The Crime-Rate in Our Land Is So Great That I Could Commit *Murder A* Confident That Simultaneously Someone Unknown to Me Would Nearby Be Committing *Murder B*

• As I do with bouts of damnlessness I stayed out of tablets yesterday
• As I suspected with fucked-up me utterfucklessness tries to cure itself with impotent fury at all I can't change, but at least we got to the woods yesterday
• Combine August is the deadest month of Blog Days of Summer with new utterfucklessness & I am completely unable to ignore compulsion to post
• Earthgirl is sleeping Sunday morning as I type this I left my phone in our bedroom so the photo below isn't from yesterday's hike but last Sunday's, utterfucklessness abounds

• I am stupid for goldenrod
• The twittering machine
• Whoever ordered Epstein's snuff works at a much higher pay-grade than errand boys like Trump or Clinton
• The obvious song for snuffepstein
• Do you know there are people who think trumpside and clintonside work for different and competing sociopathic overlords?
• I mean, of course our sociopath overlords compete with each other over who is the most sociopathic fuck of the bunch, but....
• Verschworungssymmetrie
• Our sociopath overlords will run the corpse of Jeffrey Epstein before they allow Sanders to run as Democratic nominee
• Late Imperialism
• The Father of Teeth
• STOP EATING ANIMALS
• Humans are shit 
• Time at the bar
• Maggie's weekly links
• Napping
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links

      
ANOTHER FALSE EXECUTION

Bill Knott

The crime-rate in our land is so great that
I could commit Murder A confident that
Simultaneously someone unknown to me
Would nearby be committing Murder B.

My plan's to confess to Murder B which should
Cover up my guilt for A because if
I was busy perpetrating B how could
I have done A. The identical times of

The crimes and my evidentiary shame
Convince the law of that. The subsequent
Trial verdict shall hoistpetard my scheme
Girding me with the gloat I'm innocent

Of that which I stand condemned: I die
Endowed in the knowledge my sentence
Is wrong, thereby maintaining to the end
That moral superiority, that perfect high

Which is the cause of most crimes if not mine.

Will Become a Chasm Before Anyone's Had a Chance to Waver

• Blue tablet filled yesterday morning filed afternoon forgot last night
• Redorange tablet debuted, same rules at start as Blue's at end
• inviolable until violated when new inviolable rules decreed

• What did you expect them to say, the Crackerbaiters, with screenshot after years of screenshots of their crackerbaiting?
• I am telling you three times, set aside Crackerbaiters' cowardly cynicism blaming digital violence for analog's, they are not wrong, we *are* being reprogrammed and reprogrammed just for this and guess who the digital violence is meant to bend (see bullet before Bernie below)
• Our sociopath rulers... You aren't getting theirs, and they'll kill the nigger
• Funny, new tablet, tonight's a type night
• Somebody better tell Bernie about cops:

We must treat this violent racism like the security threat that it is. That means investing in law enforcement resources to combat the growing population of white nationalists who are engaging in violence. 4/4

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) August 4, 2019

Do the Collapse was twenty yesterday, GbV twooter told me, here:






                 
BOUNDARY ISSUES

John Ashbery

Here in life, they would understand.   

How could it be otherwise? We had groped too,   

unwise, till the margin began to give way,   

at which point all was sullen, or lost, or both.   

                 

Now it was time, and there was nothing for it.   

                  

We had a good meal, I and my friend,   

slurping from the milk pail, grabbing at newer vegetables.   

Yet life was a desert. Come home, in good faith.   

You can still decide to. But it wanted warmth.   

Otherwise ruse and subtlety would become impossible   

in the few years or hours left to us. “Yes, but . . .”   

The iconic beggars shuffled off   too. I told you,   

once a breach emerges it will become a chasm   

before anyone’s had a chance to waver. A dispute   

on the far side of town erupts into a war   

in no time at all, and ends as abruptly. The tendency to heal   

sweeps all before it, into the arroyo, the mine shaft,   

into whatever pocket you were contemplating. And the truly lost   

make up for it. It’s always us that has to pay.   

