Between Us
They kicked us out of heaven.
In pools of broken black glass
we took to the streets
lost wondering as staggering
we float through pain, unseen
hugging walls turning inward,
to light quickly in ashen alleys,
to keep silent still watch.
Conceive, there in the shadows,
always the stuporous agony of embodiment
follows unthinking,
stealthy peer, then shoved once again into plain view.
The ragged electrical we:
beckons glance
supplicate
analyze.
Frozen trails slip, through crowds, over tears and
ghostly slow motion broken storefront.
Tempered glass slice feet.
So screaming through the sky, so far was the fall.
To the skin as wind streaks:
dividing
fanning.
As veins spread consciousness across new possibilities,
united with glimmering shards of the vast catalogue,
subject to the tribulations, of ten thousand smashed windows,
fed back deep, through the gasping foreign stream of us.
Das neunte mal ich versuchte. *
Settling.
Close eyes so only the caress of triumph
alone sounds the irrelevancy of finality.
Space between sounds writes patterns
onto history, silent icy words
and meanings between
and relationships between
and eternity.
Look, silence broken sound.
Look, tired senseless old.
Look, long leaking emptiness.
Pull back, turn back.
Turn to face them:
that constant disappearance
in darkness
of sound.
These are wavering notes.
As walls and fingers hold together,
rushing among one another
falling slowly
quickly fading
always returning,
To crystalline remnants, each the same in its solemnity
for each, decoding constant histories,
for: (you)(I)(ever)
street. night. hallway.
To the crowds,
this tiny candlelight would not shed wide enough
to distinguish beyond this shuttered
attic window.
self. praise. pity.
With fingers pressing soft wick glows.
Pull back, turn back.
Void.
Then phosphenes:
flit flicker over reflected window along street sides,
sitting in window thresholds.
The fabric of us,
woven smoky ribbons cross spotted light trails,
unraveling in vain comprehension.
Down from up,
life to death to death,
love to love to loathing,
you me we.
We sat back slowly on the
green Rhine banks
as glass black water flowed
we sat.
Sometimes it reaches out forever,
as a river of smoke.
“Sometimes I blame them for my deaths.”
Those crowds go up in smoke
with fingers flying grey go streaking
across the sky
and light quickly
millions upon the street.
“Sometimes I drown myself in this river.”
Dark wet death,
cold black ash for breath.
As blackened skies close eyes.
As throat folds forward
sparking points light on mind
arcing into the distance
thrown like some lofty wind lifts.
Within hollow volumes of silent swirling sounds
of air
rushing to nothing,
is the processional of fainter growing light.
“Why me. Why now.”
Another flame
sputters against burnt fingers.
Light fog wanders up, lingers across:
conversation
struggle for history.
Obscuring slightly the lucid ground
written into the murk of figurality
in consistent codes, configurations
and reductive pathways.
“It was never the seen.”
Only experience
that climbs across us
reaching to wipe away the truth:
the spaces between us that seal away
such redundancy, the too late, and the
moments between the seconds
that carry them.
Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est. **
Have we not wandered the same streets?
Within the void of those backlit
instants
We, are suffering.
