Tissue Of Truths
Little cameos,
pocket machines, sometimes helvetically perfect,
self contained, in moto perpetuo,
others unfinished with gears awry,
random spars of unburnished raw substance
projecting, unsignifying, in stark rebuke
of the maker’s craft;
or puzzle boxes, matter, substance, vessel
in mock unity, in single voiced cacophony;
never-watertight essays in gifting complexity.
Observable yes, but exceeding observation,
as though extending unseen into metaspacial dimensions,
planetary dice that show differing glyphs
as their faces rise above the limb,
or cross the terminator.
Or sometimes nothing like that!
Sometimes great howling fucking screams of songs!
Incantations, superstitious OCD rituals
and incoherent vomitoria and ragged beasts,
and signals set in motion and repeating like tics,
and bombers dispatched beyond recall,
and violent scripts triggered by secret words
like ‘mustard’ or ‘death’. Yes,
the gibbering of a madman in a reference library:
‘What is sweeter than honey? Sexual intercourse.’
Sometimes muscle: tensioned sinew
or that heartbreaking valvetronic protein,
the heart. Heart of a youth,
singing her little heart out,
or terse, toned, twanging resonance
of an older, wiser economy, ruthlessly bereft
of tattoos or other crimes. A bell tuned
to answer recognition’s clapper
with its maker’s needful pitch.
Sometimes insensible bloody assault, selfish sharing,
anaesthetic shout, unpremeditated importunity.
Campanologist, victim, time-teller,
eavesdropper, die roller, listener, reader:
giver of meaning to fragments of code.
Chooser of meaning! Maker! Maker of meaning…
Makers of little cameos supplicate you;
generations of howlers crowd your antechamber
begging your indulgence, entreating you
to bestow the given upon their gifts;
to understand.
To grasp complete in all its overwhelming irreducibility
that sole specific instance of
the ineffable, inscrutable, untransmittable business
of being self, and other, and having to die.
Sometimes inconsequential jokes
or life affirming observations;
sometimes simply rhymes.
Always utterance, utter failure
of all other signifying means;
parole of last resort, beyond retort,
tissue of truths, reifying dreams.
Midi-Pyrénées, August 2010
