‘Deviously devoid of all language’: Five poems on the absurdity of suffering and the cosmic machine

Evening

Evening,
a marble plateau,
sliced breath of the day

Red pomegranate seeds splutter,
turning the mouth’s estranged sky
into a velvet sienna

Stillness—
lack of movement
or lack of thought?

An elongation of emotion
a requiem for the living

The air, it seems,
is suffused with a flat, ochre light,
static around the bark of all trees

A consolation,
a lullaby,
a long, long pause
everything in the goddamn world
bending down
to stare at its very own miracle

Twilight’s veil flutters,
an insect strapped to the day’s chest

She moves,

Slowly,
Carefully—
there are no mistakes made here
the day falls in precise moments,
just as it began

A cold shudder

A celestial beast
salivates over life’s porous face

And the horizon grins

Evening,
the sly tongue of light

Lilith

Lilith,
sepulcher of stunted air

A thin laugh—
the drooping Venus-tongues
ecstatic in the wedges of space

My garden blistered with their warm breath,
their constant heaving

Their inaudible, glaring presence
thousands of purple baby-fists

Hanging, just
hanging

The most precious of sights

yet appalling,
very appalling

Lilith,
your large, viscous being
above these pockets of breasts

You stand
with your tongue deep in my mouth,
a fine straw of divine ache

You stand—still,
deviously devoid of all language,

You stand,
seeking neither forgiveness
nor awaiting any,

You stand outside,
outside breath, sense, being,

You stand,
outside of all human judgement—
plain vicious,

the glorious face of luscious lunacy

Abduction

White salt out there,
your whitewashed twigs scowl—

motions unfamiliar

The night is growing thick;
the finger is aflame, a matchstick

It has sworn to shimmer;
the teeth abandon the jaw
and float into the sea,

A jawbone into the sea’s eternity
a poet stood before the ocean

And never returned,
return he did not

And in my cupped eyelid,
a quarter of the moon, the man’s weakening
steps, a half knee dipped in...

Read more