MARCEL MAGRITTE TAKES STOCK
OF ANOTHER FROSTED INTERLUDE
A dissection in 15 stages
1.
Marcel Magritte knew the game well by now:
they should perform systematic, passive deaths between long pauses.
One moment over, the next one prolongs itself unexpectedly,
As if indispensable, until the next small death, equally boring. Sealed by the night.
2.
“Should we vault the brick wall, making it look like a shrine for relics?”, she started asking herself, tired of her keyhole existence.
Nothing seemed real anymore, except the alchemy of silence and stale flesh.
Receptacles of sultry silence.
And dimmed-out reflections.
Icons distort their presence in implacable positions.
Their convoluted structures take new shapes and nuances.
And everything becomes almost confessional.
3.
Magritte would know they had to prepare their last meal together,
against the sunset.
At table she drinks bubbles. He slices repeats.
They will toast, as customary, a lacerated love dressed up in absurd imagery.
Dressed in its shadows.
A skeletal bird pecks at the table.
4.
Marcel Magritte thinks:
“We sustain ourselves briefly, attached to fleeting time.
We listen to steel music and want to release stifled cries. But we meet the moment with sober demeanour”.
Her ideas do not matter anymore, splintered as they are, into patches of constant loss.
5.
Hallowed gospels tumble around us.
We gird ourselves for tomorrow, agonised, framed in despair.
“Perhaps we can by-pass the pain,” she says in apprehensive inspiration.
Meanwhile, sea-gulls are hitting the bridge, shrieking and dying.
6.
Magritte suggests:
“Let’s become responsive for a while. Let’s become transmitting agents.
We can perhaps collect the shreds and recycle the fate of fallen angels.
There can be amnesic signals as a compromise, to offset our seamless anarchy”.
It’s weird to talk, when there’s nothing to tell.
7.
Vibrations continue to travel in gasps.
Of course we know. We both know.
We shall paint alarm signs & emergency exits.
We shall extinguish the heavy smell inside our plastic lunatorium.
We shall face our margins.
8.
Magritte will wear a black top hat today. Someone has committed suicide.
She’ll match his colours and his mood for a time, out of convention.
That’s what one does at the news of a suicide.
Yes. She’ll frame his mood, frame his dead skies,
hang them on the molding walls.
9.
He knew they were being watched performing their ritual.
An ominous horizon watched them, darkened by its own melancholy.
Magritte would ask for a replay of the deposition scene.
Then she would check out for her inner sky, and tell nothing.
After the deposition, she will remain especially dead.
10.
It was relayed to them in measured motion, the Table of Time,
marked by a night glow on the Hill of Knowing.
There came a Voice between them & the Voice said:
“Your space is bound up now.
You can count your contradictions.
They are interchangeable”.
11.
Thick interludes of impermanence.
The celebration of answers which will never be forthcoming.
And when the restless sand subsides,
They will take another powerful ride, striking time
with their ambiguous sex cries, their eyes wide open.
12.
Magritte has a new thought:
“She will not leave; she won’t travel with me
into her exile. This woman would forsake me like an outcast,
a body with no interpretation. She will explore
stolen stars on her own, and chant her own deliverance”.
13.
“So what now?”, thought Marcel Magritte. “The history of my fear hangs
attached to my existence”.
For him it was a like a dream gone wrong at 2.30 in the morning.
She never knew how she lived the night, infested with their sour breathing.
14.
Depositions are sad happenings.
You see the deadness and you want to bring deadness down
from the cross.
Depositions induce closeness and thoughts of separation
& later
they haunt you from a candle flame.
The cause of sorrow will stand idle at the window,
or in the doorway,
Its context fixed and obsessive.
“Still”, thought Magritte, “I shall carry her to no man’s land
and wait in the rustling shadow for her extinction”.
15.
Walls close in as Marcel muses
about further possibilities & strategies.
He takes notes in his diary but doesn’t mark logistics.
He had improvised a nest between her breasts,
under her heart,
to explore secrets now turned frozen.
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