as i read this i am dissolved and come out dripping from solvent writing me
as i dry as any living thing dries in anticipation it seems of that
unforeseeable moment when the inside which is sentient begins to mimic the
outside and the only way to deal with that which does not involve acceptance
is not to read and not to copy and therefore not to be if you read me and
yet and yet one is not one but one and another because one is not alone and
cannot be because one is one and brain which starts the repetition and
mimicry that some call love in which i am climbing from the sea towards the
hill top some cut in the surface roughly stitched together and grown over
providing a surface for the eye that i see through in imagination to the
rents made and charged by water and pulled aparts of what was smoothness a
gully made by i can't imagine what strength the kind of strength that wins
because where it contests has never known quite that kind of strength and
just has to nod as the boss says i'll make a city of this place and call it
the town of caesar or some such name as if it matters whether the voice was
that of caesar because what matters is the cut was made and the imposition
had to be accepted and the alternative was death of the women and the
children and not everything which followed was bad as nothing ever is if
only you can get far enough away but i couldnt get away i couldnt fly i was
nothing but flies and other worse but flying things being stung and bitten
while i kept on climbing nothing but sweat and muscle pain and cuts and
bruises till eventually i got to where i wanted not by the road but straight
up my own way as if there were no road the opposite of the road by a gully
formed by vulcanism and flow of water over millennia and there i was at a
nondescript but special place called if you worked it out from the local
name the city and i thought of it much later not so much the place but the
way there and not as i had felt it as i climbed but from higher up hundreds
of feet higher after another climb more towards the moon or sun as high as i
could get whereupon i looked down and saw the land scar as healed as ever it
would be and that is what i remembered simultaneously with seeing on seeing
a scar across the abdomen of a lover and asking and she doing her best to
interpret my question and me doing my best to interpret the answer and that
was what we called our conversation two intent animals alone with their
bodies the record of their wounded lives making love the whole thing
unexpected and something that perhaps as one looked down upon it would have
better not have happened because the two are not alone there being others
and the others have knives in one way or another and the intent to wound in
one way or another and perhaps that's the way of all things if you read me
because one way or another it seems to me there has to be a better way to
get there but when you get there the city is no city and who wants a city
any way and you wonder at the compulsion that makes you make these efforts
and you notice that for all the times your body tells you that this is it
and this is proper there are other times of disassociation because it's
hormonal and the brain is a control system that has gained control although
it still breaks down and any empathy there is breaks down with all the other
variations from background noise till it's all the same and that's why it is
all the same and what dies is the individual exterminated and whether that
is right or not is a meaningless question and whatever one writes will be
extinguished but what the brain does as it intellectualises the life of the
body is a distortion and a ripping up of flesh because i would rather be
back in bed with that lover than half way up a boulder strewn ravine or
sitting here in the middle of a rainy night writing this melancholia and the
brain gives and takes to its own rules yet the brain tells me this is as
real as anything gets because what is real deceives and is itself deception
there being no reality but only interrelationship because singularities
explode and communities run to entropy and nothing is the same even for the
space of four words saying it nothing is the same very long six words except
perhaps that nothing is the same as nothing and that's the reality of two
live bodies with surgery scars signifying death in a state of nature still
alive and making love in a synthetic environment a gully of soft sheets and
gentle warmth between safe walls despite the pointlessness of everything if
you happen to look down and see it and despite the certainty of eventual
death and despite the lack of any necessity to think about it but the two i
am thinking of would discuss the nature of existence in between their
ecstatic contact and what they did given time they took was divide and
combine the way its been since before there was oxygen and then they were
apart and that was done and yet the two persist as ones communities of
entities dividing and combining while there is internal time and what i
write to some extent i am will be dispersed

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"Meadows" by Lawrence Upton
22 pages linear poetry
Writers Forum, September 2000; ISBN 0 84254 007 6

"Game on a Line" by Lawrence Upton
eighteen visual poems and an essay; b/w, 36 pages, 5" x 5"
PaperBrain Press, San Diego, USA, 2000 http://www.sunbrella.net




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