Burglary 2

Burglary. incl. a condition whereby sexual excitement accompanies housebreaking. or just visceral lawbreaking excitement.

Grandma's house. she is a widow. Memories of: gran n papa. In the kitchen or ante-chamber, merchandising tie-ins... Idea: take yr beloved character n stick him on a number of disreputable products.

Andy Capp is a lazy bastart. put him on a range of microwave chips n instant cup a soups. Reclining on his couch. "fat n lazy special".

Lifestyle marketing. target the overworked single person. Oldschool Andy Capp. back when he was a gambler and wifebeater. He really belongs to the twenties just like the Broons. Flo ought to be in a cloche hat, niggardly and complaining, wringing hats. (hands).

stumbling in the dark I bang into a door, flimsy wood. a shanty town shack on clifftop. the mother imprisons me. she's thin proletarian with a tribe of kids. she's sick of travellers banging into her door in the dark.

In her house, a Daily Mail or somesuch newspaper. I attempt to steal but the thing is too big. On cover: self-aggrandizing soapstar. soapstar as sex kitten.

quote from a tabloid: "Multi-tasking is the key to superstardom nowadays; as celebs balance acting/singing/modelling/whatever like so many spinning plates".

The post-modern celebrity, or the vaguely famous. In chameleon-like guises.

Empty house. Recurring dream: Empty houses.

Ransack it, be the intruder. Steal. Eat. Suck back soup.

Some sort of complex about locked/unlocked doors. Quite commonplace. Themes: openness, concealment, privacy or lack thereof. Leave doors open n all lights on. Passerby can see through hollow of trapdoor past concrete floor to cosy basement kitchen.

like, nakedness, public exposure, neglect of person or property, anxiety thereof. Very common.

burglary (dream)

In a flat on my own. Some sort of student accommodation. unlocked door leads out to tenement passage. must be 3rd floor. unused, abandoned, even dangerous. ending in a large opening overlooking empty space and vista of grey houses. I take the old staircase upwards leading to another landing. several doors, must be the rooms of people, occupied. I enter one room. A bedroom, belonging to a student. very seedy.

2 hrs. Image: Hollow closemouth. A gap to see through to the depths. illicit. where excitement. burglary. magazines & newspapers, the theft thereof. recurring.

The following: music magazines, Q's, a pile thereof. face down. Cyndi Lauper looking like Pink. Advert on back: Black. BRMC. old. Old fanzine-style. "Post-Holocaust". Publication featuring photos of Nazi atrocities. many Victorian-style engravings. of eyes and mouths. features a poem scrawled on wall of death chamber: (i scan it)

o traveller, turn not aside

the brain is down here somewhere

...... (goes on for several more lines)

...... Death. Shakespeare.

Obviously the work of a madman. A bag of what I think is dirty washing. The cheapest British porn, say Escort, full of readers wives.

themes: dilapidated, neglected student accommodation. the neglected city. shared accom. communal apartments. urban neglect. the urban dispossessed. haunted bathrooms. the sound of a toothbrush in yr hollow mouth, changing pitch as you widen or narrow your jaw. the tenement, squatting. the squalid student: as recluse, pop-culture overloaded, isolated bohemian. youngsters clinging to the old gods: hence, rock n roll. post-post-post-post-everything popculture. the sex industry. horror as entertainment. squalid student bedroom. one-room apartment. burglaries.

poems in dreams are impossible to reconstruct:

"O dear traveller, turn not aside

The brain is down here somewhere...

(goes on for several more lines)

........ fear. shame. death. Shakespeare."

(found scrawled on the wall of a concentration camp)

Cezanne

I was looking at a book of Cezanne reproductions and was struck by a certain painting.

A portrait of a priest, done in muddy shadowish colours, an earthy palette. A gloomy-looking, darkish man, but looking also determined, in fact more like a crusader. The thing that stuck in my mind was his pure white cercingle and on his breast an absolutely blood red cross, painted a very fresh and solid red. I also liked his mephistophelian pictures, a meurtre here, a viol there, all under dark and rolling clouds.

