function of the record he keeps. To himself.




Subject of the war of narratives

if every killing is a murder

Sub judice authority riding the heavens

if every war is a crime

Subjunctive mode to which he holds himself hostage




By which kind of divine innocence poses the fundamental matter-of-factly as the logic of a civilization lost in the answers of the game she refutes but which will win abandoned to singular judgement




A splinter of light in the eye. The illegible lines on her face as she turns to dissolve in your tears. Her eyes witness us. Witnesses on trial. The trail of testimony leads to our locked doors.




We wrote the locks. A true story inside a fiction. A truce. Outside history is written up as a direct hit (as Perec wrote: 'The literature of the concentration camp does not get attacked.').
            He reads it twice. Once in the language of the bomb. Then in the language of the key. The alien letter is removed from the alphabet but the language limps on. Shod with newsprint across a territory of cracked nouns.




Individuate yourself and you're guilty/Your truth sounds all wrong your lies remain untested/The ethics of signature in an illiterate world fails the report/Fills the report/It wasn't paper that burned in the fire-proof archive




Recreation is re-creation. Putting the world back together to gather for appetite where the philosopher's path leads kicking up its own dust to the ravine's edge. A conclusion of sensory impression against the haze of intuition.
            We follow the clues impatiently before he does. The plot flatters us as he discovers uncovers for what he was being prepared in his sonorous recitation. Crumbs from the lettered man's writing desk.
            Imagine Hitler's linguistics strictly philological. Not structural. Like Stalin's. Diachronic rather than synchronic. The twisted etymologies the genealogies of invasion the genetics of the word. Pure signifieds with no bodily functions. No sense.
            They spout Goethe rhythmically at the edge of the limepit for their own comfort. Forced labour of the library. We need Shakespeare like a hole in the head that speaks for itself.
            He Nazifies his history books. A heimlich turning of his stale breath.




An archive of the archive of suggestion (illuminated portraits of the gospel scribes

Words are put in your mouth (photographs of heads of state signing declarations treaties surrenders

Framed and in the picture the sentence becomes the pure sign of inscription (a romantic sketch of a poet dashing off a sonnet

You wouldn't be there if you couldn't read (the posed portrait with the poised quill

'I wouldn't be here if you couldn't read' he writes then crosses it out (cancelled and legible




It doesn't matter. There is nothing to say. The witnesses' cloak of antimatter. Black hole in a white lie.




Memory doesn't fade a gob of sugar spat for invisible birds you 'imagine' as black angels on the watchtower. It breeds a holiday in Palestine. A book read to you by a victim. Of a victim. After such farce it could be back to tragedy once more. The reader his face her face. Disposable as cracked reading glasses. The story changes voice. Your hands are cut to ribbons by the barbed wire that fences your epiphany. She fell into the wall and sank there a mistranslation from Ovid. Only a ship built of ice could defeat this enemy. Rewards for servility will always glitter. The centre of the image tortured on the frame of the moment is speaking to you. But the voice is yours. Reading a script it cannot see. We will wipe you away with your sins collateral to your self-consuming. We will kill anyone who drops from helicopter rope ladders onto our Pavilion of Hope.




A day trip to Auschwitz from Liverpool Airport

A day trip to York from Liverpool Lime St

Climb the steep mound to the tower




The codes swing unhinged/not a spectacular gloss to tinge everything you see/the images won't hold like ancient television/At Camp X Ray they see right through your game




The place where it didn't happen. Where did. Face to face with the book. When he abandons justice and justice abandons her. We become (like) her. Like her? Reading the situation. Between

the lines I don't remember

            a thing                        (or do it                         (or feel it

            no thing

            no one

            no where

                   when

                   how



                   why




The life sentence and the death sentence are the same

She pays with her life

Bargaining with the sincerity of her guilt like a bride

Sacrificed at a ritual reading

She is penetrated by the God who renders her insubstantial a story to frighten naughty children

I am a love story and you are the lover

Read me till I bleed.