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Leafland

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2018

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Thin divide of tarmac and sewer gap,

Stretching a line across street’s danger

And the shove, heave, sidewalk glisten

Accosted by maws and drool and good

Couples leering, smiling, select glinting

As to…

No we’re not large enough for empathy

—not just yet.

 

Whistle of falling leaves and heaving

Lungs and incalculable distance, too

Minute and private, blank eyes held in a

Network of missingnesses, sweating

Green matrix of unreciprocation— or

You wish.

Reciprocation delivers in the essence of dogs laughing and the lurching, spluttering of the shadows who guide them. Not human, but unalone

—and all too.

 

Emotions from the future (if it’s not new
We don’t wanna feel it), entangled

In the enemy’s minimum-effort empathy,

Ran like interference, leaf-fall on the lakes

Of their souls they made from mirrors

(They’re more scared of you),

How in viral shudders your arms are the colour of music. The radar’s unreadable. Long- and too minute-, incalculable-range missiles astonish the enemy with invisible and inaudible fury. Feel what shouldn’t be, and they’ll say

They feel nothing.

 

There’s no conspiracy, except against
Secrecy, ‘And is that not the opposite?’
Night in Nouméa, cruise guide warns me:

‘The trees have eyes, we say,’ but the people?
Here, where the royal colour is Infrared,
Only the bats have eyes.

Among many, the first Rite of Belonging is the penance of not-being. Unborn again, blinking in the dry air,

They blink the light back out of their teeth.

 

•  

Ash-sift of dust, rain’s disintegration

As flecks, motes, gold particles of absence

Flock, speckle the wind with nothing to breathe,

Stack gapnesses extorting oxygen,

Dry, spitting depths like invisible smoke

That drown the death out,

And cram your soul with jagged cubes, cuts of life nobody asked for, indeed screamed protest at the ripping and plunging sun-bits retched high-up-to-down to snick, to bloodlet

Your Nothing back.

 

Time’s mark on two dimensions on Screen Street

Spills knots of bodiless zoning, blurs tracks,

Tracks blurs, re-paths amid the re-organ-ing

Of the Disembody. Maps de-collapse.

Maps wake. Golden Age sucks bruise-blue Youth down

To site. To ‘You are here—’

Joie de vivre’s a niche kink. Nothing you should be looking to see, hoping to see reflected, in any generation too young to be any of your dick’s business. Live with

‘—and not there.’

 

… [unfinished]

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