Faces in a Rear View

“The room is worn out; it is as if people have been coming here since the beginning of time.”

The middle of the room

Smelling of dust,

The pattern of an eye, repeats.

Bare walls like these

Have too much between them,

Too many heartbreaking corners

Made human, by virtue

Of being touched.

So the rubbed down knob

And the painted latch,

Moldings of men

Wear away, into slowness

Pass away like smoke.

*

From the hallway mirror

A face enters from a tomb

Finding itself,

Hanging from a peculiar hook,

Feels alone by the evening.

Night, (all consuming) falls

A habit of recession

Alike to each one before.

Yesterday is remembered.

*

“Now I can no longer see anything but the pallor of my face, with its deep eye-sockets, buried in the dusk, and my mouth full of silence which is gently but surely stifling and destroying me.”

For days to multiply:

The next imaginable face

Glanced from a dark window.

There is only one’s voice

Carouseled sounds

On a flat, languid tongue

Vaguely human.

The exaggerated sunset

Is a small knick of death

Is a captivity

Stripped and diminished

Wandering to a dangerous lust

For a return.

“I try to discover the purpose of her gestures, but they escape me… I have a feeling that, in spite of the wall, my body is leaning toward her” (p.21-22).

“The body is the appearance that dictates your life.” – M.B

In the public square

where crowds spill

as if to be,

so utterly open

bodies give up

their plurality.

Behind a locked door

faces and gestures

come closer

to their curious feature.

The muted sun,

coming through a window

onto stockings

worn at the toes

A little pure flesh

small enough for a kiss

Visible at the instant

of being known.

Onto the face:

The site of all nudity

Beneath its pipes of bone

tectonically separating

to be the gap

of your mouth

Between parted lips

there is no location.

Distant Cities

As the echo

perforates

toward the smog

of its own

elliptical center

Emptiness holds

at the grainy core

The static limbs

slung over the bed

The chin tucks away

from the stationary lamp

Clarity hangs

above the topple

of suitcases

From the corner

the deposits

of footsteps

have a film of absence

And the face

peeking from the dresser

is mistaken

for a face on the sidewalk