The song that cuts the throat
Muse teach me the song
that cuts my throat
I
Teach me to twist the tongue.
But not so suddenly.
I need this dust and wind
(and not only to be scratched)
Teach me the leisure of the tongue
which is no stranger to the strange saliva
slits or the breath whistle
in the whispered curves
of greyness, to the severity
of flat objects in the dark chambers
of my lucidity. Eager,
mundane.
The incalculable, mostly.
The hangover after being so close
to the present, after having my temples
so inward looking.
Or whatever this might be.
Teach me the song that uncomfortably
bends the tongue’s excitement.
A sure way to hasten
the reticence of what is to come.
Teach me this chewing
this muscle-waving
and eventually refine
the bitter spit I generate.
Rehearsals.
For training the urgency.
I’ll save my teeth for other tasks,
Other verbs, less narrow meanings.
Teach me a language
That scratches.
That’s all.
Like somersaults on the tarmac:
Jolly, although necessary.
Even more: that scratches the scratch itself.
A language
as that which is spoken by man
sometimes unknowingly
(My knowing and not knowing it
simultaneously)
Teach me how a language is spat
By those who countless times have
spat out beauty, because it was faintly implacable.
Just as those who’ve been taught
that the hours which thus
softly strike certainties
tie us to this soil
and that this is the only song.
All of them who whistle with pursed
lips have another obscure song.
Consonants tightened
by a knotted grief and by tenacious
vowels in their indistinct resounding.
An effortful voice
For it comes raw and indecisive
Through the cracks of what’s necessary
– We always come back to it
As we peer through the slits of anger.
I am told that language
belongs to murkiness and dampness.
Or the other way round.
That the poets own
Particularly twisted ones,
Slashed by shadows.
But that’s not it:
Fuck the poets’ tongues.
Its pleats don’t agree with midday.
These days disagree with me
But I insist in licking up their dust.
Teach me to lick up the dust
in another way.
I want the language of all
The afflicted, the clumsy spirals
Of the frantic blade which the world is.
Airy the language in the sun
Twist it under the light
Unhinge it so that it finds
its mismatching speech.
The contrived wriggling
sneaking off through the places
these times have imposed on us.
Teach me how to bend pain
To draw out the body and the embarrassment
Of almost possible gestures
In this language, this buzzed
foretelling of quasi futures.
Teach me, muse, unworkable music
II
I no longer search for the cause
The first – the cause without a cause
– in explosions or sobbing of matter.
I presume the stupid need
For the beginning and the necessary
Contingency for disorder.
I presume purpose with a grimace
I also recognise in others.
With them I assume the wavering means.
We go where the faint
Tremors that humble us
will lead.
That which we still call the future.
Teach me the gasping blow
that twists our tongue.
Sing to me that which holds
the sweetness of breathing.
That which we still call for
And some called the song.
Perhaps mistakenly
But let’s start with error
And let’s take its knots
to our fierce
and possible conclusions.
Let grenades burst
where the throat folds.
With tooth and nail, the breath
still alive of so much dust
and hoarseness. The evidence of the doubt.
All there is which is most splintered.
We, the latent rage that we are,
the daggers soiled with revolts of yore.
Up to the present.
Where to begin except
where its slight leanings
may take us?
My temples go on surviving
The consecutive and necessary massacres of my ego.
The present.
Its gentle tendencies.
Its certainties, its impurities,
its vague messianisms
Its clarities, its closures,
its heavy rhythms.
The obvious is the spot where things are nothing
but the ill disguised ramblings of our waiting.
We are alive, or something like it.
That’s right, we live of dusts.
Brute, abrupt.
Between the terrified tongue and the nebulous temple.
But, nevertheless, alive.
Someone mentioned the necessary impurities.
III
Is it song that
which awakens me to almost life
on the tips so tender that I don’t even know
whether they’re tips of fingers or of dense
fierce fixed
ideas I entertained
while I thus breathed myself in, breathed myself in
and breathedmyselfin
again and again.
That which thus moves me
and scratches me.
I breathed in because breathing out brings
the hooks where in haste
I hang the song.
As it is. What it is. The murmur’s beat.
That Which the song Which thus
made me an instrument with untouchable chords?
Get used to it. And extricate yourself at your peril.
Once I heard a voice being undone.
What has from the other side
thrown me into the shadow?
There are other sounds, winds, exercises
So that chords shudder in silence,
implicit in centres and ends.
I still feel the thread that leads us
from the suspended nails to the prayers.
Neither ecstasy nor furore
or devastation, or anything at all.
Compose, though,
as if they all existed.
Let the wind awake with precarious
tongs the obscure and imperfect
murmur. I spoke.
Let you
wake up. I spoke.
The fierce, oblique mornings,
the future
in chords
of turmoil, anger and clarity.
That is the tangle that interests me.
The mouth that forgot the song
But not the agony that hisses it.
The muse that has forsaken me
But hasn’t abandoned that which will
one day be my deferred lucidity.
The word that pushes the wall
of noise from the inside.
If there were an inside.
If there weren’t only the wind
And the mechanisms of uncertainty.
The song, after all.
Here’s another explanation for my shyness.
Like the wildest song
(for the tone has to be found)
Let them not be in vain,
the sounds and the subsequent verse
wherever they fall.
This is how I hear
what I scarcely perceive
How I fabricate what I scarcely
comprehend
This is how, bit by bit, the world.
Let confusion be
only the beginning
The eye be
the momentum beyond vagueness
The arm be
that which makes the soil
our own, the voice
be like light
and campus.
Humbles prayers, I know,
and uncertain: just that
which ties me to the sounds and that
which your whispered name
throws at me.
Teach to peer into the creaking of my nape.
Teach me all that is more than this.