I found your brother
As I went for a walk
Through the grass and marble
We had our silent talk
He listened wordlessly
And caught my tears
Even though he couldn't speak
He unmasked your fears
Leaving him a flower,
I cleaned up his headstone
I said goodbye to a boy I will never meet
Understanding why you feel alone

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half crazy
But that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges
That come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her
That you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.
And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind.
Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror
And you want to travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind.

Keep me in this place of vagueness,
cool dissonance passing between
my eyes and yours and deem it
love.

Keep me here, as I am at home here.
In the passing.

I am ethereal in my smoke-laden internal compass.
I dangle before you tools of your trade for
ecstasy and
decadence.

I swivel below the ribs,
all the easier to eat me with,
I faint at the sight of your kindness.

I will weep for your laughter and
water your shortcomings;
we will grow less as we
become more.

Follow me.

And I will lead you down the
garden path of
I just can't
help myself.

I, after difficult entry through my mother's blood
And stumbling childhood (hitting my head against the world);
I, intricate, easily unshipped, untracked, unaligned;
Cut off in my communications; stammering; speaking
A dialect shared by you, but not you and you;
I, strangely undeft, bereft; I searching always
For my lost rib (clothed in laughter yet understanding)
To come round the corner of Wardour Street into the Square
Or to signal across the Park and share my bed;
I, focus in night for star-sent beams of light,
I, fulcrum of levers whose end I cannot see ...
Have this one deftness - that I admit undeftness:
Know that the stars are far, the levers long:
Can understand my unstrength.

Is it sounds
                  converging,
Sounds
            nearing,
Infringement,
                     impingement,
Impact,
            contact
With surfaces of the sounds
Or surfaces without the sounds:
Diagrams,
                skeletal,
                             strange?

Is it winds
                curling round invisible corners?
Polyphony of perfumes?
Antennae discovering an axis,
                          erecting the architecture of a world?

Is it
      orchestration of the finger-tips,
                                                       graph of a fugue:
Scaffold for colours:
                              colour itself being god?

One day people will touch and talk perhaps
easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as
sunlight,
And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted,
Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers,
Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea,
And work will be simple and swift
as a seagull flying,
And play will be casual and quiet
as a seagull settling,
And the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder
or care or notice,
And people will smile without reason,
Even in winter, even in the rain.

I - Held

I held the girl
as she held her dog
who, had she been able,
could have looked
eye-level
at the woman in the white coat
who held a plastic syringe
which held the soft, pink poison.

II - Elevation Level

Even though the woman in the white coat told us
as she left the room
to leave the dead dog on the ground
- the remains, she called it -
we did not.
Placing her instead on the examination table
because
somehow
the cold steel of the unadorned table
seemed more dignified
than the hard, bleached tile
of the floor.

III - Almost as if Alive

Curled around her tale as if asleep.
Only a certain, solid stillness showing
that she rather something more than slumbered -
the now-forever-open, gelatined-eyes
removed all doubt.
I placed my hand, ever so delicately,
overtop the elongated, tapered face
and pushed down
hoping to restore some lost dignity
by closing her eyes -
the way they do in movies.
Almost as if alive,
her eyes, thick with death and slime,
opened.
They never show that in the movies.

When you are slightly drunk
Things are so close, so friendly.
The road asks to be walked upon,
The road rewards you for walking
With firm upward contact answering your downward contact
Like the pressure of a hand in yours.
You think - this studious balancing
Of right leg while left leg advances, of left while right,
How splendid
Like somebody-or-other-on-a-peak-in-Darien!
How cleverly that seat shapes the body of the girl who sits there.
How well, how skilfully that man there walks towards you,
Arms hanging, swinging, waiting.
You move the muscles of your cheeks,
How cunningly a smile responds.
And now you are actually speaking
Round sounding words
Magnificent
As that lady's hat!