and you are an idiot
outside there is baying that meets the seagulls' dying fall
ruffled barking rises to reach this inverted angels’ hierarchy
part-wing, part-leg, part fur
intelligence is the recognition of life, the pricked ear, the epistemic twitch
the other night a voice wonders if all the satellites and waves and messages
have pushed the angels higher, skyunseeable, or dragged them down to earth, chimera
making love with the machine sans sex, sans desire, sans words, form-electricity-vibration
and you have turned your radio off but it wont go off like that episode of The Prisoner when he keeps smashing it and it wont stop playing and somehow this is terrifying the sounds diegetic or non-diegetic can you ever remember which is which and here in this scene it is both you must say, the emitting of and sound of screaming, and when you get high do you listen or do you talk? The talking people listen and the quiet people speak, the carnival flip ‘and in the morning they say thank you, but I can never remember what they told me’
and your heart is heavy
the gargoyle lies there asleep, at the bottom, his hand stretching up, unthinking, to periodically grab the harp strings tightrope, Dowland for demons, Screwtape and Meddle, drawing energy from the manna of laughter, eating darkmattercake, downing the wretched fuel.
And there is static, satanic
And interference
cross-purpose
And you have to get through this: the wooden circles around the eyes
The weariness that is not yet wisdom, yet could it be? For God’s sake, who let hope out of the jar again? A new facecream from Pandora, brightens up the world!
And you are an idiot
outside of this city, babbling, at odds, hot, sad, counting the hours reading tools and medieval disputations, lacklustre, lucklustre, tired, the clock will eat itself
you are babbling again, no clear stream only the popping of mud
chaos is the unnecessary multiplication of the nothing
carnage is the unnecessary multiplication of the flesh
your numbers are falling off, too thinly painted on the dice, not bored through, probability like cigarette paper
And there is no saying, only doing
And most of doing is not doing which makes it hard when what you want to do is something not nothing but the good nothing is the letting-be, the calm, the by-your-side, the peace, the prayer, the loving sigh, the gratitude, the grace, the everything means something
and the bad nothing, the play-acting, the rising pitch, the broken mirror, broken record, the discordant repetition, the choir of pigs, polyphonic misery
you must sleep, sometimes
yes,