Now Cezanne was a determined man if nothing else, a man who valued sincerity in painting but who also had a healthy dose of old classical aesthetic sensibilities. He lived in the country and was apparently of independent means, had a wife, cared not much about Paris and the fashionable world, was basically a bourgeois. Toiled away in obscurity.

How many hours did he stand before that Mont St. Victoire, squinting, making adjustments, straining, determined to push through, to render the rocks and the trees solidly and harmonically.

Off he trundles home with his easel on his back, no doubt in a peasanty smock. Full bountiful beard, thinning hair, tendency to impatience or irascibility. Didn't suffer fools gladly. Off to paint his fleurs et fruits.

When a kid he swam in rivers on vacation from the lycee, his head fulla Greek. And he said his favourite smell was "the smell of the fields".

The morning ablutions

At a girl's boarding school in the country, a greying house on its own within dull implacable grounds.

Now I see a young lady, slim, rotund face with a tendency to sulkiness or irritability, but also rather proud and leonine, hair a scruffy blondeish colour, eyes blue. Aged about 18 at the most.

The constraints and properness of a disciplined boarding school. Having to wake up in cold mornings and scrape hair back, and into a plain and functional uniform, on with the sensible shoes.

This particular girl seems to shine among her schoolmates, and in the dank surroundings of the school grounds. Lips a subtle mauveish colour, mascara'd eyes bringing out the grace and strength of her face. Eyes flicker holding a certain fiery naïvety.

The morning ablutions start: The girls are marched in detachments of about half a dozen to a marked-off section of lawn near the gravelled driveway.

Here the girls line up before a solid plinth of marble, on the wall of which is set four or five medium-sized sinks. In the background, the old Victorian school building. Grey early morning clouds.

At a given signal, a few girls detach themselves from the queue where they have waited rigidly hands clasped together. In this particular group marches our blonde girl. She takes the second sink.

Each girl begins immediately to fill her sink with water which after a few minutes runs from cold to tepid to decently warm. The blonde girl depresses a nozzle set by the sink and lets fall into her hand a quantity of smooth lotion. It is fragrant, viscous stuff which soon works up into a good lather.

The girls thoroughly and methodically wash their hands, as if performing a long-practised task, the blonde girl with a careful, fastidious sulkiness.

Morning ablutions are all part of the drill.

Mad King version

a monarch should have a kingdom

a gold crown, ermine furs and plush red robe

at twilight. A wide estate of green swards

A hall in which shadows gather.

(and the king should be allowed to do as he pleases).

I had just finished watching a weekday movie:

Up the marble stairs, by the balustrade,

through dust-swathed twilights, of old salons, wallpaper,

memories of a stately home. Past gilt picture-frame

Velvet rope, a faceless marble bust

Rooms of state- a terracotta army of footmen

Featureless and quiet

Stradivarius in alabaster, is to give a concert at four

And I cut a swathe through the dusty air.

And the princess stands in the state room...

Mad King 2

The Mad King at court, in full view of the dandies and pallid butlers, has insulted the Venetian ambassador. "I suggest, sir" he informs him, "that you have come to me in the guise of a grinning monkey. I shall send at once to the Treasury for a thousand florins stamped with the emblem of my arse. You may go."

The countess has put on facepaint. Her face aghast.

The King's stream-of-consciousness monologue continues interminably. Shadows lengthen from the high windows.

Dust collects in corners.

The King's son the Prince Regent was, as history has recorded, an extremely corpulent and vulgar man. Showed no signs of madness, but did demonstrate unbridled wastefulness, idleness, and stupidity.

His reaction to his father's insanity? A certain slow disgusted outjutting of jaw. Otherwise greedy for the old fella's throne.

Typical of the blighted sons of the house of Hanover. You can see it in the faces of Victoria and her successor. Heavy jowled and lidded, dull, obtuse, as if bludgeoned into pituitary insensibility by a lifetime of pampering and being grovelled at. Apparently the line is affected with some genetic malady probably caused by selective breeding.

