Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
René Mutumé Aug 2013
He makes a wide ring around my feet, as
if him tied to me
or me tied to it - moving me over
the polished grass, taking my mind away
from its machinery;
his urgency is mine for a time, mellow
violent arcs within arcs, splintering
between fork tail and mate, deciding which mood
their pattern will make, finally the image of dance
ends, where the world is carried further
by the replicants of their colour
on the hand of skin,
between thumb, and fore finger

tapping a key board with one speaker
in the best room the dusk can buy,
the sonata shuts off,
eyes made of oil passing over the brim,
shivering with innate worlds smashing on a plate

unslaved gambles and flushing light,
suns night colouring thought in endless epigram,
letting the conduits and candles melt down,
into the folding pool, to journey out

wolves storming bones with silk, and
silence, passion without conscience,
a planet seducing the hive, so acutely mad
that, until it stops to roll the bread in its hands
letting its animals eat
and love first
it cannot grow

a swallow followed me back, the village gathers
into concrete ***** of feral child scream,
and the weeds burst through the concrete, not knowing
that heavens humour mocks everything below,
the local news, the national news, and any news,
make your atoms ache if they join hands for too long

but later
we form one walk,
where our feet whip the path
and signal to the storm with the gestures of our own
that we make in confidence;
turning the lights on,
where they are not,
buying the last tickets
to the last opera, and letting it sing
purging the stage,
and letting us dance up;
feeding the sky
as our joy tells the rest,
it can just wait,
for today.
René Mutumé Aug 2013
Nineteen twenty ways
to love the same photo, I
remember, it all.

The blubbering moon,
was thumping like itself;
no matter, we go!

We entered the room,
and we became an image,
and drank until full.

Illuminating
hot seat, the material
IKEA, alone,

pristine sounds of loss,
a man and woman dancing
each others eyes, there.

Midnight morning fly,
buzzing flea-like, almost gone.
My window opens.

All the yakking dead.
My porch- old wood and sunset,
smoke diving within.

Suffocate us sea!
If you dare drink what we have!
Our stomachs fit you!

The Titanic floats,
the night swim will carry us,
calmly to ourselves.

Opaque sea-gulls fly;
we are but moon beams seeking.
Igniting ripples.

The taste of salt shouts,
it devours our tiredness.
Running beside us.

Half shore nearing us,
no other bodies near us,
we know only peace.

Inside our madness
there is every dream which wakes
wet steps, standing up.

Skin inked by needle,
below your growing wild hair,
moving, as it stays,

A religious book,
its pages moving in wind,
brown with gentle time.

Negative film roll,
opal, and doused with liquid,
so we are, so still.

Permeating dream
a leaf from burning tree branch
settling in grass.

Sudden flower bloom,
I watch you grow as days change.
Time, can never be.

Holocaustic love,
returning to the swap mind,
nothing stays buried.

The last beggar hangs,
he was a poet, a friend.
Servant girl watching.

Holograph song sings,
she is more awake than words.
I smile back at her.

Doorless buildings shine,
travelling up beyond us,
the meeting begins.

The office suite melts,
only listening to data.
So much for talking…

Peyote smoked.
Old tribes knowing how it goes.
Perfectly happy.

Madigras come now!
Alive smokin drunk street life!
Masks bleeding with ghosts.

Mine, yours, lit by fire.
Lets join the raining parade,
and grab a chicken.

They do it in the ethereal range of our eye’s linking hands,
our bodies swaying to the din of infinite types of drum life,
happy to be ours, enough to fill every street with realms,
packed dead-masked as New Orleans is definitely new my love – - !
the bar door requires a kick from our ripened legs,
it shatters the sweat stairs as we walk down finding the ground
inside leaving the painted parade to flood in on itself,
the chorus is tap tap tapped and stamped by the bar-man ready here
to cool us down and let us choose from any drink we wish.

In thick New Orleans accent he says:

“You been swimmin’ in the big Bayou brotha-sista.”

But it’s enough for us to answer him from the photo behind his bar.

We let him touch us, we sit frozen in front of a box camera and wonder
what’ll happen as the bulb flashes.

I pull ma Creole queen into me, as all galllreees open brotha-sista!

The photo be taken quick enough to ****** life from shotgun.

You’ll just keep on sittin there wontcha ma cher,
while these gumbo ya-ya come down ma stairs.

**** Mardi graaa…

A couple come down the wooden stairs.

Helping each other stand from too much street juice.

