The Strangles

By | 1 March 2015

I am not contagious though
dreaming up cities all night in compensation
for missing all the additional lives, what
cottaging makes palpable is
only the flesh end and I miss them.
Speaking privately all night,
and beating them to a pulp.

Chasing after language I end
up hunched by fantastic violence,
not violence as in the violence inherent
but a daydream of a brutal violation:
my nested eye in its blue pocket,
my survival instinct. I am not
historical but somewhat sadistic,
the run I go for is another man’s
writhing table of human limbs.

This is a fantasy of assessment.
Drowning in urgency how relatives
would be rearranged, and the sickle
blank out scheduled day. I wake up
liquid and heaving, either way,
taking a knife to the gobbet,
or endlessly coming onto a familiar face.

Then dreams make me broad
waking into a deathless instrument,
in parody of my body’s cantilevered grim.
Slipping into my forties I make
noises to accompany physical effort,
I brace myself on my knee.
Like the abandoned railways and sure
start centres, my dilapidation is a matter
solely of principle.

A hanged moth. While my children
reorganise the city one rubber band
at a time I am heroic during smears,
my devil’s advocate ragged under the lamps,
my futurity creeped out and desertified.
At one moment the balance tips into finitude,
calculating the remainder is actually quite easy,
I am doing what types me rather than the interim.
My body rich in timely organs none of which
is the word, I will see them
every two years equals ten
times at most.

I dream of Kenneth alive in his hyperbaric chamber
and Jean alive in her anechoic chamber
and John completing another circuit, but none
are at rest, I dream that your body is suddenly wax.
Without you, all memories are fantastic
like my legitimacy after their annulment.
A tiger carves the remainder to slivers,
and gobbles all the water from the tap.

I can picture you as a monument
heavy and costumed in the bed more than live
with the increments of your destruction.
And Emily alive in her kitchen. And all the others
climbing out of cars and pools. I die
tomorrow without having salvaged
the Concordia, put the stoppers
back in toy pistols. Desalinated
all the drinking water in Gaza. I am a pain
to children, and where my face was
the grotesque is spreading, the cloud
promises immortality but only packaged
as speculation my desires
have no more to do
with the propagation of species.

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