* * *
I've been standing so close to my own pain
that I didn't see the crowd form around me,
nor the crowd's hands growing bigger and beginning to clap in time.
I stepped back last night,
and I joined them.
With, too, my big hands.
I thought I was the spectacle because I had been in the center,
thought I was threatened because I heard the beat.
But I was only standing in a clearance where the crowd was wanting to dance.
* * *
Oh fuck when pride blends with pain, the colors you see as the shape recedes:
* * *
excerpts from A Poem to Shout in the Ruins
Let's spit the two of us let's spit
On what we loved
On what we loved the two of us
Yes because this poem the two of us
Is a waltz tune and I imagine
What is dark and incomparable passing between us
Like a dialogue between mirrors abandoned
in a baggage claim somewhere
...
I remember so many things
So many evenings rooms walks rages
So many stops in worthless places
Where in spite of everything the spirit rose up
...
So I am speaking to the past Go ahead and laugh
At the sound of my words if you feel that way
He loved and Was and Came and Caressed
And Waited and Kept watch on the stairs which creaked
Oh violence violence I am a haunted man
And waited and waited bottomless wells
I thought I would die waiting
Silence sharpened pencils in the street
A coughing taxi drove off to die in the dark
And waited and waited smothered voices
In front of the door the language of doors
Hiccup of houses and waited
One after another familiar objects took on
And waited the ghostlike look And waited
Of convicts And waited
And waited God Damn
Escaped from a prison of half-light and suddenly
No Stupid No
Idiot
The shoe crushed the nap of the rug
I barely return
And loved loved loved but you cannot know how much
And loved it's in the past
Loved loved loved loved loved
Oh violence
It's nothing but a joke to those
Who talk as if love were the story of a fling
Shit on all that pretence
...
What is it then that stirs me up to such a pitch
In these last words
The word last perhaps a word in which
Everything is cruel cruelly irreparable
And torn to shreds Word panther Word electric
Chair
The last word of love imagine that
And the last kiss and the last
Nonchalance
And the last sleep No kidding it's comic
...
Yes let's spit
On what we loved together
Let's spit on love
On our unmade beds
On our silence and on our mumbled words
On the stars even if they are
Your eyes
On the sun even if it is
Your teeth
On eternity even if it is
Your mouth
And on our love
Even if it is
Your love
Yes let's spit.
- Louis Aragon, translated by Geoffrey Young
* * *
 |
| one exposure made on my way to sleep, one exposure made upon waking; last week |
[T]he speaker refuses to give up, to give into exhaustion;
if the poem approaches an elegiac timbre, it does so with blood on its teeth.
if the poem approaches an elegiac timbre, it does so with blood on its teeth.
- Dean Young, on A Poem to Shout in the Ruins
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