oh city of angels
hideous to the tongue
urine-fumed fleur de lis
and vomit baked by sun
neon perpendicular
baking us like clay
music sitting sweetly
like a locust in my ear
my spine curls
my lymph chokes back
poisonous souvenirs
at the grey bus stop
art deco hospital
bibliotech confused
crackpipe vapors
over strawberry sewers
on the twentieth floor
over your cheap smog
i am looking out
over dollar bills.
there is one there
i love so dear
his head is choking
asthmatic wheeze
you give him distillations
of sunset’s best lizards
i will meet you again
bathed in grey: my body
greyer in your blue
smoke; to kiss him there
in poison gas
Hiroshima knows
no blessing Chernobyl
curse los angeles
my love dystopia
visions birth curse
Friday, 23 July 2010
Friday, 4 June 2010
calligraphies of bones
Calligraphies of bones
No words dare deface you
your arms around my empty hips
this time
more truth
under the death smog
the earth is over
waking up in hiroshima again
this time with you, little different
except the happiness I feel
the crisp beauty of your sleeping face
I said you only need one love,
meaning, I only need you, you are
all my heart can stand
you are everything inside my heart
you perfume the night
I want softly this not
to be an end. To be for you forever. And
that we speak, when no words rip
from me my dengue. And there
in the heart of your silence
you always bring me up. Our
book born in my mind like a child.
The silence of your ways.
I slept with you at seventeen.
I slept with you at eight.
I felt the fullness of your kind
smile linger over me.
What you give and what you
do not cannot supercede.
I never tried to take you
I never was so blind
to walk too fast into
your light
the others were too fast,
each year will be
flirtation, confection,
or a noose. So
slowly, I will love
you and speak
to you in prose.
And if in years i'd
have you, or if in
three you me, I will
not hope to bargain
for things that make
me weep.
Beside me last eve
ever, was more than
ere I need, to walk at
noon beside you, and give you leave.
II.
let out of prison to the heart of your love
your love is honest
this I have known
you make no promise
of things we don't know
your love is honest the heart of your love
is finally beside me
time was hiroshima
aftermath
I was waking in hiroshima
without you for years
now I am out of prison
to the heart of your love
a love which is honest
which doesn't ask much
my love is foolish in fits and starts
my love is sleeping in the sepulchre of hearts
my love awakened to say goodbye
out of prison to say goodbye
your love is honest
I do not know why
you ask for nothing and then I reply
your love is honest
so patient and kind
your love is honest
silent and kind
your love is honest
goodbye, goodbye
III
awash in your golden orb
scorpion I cannot say
propaganda master for
fools gold
your eyes on the ocean
in time the thames
washes in the blood of
Kipling's rue
I crafted your name into this verse
but wrote not what you
are
In the silence of sleep and time
you teach me melody
contingent on life and breath
when all was question mark
pushed to the point of
silence and cured by melody
I wish you could have known
my mother's name for me
hungrily I devour these
seconds here with you
terrified at the expanse
of time when your
face will be far from my eyes
in this my memory feels you
as in absense I held
your ghost
invited through the window
as incubi or host
angelic priest of sound
you are to me ever pure
and the terrors of my carnal silence know no cure
I want to hold you and
I do not, as this
exquisite pain to me
delivers me to ecstasy
where now I live with thee
and here floating silently
through memory and time
you muse are master of
then and now, the future
and the end
if only I could wrap
my bones around yours
when I die
all this wanting and
denial would quickly
realize itself into
calligraphies of
bones our bodies do
now make and in death
stillness might make
the shape of love
eternal.
by mary eng
for nicholas alexander maybury
Sunday, 31 January 2010
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