The Swimmer And She Who Knows

(First published in the UK, in Terrible Work - Issue 9, 1999)

Furlong deep in dog mercury cuckoo florid earth, orange tipped, the swimmer, smeared in dolphin grease, burrows, scrabbled & scratch-scraped,

down down down

gulps fairway breaths, rutted, the imperious, impervious sopping air/ downwards, aching against, seminal gravity of light, dense photons of ultraviolet infrared x-ray gamma-ed (the stigma skin, less interesting visually than, say, a Grunewald)/ down against the cuckolded calling of primary, secondary, tertiary urgency

this not cut, cut up, uppercut, a stranded dream

breeding false springs, limbs frost riveted to frozen mass/ the swimmer sinking down into darkness/ the man on the radio watching out for swallows, tit willow, tit willow, the weather diabolical/ thunder, lightning, hail/ down into the darkness of dank roots and wild rubbish/ raking among the detritus of forgotten dreams... and there, he goes relentlessly following her, everywhere she goes; and I thought we were going to see them mating. 'Oh, I remember fucking in the mad midnight winter wheat fields when I was animal soul, type-writer body, she was water wheels to my stormy petrol, and in coitus, we procreated electric rainbow voodoo children, cast Stratocaster shadows in the frost of migrant bird workers'. Down into the stinking earth where delirious demons Mardi-Gras parade, fat Tuesday caskets of Pandora miseries/ these soul eggs, cracked in Beelzebub's fistular claws/ Eostra promising awakenings with Christ fasted scientific destructions/ and God is lurking round your bed, like a shadow, like a thief in the night.

Thrusting through grasping theistic fingers/ sympathy laughing mythological, alcoholic through mouth-hands, electro-microscopic tentacles of uncomfortable tradition. 'Is the world a totality of facts?' Tautologists stare wide through lightless void... and if God is dead, all sorts of things could be going on.

Hey, hey, hey, let us look for signs and wonders in the thunder, miracles in the cracks between the worlds. Cut up this course now... miracles are science naturally forgiving, Will Burroughs and Aldous Huxley in narcotic conflict, they enable you to heal the nightmare of atonement, imposing a framework of intelligibility, a religious impulse in the brain that intrigues & creation of light is real, unreal, real this world of information, of growth… and putting our brains out on the table, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference/ let us blunder through our lives then with a virtual expression of love/ find ourselves sympathetic to an acceleration of divine impossibility/ the awesome advances of new technologies/ the arch-angel of silicon based intelligence/ unashamedly millenarian-Aryan/ the drug-taking human mind... and the unresolved question of whether everything will shut down come the tic tock flop into the year two thousand.

I may consider selling my brain/ now that I have been superseded by my computer.

And in this crack between the worlds there are no seamless existentialists/ La Que Sabe leaves a trail of bones/ running with the wolves now/ she whispers stories… and you should listen well, for this crone shadow is she who knows.

Expressing uncertainty, creeping through the valley, a possible victim, the wolf - a common or garden intellectual - fixes an unreal world in the appropriated arts. Shamanic & chilled, the quantum multiple-world anally monopolises imagination. In and out of belief, the woman constructs the shiny and bleak details of his world... black menses of earth/ he suffocates/ not waving, the swimmer/ computing the madness of drowning/ a fragile thread of hieroglyphs/ perishing in the thin floodlight of moonlight/ he bides down in striations of saturated soil/ La Que Sabe laughing a trail of bones through bloodless ears. He corpses on stage/ sinks down into ambiguous nothingness/ a fine spiral of voice, heard only in the hollows of sleeping hours.

'I remember fucking her in the mad midnight winter of diplomacy: her foreign office ransacked by floodwaters of union.' He dreams of referenda, drowning in the totalitarian soil of her wisdom. Her electrical discharges, enlightening the shadowed cracks between the worlds. He urges his smallfart plebs onto the streets to raise revolution and plead for the continuance of darkness, rallies them with sectarian sentiment. La Que Sabe laughs a trail of bones through the idiocy of their leeched blood/ rapes his bunged ears with the vaginissimus of her inevitability. Scalding all tongues on stolen waters. There can be no sweetness in the swimming drowning not waving of initiating patriarch penis wielding God. Oh jealous, jealous, jealous, the infant shielding his scrotum/ brass welded to the cold nothing of control. The swimmer breathing filaments of earth into starving lungs. La Que Sabe waves her breasts in apocalyptic zeal/ the swimmer squeals, clutches the oakwood-iron cross to his lacerated, sobbing chest.