threefold: Eating the Baby, Miraculous Day, L'Enfance du Christ*

Eating the Baby

Love is a covert operation
like the skillful manipulation of phallic symbols

in television advertisements,
a postulate for the subconscious, the red-painted nail

on the female hand, suggestion of the tactile,
the smooth reflective surfaces of the car’s body,

its dark interior.

And the body’s body grows bigger than ordinarily possible
giving you the surprise

of mistaken identity.

The body is a surprise party, inviting its friends around
for the night and breaking your heart

as it leaps into the arms of the man
who stopped her screaming by placing his hand over her mouth,

lucky man, whom you’ve never met,
and falling on the floor in disarray

and a state of undress.

The corridors of power contract
when love enters with conspiratorial ease…

And the frankness of the politician’s lie, is it a mystery
how it engenders the suspension of disbelief?

now the appurtenances of the physical manifest prejudices
over which we have no control,

when our sympathy lies with the enemies of good sense,
with the Enemy, detractor, atheist,

subterranean, the gangster, escaped convict, terrorist & Liberal,
underdog and nihilist, apostate, democrat and existentialist,

or at least vacillates towards the minority, black guy, bad guy,
man with a womb, the junky and the suicide,

when we love the artist? …

And the object multiplies
according to the arousal of desire for possession,

Desire that hath its seat in the Mind
and consumeth all Things which the act of generation

gives forth, eating the baby,
born of the camera or the mirror, born of desire itself,

and the image of the object itself proliferates;
all things from the self re-appropriated to the self

by the secret signs of possession,
like the signs of the supermarket and the sure-handedness

of the check-out girl
and the availability of all items on the shopping-list,

(her pleasant smile,
her sales-pitch, her uninhibited sexual provocation)

delivering receipt and satisfaction
in the marketplace of sensation, manipulating the signs

in the charged sphere of holinesse
and the gaze met with sweet hysteria that is the language

of the magic of Heaven.

Sex is inherently metaphysical (which is why the nubile
must shop around),

integrity of to be, am, passes into relinquishment of same
for the mutuality of genders,

sharing the Cork screw and Piece of Meat that signify
the persistence and the progress,

accumulating on the earth’s crust perpetually,
with facial variations and mass consciousness,

forward into wind of time of eternity, violating each other,
swallowed up by so many relations and statistical awareness…

Feminists have cause to fear the turning of the key
inside the lock,

the invasion of the privacy of the empty room, its population
by a man smoking a pipe,

gaudy wallpaper, the installation of a wing-back chair,
because the situation

involves compromise, meeting halfway on a darkened street,
looking for a weapon in the darkness.

Let him know about accountability, try leather, it is a short
step from here to every major American city,

submission and enterprise go hand on head, go hard in, and
endeavour to personalise the object

of your caresses, call him by name, by the names you would
have called unto yourself,

the embroidered monogram is your sign; and you, let her know
you respect the person of her womanhood

and respect the identity of her identikit, remember her number–
many couples today

are learning about animal by-products, take the stopovers
suggested by your travel-brochures,

don’t stint on the purchases she would have you make,
on the feelings you would have felt,

our preferences are constitutive of our personalities,
your appearance is the next best thing,

and your umbilical cord lies coiled in her handbag, or nap-sack
if she is a jogger or Swiss.

Incest can only occur between human beings, etcetera
capitalist democracy does not preclude

the possibility of mutual consent and rewards
taking advantage of the status quo:

eight to eleven year olds standing in a line, whose testimonies
will be remunerated at the state’s expense,

that is, those denouncing immediate family will receive
additional bonuses,

duck and cover, show and tell, lay and betray, your bodies
are your own,

like brand new toys from which the packaging
has not yet been removed

and the red zones must not be touched, and the blue zones
covered always,

the pudenda of little girls cannot be used
to sell cigarettes

and choruses of small boys with unbroken voices
shall not sing soprano

in advertising material for insurance companies;
eleven to thirteen year olds

hands up if you are your own operator… and when the system
screws you

make it pay, like everybody else–
illiteracy and ignorance are a good self-defense,

may the teevee dreams of childhood and annihilation
protect you and forefend

against any incursion on your rights,
your genitals belong to the state

once you have filled out a tax form. And pornography
can only improve within the free market system,

