Days Of The Water Sun

What can the sun want? Everyday it passes, too quickly, unable to stop, failing to voice some message-perhaps a vain warning of a vain tomorrow. Today slipping liquid over the dome like rain running off a beetle’s back...

I’m defenceless against the all.
Outside me, Inside me.
The surface of me.

To trigger the deathly puppy tears wept left in a web undone my naval oozing going before me a belly full of question now lacking the pins to prick it you couldn’t know this new impossible the curse of the un done.

An undeniable heterogeneity ripping the failed fabric to shreds and that’s the only undeniable. Lucky people that knows less.

Inner voicing like a Caliban or Puck now vocations are sherbert blown by ‘casual asides’ of relatively macho peers. Doomed for the bin despite dreams and endeavours.

Don’t go on when you can’t go on when your shuddering limbs turn cardboard and your heart’s a preserve.

Then read Borges’ “There are roofs from which I let myself fall until I am bloody.” and tears spring. Again shudder and if anyone has those years spent quicker than a borrowed pound... Spider beak at my nape.

Sun hair too morning sickly mirror smile last night what was? should I?

Melon face cold nose bath waiting cough should I? Idea of love transferred to a new body a new fantasy.

Somehow happy. Unposted parcels sunbathe on disco desk. Volume’s what’s required. Production. Tit for Tat, eyes for eyes, exchanges, economies.

Breakfast melonbone noseruncough. Moss atop bricks in sun. Everything either in or out of sun. Reflecting kneebone the screen. Everything either on or off screen. Technology our sun god.

Backpain (One to soothe it?) Scratch mine scratch yours exchange economy. Cough Cough Sniff. Scratch Cough and sniff.

My fantasy, reeled out of me last night by wine and want. A pair of sadly angled eyes meaning no harm reeling that silver fishbone of my fantasy up out of me. And when its done I’m empty and no more to say. Did I do too?

Art from affection. To me art’s affectionate. A replica world that doesn’t tell lies.
Not like the well-dressed riddle-talkers rationing love, the impeccable liars whose careers build on genocides unseen.

Windmill holds one flipper aloft as it dies beyond the rooftops. Clever am I? Fattening am I? Nuts create excess. Is that an art theory?

Cloud of words inside like bees awaiting release. Everything inside me, outside me, on the surface of-me.

A well, a well-turned phrase, a well-oiled machine, post-capital?, economies? A temporal economy. Big Ben Big Bang. Just water running through a stream.

Cold, clean water.

Water clean, clean?

??

Everything questionable including question. This one-demensional pursuit this loveless life banishes the explosive and inexplicable. Simply wading around a familiar globe in waterproofs.

Save eachother from hell of youth.

No more practise. All gone, washed away by hoops unjumped through. Stymied by fools with needs to compete. That contingent magic groaning inside like a horde of trapped bees. See the key left at your feet by magic. The moving pavement of magic eventually claims us all.

You find a key. Means nought to you but lots to loser. You find a key, stands for something to you, opens possibility in mind. To the loser, because it opens something important it opens no possibility in mind. A possibility in mind is more than important.

Key’s not there anyway, only as part of a love story. Do you pick it up or not? Can you survive another story? Is it rude to read the cover then return it to the shelf?

The bourgeoise love story is more pragmatic, expedient, budgeted. Thus I’m banished no matter what my qualities or passions.

Wearing a zippered mouth in a hostile land, faking the lingo cos there’s nowhere else to go. They’re everywhere now.

When you wake who knows where you’ve been?

A terrible trilogy of twigs, hats and greyness. Old single people with sticks and the pale sky of the shortest days.

A handskin drying uncontrollably drying you age like a tree twig drying greying so shouldn’t you love? Love the oil to soften you to lubricate to interface life’s chafing to stem your evaporation to cradle your head while it’s tormented like a dandelion clock in clifftop breezez.

Love was what you left at the door to this foreign kingdom, left like a hat on a stand.

The cliffs again come to me, ride here on dark horses. Hot soled and cross-legged I linger purgatorial between all things. Fattening on nuts creating excess.

The unforgiveable sin of celibacy. Fetch me a bandana, a girdle to crush this fattening waist. Save me from vampires who’s idea of mistaken love crushes me.

