from seven strangely exciting lies

from seven strangely exciting lies

from seven strangely exciting lies

vii Disintegrate me

There was such brilliance lifting off the sea, its aquamarine strip
blocked in behind white-dashed mimosas, that it stung my eyes
all morning as I stood in the old playground, pushing the swing
steadily, looking out across the water and longing to do without
these radio voices, and without my post as zealous secretary, as
transmitter of messages from the dead, who’d issue disclaimers
that they’d ever sent them – all the while a slow hot cut spreads
to baste me now with questions of my own complicity in harm
muttering thoughtfully about ‘patterns’ until I’m stamped out as
an old paisley shawl or worn kelim, do I look good as this one
or should I be less loud, or less repetitive? and on the top of my
wardrobe, familiar spirits cluster and hang to chatter, lean over
to peer down interestedly at me, vivaciously complaining about
the large amounts of fluff I’ve left up there, ‘that’s just as we’d
expect’: meanwhile the out-to-kill person is not, or so she or he
shrugs, pulled at by voices, but dead at heart stands amnesiac
plumped out with the effective innocence of the untroubled –
This gloss is taking me on unconvincing dashes down blind
alleys I mistrust, since desperate to see things straight, I can’t fit
apt blame in to self-damnation: could I believe instead in drained
abandon, in mild drift out over some creamy acre studded with
brick reds, to be lifted, eased above great sienna fields and born
onward to be an opened stem or standing hollow, a flesh ring
through which all slips or a fluent cylinder washed through by
azure-tangled braid, trailing Stella Maris, fervent star of the sea
marine milk vessel flopped at the lip flicking down swathes of
gulls emulsifying blackened earth striped and coiled under rock
under burnt straw air fuzzed in breathy fields of coconut-sharp
gorse flowers flushed tan on cliffs where lower, toothpaste green
lucidly rears and rears in the crash of blinding crumpled water
smoothing to clear and flat; so calmly let me disperse so simply
let me disperse, drawn out thin-frothed in a broad lacy pancake
fan of salt, or let me fall back as dolphins rock back in the sea
twirled like slow toys on pin-wheels – No single word of this
is any more than decoration of an old self-magnifying wish
to throw the self away so violently and widely that interrogation
has to pause since its chief suspect’s sloped off to be cloud, to be
wavery colour bands: no ‘release from service to a hard master’
said of the thankful close, it’s hoped, of sexual need in oldest age
can touch this other drive of shame fighting to clear a name to itself:
it can’t, because its motor runs on a conviction that if I understood
my own extent of blame then that would prove me agent; it doesn’t
want to face a likely truth of helplessness – that the inflated will to
gauge and skewer each wrong turn may blank out what’s far worse
to bear: impersonal hazard, the humiliating lack of much control –
I don’t get past this thought with any confidence.