Looking back from the photo the barman knows that the couple
heard him talking, they slap down on the bar stools as he kisses the
photo of him and his wife.

“Well they be a truer than you or me cher, dontcha think?”

He says smiling back, more cheer than teeth, as the conversation begins,
undisturbed by the pulsing sounds from above.
René Mutumé Aug 2013
And the world was never mad,
it simply forgets where it should place it all,
some crave the stone
where it was carved into the top of blood alters,
and can’t find a chisel good enough;
even though the clothes are piling up and there’s dents in the floor boards;
some like it when its saved until the weekend and blown in through the
mouth
whilst it fights for air with liquids costing five pounds per word;
the pitch squeezing up through all walls no matter where you’re sat,
and what you’ve got.

A face looking at you from across the underground train.
A paragraph says nothing, even the rats look for gods in the rain,
cars plummet by caring nothing of your thoughts,
where they centre in wild spins through the air somersaulting;
colliding snakes made from your favourite director.
The world was never mad – and proves it by the chance to place it all,
and take it all in from a smooth place in the grass, or desert,
or black room lit by giant screen.

The room plays with your will, rolling a 6
and a 6
and a 6
and an angel
1.

And the avalanches roar in cascade worthy of your soul and logic,
and you walk out to the street rolling your own numbers,
in your own cup – it grows by giant star -
but is still not mad. It never was.

The splendour of going home in the peace of neon signs,
and the smoke of the city inhaled, by your lungs, once
or twice,
(depending on your vice)
bringing us back to zero -
passing up your thigh bone with all the messages
the basement
locked away
for a while.

The words are clear, fleeing from flashing screen to cortex,
hastening, and flushing away
whatever was lost in the gambling room.
You reply with a smile.
Death cannot.

And madness is a choice of joining, and doing.
Time shines behind a moon made of marbled skin tonight,
a view from your bed that awakens you without you waking fully,
five roman pillars in front of your window,
a floor sprayed with construction work all around you,
a balcony where you thought there was just a wall,
opening on the same plane as the statuesque building on your lawn;
and to your right, a grassy path leading
to a church, enough to wake-
and see it again
knowing that your room has gone back,
no sun, no darkness, no fireflies in your hand
or mind, no silhouettes,
no choke;
no passers by, no question;
just a question of heat
within your body,
timed to the perfect decibel of your hair
or mine

Singing it out in some room made of nothing but the clarity
of our lost bodies, calling to the ceiling and sky
to mount as much as they wish
because our arms are suited and dressed;
we’ve come a long way,
we’ve been bored in the pit of dinner parties
and holiday tables
drank water in patience of the waiter exploding,
opened a steak and a vegetable
spewing its guts to time;

Call it what’s left in our DNA to know,
call it anything but madness,
it was created the same way bad food was,
chipping paint
without someone
to look out for it,
horses flying through the fields,
wind making water fly from their eyes,
as they run,

no riders
upon their backs.
René Mutumé Jul 2013
The afternoon’s season is meditating sun,
It takes you completely into the rock, and lays you down.
Soon the waves will rise up by the nooks,
suing the sand moss, and disturbing them
as they are devoured by the daily tide, once more.

Once my tourist eyes are no longer needed
by the hovering gulls penetrating the occasional air, and
the dog owners have taken their dogs home,
there will be peace.

But until then, I walk through the dunes with you,
where peace grows in the battering shocks of
the sea, rolling up nearer and nearer; the beach staggers
away in languid smiles, that bow in the focus of our night,
shooting our silhouettes across the shore.
René Mutumé Jul 2013
It'll be alright by the lightening
it helps us walk like itself;
walking up through the ceiling window
of my flat
we link myth and flesh
amongst the cherub jokes and sinuous cloud,
hands shaking pulse in the concaves,
death dance and phoenix breeze,
the prayer and the wet
rolling down the slates
harmony in our butts, rolling the storm back, and watching it all
happen.

The night spills its last beer like weighted sweat.
The opera accepts our tickets and slices us down with gallous applause
Where do our limbs stop being the night?
They do not, so it seems, and spread the thunder out
from our one hand
to another;
the nails, and skull, of one, open
fist, retaken-
and driven up
from the worlds core, remedy in scent
the talent of our blood,
damming the poison, allowed to evolve
inside cell
and be another - celestial light, that not only drives the heard,
but is at home in the energy of waking
life.