Unheroic, untravelled, unkempt theorists raid poets raid poetry which explodes from raids on love and pain and joy and want and loss, each themselves a raid on the life we want.

The fools gathered in their isolation on fool’s day, taught lessons by the able, punished for their inablity, disability to succeed.

The nerve-ending backdrop. They have ways of making you talk, good food and wine and loving voices. But every time the sting, the life-shortening sting in the tail.

Here I stay growing fat on nuts banished to sleep. Peer-driven catatonia. Can’t you hear this polite screaming! I’m trapped and rotting. Smiling visitors pluck my irreplaceable fruits.

The illustration of a theory, a poem. The realisation of a need. The end of a means. A piece of economy to exchange.

How cold it is now and how my skin’s transformed by it. Part man part fowl.
Sabotaged often. Loved by few. Serving a sentence of luxury, a sentence by which you grow more guilty the longer you serve.

How unimaginably more clever they are, in their chess-minded trickery and intricate tortures. Ahh! Sport again.

Nails ripping mortar from between bricks. Pissed around by drunkards. Fooled by the able. An angel is a lover not a saint. A dancing, lover of an angel, not me.

Nauseous exhaustion the plight of the bankrupt. There are agents of the wickedness you’ll never know until too late. Agents and angels frame the millieu.

Goodbye. You entered the labyrinth without saying goodbye. I’m left surrounded by fangs. (Ever hands reaching into my many pockets) No more a poem, no more a letter, no more a theory, story, essay. Blood curdling whispers from an angry spine. Feathers alighting in molten tar.

This is flight, how we can fly. So many bifurcating roads, all refused. Some run, some are transfixed. I am transfixed, fatally impaled by their wit.

The fashion for utopias died long ago, instead they exchange poisonous gifts, disruptive, viral ideas. It is a serpent’s race of cold-blooded liars. The devil can’t lose here today.

Hey you! you who destroyed like a cat with a mouse, you who built your corner-shop petit empire on so many crucifixions, you petty bloated bourgeois who stole my youth and all my love...but nothing I can say won’t strip yet more from me to line your pockets. You breed hate and thrive on its returns.

I’m big my big brother tells me. So pigmys out of my way. You expedient chilldren of expedient parents. You very products of expedient mating. Where have I gone.

Where have I gone. Perhaps left behind in a pen store searching for the ultimate nib.

History allows me any tirade. History won’t let go of even childrens’ ankles. History pours like custard on the fresh banana of every ripe idea. It is a quality. history, a particular spice to add to your flavour.

Hostility is the majority of experience. No surprise that mothers cry when children leave. The saddest part is there’s none to blame. To blame is itself a hostile crime. To complain is of course impolite.

But a lead umbrella and cape would only crush you to the spot.

I’m not the one to answer, I’m a slave to fortune.
Files of dusty best-shots prove it.

Waking tragically again straw hair curse. Then wallowing through a Friday 13th of a Monday 29th Jan 97.

Why this idea that we approach our fantasy, even obliquely or heroically. I turn against the grain of dream as if to toughen shoulders just as salmon swim upstream. At continual crossroads this the way I choose.

Elsewhere clifftops are bathed in dew and there another I is fulfilled. That I that never met your kind.

Workless, confused day. Lonely wasted day. Spent repentant.

Honeychin day, dumb day, breadcrumb day, no sun day. Pitiful wreck.

These days between Christmas and New Year, particularly vacant days, days of the water sun.

Can’t you hear this pilot screaming.

They said he left his briefcase on the desk and died of brain injuries. Don’t we all?

The news will always make you cry.

They said he was muttering some Buddhist proverb.

Last spring in the rose garden she muttered and sang from a prayer book.
I also read myself high in the hot early sun.

What special intense days they were, and all mine unlike now, since dragged into teeth of the dragon, recoiling from foul breaths, polluted by sick buildings and power corridors redolent of stale biscuits and sour feet.

Dear Basho saved me then so well.

But the self-made beautiful thus cried out to be destroyed. Wolves soon came sniffing dressed-up as beauty. One day get it right help yourself no-one else, become fantasy number one.