                        

I have a suggestion to make: draw the sting out   

as probingly as you please. Plaster the windows over   

with wood pulp against the noon gloom proposing its enigmas,   

its elixirs. Banish truth-telling.

That’s the whole point, as I understand it.   

Each new investigation rebuilds the urgency,   

like a sand rampart. And further reflection undermines it,   

causing its eventual collapse. We could see all that   

from a distance, as on a curving abacus, in urgency mode   

from day one, but by then dispatches hardly mattered.   

It was camaraderie, or something like it, that did,   

poring over us like we were papyri, hoping to find one   

correct attitude sketched on the gaslit air, night’s friendly takeover.

Sink the Whale and Sleep All Day in the Real World, Up and Functioning More Fully Imagined and Dreamed, in Society's Than in Your Own, Imagination?

• The problems of Bartleby
• Twelve billion tons of ice melted in Greenland yesterday
• Reading, and mourning, *Moby Dick* on the cusp of climate catastrophe: Melville’s 200th birthday coincides with the human-made sixth extinction, as well as with the emptying, warming, and clogging up of the world’s oceans via overfishing and the dumping of plastics. Such facts imbue his novel with renewed and melancholy relevance. Reading his book about a sentient, majestic, and desperate-to-live marine mammal in a period when the planet’s whales — and all other creatures — are under such threat grants the work a grim ecological cast.
• And then there is Chapter 77, *The Great Heidelburgh Tun,* on decapitating the slaughtered whale to extract profit, what my copy opened to when I picked it up just now, and...
• Bleggalgaze

    

"HAVE MADE EARTH A MIRROR OF HEAVEN"

Alice Notley

my name is Alice Elizabeth, so am I

Allie Sheedy of the movie Short Circuits thus angry

or Elizabeth McGovern self-controlled?

This question is posited

on a television screen where I can't quite identify

the actress shown—which is she?

  

I am Allie and I will continue to rant.

__  __________________

  

My voice rises in real life often—

because I am 'passionate' ... that's

a convenient word.

___________________

  

I'm still in the forest, darkening

wishing I were 'nicer.'

  

Hardwood says, You should stand up soon

I'll help you

I say, I have cramps

I say, I'm using my period, to get pissed off and to Know.

____________________

  

I dreamed, last night, about an immense Dead Seal

below the surface of the water in a harbor

  

pull the curtain down.

For months you would not break the spell

for eternities you have not done so, citing economic

exigencies; the whole thing is a mess.

I might rather be dead

than doing what it takes to keep the seal under water

whale-sized

  

E is for seal. For spell. For suppression.

____________________

  

To take part in you is to die

is why one dies

Have I said this before? 

____________________

  

I am Alp the Dizzy.

____________________

  

The dead seal isn't a person, it's poetry the seal

the hallmark

of selfhood, dead grotesquely large and richly hardening.

  

"Hardwood it was someone like you

you drowned the seal"

  

"No I'm making both you and it 'hard.' "

____________________

  

And I'm still in the forest.

____________________

  

And I'm still in the forest

  

Money's more the real live poetry

abstract symbolic imaginary

trade your life for it and trade it for your life

so you'll have something 'to do'

  

Sink the whale

and sleep all day in the real world, up and functioning

more fully imagined and dreamed, in society's

than in your own, imagination?

  

I'm standing

I'm standing up Hard

I keep being Hardwood myself, dark and hard.

____________________

  

Initiating a new 'broken symmetry' (spinning to the

Left, like a newborn neutrino)

so that we can have a new consciousness ...

am I doing that? Yes I think so.

____________________

  

The forest contains a French restaurant

every meter or so ...

difficult to fast in this dream vision.

We're a very unpopular group today

We've shot off another great bomb

and we've shot down a terrorist,

an Arab, young, before

we even found out what he "knew."

____________________

  

Tell me something beautiful, bitter

because we are somehow bitter, forever,

a taste included in origin, in love, in you.