As for the present Windsors, there's hardly a noble or majestic physigniomy among them. They're alternately heavy and ox-like or weedy and awkward specimens.

It seems the royal line has run right to seed.

The Mad King

The madness of kings- Did ye ever see that movie the Madness of King George? The King in his nightshirt scarpering over the lawns, at dawn, his anxious footmen following.

Twittering on voluptuously, hallucinatin, his perriwig n hose. Or at the palace of Versailles to hear a symphony he makes lewd suggestions to the ladies-in-waiting.

At first, no-one tells him what to do. It's all "Yes, your Majesty, of course, your Majesty". The deranged monarch in this position of unquestioned power lost all decorum. Could've pissed on the floor if he chose.

He goes on a wild goose chase, in pursuit of nothing, this crazed king. Runs through high palatial rooms, past tall elegant windows. Raging cursewords for the pallid courtiers. His wife, the countess, very anxious to project aristocratic dignity as a head of state, is mortified.

... The king has fled down a wide sweeping staircase, pausing only to upset a marble bust, smash a stradivarius. Lunacy don't go down too well at court.

He bursts through double doors into the groundfloor ballroom where a dance is to take place. The ladies of the court are idly fanning themselves, the gentlemen stand graciously by. He run past rows of liveried footmen, solemn-faced, unseeing.

At one end of the hall stands the King's consort and their little daughter, the princess.

"Fetch me peace-juice and gin! It's good for the constitution... keeps the skin pliable... don't keep me starving!" he addresses a nearby footman.

The King sweaty-faced interrupts his ravings when he catches sight of his little daughter. A taciturn and gloomy child, she merely watches, uncomprehending and a little frightened.

The King, wretched, exhausted from his flight around the house, lets out an "Ah, my dear, my little cherub, my delight!..." He approaches her pityingly, displaying something like a parody of fatherly concern, the trapped agony of hysteria still in his eye...

He gently caresses her cheek with his knuckles, cooing at her sorrowfully. "I hear you're mad, my dear" says the King. "Are you? Are you mad, dear one?"... a particular loneliness in his voice.

The princess merely gazes sorrowfully into his eyes. "No, sir" she meekly replies.

(It seems that children understand madness).

Spring Is Not Coming

Spring blossoms in May

And turns its face deliberately

In moulting yellow streets-

Dropping blossoms on the sinners

And the semi saints who fondle crimes

In bars.

Spring born into winter- in its own haze of light

Disregarded in a street

Before we were born.

New Spring was sadly falling

Outside the window

Before I awoke.

Spring a handle of clumsy wish fulfilment- and its blossoms

only garbage. It is a dream Spring that brings scents,

to purify city streets.

Its cloak is large. It speaks in many voices.

It appears suddenly on a corner, where the lovers look up.

Disregarded by most.

Spring is not coming. Not like the rush of a train.

Spring always descends- It is a momentary thing.

Like Love, walking in the backstreets,

It hands tied behind its back-

I do not believe in that Spring,

and Love had drowned itself in the black water.

(But through my little dream the Spring has spoken:

"From inside. And I am as light as air.

Silver-clad and like a billow

I am passing over cities and times

Rushing over cities and valleys

And my hand washing the stain away.

My heart is flying like a death-bird

Speaking strains of new music

... I am soaring.")

And, from somewhere, as if a sorrowful spring has brought itself into being in mid-winter, a shower of rose-petals descend on us. They skitter among the sweetie-wrappers in the road. Scarlet debris, like rose-blossoms.

Small conventional poem

Red rose that blooms most bravely on the grave,

Where is a mote that I can save

Of thy sustaining scent or shade,

That will restrain the cutting blade?

Where is the poet, and where the priest

To lend me succour and surcease

Of these dull phantoms, who increase

Their nightly throngs to murther peace,

And kindle fire of fretful care,

Into my entrails steal their lair,

And burden ev'ry murmured prayer

With leaden weights of bleak despair.

