a poet, an abyss and some questions
"Am I now more beautiful to you?"
"Hasn't my suffering morphed into its ekphrasis?
Did you not recognise that I speak out lamentations instead of cry?
And should I do so, the tortured ululations that tear through my lungs
Still hold a metre I cannot escape from.
What is beautiful about these iron-barred stanzas
When My Heart is dry from pouring out my innards
Like a dirty washing-up sponge."
His face is now looking directly into theirs
"You who have chased me through to my hiding place
My domesticity replaced by complicity
To make my own abode a gallery
The bathroom its most prized exhibition
For in it my insides are purged
My true emotions revealed
My most shattering screams drill into the walls
With nails of ink and spit and tears."
No reply to the Poet, but he continues,
"You dismembered me, limb by limb,
But this art is not a canvas
If it can breathe out its own self-perception."
Silence for a beat, and the poet cries,
"Speak! Why must you remain dumb?
I have chiselled myself into Galatea,
As I look into my reflection as my muse.
Narcissus am I, who drowning in my own depiction
Perceived marble flaking off my skin, instead of chunks of flesh."
The Tormentor smiled, but the Poet ploughs on.
"Why must my torment be your bliss?
Let me speak about the beauty of the firmament
Which encases and envelops the stars in its thick blanket
About the sun, which gently dips the world into honey
Even when it is recently born into the day from milk
But you always remind me that all flames gasp out smoke
And the shattering of both takes--
"Why must I do one and not the other?
Why must I wait until my lust becomes akin to sadism
To talk about the empty throngs of pulsing desire?
You remind me that I am never enrapturing, enticing, intoxicating
But I remind myself of my equal failure to describe the few months
When I was at bliss in love."
"Always the bad, never the good."
The assailer finally replies.
For the voice that speaks is the very gurgle of the chasm
Like the swallowing of water from a dying thirsty man