The lightening passing down through gelatenous night clouds,
caring that there is only sense in the warmth of our mind, our synapse grace,
the float of our hands moving away from the globe,
un lapin mouvements de warren
farmer gathering his flock as the night moves
chain smoker watching you cook
another reason to storm the bellowing halls, one more toast to the sodden market,
brings the landscape to a halt, and strokes out its weariness as apes walk
the amazonian peaks, as the sunrise settles down
and into us; summits
made of nothing,
but the story of your day, all that makes a man
know
and remember
that yours
are always waiting
and are willed by things
that I will never know
completely, but walk like lightening;
creating,
when the storm comes.

Letting me know
it's all **** false,
if not
you.
René Mutumé Jul 2013
The males. Dressed in straight shoulder pads and collar bone,
a stretch of bone padded material.
No breathes admitting that they need air.
The females. Seeping ‘S’s’ – here for the same job
some of the actors knowing their lines, others
under the hollow gloom
more honest
about the play.

The training room.
The world made of blue felt and none
of the leaders allow hell to come;
where they lead us.

We know that the statues don’t remember.
We know what the worm knows where (s)he rattles
out, a constant poem that is not afraid.
We know that the sea must dance and lead the statues from their weave.
We are not the names given, but the names heard.
We’re sat in salacious dog eyes in the milking fruit.
We’re vaults on the decaying tongue of sad minstrels.
We’re the same as his battered fingers ******* infinite strings.
We’re infinite style.
We’re the lyre coming from the cocoon
savouring the world;
wings and unheard screams distilled in a womb of immense energy
flowing to the root
Apollo Agoria Abbraxus
is one of the names
releasing the buckle and diving into bed belonging to nothing
just a hearse in a low gear, just the last radio song fulfilling the waves with a
song and video;
where a black woman shakes near a window and smokes
like she does, when she smiles her mind is a knife, more naked
than a training room full of melancholy.

She’s drunk and sober.
She’s more awake than the sadness of mannequin eyes.
She’s the conversation that out lasts the time we have.
She’s every word that holds power and meaning in a den
that’s turning into a heated pile of digital scream.

We’re the first thing chiselled into rock.
We’re dressing our limbs and placing new scents upon our skin.
We’re the night we’re the jazz.
We’re the thrash and the shadow.
We’re the history and the human.

We are the private life of two workers
keeping our puke to a minimum.

Then letting it break out in one sigh of red thought
once we return home.

My weariness is forgotten as heat rolls across my cheap carpet
and you’re already back.
There’s stubble upstairs on my cheap razor.
There’s a small humming bird sat on the fence past my kitchen window.
You’ve already thrown away your office
clothes
as I throw mine away
too.

It’s 10. And the fire is forgotten and new. We don’t own a TV
and the walls are cleaner than a womb made from our own flesh.
Dusky sand blown into our face from a bomb collapsing out and in from the sand.
We’re the particles collecting over the dunes, uniting themselves
in the night – new languages opened in sphinx dreams and sphinx sighs.

All we gotta do is sit back and watch as her paws twitch and she rolls her neck.
It’s tight after a few millennia of sleep.
No one is sat near our place below her chin.
Watching it drink in the murmur of our thumping chests and heat scent.

There’s the sound of flesh ripping from marrow.

There’s the sound of lorn coyote’s mixing in the heavens and the street rain.

The street has a thousand strings combining our arms within itself
knowing that the road rythm is a mime, and that our four paws
are more
and are grace itself. The stage
the gods,
the science,
the electric
breathes
of nature
hungered in the spectacle of sliding shadow
amidst the mood of viperous traffic lights and moans behind sunglasses,
a wolfing flock,
a cavernous look of sacrifice
in the death strike of a swan
protecting its eggs
below the bridge where we once walked.

An absolute, of sheer life.
A universe of sheer decay.
Broken away.
By our song.
René Mutumé Jul 2013
the fish lizards don’t wanna start again
they’ve already dragged their bellies far enough
just let the concert fall in on itself
just grab whomever you love and slice their ear
with a kiss, or a hymn of your own
let the rubble of our ideas gaze
like bibles
made from our holding hands;
letting any invention
not from the heart
die like a thousand viruses
torn from limb;
let the dreams come through whilst
we are here
and treat the king like a pawn
a garden
without pearls
an ammasing heat
an island
that lays down a road
in the dead swamp
and bleeds
chords off-tune
but higher than the operas of earth
as atlantis dives.
Next page