which is an adventure (like love
and a covert operation) leading the faithful into the future

which is a desert, and we will meet ourselves on the way back
shot full of arrows, victims of melanoma and immune

deficiency syndrome. Perhaps children are the best martyrs
because they are smaller, their icons smaller,

and their suffering increases in inverse proportion
to their size,

so that the torture of children represents an economic paradigm
which we can demonstrate and repeat,

making it scientific, upon which we may elaborate
an entire philosophy of human nature,

soaking the cloths in urine, removing the eyeball
with the heel of an Italian stiletto,

amateur histrionics are inappropriate at this time
and metaphors of violence have been monopolised,

if not exhausted, by the business community and the battle
between the sexes. What recourse but to lie?

Guilt is normal, hereditary, in phase with the moon,
staining the bedsheets

that lead this procession, like flags, hung on sticks,
accompanied by military bands,

the Germans realised how guilt motivates a nation
and capitalised on it, the urge to make babies, likewise,

is inspired by the guilt of failed lives:
the dream of fulfillment is established in the dust of remorse

and the perpetuation of the race perpetuates
the endless convalescence of an incurable love…

Observe how the baby grows from the body, is severed,
desiring only to cleave back to the void,

that is its mother; how in the several ages of its infantile,
pubescent and adult existence, its development

into the ripeness of personhood, the desire to consume
and to be consumed remains consistent; how

it is never loosed from this bondage and when it loves best
in union seeking the terminal abyss whence it came,

with always the rumour of success–a distant tympanum–,
release through the senses into the glory of the light

named God (or the swan transfixed mid-flight in an opera)
which light and epiphany is as a pit

that obliterates identity; how to the last
as the organism enters its nadir it clings ever more desperately

to the promise of a salvation it can no longer see, touch, or hear
and in its feebleness can’t reach,

as it were situated in a high place,
by the primitive reflex of faith

or the long arthritic finger of grace,
yet it stretches out its arms

and with its last strength
tries to articulate the word that out of fear

and paralysis of reason
it hopes in vain is the right word, the word made Manifest,

the word embracing death
and consummation that the infant screams or the lover cries out,

and the word issues
as the sigh of the final respiration….

(These memories I hold dear, my love, I entrust to thee
the seven golden platitudes.)

(Now it’s time, ladies and gentlemen, to cash in
your life insurance, to fit the beauty of the corpse

with a diamond tiara and a satin sash.)

Lying puts on rubber gloves for the operation, out of love,
to leave no fingerprints, to remain anonymous, and wears

a surgical mask also, to guard against bacterial infection.

There is no scar,
and nothing need have changed hands,

because nothing ends with death
except identity, which was always an enigma,

whose loss no one regrets, or even notices, and which
is forsaken

with the lubricated ease
of immediate and narcissistic

self-gratification.

(Christmas Day 1988)

Miraculous Day

…See

desert sand in the mirror glass
people made plastic and rats dancing and leaping
outside the restaurant, in the ivy,
where the mallard makes its nest/ the silted river
and water wrinkles under a plumed wind, chef on the stoop
feeding tame ducks during smoko, a generous dispensation
of stale bread, and an eel thick as an elephant’s trunk,

how, flat-mouthed, voluptuous,
do you tickle a trout? or wring a duck’s neck?

warm & with life vibrating inside it, like a human member;
Christchurch’s ugliest fountain plays,

a brass tubed dandelion (…the one in King’s Cross:
whores are the only persons, in these antipodes,
to have learnt how to walk in high heels: lycra shimmies
the tight arse) postcards

of our duplications
show the nature scene
exploding with beauty,

behind the Tourist the Tearooms the provincial stage,
the fiord and volcano, an arras of mist, rise
out of the sea: the whole South Pacific backdrop

scintillates, cut out hunks of biology, its architecture,
sculpted out of light, dripping & gleaming, behind
colonial hospitality
in NZ Australasia;

And New Zealand’s own
indigenous sub-culture
forms a racial frieze,

and the principal characters get stage-fright, lose their lines,
and the dramatic situation recalls Chekhov, Moskva!
our sad eye turned to the setting sun & waning empire
of the West

North, which collapses like an umbrella,

as the threat of War is replaced by the threat of Trade,
and the Colours of all Nations run together, black,
red gold white & blue, as Water and as Progress runs,
down the easiest route

a dead sea.