I am thy pupil and thy monk,

Thy buds to me are verses sunk,

Wherein I read an august work

Where scents do teach and shades instruct.

Teach me the story of thy grace,

That on this mound is held in place

To one disgruntled and displaced,

To beckon in the tomb's embrace.

Beltane 3

Ascending the long grey hump of hill, past the quiet old thatched houses, past the pig-pens full of muck and iron gates where tired old farmers stomp their boots. It feels like a Sunday, sleepy, warm, old ladies in front of TV after dinner, watching Antiques Roadshow. Or something much older past the old stone, thatched roofs, and polite curtains, only suggestive of silence, stoked fires, and wood beams. But then, passing by a corner where two buildings part, M and Charles see briefly but tantalisingly, a large clearing or yard beyond, where a great many people are gathered and from which the sounds of music and celebration ooze lazily forth, mixing like honey with the still Sunday air. "There are people listening to country n western music in there" is M's first reaction, as they hear the whining violins and mellow tones of fluted song, rise up, yellowish and sodden, as if from the earth itself. Charles and M tut a little at the eccentricities of these country bumpkins as they walk on, a little confused at what they had seen.

They saw what could only be an old-style celebration, a clan gathering, a rodeo, a Celtic feast-day. They saw folks arriving in brown stetsons and check shirts, like travellers or gypsies from bright-painted wagons. They saw men with golden hair braided in two tough, long plaits, muscular torsos gleaming with sweat, singing what seemed to be sorrowful battle-songs, preparing like Celts of old for sacrifice or battle. Somewhere fires blaze, there are pearly kings and fat morris dancers inside, as well as people who seem to be decked out in what looks like Welsh or Dutch national costume, while all along the sweet, sentiment-laden country music swills lazily around the yard. It is like a sorrowful Brueghel scene scattered with golden sunshine, all in slowmotion, swept with sweat and tears, like a great pagan festival, like a lamenting Beltane carried out by a few tired individuals...

Beltane 2

"Oh allright?" he says, pursing his lips to receive his fagend. His name is Charles, and for a few minutes he and M talk to one another haltingly. "So what you been up to?" says Charles, there in that field with moisture dripping from the leaves, and the broken blocks of stone scattered in the wet grass, and the poignant morning sunshine filtering through the leaves. M shifts his feet around restlessly, gives an account of his none-too-interesting life of the past few days, to which Charles acquiesces quietly, not expecting much.

Over in the corner of the field, on the other side of the old tree and by more crumbling stonework, are a few more students, drably dressed, conversing apathetically. This, after all, is Sunday, and students, like these, called out into hamlets for dull project work, are bored with their fates and yawn.

After dully exchanging banter for some minutes, M and Charles become restless. Charles tosses aside his fag and, taking the initiative impatiently as he always does, suggests that he and M should back down the hill out of this little village, perhaps back to the white-washed, pristine walls of the New School. They feel they have spent long enough in this place to satisfy their tutors, and so they clamber speedily over the brokendown wall and end up in the dank road.

They walk along together, down through the village, at a leisurely pace, talking gently and in a somewhat conspiratorial fashion, probably about women. They are both relaxed and impassive now that they are absolved of responsibility, Charles with his green jacket and a kind of manly irritability as he tilts his head to listen to some remark of M's. They are quietly pleased with one another's company.

Beltane 1

On Sunday, M left home and travelled into the surrounding country. He walked up the shallow country lanes. It was a drippy, dew-wet Sunday morning when birds trilled lazily in trees, but occasionally, passing through certain streets and lanes, a blinding blaze of sunshine would sweep in, through the moisture in the air, transfused into a sublime golden Sunday morning light.

Up M marched, ever onward up grey tarmaced roads, till he reached a small, sleepy village, full of stone houses and thatched roofs, smoking chimneys, benches where old men smoke. He traverses the main grey road through the village and past the old Tudor pub, advancing past the main group of houses till he comes in sight of a long-abandoned, grey-green field, leading past the westward-bound road, and dominated by a huge, sad, drippy oak.

