whole anthology

bandage up me eye

with my own history

toussaint a slave

with vision

what happen to de Caribs and

de Arawaks too

a healing star

among the wounded

I checking out me own history

I carving out me identity

a shaven head

full of powerful incantations

the little fishing boats

strung out like bunting

a tuna, the dark prince

muscular dangerous

gradually we too learned

to be silent

he must have wondered

which had been the better way to die

paper that lets

the light shine through

this is what

could alter things

pages smoothed and stroked

and turned transparent with attention

maps too

the sun shines through their borderlines

fine slips […] might

fly our lives like paper kites

an architect could use all this, place layer over layer

luminous script over numbers over line

never wish to build again

with brick or block

trace a grand design

with living tissue

raise a structure

that was never meant to last

turned into

your skin

spools of suffering

set out in ordered rows

his hands which did not tremble then

though seem to now

a stranger’s features

faintly start to twist

a hundred agonies

in black and white

between the bath

and pre-lunch bears

spasms of

paper red

all my words flattened

rolled, turned into felt

the world overflowing

like a treasure chest

the dive pulled

freely against the sky an ornamental stitch

I went into your bedroom

released a song bird from its cage

suddenly he

awoke and was running

his sweat

heavy

a green hedge

that dazzled with rifle fire

lugged a rifle

numb as a smashed arm

the patriotic tear

that had brimmed in his eye

cold clockwork

of the stars and the nations

a yellow hare

that rolled like a flame

its mouth wide

open silent

king honour

human dignity etcetera

his terror’s touchy

dynamite

you can listen to the thing you fear

forgetting it pummels your house too

strange it is

a huge nothing that we fear

we build our houses squat

sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate

but there are no trees,

no natural shelter

you might think the sea is company

exploding comfortably down on the cliffs

That’s my last duchess painted on the wall

looking as if she were alive

twas not her husband’s presence only

called that spot of joy into the duchess’ cheek

I gave commands

then all smiles stopped together

notice neptune though

taming a sea horse

ranked my gift of a nine-hundred years

old name with anybody’s

one summer evening

led by her

the horizon’s utmost boundary

far above was nothing but stars and the gray sky

my brain worked with

a dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being

huge and mighty forms

that do not live like living men

moved slowly through the mind by day

and were a trouble to my dreams

lustily I dipped

my oars into the silent lake

I left it as a child

but my memory of it is sunlight clear

It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants

but I am branded by an impression of sunlight

That child’s vocabulary I carried here

like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar

there once

was a country

the bright

filled paperweight

I can’t get it off my tongue

it tastes like sunlight

my city takes me

dancing through the city of walls

accuse me of

being dark in their free city

my shadow falls

as evidence of sunlight

I wander thro’

each charter’ed street

mark in every face I meet

marks of weakness, marks of woe

the mind-forg’d

manacles I hear

every blackning

church appalls

runs in blood

down palace walls

and blights

with plagues the marriage hearse

the merciless

iced east winds that knive us

worried by

silence

but

nothing happens

dull rumour

of some other war

what

are we doing here

poignant misery

of dawn

war lasts, rain soaks

and clouds sag stormy

dawn massing

in the east her melancholy army

sudden successive flights of

bullets streak the silence

less deadly than

the air that shudders black with snow

is it

that we are dying

our ghosts

drag home

love of god

seems dying

this frost will fasten

on this mud and us

half-known

faces

their eyes

are ice

on

another occasion

probably armed

possibly not

all of

the same mind

three of a kind

all letting fly

I see every round

as it rips through his life

there on the ground

sort of inside out

tosses his guts

back into his body

end of story

except not really

blood-shadow

stays on the street

bursts again

through the doors

the drink and the drugs

won’t flush him out

here

in my head

his bloody life

in my bloody hands