So I don't have to be cloyed.

  

... soul's waters are reticent

sly swamps.

                       It had nothing in it,

that swamp; because I didn't know how to look for

the parts of its obvious whole—death is

minute, flavorful parts—which are said to spin

as I'm said to walk, moving while else

mostly unconscious of that.

____________________

  

In the new consciousness

In short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the care-free, joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, and irresponsible creature?

Born 200 years ago today.

From Moby Dick:

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

(Added 2015: read that outloud. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.)

Via Brad:

"Poor Hoffman — I remember the shock I had when I first saw the mention of his madness. — But he was just the man to go mad — imaginative, voluptuously inclined, poor, unemployed, in the race of life distanced by his inferiors, unmarried, — without a port of haven in the universe to make. . . . This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him, — which but few men do.  For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire.  And he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains." (Correspondence)

"[I]t is often to be observed, that as in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light.  Happy would it be, if the man possessed in himself some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort: but . . . [n]o common-place is ever effectually got rid of, except by essentially emptying one's self of it into a book; for once trapped in a book, then the book can be put into the fire, and all will be well." (Pierre)

"I forgot to mention, that last night about 9 1/2 P.M. Adler & Taylor came into my room, & it was proposed to have whiskey punches, which we did have, accordingly.  Adler drank about three table spoons full — Taylor 4 or five tumblers &c.  We had an extraordinary time & did not break up till after two in the morning.  We talked metaphysics continually, & Hegel, Schlegel, Kant &c. were discussed under the influence of the whiskey." (Correspondence)

"We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street." (Correspondence)

""Dolt & ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William [Shakespeare]." (Correspondence)

From: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

"I am pleased to believe that beauty is at bottom incompatible with ill, and therefore am so eccentric as to have confidence in the latent benignity of that beautiful creature, the rattle-snake, whose lithe neck and burnished maze of tawny gold, as he sleekly curls aloft in the sun, who on the prairie can behold without wonder?" As he breathed these words, he seemed so to enter into their spirit — as some earnest descriptive speakers will — as unconsciously to wreathe his form and sidelong crest his head, till he all but seemed the creature described. Meantime, the stranger regarded him with little surprise, apparently, though with much contemplativeness of a mystical sort, and presently said: "When charmed by the beauty of that viper, did it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the care-free, joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, and irresponsible creature?

Via Ed (lots of Melville there):

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

(from Moby Dick).

Via Flowerville, from Pierre, or The Ambiguities.

From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is quite conscious of much that is so anomalously hard and bitter in his lot, of much that is so black and terrific in his soul. Yet that knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable him to change or better his condition. Conclusive proof that he has on power over his condition. For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; -- nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.

ibid:

But is life, indeed, a thing for all infidel levities, and we, its misdeemed beneficiaries, so utterly fools and infatuate, that what we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event—the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather? Are we so entirely insecure, that that casket, wherein we have placed our holiest and most final joy, and which we have secured by a lock of infinite deftness; can that casket be picked and desecrated at the merest stranger's touch, when we think that we alone hold the only and chosen key? 

                         
From Moby Dick:

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tassled, the sharks, also, with the jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside-down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet there is no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whale-ship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.

From Moby Dick (and for Savid Dampselle and that other guy who was in Dampselle's Gaithersburg High School English class up on D-Wing above the Auto-Shop classroom/garage):

“Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”   

Oh, you read Melville's traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day post this far? Thank you!

2019: I wrote earlier this year I can't imagine reading Moby Dick again because of whaling, I can imagine reading again, maybe, but not soon.

2019: Someone else with my qualms and reason to read it again soon

Have I ever mentioned that I love Melville? Oh, the condensed Moby Dick? Was six years ago's Giftmas present from Planet. Have you ever gathered I love my daughter?

"How did you make it," I said. "I didn't, I fell straight down and killed myself,"he said. "Thats a shame," I said. "You're telling me," he said.

