THREE



This is the Autobiography of a Dead Man. He feverishly entered history through her body. And died there. He buries the flower of his youth. He stands on his own grave as its memorial. During each night he is daubed with a swastika that he spends his days bleaching.




Call his body a work of art. Its story the catalogue. But telling the story is the same as not telling. Forgetting is louder than memory. Recall the half erasures guiltier than confession. Page upon page of the re-unrecalled. She built herself around him and he's on loan to her bare walls. She leaves him on show. (Who will believe him as the boy in the bad film of his ex-wife's memoirs?)




Her function is automated. His ticket has expired. The route is the margin between inquisitiveness and inquisition. A routine quiz.




Caught in the astonished archive      The past has passed      The present      In a court of its own      Only the dead may represent themselves      Accused or abused      To embark anew      Test history's pulse      Only when it is stone will it move




Record   A reflex beneath the throat. Waiting on its whisper

A writer is a reader re-incarnate

He censors his moment. The Disappeared of his own Entartete Kunst. Victims of his familiar venom. Between the lines lie many stories of abuse   Pause

He is possessed of perfect recall but the lyre makes free with his story   Unpause   'The suitors arrive each day for a decade. The uncalled call. Calypso listens at her own bedside. The odyssey of sleepwalk leads to the final dissolution of the lovers   Stop   Rewind




Play   Never re-unworded. History has learnt to read itself

Legible scribbles on the pavement. Dribbles from the window-cleaner's bucket. The failure of the unilliterate

He is the dummy on Tradition's knee. The already spoken

A token

For the unsayings. A jammed broadcast East. Glossolalia on the instalment plan. The judge imposes a destruction order

Upon his words. Piled high like bleached bones in the unmuseum.




The reader is an inmate. Not an intimate. Unentitled. He re-inflicts her love-punishment. Upon himself. He breaks copyright. Transmits 'literature'. Perec's decent inverted commas. To her 'retrieval system'. To quote the Law. Her archive of torn throats.
            Commentary on a text is a decoy.




His nose is summoned. To sniff her out. Nuzzle the folds of the past. He doesn't believe the words his eyes show him. This is her place. She is an ear. Listening out for the dead. He is in love. With the sound of his own voice. She wants it in a little box. For undeportation. At least. She's in his hands. At last. But not in his arms. This is a taste of freedom. She could be released from his mouth. A curse.




He unpicks his brains. Unless he had sucked pleasure from the guilt. A child eats a tangerine first delivery post-War. The stomach of the cannibal god convulses. Twitches around them in ulcerous enclosure. He arranges this space. Nazi furniture. He reads her voice. Wipes the tapes.




Could not be allowed to return from where she had been. Should not read her among the dropped utensils. Her library of Holocaust Studies. History stretched on its slab. Sickly with youth. Gets up. Walks off. Lets him climb. On the marble a monument. To his own silence.




A fellow traveller of the Diaspora. He brings his own caddy to the tea party. Read him as his own ghost. His desire to be the best seller free of guilt in the American Dream. Identikit cells. Death sells. The manner of fact. This laugh is not how it is meant to end. It's from a bad movie with one star. On the make. The other has missed the plot but second guessed the waste! The stuttering guest has to face Holocaust Chic. At best you get to keep otherly otherness




Of the other stories. That didn't escape. Other readings. That did not want to get read. Speaking the written down will never recover the voice. An Audiobook of the dead. For the long drive East. Recovery. And re-covering. Scratch the loose earth covering the grave. On or off the record. Unrecovered. We are his responsibility. For ever