square white world

III.

Is it time

a sheering

a shelf

the world

borne up

by what

Is it so much

 

Is it time

by the capillary action

of years of photographs

of looks

of looks lost on one another

Is it so much

 

I had no idea

daylight would be

like this

I had no idea

of love

in the daylight

 

Your eyes are blue

volcanic lakes

 

without depth

without heat

 

simply welling up

so much time

…the reasons someone who’s about to shoot another man thinks he has may vary, but the deed is the same, someone will press the trigger, and when the lead breaks the skin and drills into the cranium and damages a lobe and perforates it and opens a path in the brain, a life with a history and past will be cut short and a body transformed into a bloodstained mass that will fall to the ground, and that fact, which is horrible in itself and can’t in any way be explained or justified, makes all the reasons equivalent; in the middle of the twentieth century it was ideologies, then it was land or the control of resources, reserves of hydrocarbons. …

Do you know the contemporary name for perversity? It’s democracy. If a chimpanzee with a drum becomes popular and amusing, he could be elected president.

– Santiago Gamboa, Night Prayers, trans. Howard Curtis, Europa Editions, 2016, p. 222

…the world wasn’t made for harmony and kindness, but quite the contrary, for confrontation. The world is a boxing ring, a battlefield. And you don’t go to battlefields with smiles and soft words, no, sir, you go armed to the teeth.

– ibid., p. 232

We played with madness (were we fantasizing?) until the afternoon gave my mouth the terrifying smile of the idiot.

– ibid., p. 290

II.

she said

I’m going to talk to you quite openly

and she

apologised for her vulgarity

 

is there a way onward

Juana

by Gamboa

the western cordillero

 

a patch of vomit

made up of the lights

of Bogotá

 

cupped in the hands

of a thousand digits

 

figures of bone

walk the western

horizon

 

still recognisable

moving without acknowledgement

you are watching

 

relations of yours

I ask

 

you trap me in fucking

you trap me

we shut up

we know

 

the identity

we need to show

indifference to

and used to advertise on Titter a link to this.

who is the artist

who the model?

perhaps it reminds me of James Palumbo’s (aka Lord Palumbo of Southwark, member of the UK House of Lords; aka Baron Palumbo, founder of Ministry of Sound and very very rich) novel Tomas.

Letter to the Prime Minister of New Zealand

this in common

poem is problem

and this

 

very important

a sort of program

 

gathering of words

conjunctives

as substantives

of types

of syntactical moments

of verbal tonalities

 

the alternate face

here widened

 

towards the obscure

scintillating

 

with certainty of a

phenomenon

 

not a thought but

process of thought

mirror-like

 

refraction

of the human

 

end

in itself

end

of itself

 

end

germ

 

of an infinity

of horrors

 

reserves in one’s thoughts

hidden intention

charlatanism

addressing an audience

addressing a public

 

whom shall I kill

 

synthesis of all the vertigoes

dictation of memoirs

 

history of mind

absurd by what it seeks

 

great by what it finds

every beginning

 

coincidence

I don’t know what

 

sort of contact between all

and nothing

 

three words

two words

 

the tomb of the poet Edward

this girl couldn’t be buried

buried on a moonlit night

 

the dead girl’s name

Narcissa

who found himself so

in his reflection

 

the cyclical and repetitive functions of life

take love where it has never been

to the end

of the will to

 

killed his puppet

his puppet killed

in favor of a poetry

 

claiming autonomy

through critical self-reference

 

claims

to repressing the developments of intelligence

to depreciating the value of pure research

to taking often atrocious measures against

who consecrated themselves to these things

 

to favoring

even as far as endowed chairs and laboratories

 

worshippers of the idol

to the detriment

independent creators

spiritual richness

 

and they have imposed on the arts

on the sciences

the utilitarian ends which a power

 

founded on declamations and terror

pursues

 

praise of Bergson

 

sameness within vast

elusive differences

 

[all of which, on the poet Paul Valéry

1871-1945, you can read here.]

I.

we all looked and could see nothing

what are we supposed to see

what are we supposed to see

the inexhaustible

the inexhaustible

horizon

 

torn from our hands

Valéry said

I cannot repeat

don’t be so dramatic

the sun fell

in time

the sun fell

 

we spoke of things

one spoke

in the dark

outside

another answered

Valéry

you have to answer for

you have to answer for

him

 

do you have the answer

hidden

in a fold of skin

hidden

between your lips

hiding

behind

the everyday

 

around him

grew the desert

the desert grew

and every day

there

there you are

knots in his fingers

his whole rag head

rag and jag

Buster was not his name

Buster she said

was not his name

 

she whispers

come here

wraps you

wraps you

in grease proof paper

and she wraps you

there you are

well at dawn

there you lie

tied up with a string

a prayer

you cannot answer for

click beautiful click

David Byrne presents one year later … romantic conflagration of the first third of 1000 days …

http://davidbyrne.com/radio/david-byrne-presents-one-year-later

best,

Simon