The great dumb earth stares thru the eyes of cattle
and a mountain of fishes… I think anything so passive

asks for slaughter … second-rate jazz

and a cafe called Rossini’s make a gesture
towards sophistication, downtown Christchurch,

lacking only the european sense of style, or the american,

which is its inverse; ladies haute couture
walk like rugby players; this could be
the Eastern Bloc: a black & white imitation

for the Western visitor:
Yen, the hard currency, buys food without finesse
and waitresses with natural charmlessness.

Humanity is a team sport
the Greek torso at play on a field of jade

in perfect community chasing a pig’s bladder
or in the amphitheatre

its athletic suggestions of sex and death, death and sex
and the public cross

gives Christ professional status
making us all spectators. Is it Marx?

or the French Revolution
restoring us to participation? There are no

pivotal episodes we can turn from or learn from
in history, just men & women in common becoming

as undifferentiated as a flea circus
or advertisement hoardings on a motorway

before a major city, city of the ideal relationship.
And facing uncertainty

and the besetting illnesses of our age, can we say,
I have endured mortifications

in order that I might give myself up wholly to pleasure
like a champion, each of us?

O what de Sade can teach us! Hoof strikes the frost at dawn,
it is Goethe’s libido saving him from seriousness,

although Gretchen retain gravity
and the sensual thought remain, a fountain of crystals,

the charm of his or her illusions and contour
of the body’s lover’s blurred and dissolves

into other bodies and illusions.
So, can we say, I grow bored? Attention,

poetry is simply the algebra of names
and the young poet’s soul empties itself of content

in a leaning tower of rain
and cloud is a handful of grey doves dispersing…

Ideas create impotence. Regard the mad poet in his cage,
the mad poet is a cage and in his soul

a stinging shower of rage, even the primitive mind
can be made to grasp the rules of simple logic, brought

into a state of impotence,
and when the world ends there are no jews we can blame,

no conspirators to name, nor women we can shame,
criminals to maim, history bears no witness,

can we say, thought has failed merely?
An endless chain of mouths & words meaningless, you

are the weak link perhaps. Courage friend, join the team:
cooperation will descend from above

like a trade initiative scheme, we have the technology,
we have faith in the human organism’s capacity for survival,

we’re coming to the party, turning the economy around,
and pinning the tail on the donkey.

You and I became children of the human condition
when we joined together,
opening our legs to the proposition
cutting it in half with a feather.

We were mannequins
we were carbon copies
and we were possessed by the spirits of animals,
animals desiring to possess identities.

And because the sex was better than expected
and our aphrodisiac was knowledge
and the language was inflected
there came a language of bondage.

There was a time I did not want children,
I’ve had to abandon my former position;
healing love, there is only contradiction,
there is only contradiction.

You and I accepted this condition of hell
and its happiness, its malady;
it is song without refrain, perpetual
change, continuous melody.

Satan tonite and I signed a contract,
I could see the eyes under her skin,
a million spiders weaving the act;
I admit to some trepidation.

If we invite these barbarians into our home
will they be friendly?
If we are a couple, we are alone
and we copulate freely.

And she came out in her knickers
when I was drinking late after the party of intoxication,
her fingers were like sickles
and rape was clearly the implication.

Stench of bitumen sunshine

men lean on spades at the roadworks

sweating over a tank of tar, hot carpet of asphalt;

lawns tooled to an edge, & ticky-tacky

homes locked in quiet hysteria of the stations of the clock;

the railway guard

hung like a donkey

alights on suburban platform to violate

or make an assault

on her chastity,
and, as if the door
opened

before the battery arrived, he bursts in – clickety-clack
through the Johnsonville tunnel: those narrow-gauge

untrammelled ways!

See their toes curl, on the day-bed in the early afternoon

their two backs
striped like tigers,

butter-yellow sunlight thru cracks in the venetian blinds

(little black sambo) their
horizontal love-making, missionary

zealous, in order she may procure
an abortion.

If we can think of nation
as an individual,
Imagine the state nude,
and glowing, in the greenhouse

on a satin topaz ocean,
its genital proportions
exaggerated by the media – a national
obscenity

in the bordello of international relations –:
Apollinaire went out in a blaze of lilies, for example,
at the end of culture,
before politics
were sexual.