And Camus saved then so well.
And Plath too
Oh! and BuddahKrishnaChrist.
And Santoka

But what I saw then, did I describe? Yes in scrawls, in notes and little scribbled highs and petals squashed between pages. History or rubbish? It depends.

Set out to be misunderstood as to be understood is not worth precious while. Set out to be marginalised so as not to partake in the back-slapping ‘discourse’ of another academic cul-de-sac, or a bloody-handed gangster brotherhood.

Sadly you must lose, if only to avoid condoning this vileness.

“Only the man who strives to fail deserves our trust” said that man Cioran.

Poetry now driven out, burnt out, hollowed out, cut out. Suffering these duldrum days of the water sun. Short, cold days, alone days, guilty, desperate, grown-old days, do-nothing-right days. Do-nothing-and-that’s-not- right days.

Hands grow hard, Fit only for karate chopping. Belly grows soft. Back grows pained, should sleep on soft or hard things? When sleep, your last resort and only refuge, becomes thus problematic you mine new seams of hidden doom.

What cruel tricks that the elderly can’t sleep.

The water sun plays on the glass of my tank a dappled greeting waved through the willow. Windmill’s lone flipper throws a salute over rooftops.

The dryness, the sickness, the exhaustion. Am I preyed upon by invisible vampires?
Sady some days that is true.

Sun on the glittering velvet da-glo moss. Sound of the computer’s fan like a mini-jet taxiing. A real jet cruising high above scoring a motorboat’s wake in a mint thrust across liquid sky.

The news is sad again. The PM is on holiday.

Does the flower, like the human, have to strive to grow through weeds towards the sun or ...

Telephone call interrupts.

If we let ourselves fall down to the sub-human would some force raise us? Or isn’t the condition of a flower a lofty aspiration only superhumans could achieve.

What does the sun want? Everyday it passes, unable to stop, failing to communicate its message-perhaps a vain warning of tomorrow. Today it runs liquid over the dome like a drip off a beetle’s back.

Pitiful days and nights becalmed, hands growing dry turning twigs, belly inflating on nuts creating a mirror of the days of the water sun, in no style.

And yet now the winds and rains have come, up from out of the West, bringing with them, not only sensations and scents of cliffs and moors, borne in spores amidst the turbulent air, but also times past returned, seemingly returned, prompting goosebumps and tears, as if for unpredictable moments old happinesses were never left at beaches or on hills, left in order to return sensibly home, but foolishly kept forever with me, about me in a memory made of myriad pockets.

But still the sky is placid, limpid, promising nothing.

Perhaps the winds brought the truth of gently, ever-so-slowly dying, so that life drifted rather than flashed before my eyes. Why seek happiness when it can fall unexpectedly like this, like the softest powder from mother’s hands.

A crocus, a snowdrop and a daffodil tantalised by the bait of spring taunting me from the tragedy of dead winter skin and the ship you have loaded once again sails without you and what they mean by ‘there is no bourgeois’ is a form of censorship to hide the fact that all is bourgeoise.

Tornados have breathed and rested and tigers have swallowed their masters. All the downtrodden, hidden words held at bay by the silence of lying thieves, testosterone-trampled flowers unliving outside the territory of history. The gangster style is everywhere appropriated to set in place the next regime. From the Cotswold 4x4s to ... you know.

Anyway, now that you have played that trick again, the trick of robbery with assasination, now that I’ve provided a little step for you by kneeling as a patsy for you to tread, all I can do, apart from return your violence, is to walk away and watch you, like those before you, grow fat on the essence of my life.

Cut-throat gangsters are always silent as they discourage you with their silence. Silent when you ask for their opinions while they are hoovering up the best of you to serve their purposes. Of course they play dumb and act the fool, the most frightening people always act dumb. Dumb, blood-stained, lying, theiving assasinators who, paradoxically, many love. They say more than anything about the status quo, they, again paradoxically, are the conservative force in society, maintaining the dynasty of polite hatred. If you want to understand my actions, I act so as not be complicit with the murders and genocides which result from the above, although it is never expedient and costs me dear.

Story love, story love, I’m still so seduced by that old story love. But that’s another story.

End

© 1997 Paul O'Kane

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