Exit Music [go home now, stranger]

To be looped continuously.

Words are Auden's. Sound is mine.

To West Texas

headlights will fade, deadly houses

whitewash will fade, run down sawmill

lime trees will die, sad gardener

typhus germ just might, snake charmer

Do you remember

that night at context

making up shit

like we were animals

we made no sense

no sense

we had no sex

Can you see

the moon is so hollow

what's the use

when i can see right through you

[Chan Marshall] 

When all within is violent

You have travelled miles

for the northern light

and I've waited south, mother's eye

closer, never apart

Moving in, more obscure

our solstice was mainly 

doubt. And me, I'm a house.

Half of everything.

In reviewing my notebook, I have travelled for too long, now.

Various small fires and milk

a mound of dust

or rites for bad luck.

embankment of dusk

setting us apart

lieber maler, male mir!

____________________

Alguns pequenos fogos e leite

Um punhado de terra

ou rituais de má sorte.

Diques de anoitecer

nos separando

querido pintor, pinte a mim!

A poem.

A poem so great

that it actually seems

like torture itself

torture to know

so much sweetness

can be given

and can be taken away.

Derelict

In snowy, muddy shores

Like a shipwreck of my own invention

Coming of age, a boy

Tosses the letter towards the debris

concocting the life-to-be

of what was once his good intentions

From "Death under glass"

Going down,

He tore at the long weeds

as one might tear a gown.

Suffering comes to people as war comes to countries

And issues are clarified. Others are completely lost.

Let me know

Waiting for time to tell

growing back body hair

These feathers from Denmark

sleeping under your spell

FUCK

KNIFE

ENTER

SHOT

THAMES

SILVER

GALLOP

PLUM

MASK

KNIT

Small Prayer

Change, move, dead clock, that this fresh day

May break with dazzling light to these sick eyes.

Burn, glare, old sun, so long unseen,

That time may find its sound again, and cleanse

What ever it is that a wound remembers

After the healing ends.

[Weldon Kees]

Subtitling subtleties

Minha vida violenta.

Jolly Roger e Candy Apples.

Morte lenta em Nova Scotia.

Carinho rosa.

Code-switching [don't mind, don't care].

Cavalo baixo [drop crotch].

Minha frase favorita, minha vida violenta.

...loosen my dress

tie me up just like all the rest...

The Scene

Thank you for the compliment. I will assume

it is partly sincere. And soon, when I compliment

your work, I will try hard to be sincere.

Thus our relations will be cordial - thus we may be grateful

for the social scene that prompts from us these compliments.

But what I want - 

ten or eleven years from now

you stand at a window, early on a winter morning;

it is a week or a month after the death of

someone you knew well; you gaze out upon the chill stiff scene

of trees and stone walls, gray and black and gray...

admire my work then. Love it then.

[Mark Halliday]

Whispers

'Tis not alone the warbling woods,

The starred abysses of the sky,

The silent hills, the stormy floods,

The green that fills the eye - 

These only do not move the breast;

Like some wise artist, Nature gives,

Through all her works, to each that lives

A hint of somewhat unexprest.

Whate'er I see, where'er I move,

These whispers rise, and fall away,

Something of pain - of bliss - of Love,

But what, were hard to say .

I could not tell it: if I could

Yet every form of mind is made

To vary in some light or shade

So were my tale misunderstood.

[A. Tennyson]

Wood-paneled room omen

Then the rooms called upon us

constantly in the dark [they're cemeteries] 

and they'll devour the palaces of Jerusalem

with their parting words of consolation

carousing their way to other dwellings

Hobby horse

I've come to learn

how very common it was

for russians to walk into

frozen lakes in winter

they'd walk in 

and disappear in winter

only to resurface

and reappear by summer

Fakebook

There was only her heart

like a rabbit and this terrible hurt

Through the room there was

a quiet murmur of agreement

The words swelled in him

the rain continued gray

and bitter and cold

in rigid silence

All loosely bound in bundles

Shortly after I died

My sister discovered poems

It sounded as if the streets were running

As sense was breaking through

Decades of arrogance between

A night ago or two

In houses unperceived

Not audible as ours to us

To counteract a knock 

we must keep apart, You there, I here

In this brief tragedy of flesh

While sunrise grows so near