Ethos of economic self-advancement
I will attain my full potential tomorrow,

I will shed my inhibitions, you are my realisation,
Natural Selection bred me,

Land of Milk and Honey fed me,
I have suckled on the tit of cosmopolitan & opportunity,

shifted like a fish in a tide of telecommunications
and modernity, I will satisfy primitive want

and reconcile my higher nature, I’ll transcend Democracy,
achieve maturity, cash in orgasm, wear brogues

and suck cocaine, You are my Future, tomorrow…
Tonight I attain only nadir

and shed six hundred and sixty-six tears.
And the dog, the dog looks at you like an arm

you might need the use of.
And these children need a father…

But tonight your mind’s a metropolitan refuse station,
your heart’s a term so porous, so dry,

your body-clock’s an iron predetermination,
you’re a cul-de-sac in a deadend generation, do do, & I

in crocodile alcohol melancholic style,
I’m doing the smokedance,

praying to the ashtray, What does the wind say? thru its teeth,
that the rain laughs in its drain

and “flies buzz in the golden room… baptise me in gin”
that I rise again, do do,

let the breath speak through the breach in the word,
and the wound to body bleed;

Let God talk big and fraudulent,
till from the husk of the lord

no juice come. Rise up,
rise up again, I am underneath you.

And a tourist in our lives says,
You have each other…

You are both frustrated… I feel a song:
If you’ve ever hitched your wagon to a star,

if you’ve ever hoped or loved from far-off, dreamed,
striven, sought or followed after, then if you’ve

borrowed and then bought, set a trap and caught,
you will know how hollow O is having,

what bitter sport!

Time‘s children, we suffer as children
suffer the polarities of convalescence;
who mops the brow of the delirium?
Pain produces no suitable epithets.

Being an instance, the passion passes,
into nostalgia, empty of meaning;
salt on the tongue, the rattle of paradise:
the voices are angels’ screaming.

And I can read on your face the deliberate mechanism
of the animal, that is the aftertaste without flavour,
the mask of horror trammelled into the skin,
and I can see traces of inexplicable, unselfknowing behaviour.

And the rape of experience
of the rape of experience is incommunicable,
taking power of speech, restoring his/her innocence;
a sense of humour determines what is meaningful.

So hilarity is primitive
in the formation of the personality,
and society constitutive
of our unwillingness to take it seriously.

Tribal dance will be reinstated in the livingroom,
the social bond redefined as sexuality,
and the invitation to oblivion
will stress party dress and informality.

And that because you do not understand
power in the darkness;
the lie of the land
is that she said no when she meant yes.

And the skin condition of pain
becomes the music the laughter the drunkenness,
because you will not try to explain
power to the darkness.

Night chitter of sparrows
and illumination sodium reanimates the pigeons

a mephistophelean cat appeared along the ivy,
a twenty gallon drum of scraps, a young man

engaged in entrepreneurial activity
stands in the doorway of an edwardian facade:

he is a grandfather, whose mother lost her budgerigar

and had it returned intact by a fire-engine;

his eyes have folded wings as he consorts with a gentle skinhead

and he affords comparison with a political scientist

flying in the anodyne of a solid revolutionary prospect
in a drugless faculty,

except that he has lost his buttocks

and the firmness of his belief in the social fabric,

like a child
at a cock-tail party,
he looks at the knees of the people
and sits at the feet of the city,

city of the capital accumulation process

head swivel neck vibrant musical feathers

lapidary song
is the inscription of desire
on the stone facade

commerce of dreams
migration of language
island of birds,
inheritors of extinction:

((Penguins wear mourning black tuxedo,

Antarctica also, black ice-floe, and oiled waters)
Exxon, industrial stallion, Exxon,
seals remove their eyes,

(a drunk ship foundered on the smutted beach)
and the gulls preen in the grease-bath,

Thighs of Alaska:
no chemical douche can expunge that excessive lubrication.

(With a single masturbatory finger, Sir H. raises the point
and conducts the meeting
Song of the Kiwi

and a saint and visionary executive saves the city
with a festival of mediocrity)
(and a feminist births on a tabletop)
(I see

a manless womb-world
ethnic ecological intuition
and ceaseless gameshow challenge
of the handicap & disadvantaged person))

cheap, cheap dreams and extinction
island of birds.