M has had to climb a huge, grey wet hump of hill to reach this far, and he trudges determinedly on, till he comes to the brokendown stone wall bordering the field. In the west spring sunshine dappled by oak leaves, he clambers over this, with its crumbled masonry exposed like blocks of white flesh, and comes into contact with the other students who are assembled in this long, lank field, with its dying grass and hopeless tree.

First to meet M is a tall kid standing nervously near the wall. He turns around suddenly, towering above M, the stub of a cigarette in his long fingers. His tall frame is dressed in a neat indie-kid sports jacket and he wears old trainers, scuffed and weary, on his feet. He is rather acne-scarred and shifty, perpetually disgruntled with an odd kind of fidgetiness and nervousness, and his words come out cracked and mumbled, peppered with curses. He has a curious concave face and the large nose of a peasant farmer. But turning there in the field, M sees his green eyes glint lightly, and with surprise, in the sunshine.

The Esoteric Drama Club 3

The people in the room now become more annoyed and argue technicalities of dramatic technique, relating to small points of hand gesture and vocalization, more ardently, but with an underlying good nature. M laughs, feels surging up inside of him a well of joy from some inexpressible source, and he leaps off the mattress.

As the discussion continues, he heads for the door. Through the bare, paint-peeled doorway, standing in the ante-room which is cluttered with files and is lit by a bare, burning-white bulb, M sees Anne, the student girl whom he nonchalantly loves. She is continuing to debate, inquiring in a high, wavering voice which dominates the two rooms so that the tumult is hushed around her, the etymology and proper usage of some small word. She is tall and thin, and dressed fussily in brown clothes, with round glasses and a virginal sort of neatness. She continues, with an incredibly pedantic determination, and with finger raised, to cry out for a clear definition of that word. Not without humour she watches M chuckle, ignore her, and walk through the door.

Once back out into the darkness of the stairwells and bat-ridden attics, he races down the stairs, whooshing to himself like the wind, full of an unspeakable dark joy like a vampire. As he glides down the stairs he is happy in the knowledge that he can leave the white-washed building for back home, suburban bedrooms, chalk streets, burnished lamps...

The Esoteric Drama Club is over for another week.

The Esoteric Drama Club 2

In time, and more or less on time, he trudges wearily to the room where the class is to be held. It is located through a series of secret doors and obtuse turnings, all painted in cheap white paint and constructed badly. The room itself is large and is connected to a smaller ante-room, beyond which is a corridor down which the participants stroll. Everything here is brightly, glaringly lit, the walls of the corridor are white, the big drama room itself is shockingly piss-yellow with faded, peeling 1970's wallpaper of the most tasteless kind.

This is the setting for the Esoteric Drama Club. These two rooms are already filled with shrieking, excitable people of the most bizarre kind. They all tend to like gesticulation and debate, sometimes heated argument. Some are dressed in white sheets like the devotees of some strange religion. Others are dressed very plainly and simply indeed, almost puritanically. Some sport pantomime horse's heads and absurd grinning masks, others are festooned with props purloined from drama departments. Girls and boys are there, all of them compelled to be there but all of them secretly loving it, small dark girls who rarely speak, as well as the old men who are in the class, with their screwed-up faces and balding heads shining in the light, draped in white sheets.

A howling, mad drama exercise soon begins. Nailed to the far wall are three gaudy, yellow, sickly mattresses, with stuffing falling out, covered in a blue-glazed pattern. On these three students sit, M, and a couple of the old men. M is particular confidante with one of these old fellows, who sits on the edge of the mattress, digging his nails in, grey locks of hair bobbing on his balding head. The three on the mattress are to enact the part of great exploitative tyrants, so they growl and harangue their subjects, curse them, abuse them, rattle money-cups at those who grovel below them. Chaos ensues. The participants chime in from all parts of the room, all debating dramatic points, whether or not this or that hand gesture, or a particular nuance of speech was effective. (M has enjoyed thoroughly his part of the evil emperor, the oppressor, perching on the mattress although almost slipping off, raging like the old men around him.)

