SEXTET: AN ALMOST POSTMODERN VERSION OF UNESSENTIAL FRAGMENTS
1.
Blazon with spittle a cross on your forehead,
ordained
Serafina. Mark it where you feel the pain,
then drink the pestled potion
as I recite an orison:
Let
the force of evil flee the circle
of
your agony and may your face
repose in autumnal slumber.
Serafina
can’t guess I’m my own afflicted island
and that
without pain I would sink
along with
my frenzy.
Serafina
does not seem to know
it’s all about
installation & dislocation.
2.
I never
needed a motherland.
I chose
instead the comity of people:
- those who
at night hope to rescue their eyeballs from glasses of wine
- those who
hang their prosthetic limbs on the bedstead, alongside rosary beads
- those
whose blood supply has been clogged with anorexy.
No
homeland. But I know of a low-line island
that runs a
circus,
promising
itself to deflect a flood of sighs and tears,
promising
to avert the numb sores that can start throbbing
relentlessly
at any
time.
3.
I’m the resident
alien who treads
on alternative
reality,
daubed with
sepia,
colouring
the chronic platitudes of the multitude.
Excessively
sentimental and cloying,
what is the
moon searching for?
4.
Sometimes
she looked like a funerary bird,
with a waxen
song sewn into its wings.
But that
day
there was
no sound to her voice as she spoke:
Your woeful poetry might survive
to fill my absence.
She might
have been rehearsing her own equipoise
as a woman.
Perhaps
destroyed. Perhaps not.
5.
The old,
opaque curtain has descended again
between
us. I can’t decipher your restored
profile.
As I walked
the wet promenade
I
remembered you saying
you prefer
anticipation to actuality.
Then you
slid into uncertainty.
Something
had to give:
a dialectic
need to counter
your
anesthesia with my foretold demise.
The
cellular phone throws a signal.
There’s a
message from you:
it’s about
a technical detail.
6.
Sealing our
eyes does not help us
forget
each other’s buzzing fever
as we
coil into the shadows of our innermost selves
within
the vaults of a catacomb,
Let’s wait
for a gusting wind
to track
down the shavings of our bilateral exile.