Brothers, Sisters, take my arms,
lead me through the abattoir,

where there is a swimmingpool;
you cannot see the instruments,

they are buried in the carcass.
this is the environment.

Listen to the organisation of the harmonies,
there are a million possible consequences,

an unreasonable profit. I know,
you have nothing to confess,

but there is no consolation
for those not wishing to be saved.

Between your word and mine,
being in the space within the question,

in togetherness on a big bed,
there are only so many permutations,

different positions and opinions, to be exploited
in our intimacy, for the stimulation

of higher levels of consumption.
And pleasure does not increase

with rigidity or quality, but in proportion
to the play of high numbers and quantity

and the enumeration of possibilities, their multiplication,
which is the work of large bureaucracies,

pornography and the new technologies.
Her bounty is boundless,

and nature recognises no restrictions;
at the limits of personality,

we are exceeded by our preferences;
because the economy of the provisional

constitutes itself tightly in a lifestyle
and family of man and solidly in a prisoncell

and asylum as an endless labyrinth of thresholds,
like a threshold through a doorway into heaven or hell

and a threshold into the world of atomic quanta,
barcode, mirrorglass, georgian portico & virginity:

so that the provisional interposes itself
on behalf of the absolute,

and Freedom is absolute,
because Slavery can be bought or sold

and any limit consumed over time’s unseen topography…
But whether either’s true,

but as necessary abstractions,
but as the reasonable margins of public acceptability,

opening up a field for the deployment of the commodity
in which all relations are spatialised & depersonalised,

and as to whether truth is an appropriate category
for the ‘games people play’ is unavailable

at the present moment,
an old model with a fresh label and no containment.

Returning to our pigeonholes
we bear messages of condolence:

that is the extent
of my sociability.

You and I cannot be held personally accountable
for our bankruptcy, nor for the actions
of our children and the demonstrable
anatomy of their intimate patterns.

If we consider the problem of the arrow
where it flies from bow to bullseye,
we are illegible presents of an uncaring attitude
made legitimate by an impoverished responsibility.

And, painted in gouache on a broad canvas,
reality comes to resemble a meathook,
jerking us out of limbo,
this refrigerator and dream-garden.

We have been gods, miracle risings,
pursuing the proper avenues and vistas,
welcoming domestic life
and entertaining hysterical visitors.

“I am immaculate. Don’t touch me.”
Imagine the ghosts who walk these lines and frames
(as years click by on celestial chinese abaci)
where miraculously so much is unchanged.

Their exquisite figures and unspoken genitalia,
their infantile predisposition towards prawnpink icecream;
we are ballooning above the superintendence of the mystery
of love, all the graces gone before & fascism.

The unfamiliar habitat
is penetrated by a highway
of scenic paradoxes,
and, in this way, all knowledge is mirrorplay.

A lozenge of departures and arrivals,
do we meet at the vanishing point,
does the river run still,
does pleasure pass through the body like a glass of water.

L’Enfance du Christ

calling penetration the overlapping of surfaces

A knife in the flesh
splits the sheaf and the leaves fall
open, at a fresh page,

Is to say, because the body does not burst
its sac, but clings within its circumference –
and hides out in a saloon or brothel
waving the red flag or the white flag or both at once –
I am the sum of all my skin,

the fine skin of the vesicles
and the coarse palp of my fingertips, that is,
inasmuch as every contour
relies on contrast and touch,

How the limb bifurcates and vertebrae kiss
and the soft traffic and stream of corpuscles
shakes the fabric of air in the ear’s tinnitus,

The infinite play of surfaces,
of sheath upon sheath.

telling the rapist
he has witnessed the bather
drawing the ceaseless stocking
from the wave’s structuration,

A snake in the carpark
oiled its back,
spilt seed on a flat soil, and found purchase
for its hooked head
in a geometric and a slippery place,

Is to brag that she is inviolable,
she is unpuncturable like the sea,
the bullet’s round face laughs in her bathwater

and cigars roll from her dark thighs
as Mary doth arise,

she is inseminated with foam or with smoke,
because her womb echoes and is the City of God
unconquerable,

there is no insinuation,
or comparison, or conquest,
for it is no fortress, nor mouth except toothless,
nor home,

and the cursing voice returns modulated
from the answering, unquestioning cave,
and the singing voice from the minaret’s lost
in the endless tesselations
of its civic architecture,

The witness
turns to stone before the Medusa
and the muezzin praises
the fundamental and the transmogrified
manifestation,

Glory to the rosette
and political fraternity, glory to the curse
and embryonic capitalism, glory to the curtain
and transparent community, glory to the head
and the state’s penetralia, to the dawn, the news,
the curled moon and the coil
unfolding its red legs on the spiderweb, glory,
the popular consensus, and to the want of love,
loving supplication, to Birth and Scissors, glory,
and so forth.

