II

Do you know what it is like, night after night to run
on the seabed of your own imaginings, to be rifled through
like hands searching through pockets looking for
forgotten money. To cast a tapestry of shadows each night
on walls that care to sleep now, but you can only bleat
now. Do you know what it’s like to walk on water, and
grasp for arms to hold you, to watch murders of people
you do not know. To see a face of an angel, would you rush
into traffic and take the chance of losing your very, very
life. Can you pretend for a split of a second that a tree
is you, a tentacle is you, the soft pad on the paw of a cat
is you, the hair on the floor of a barber shop is you, a
pile of rotting leaves is you, rain-water slicking the streets
is you, sugar in a stranger’s cup of coffee eight hundred
miles away is you, you are a car smouldering on the
highway, you are the highest star looked upon from
above, you are a mountaineer asphyxiating from lack of
oxygen on Mt.Everest, an insect crawling on the page is
you, every wheel turning is you, a woman screaming
giving birth is you, a homeless man fainted on the street
from hunger is you, an anthill, all it’s convoluted
passageways is you and you are also, the ant, the Andes,
the Himalayas, the Alps, the restitution of this night
remembered, the cars careening on highways, the telephone
poles, the underground sewage system, the waste of human
lives gurgling, every drop of blood flowing in every
artery, every vein in every living body in every town, in
every city, in every country is yours. Every dead body
buried in the earth is you. Every heart beating is you.
Every slow chant is you. Every muttering in disturbed
sleep. Every eye opening. Every foot touching the earth,
treading,treading the surface. Every hand holding
another hand, every tooth biting, tearing, chewing,
grinding, gnawing, every throat gulping, every
taste bud on every tongue tasting another tongue. Dead
skin falling off every body, new skin growing everyday.
Pieces of you lost in the sea fall to the seabed and are
planted. You become an anemone. A cucumber. Your
hair is plankton, your limbs seaweed. Your eyes are the
light of the Noctiluca, carnivorous. Your heart is the
green dragon rising up to meet the golden orb in
the crepuscular dawn.

V

It is a pleasure doing business with you night
racketeer, night baster, night unguent. At this star-lit
twilight awakening, my lips feel wrapped in paper gold,
pale heliotrope essence floats like smoke. I clutch
the tails of your coat when I shut my eyes, my fingers
the curling feathers of an ocelot. Are you dreaming me?

VII

Night lends its hand to a wing heavy with the whimsical
enchantment of geisha girls with parasols in the sun-filled
crescents of hollowed skies reflected in all our eyes, a
wind of hushed remembrance as light trickles into the
deep blue magick of the nocturne melting into sunrise.
A flashing inroad into another windowless room &
diadems set with amber, a certain deprivation of the depth
of lost consciousness, a fleck in the distance, floating.