The Wayward Stage Recording

Daily Pain (Pain Quotidien)

I’ve lost the magic touch,

and so I’m falling, crawling through mediocrity,

saying this is I or that is I, but endless.

Defined by moving lines of you,

defined by turning, swerving,

I don’t know where I’m going and

you laugh.

Don’t pack me in this box you say,

I’m not a shining bright white letter,

capital and known, I’m another,

and another,

and sun on your terrace.

I’m the rays,

grazing on your knees as you hit tarmac,

saturating in grovel, gravelling,

ending in shams,

shambles of needy calls,

into the sunken wise man’s ears I go.

“Get up!” you say and so I do.

So you look at me in one of

two ways, either dead or ray-like,

on sunny sunny terraces.

“But isn’t love endless?” – Oh, you silly silly child, no wonder you’re always tripping up.

Forwarding

Men with moustaches masquerade

The reminisce of bustle still lingers, otiose and dreamlike.

He, the other, one of many,

Stumbles along, across a square,

Armed with slippers and insanity

Through attics of comprehending boxes

Boxing in, boxing out, up

Bursting into the endless maps of now.

Time drives a man to the edge like that:

His mouth hung low, parted, disenchanted,

Listlessly, ingesting all the trivialities

One step at a time

In all its odd importance.

This square used to feel different

The sounds, the debates he used to have

His lips curled up in the glory of infancy

They are all consigned to oblivion, those hours,

Those silent films, watched on mind-screens;

A headache with pictures.

Frail hands grasp onto each other,

Their arthritis mutual, merging into one

Mess, but glad to find refuge in

Each other’s sadness, mating.

Trembling, they lie

Behind his back;

It’s all they’ve got,

And eyes flicker fanatically

In frantic endeavours to

Scrawl all these pantomimes into

His eroding mind.

The feeling is almost faded

In his legs

With their protruding violet veins

And messily pleated skin

This drain of feeling dances like

An idea, rotting around this body.

And there are herds of you

Walking down myriad alleys

In this delirious city, all with

That very same posture.

All of you reduced by age

Into chains of ants on the tarmac desert

Side by side dogs with mixed up heads,

Mixed up to be growing old

And cruising towards endlessness,

Bursting into blue.

That Mole

That mole. It bled

That night

In the room with the

Curtains you adore

“Look at the curtains!” you

Said “Look at the curtains!”

But I was looking at

That mole

With its erupting black antennae,

Fossils from its

Previous diseasing.

I asked you to come back

To bed, but

Your eyes were wide and

You stood, owling on the floorboards.

Lips taped, stricken before that

Mole – that mole that could

Eat you up, swallow you whole,

Drown you, all the while

Dribbling by your side;

Vomiting life onto

Those hips of yours.

And Google had

All the answers,

Of course.

All the wrong ones

From babbling strangers

Kept up one night by

Their own diseases in

Hospital beds,

Recovery beds or  

Death beds.

But not yours:

Yours is the bed where

We fumble.

Yours is the bed where

We’ll lie, unspoken,

Ideas strangling –

Worrying.