I own the new last Tate and soon so shall a few of you

• Tate and Thursday Night Pints, the voice I chose more than half by reading Tate when starting TNP, I said to no one last night
• I'd written news of new last Tate earlier this year I think, verifying constitutes research, and *think* I pre-ordered from some notbezos, if I did it never arrived and I can't remember from who, discovering constitutes research, and
• I needed it, need it and need it new and now, had time to kill while a taxi, the Rockville Pike Barnes and Noble had four copies, First Editions each, thank you Grand Prize Winners for playing BLCKDGRD!

Hear the Hoofs Over the Seethe of the Sea

[Seething needing...]

Pjoepf of Vriecyh

Seething needing target requires objects I can’t damage
forgive me, I Chick fil-a the clusterfuck *every* Sunday
I’m skittle, fucking destroy everything I can’t destroy, save what I can

• Poem above life update, Beloveds, and reminder: *I* am the fine fucking metaphor abounding
• I have barked at you more than three times, we are being reprogrammed
• The New Fugitive Slave Laws
• Anti-Enlightenment and the folk horror revival (seems a plausible theory, but I don't watch movies in general often and when I do it never occurs to me to watch a horror movie)
• Scenarios
• I *do* hate motherfucking Democrats
• White Americans will kill us all
• Democrats (tweeting the sentiment yesterday good as always for at least four unfollows)
• Dan reviews an experimental theory on experimental novels
• Geometry in the Dust
• I am two-fifths through Hernan Diaz' *In the Distance,* I like very much but fear the violence that's coming, it's strange, *Black Leopard, Red Wolf* was the most violent novel I've read since *Blood Meridian* (which *In the Distance* is often compared to) but because it's horses, for example, that die gruesomely in *In the Distance,* not imaginary monsters as in *BL,RW,* I'm....

AKIBA

Muriel Rukeyser

THE WAY OUT
        

The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man,

with signs, and his journeys.     Where the rock is split

and speaks to the water;     the flame speaks to the cloud;

the red splatter, abstraction, on the door

speaks to the angel and the constellations.

The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon.

And the loud hammering of the land behind

speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs,

we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea.
             

All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage.
                        

Music of one child carried into the desert;

firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid.

Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people

led by the water-drawn man to the smoke mountain.

The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs,

the burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening.

Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain.

Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child.

The meaning beginning to move, which is the song.
           

Music of those who have walked out of slavery.
           

Into that journey where all things speak to all things

refusing to accept the curse, and taking

for signs the signs of all things, the world, the body

which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world,

all creation being created in one image, creation.

This is not the past walking into the future,

the walk is painful, into the present, the dance

not visible as dance until much later.

These dancers are discoverers of God.
            

We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song.
               

Out of a life of building lack on lack:

the slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith:

an army who came to the ocean: the walkers

who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou,

city and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo,

the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes,

swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris

and the glass black hearses; those on the Long March:

all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man.
                    

Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world.
            

Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death

by his disciples carried from Jerusalem

in blackness journeying to find his journey

to whatever he was loving with his life.

The wilderness journey through which we move

under the whirlwind truth into the new,

the only accurate. A cluster of lights at night:

faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching

while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in.
       

Barbarian music, a new song.
          

Acknowledging opened water, possibility:

open like a woman to this meaning.

In a time of building statues of the stars,

valuing certain partial ferocious skills

while past us the chill and immense wilderness

spreads its one-color wings until we know

rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea,

the world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find.

What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey.
                         

Ways to discover. The song of the way in.

