The last exercise: really long and slightly nonsensical

Go blind today already, king of rhythm, because today is the day it all dies, not music but something deeper– the beat, the heartbeat in us all. They dressed on the beach, the rhythm-killers, this morning while we were sleeping, crawled without color over a colorful land. Now we are drained of it. Maybe you can come back on a day of the wind and blow through us, the more you move your hands the more we might remember you, remember what it felt like to be bodies in synch below the surface. Or maybe we’ll have forgotten you, as we tend to do (I’m sorry). Oh misfit king, without you we are migratory animals unable to form a flock–moving in no direction. My voice grows louder–do you hear how loud?–because the background noise is fading. That empire where you are–blind king, open your eyes. It is a hall of mirrors. The future is blue without you and you’re still dreaming that it is night and this is the same world you know. Across the rooftops the killers are coming, you can’t hear or feel them, they’re coming. Soon you’ll have no name left for us to remember you by, soon we’ll have just vague dreams of something larger than us, some loose sky which shook itself free of its hooks and came down around us for a moment. We’ll no longer know how to gravitate towards each other without your pull, the guide of your humdrum thumpthump. Don’t run. They’re here and there’s nowhere to go. The incident of your death is already in the air. It’s just you and me now. It’s just you and me now. To hold out would be futile, but I will help you barricade the doors (I think they’ll come in through the windows). “I don’t remember this being the way it ended,” you say. “After today you’ll never notice the breathing of someone who lies beside you in the moonlight. You’ll never be able to sing songs to your child.” Other women may have been more upset by this but I am helping to stuff cotton balls in your ears. Don’t open yourself–they will come in through your mouth. The assassins are coming, they can’t be seen or heard or felt, but from your eyes leaks something other than blood or tears and this is the sign that they are coming. “Even without me,” you say, “life is something, life is everything.” I am taking on the lake of time signatures pouring out of you. As if the wall of well had been split open. I hold your 4/4s and your 6/8s in my hands and try to shove them back down your throat. “This is a testimony to the presence of God,” you say. You are being swallowed up now. We seek the shelter of a windowless room to hold everything in but it’s too late. The rhythm-killers are here. They are inside of us. You could walk into this room and see or hear nothing but the tragedy is still lingering in the air, broken up, fragmented. Without you we are houses without windows, we are forever inside ourselves, we cannot get out.

~ by raymunbro on January 30, 2008.