The Esoteric Drama Club 1

In the New School building it is time for Drama class...

The New School is a large white building with many annexes and blocks of stone scattered about.

Some people see it is a sinister minimalist building, most see it in a practical way, as purely functional, with its white-washed walls and its hospital windows filled with secretive blinds and darkness. M, the student, has after climbing barricades gained entrance to the ground floor, feeling as if he has disturbed a tomb, or an ancient megalith, with all the corridors and stairwells dark and stuffy... He gains access to a long corridor inside, which reminds him, strangely, of a youth centre he attended long ago, all brown counters and dripping taps in cluttered, long-abandoned classrooms. He reaches a long flight of white-painted stairs which are the ghostly, skeletal type of school stairs with steel bannisters. He climbs them slowly and carefully, thrilling to his secrets. He is compelled to attend the Esoteric Drama class high in the building, but its the favourite of his subjects. As he climbs the weary, rickety stairs higher and higher (ascending, it seems to him, farther than he ought to) the walls around him brighten, evidence of a festive attitude begins to appear, there are red lightbulbs and grinning masks, the darkest corners have been brightened and all the cobwebs swept away. He sees another participant arrive, a tall, thin individual covered in a sheet and wearing a huge papier-mache head with bulging eyes and a red, sharptongue mouth, gliding up the stairs, bustling with excitement.

Weeds

Up the sickly green hill the kid wandered... From the shallow bottom of the housing estate, greyish below him, a pit of old streets, lamp-posts, secret addicts in backyards. In the windblown, fresh morning he had ascended the hill, pale-faced. He was a large-skulled kid with a sorrowful expression on his face, long fingers, and was carrying a bunch of bright yellow daffodils, for no reason, nonchalantly. He seemed anaemic, insipid, frightened, yet oddly beautiful in his thinness. He walked gradually up the gravelly path, over the green smooth hump of the hill, round and swelling above the pitiful rain-smoky town. A picturesque panorama on Saturday morning in spring, just awaken from electronic bedrooms.

As he reaches the top of the hill, painful-eyed, he stops short as a hugely powerful, windy voice bellows out at him. "Ha, and are the Aliens after you?" The boy stops and he knows that the aliens are indeed after him, bug-eyed grey Aliens, strangely intelligent, full of sinister mirth, with theirs shining black eyes and in their polished saucers, always reaching for him with hollow fingers. Yet he responds simply, caressing his daffodils: "Yes, and the weeds too".

For he knows that in his wake, all along the length of the slow path he has ascended, have sprouted an undergrowth of pale-green weeds that even now rustle in the wind, that wave like living fronds of seaweed in the path. They follow him faithfully where he walks, sprout with the enthusiasm of a dog bounding behind him. They are lustrous, honest, hardy weeds, too sorrowful, too embedded in earth, to ever be plucked out.

conversation friday night

"What I need to do really is go to sleep at night, but I slept most of the day, like a fool, dreaming Nietzschean syllogisms." "And they are?"

"Well I was thinking about a quote I read, "what is possible is natural". But if you think about it, a lot of things are possible, murder, rape, cannibalism, genocide are possible, but are they natural?"

"Well, plastic surgery is for sure not natural" "Well, good point, but it is possible. Anyway, that's what my dreams were full of, Nietzschean riddles about possibility and nature. I woke up, it was sunset, six o clock.

... One is forced to the conclusion, after all, that all of the above is natural, and that even the end of the world, being possible, is natural. It's the only conclusion.

So do not fear the end of the world my friend, embrace it like a lover, knowing how inevitable it is, how sound and right".

"You really got me thinking". "Good."

Ghost 9

Watching the trees wave- pools of liquid

Under the earth. Talking about the angel with the poor boy.

A circle storm rages in the lake.

By its side I cannot force myself to even dream.

Light- inhabiting poolsides- in my mouth.

