The Mirror

Sleep     horns of a snail                                           protruding, retracting What we choose to know                                            or not know                                                                  all these years sleepwalking                         next to death I  This snail could have been eaten  This snail could have been crushed This snail could have dreamed it was a painter or a poet This snail could have driven fast at night putting up graffiti with a spray-gu...

About resititution, say this, the money is nice. Buys schöne Aussicht, Schlagrahm, Rosenthal and Rucksack (my bitter, modest Wermut) O lovely handy twenty years later. Neither mangled, crippled nor marks, nor bruises on it. Honest cash money healthy as when last seen, separated, kissed goodbye— (Besides, I was hardly born, no more than Horst Eichmann; it was my father's business) Why where have you been my darling and how long I thought you one with dentures, gold teeth, babies' bones, the glue pots of the world had had you— (And why should they get fat on it? They're getting more than enough) Let's know ourselves my treasure. Come Bundesbahn together.                       Ashes Ashes                       fall down, all, fall down [From: Halley, Anne. (1...

Children we have not borne bedevil us by becoming themselves painfully sharp and unavoidable like a needle in our flesh. Coming home on the subway from a PTA meeting of minds committed like murder or suicide to their own private struggle a long-legged girl with a horse in her brain slumps down beside me begging to be ridden asleep for the price of a midnight train free from desire. Little girl on the nod if we are measured by the dreams we avoid then you are the nightmare of all sleeping mothers rocking back and forth the dead weight of your arms locked about our necks heavier than our habit of looking for reasons. My corrupt concern will not replace what you once needed but I am locked into my own addictions and offer you my help, one eye out for my own station. Roused and deprived your costly dream explodes into a terrible technicoloured laughter at my failure up and down across the aisle women avert their eyes as the other mothers who became usel...

Your vividness grants color where   Great need is, in this dingy town,   As you in pride of rose and brown      Thread the dull thoroughfare. Across the Southern sleepiness    Flashes a something swiftly real:    The unavoidable appeal       Of your sharp loveliness. And not as Cavalier scions, do    These listless Southrons, furtive-eyed,    Greet gracefully your proper pride, -        But wonderstruck at you, Regret awhile, that aliens    They will remain, darkly allured    By an inviolable, assured,        Laughing indifference. You pass, provocative, discreet,    Serenely waving to his place,    Each lover of your bronzen face,        Your merry, flashing feet. The impudence filling your eyes    Will call down on your swarthy ...