Power Politics (3 page)

After all you are quite
ordinary: 2 arms 2 legs
a head, a reasonable
body, toes & fingers, a few
eccentricities, a few honesties
but not too many, too many
postponements & regrets but

you'll adjust to it, meeting
deadlines and other
people, pretending to love
the wrong woman some of the
time, listening to your brain
shrink, your diaries
expanding as you grow older,

growing older, of course you'll
die but not yet, you'll outlive
even my distortions of you

and there isn't anything
I want to do about the fact
that you are unhappy & sick

you aren't sick & unhappy
only alive & stuck with it.

Small tactics

1

These days my fingers bleed
even before I bite them

Can't play it safe, can't play
at all any more

Let's go back please
to the games, they were
more fun and less painful

2

You too have your gentle
moments, you too have
eyelashes, each of your eyes
is a different colour

in the half light
your body stutters against
me, tentative as moths, your
skin is nervous

               I touch
your mouth, I don't
want to hurt
you any more
now than I have to

3

Waiting for news of you
which does not come, I have to
guess you

    You are
in the city, climbing the stairs
already, that is you at the door

or you have gone, your last
message to me left
illegible on the mountain
road, quick
scribble of glass and blood

4

For stones, opening
is not easy

Staying closed is
less pain but

your anger finally
is more dangerous

To be picked up and thrown
(you won't stop) against

the ground, picked up
and thrown again and again

5

It's getting bad, you weren't
there again

Wire silences, you trying

to think of something you haven't
said, at least to me

Me trying to give
the impression it isn't

getting bad         at least
not yet

6

I walk the cell, open the window,
shut the window, the little
motors click
and whir, I turn on all the
taps and switches

I take pills, I drink water, I kneel

O electric lights
that shine on my suitcases and my fears

Let me stop caring
about anything but skinless
wheels and smoothly
running money

Get me out of this trap, this
body, let me be
like you, closed and useful

7

What do you expect after this?
Applause? Your name on stone?

You will have nothing
but me and in a worse way than before,

my face packed in cotton
in a white gift box, the features

dissolving and re-forming so quickly
I seem only to flicker.

There are better ways of doing this

It would be so good if you'd
only stay up there
where I put you, I could
believe, you'd solve
most of my religious problems

you have to admit it's easier
when you're somewhere else

but today it's this
deserted mattress, music over-
heard through the end wall, you giving me
a hard time again for the fun
of it or just for

the publicity, when we leave each other
it will be so
we can say we did.

yes at first you
go down smooth as
pills, all of me
breathes you in and then it's

a kick in the head, orange
and brutal, sharp jewels
hit and my
hair splinters

             the adjectives
fall away from me, no
threads left holding
me, I flake apart
layer by
layer down
quietly to the bone, my skull
unfolds to an astounded flower

regrowing the body, learning
speech again takes
days and longer
each time / too much of
this is fatal

The accident has occurred,
the ship has broken, the motor
of the car has failed, we have been
separated from the others,
we are alone in the sand, the ocean,
the frozen snow

I remember what I have to do
in order to stay alive,
I take stock of our belongings
most of them useless

I know I should be digging shelters,
killing seabirds and making
clothes from their feathers,
cutting the rinds from cacti, chewing
roots for water, scraping through
the ice for treebark, for moss

but I rest here without power
to save myself, tasting
salt in my mouth, the fact that
you won't save me

watching the mirage of us
hands locked, smiling,
as it fades into the white desert.

I touch you, straighten the sheet, you turn over
in the bed, tender
sun comes through the curtains

Which of us will survive
which of us will survive the other

1

We are hard on each other
and call it honesty,
choosing our jagged truths
with care and aiming them across
the neutral table.

The things we say are
true; it is our crooked
aims, our choices
turn them criminal.

2

Of course your lies
are more amusing:
you make them new each time.

Your truths, painful and boring
repeat themselves over & over
perhaps because you own
so few of them

3

A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?

4

Does the body lie
moving like this, are these
touches, hairs, wet
soft marble my tongue runs over
lies you are telling me?

Your body is not a word,
it does not lie or
speak truth either.

It is only
here or not here.

He shifts from east to west

Because we have no history
I construct one for you

making use of what
there is, parts of other people's
lives, paragraphs
I invent, now and then
an object, a watch, a picture
you claim as yours

(What did go on in that red
brick building with the fire
escape? Which river?)

(You said you took
the boat, you forget too much.)

I locate you on streets, in cities
I've never seen, you walk
against a background crowded
with lifelike detail

which crumbles and turns grey
when I look too closely.

Why should I need
to explain you, perhaps
this is the right place for you

The mountains in this hard
clear vacancy are blue tin
edges, you appear
without prelude midway between
my eyes and the nearest trees,
your colours bright, your
outline flattened

suspended in the air with no more
reason for occurring
exactly here than this billboard,
this highway or that cloud.