Like a picture
slipping picture, doubled ricochet, repeats words varying "let go"
lets go or hinders fearful stickiness, object subject
subjected, slimy, dug in in a humid flat alive
two dimensional with separate vanishing point
dreaming gain?
how shall you regain health?
this is how you come / to tell the truth
a fist expands inside her mental body / sudden / fluid uninterrupted
past happiness a midgy ox bow lake
features named after evil ones - with humour -
isn't it lovely here?
Incubation
release me, she cries;
but the tree is unresponsive;
please release me, let me go;
all the trunks move to easy music, jerkily,
ants dragging eggs from daylight
the gardener steps across...
are these two going to fuck or fight?
as in a dream she wakes him;
as if asleep,
he does not respond;
time to embalm;
it is given up to priests and technicians;
but, at night, he comes to her, fever-persistent,
sweating, crying out to her to seek forgiveness,
a little dynamo, a spinning top, where the eyes had been;
she sticks out her tongue
and he is speechless,
stiff with night's paralysis...
are these two going to fight or fuck?
heads talking
one word
for words
question similarity
sweat
dread
all kinds of nonsense courtesy
what he doesn't she does later
who said that?
shift work
they turn
devices and styles of behaviour
objectification
whatever she says
her waving from below the crossroads
it is finished
you wanker!
what a fool
while she converses,
he imagines,
providing continuity
setting fires
games they're playing, serious as the angels encircling space;
don't worry, losing's great, it's still warm, I cannot
move, the cold affects body and brain;
let's get on with it before we're ash; warm
me up, she says; leaning against
him, near old fire, something like flame gets tinder;
he licks and crackles and licks; she talks him down;
but plays draughts, containment
breaking, loses interest; making a fist of it:
I thought you understood, she says, you said you
understood: we are all always alone, I had given hope, says one of them,
say both, abusing themselves, glowing, in the dark cylinder they've imagined of a
sphere
Beginning in the
where recollections, leave this terrible place,
falsely reflect, becoming bacchanalian, in small space;
they are alone;
they become mad; they become officious; become pedagogical; inventive;
and one of them tires; and one of them locates its violence
the other joins
and both co-operate,
each other encircling,
making incompetent loves,
small creatures that cannot manage to walk from their distortions;
and still words persist
Time to die
a thing it finds itself doing, leaving the worst behind,
unindividuated, in confined space,
all of him goes out together, inventing world to inhabit;
they don't talk much, but it does get physical --
-- everything repeats with inadequate variation, everything
splits; time to die
Copyright © Lawrence Upton
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