The next dream knifed in- habit

Made me disown it.

The dream was magenta, close-knit

Of knives and teeth. Something hairless, bold-

A thing such as I had never dreamed before.

Ghost 8

Give me softly back old sorrows

Snatched from jaws of death.

Permit me to remember

Excuses, drear days of sixteen,

Banks, burns, and braes, afternoon bridges,

The warm girl at my side.

Let me see again, darkly, her grins and words,

Melting gently in the autumn air,

Curses in November to make me crave comfort

In lamplit halls, in yellow wallpaper,

When I snapped off the light and sunk into dreams,

Empty-handed, never knowing.

Let me kiss the phantom of old times,

Survey again cracked classrooms, empty chairs,

Where once, in joyless afternoons, we sat,

Only to leave for blue moons set outside

Penniless in the rigid sky.

I'll tear the teeth of death to win back to that sight!

I'll swear against time's armies, i'll submit

To any loss of sanity or will,

To feel again, the kiss of old fate,

The smell of perfume ever dear to me.

To touch again, the soft, betraying flesh,

And speak with life to life upset,

Before the arc of time all falls away,

And leaves me with a broken plate.

My words resound,

And echo back from empty walls.

The sound of stone on stone,

Of dust whispering to dust.

Ghost 7

The awkward banks of time...

I had left myself almost open to the old comicbooks,

The starlit nights when I was whole and youth was fair,

Ageless records that haunt me yet, remembrance.

Soft girl, hair midnight black, with lips lisping, roaming

Abroad, the broken autumn railway.

Evenings when I peered at the sky.

The old yellow bed, fat and sumptuous, creaking,

Me awkwardly exposed in bedsocks to life,

Skies outside, lamplight, all acknowledged earnestly,

But incompletely. Yet skectchpads of time,

Hopeless even now, unremembered, un-sought after,

Forgotten like the calendars of ancient days.

Days! When the weak sun would shine in the cold white window,

And I would lounge by the wall,

With radio, with enchantments, with sorrow never expressed,

Except in insomnia fears and unknown whispers,

Where I could recline, fall, and weep gladly,

Repeating "for myself, myself".

And the nights! O my lost comicbook nights!

Frozen under glass, half-remembered, incoherent,

Nights so pristine-pure, shamefully lost!

Night, night, with not a whisper in it,

Not a threat of the shadow to fall,

In whirpooled chambers left bare to the elements,

Under electric light,

Chanting magic formulas, sacrificing rudiments of

Love, ashamed.

Ghost 6

I conceived a great poem of the night. Among the clutter of comic-books, the light-slanted shade, the crumby carpets, the empty bed. I realised, significantly and triumphantly, over days and months, that I had lost something great. I had been living, not with knowledge of her, but with the exaggerated image of her beauty, a phantom looming large in my imagination but at the same time corrupted, despicably remote. It was a phantom I still expected to see outside, in the blue evening, from my bedroom window, traipsing listlessly across vacant lots and railway yards. I realized that the most affecting and valid word in all of our language is "loss". Loss of beauty, loss of love, loss of life. I watched it recede, day by day, hour by hour, and every day as the evening wore on I confronted it, examined it, let it affect me fully. And after all the sorrows and self-recriminations had worn away, I felt somehow alive, warmed, exalting in the death of love. And that word contained nothing now for me but loss, repeated a hundred times over, as my eyes looked forward, piercing the furthest extremities of the night.

I now saw it in terms of universal loss, loss intensified till it became acutely, exactly nothing. Loneliness is such an unbearably, oddly beautiful thing. And so, I turned my eyes again to her phantom, an image that had long ceased to bear any resemblance to reality, but was just that, a phantom, a last remembrance. Her face in my mind was turned away from me and deathly-white, her frozen black hair obscuring her mouth, but a mouth which would be screwed-up bitterly. In my imagination she always appeared in the evening, and was made of night, and was always remote, and was always alone, answering by her steps and sighs the beats of my heart.