no sun rose over the hills this morning
and i was gathering my dog-hands around the keyboard
to let them show you the latest tricks i taught them
i sent you some pictures with cloudless skies
with mountains reinventing the color white a few octaves higher
with lights floating gentle five centimeters above the table
in a spiritism session –
you told me humans are just as miraculous as Saturn rings
and their faith is stronger than the strongest drugs
and i know now it’s true –
i sent you pictures with empty libraries
and grain fields and blue-green lakes
and hospitals and slaughterhouses –
there is beauty in cruelty and in death, you told me
there is beauty in dead bodies
and war crimes there is beauty
in mothers crying their souls out
for their dead sons and for their raped daughters
there is beauty everywhere, you told me
it's just harder and harder to find
and it takes courage,
it takes strong will and a strong stomach
to see it deep down, in the heart of darkness
growing deeper and deeper inside itself
more and more alienated...
we have to bring it back,
you told me, and this is what I am trying to do right now
with these words from other worlds
i am digging deep
into the unsung childhoods sailing away forever
i am ransacking dying beds
and following god-serving moths
into their deaths
i am knocking down empty walls of concrete
white and indecent
searching for the first hum of those miraculous
four notes of Beethoven’s ninth
which promised us all redemption forever
or at least until the sun sets
and made up lights take over the world
with the subtlety of she-devils.
i dug into the heart of things
with my doggish imagination
and i turned upside down one world
after another and screamed in despair
and i know you are there
hiding deeper and deeper
carrying with you the seeds
from which this world sprang
into life and horror
i am searching for you with
all the good and all the evil in me
as you told me to
but i just can’t
i can’t, i can’t, i can’t
find you
i can’t figure out how
to get to you
and the sun sets forever
in kindness