How unlike the snake
she sloughs her skin inside her,
how unlike her insides are these rococo recesses,
these famous fountains, Quiet:

the old men of the republic
whisper in the confessionals,
in the ears of the inserted foetus,
and on the mouth of the unborn
the dead place their lips,

How natural
government in the ancient world and wise and elevated
the noise of the marketplace, the Infant is educed
from the smell of breadovens and, perhaps,
the taste of napalm
roots the unused tongue in the soil
of the moon on earth

that the crater talk like Caesar or the wound
speak like communism like pollution

from the photograph of a youngboy
carrying the corpse of his sister,

because the milk of soldiers
ticks like an ormolu wafer
in the unsmothered breast.

screaming
despite oneself,

A barb on the lash,

Twist at the joint,

Hammer on the bone,

and failure of a local anaesthetic, the point
shrills in the gum, nerve impacts
with a blunt instrument, rhythm
throbs in the cut and one is ripped
along the meridian, with upright thighs

and the thrill of an entrance or an ejection,
crossing the threshold in the arms of the redeemer,

as if He were a beast, as if she who cries out
behind my teeth were immaculate and an Angel –
I avow I am pursued by angels in my spiritual
envelope, their suffering is unspeakable
and their wings are useless -,

interacting without body, tumbling without hurt,
bearing one aloft without touching,

Because the soul is dainty
and inalienable, if you like, wrapped
close about one like a shroud,

torn at by the claws of cancer and the teeth
of solitude

where I would reveal myself
serene and implacable as a machine of war –
except that there are no wars –, it is a
juridicopolitical excess, if you will, and unable
to be distinguished from my transience
of personality, Yea, for in the manner of her sex

she has lost her boyhood,
it is the boy beside her, the charm
I pretend to, the humour incline to and the faint
elizabethan residue that comes between our legs,

between the mechanics of desire and the organs
of the state; and since the black maze

of the pain trap doth descend, angels
are its guardians and the lace darkens
under the axe: in the labyrinth

of its many skins, its many anuses, say
what lips could enter those lips? and what past

would they describe? but the history
of the heart’s muscle, how the organic
is interchangeable, the individual
a wing’d horn’d apparition

fleeing in both directions – master of the slain,
mistress of laughter – and meeting in the division
of its elastic monstrosity, after the construction

and the reconstruction, the unmasking
and the investment,

and what continuous music
reiterate? but the wind of confession

they pipe through its holes
that forces the valves
open, in the cathedral,

staining the glass and eliciting
the architecture from the harmonious scaffold,

the spire from the block,
and from the hand
of the god, the just sword, axe or hammer,
of the execution.

sleeping on the bosom of the car’s bonnet,
the noise of dolphins thrumming,
or on the lover’s bosom
dreaming,

A gate of perfume shut
on the broken garden, behind the shattered beach,

As if to reaffirm
that in the residence of the nice hostess
there is no departure from the coast,
there is no retreat from the city,

That their impermanence is
after the fashion of drowning
in the skirts of the empire – where it is true

civilisation cannot long hold sway over cannibals –,
and in the manner of a loss of the founding document,
of the sacred book – which are points of anchorage
for sales’ strategies –,

Not a matter of thuribles, obedience and prayers
and igniting a taper, but a Repossession
of the empty rooms in the kingdom of Heaven;

Yet there is the Body also,
empty and set free to circulate
among faces and surfaces in the gulag,

And, indeed, as if the Secret of power
were a palace of Dreams, it disappears,
down the hallways of the archipelago

muttering, tyrannicide, behind the arras
or palmfrond.

(Christmas Day 1989)

~~~~ ~~~~

*I pick up on this idea of the Christmas piece in part I of The Deep