For the moment, the Big Picture (or the Pig Bicture) can be accessed only by means of the Loose Canon (or the Coose Lanon), the Drifting Molecule, the Carcinogenic Radical. Après moi, the return to Classical Proportion. My sanity is a contagion.
Although we have not smoked for many a minute, we are tempted to ask the barman for one from his own pack.
Let us concentrate on the vertigo produced by easing up to the great plate-glass windows, which are all that prevent us from plunging 12 storeys into the Bay of Bengal.
– The Taj Mahal Hotel
JANA THINKS OF JOHN
Jana comes out of her house. Wearing almost nothing. The cup is still in her hand. She forgot to leave it on the table. The cold reminds her that she has neglected to dress beyond her underwear and her slip. She turns back. Shivering. Damn you, damn you, John.
She doesn’t know G-d has already killed her, and John, and Teri her Persian, and yours truly, who loves her more fiercely than John or Teri, merely because she is a woman. She doesn’t know that G-d has killed everyone.
Jana was with me once. When she was younger. When she was experimenting with the old. I want to get to know your body, Jikan. Oh sure. This is sufficiently grotesque, Jana, without my undressing. But she doesn’t call out my name as she returns to her unlocked door.
Me, I understand. John, I understand. Jana, I understand, although I hate to lose a naked woman. But Teri, why was Teri killed, as soon as G-d imagined her?
I was one of the things that was put into Jana. Once you have been put in, you have been put in forever. That is love. Sometimes it is greater than Death, sometimes smaller, sometimes the same size.
John has been killed, but that is not why his name is in her throat. It is because she is dismantled in her need of him. It used to be some kind of love but now it is beyond that in the magnitude of pain and dislocation. She has utterly forgotten that she has been killed. Do not comment on this condition unless you’ve been there.
Still, life goes on. Jana thinks of John, not me. He takes her out to the racing car garage, and she guesses which is his. She is wearing a white sweater which she bought when she was an Italian. (Milan. Mussolini’s train station. Kind, grass-stained women I never saw again. All of us killed under the tidal beauty of coming and going.) They kiss. He is off the hook. Her essence is the very leatherness of the bucket seats of his Ferrari.
And over here, my destiny whispers, “Someday in your arms, she will come to understand that she never did anything. And then she will be killed. Many like her will come to you. Many have already come. You have a job. You are a man-at-work, and you have been killed, along with the whole barber-shop, without a hitch.”
MY TIME
My time is running out
and still
I have not sung
the true song
the great song
I admit
that I seem
to have lost my courage
a glance at the mirror
a glimpse into my heart
makes me want
to shut up forever
so why do you lean me here
Lord of my life
lean me at this table
in the middle of the night
wondering
how to be beautiful
LOOKING THROUGH MY DREAMS
I was looking through my dreams
when I saw myself
looking through my dreams
looking through my dreams
and so on and so forth
until I was consumed
in the mysterious activity
of expansion and contraction
breathing in and out at the same time
and disappearing naturally
up my own asshole
I did this for 30 years
but I kept coming back
to let you know how bad it felt
Now I’m here at the end of the song
the end of the prayer
The ashes have fallen away at last
exactly as they’re supposed to do
The chains have slowly
followed the anchors
to the bottom of the sea
It’s merely a song
merely a prayer
Thank you, Teachers
Thank you, Everyone
So Do You
Because you are beautiful, but smelled bad, I knew you had been killed. And you felt the same about me. You said, “You are an elegant old man, but you stink.” After the long event of naked intervention, you brought your hands together and bowed. “Thank you,” you said. “That was the first time I never did anything.” Many are the lovely things I have been told about my luck, but this was surely the loveliest. “How do I smell now?” I asked. “Worse than ever,” you said. “Exactly my impression about you,” I said. Then you went back to France (or was it Holland?) and we have remained fast friends ever since. Sometimes, when the hummingbirds are still, I can smell you rotting halfway across the world.
Now IN MY ROOM
O my Love
I found You again
I went out
for a pack of cigarettes
and there You were
I bowed to everyone
and they rejoiced with me
I lost myself
in the eyes of a dog
who loved You
The heat lifted me up
The traffic bounced me
naked into bed
with a book about You
and a bottle of cold water
THE DARKNESS ENTERS
The darkness enters my hotel room
like a curtain coming through a curtain
billowing into different shapes of darkness
wings here a gas mask there,
simple things and double things
I sit upright on the edge of the bed
and I impede the falling darkness
with my many personalities
just as a high spiked fence
with the tips painted gold
interferes with the French rain
For a number of luminous hours
it is a standoff
Often during this highly charged segment
of my usually monotonous life
a woman enters the room with a pass-key
and in small ways manages to communicate
that we might have lived our lives together
had circumstances been otherwise
I like it especially
when she addresses me in the familiar form
of her incomprehensible language
but always in