The City So White It Is Ready for Ink

• Scanner broke at work so new poem not yet here (update: but now here)
• (t....h e...y p..t p..m I w...e in t....t)
• With an emphasis that I can't even if I wanted to today so it's easy to say this, but I am tempted to go to The Mall today to see what if anything foments at trumporgasm
• The meaning of genocide and the political stakes of naming
• Tanks for the memories
• Tonkining
• Trump is an idiot savant at playing the American id, I said yesterday to my kamalatarian colleague
• Dying of whiteness
• Indulge your jingo by torturing animals! 
• There is no difference between this shitty jingoism and trumporgasm jingoism
• A cracker could shoot twelve people on the mall tomorrow, I said to kamalatarian colleague yesterday, and if one person throws a milkshake on a cracker applauding the cracker doing the shooting the media will make the milkshake thrower the day's evilest human and direst existential threat to the Empire (update: if but New York Times columnists)

AUBADE FOR BURNING CITY

Ocean Vuong

South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.

            Milkflower petals on the street

                                                     like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright ...

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.

            Open, he says.

                                        She opens.

                                                      Outside, a soldier spits out

            his cigarette as footsteps

                            fill the square like stones fallen from the sky. May all

                                         your Christmases be white as the traffic guard

            unstraps his holster.

                                        His hand running the hem

of  her white dress.

                            His black eyes.

            Her black hair.

                            A single candle.

                                        Their shadows: two wicks.

A military truck speeds through the intersection, the sound of children

                                        shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled

            through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog

                            lies in the road, panting. Its hind legs

                                                                                   crushed into the shine

                                                       of a white Christmas.

On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard

                                                                      for the first time.

The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police

                                facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.

                                             A palm-sized photo of his father soaking

                beside his left ear.

The song moving through the city like a widow.

                A white ...    A white ...    I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow

                                                          falling from her shoulders.

Snow crackling against the window. Snow shredded

                                           with gunfire. Red sky.

                              Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.

A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.

            The city so white it is ready for ink.

                                                     The radio saying run run run.

Milkflower petals on a black dog

                            like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright. She is saying

            something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks

                        beneath them. The bed a field of ice

                                                                                 cracking.

Don’t worry, he says, as the first bomb brightens

                             their faces, my brothers have won the war

                                                                       and tomorrow ...    

                                             The lights go out.

I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming ...    

                                                            to hear sleigh bells in the snow ...    

In the square below: a nun, on fire,

                                            runs silently toward her god — 

                           Open, he says.

                                                         She opens.

Wires Tightening

THE WOUND

Tom Sleigh

When I woke the darkness was so thick,

So palpable and black that my eyes

Seemed blind as stone staring into stone.

 

The blade that I had dreamed, efficient and quick

As it cut into my thigh, cleaning a gangrened

Wound infected to the bone, seemed poised

 

Above my throat: Close-grained, impenetrable,

The blackness rose before me like a wall.

And then off in the next room, nervous, light,

 

A soft padding as of an animal

Raced like my heartbeat in my temples

Round and round, trapped, stealthily desperate

 

As if hunting its own track, terrified

And captivated by its own odor.

Skin cool in the night air, eyes drilling

 

Through the dark, who I was before I

Slept had burned off like a vapor

So that amnesiac and pure, witnessing

 

My terror that I no longer recognized

As my own, my mind floated beyond me

To confront that frantic, closing footfall

 

As Jacob dreaming met his dark angel—

Though in my wrestling nothing blessed me

Or promised any blessing; but was a mask whose eyes

 

Were all black pupil, blind as molten tar.

I strained to see what paced there, my eyes burning

Through the dark until a pair of eyes blazed

 

Back across the blackness, an insistent, glazed

Staring that shimmered and disappeared.

The shining blade plunged at my throat, my mind

 

Stretched and twisted, its wires tightening

And turning as the creature lunged back and forth

And with a deep-throated yowling, thrashing

 

And thrashing to fight clear of its own circling,

Cleanly leapt away. I reached for the knife

But gripped only air, my eyes pressing

 

Deeper and deeper into the night’s black stone,

Cutting the way the knife had cut into my wound,

Probing for the white shining of the bone:

 

What had I become? What darkness had my dream

Led me down into? Too frightened even

To move, I lay bound and sweating in

 

The sheets, the moon a warning-bell beating

On the glass, its light carving out the curtains

Like the shadow of a wing across the windowpane.