Mustache And Crown

Marshes Under Mannahatta

Secretly, like fire. Apartments touch a bang touch in nineteen something nine. All shining wood grain is covered with rusted hasps and squares. Names in the ceiling own their leaving faces. Antic ghosts stay lonely in your dream each night, until you make a sea to drown. They are satisfied and leap and gulp air with anti-joy, sleeping for collision. Frantic cities gather your ocean, building sky arms and tangling your lungs. Everything that was above is under. Surprised faces glint in little mirrors falling from pockets and purses. People see that they themselves are mere image. Saws and hands warble, nothing. Nothing when you look at the time. Nothing when the bridges are lit with sailors’ fire.

Uniform Din Horizon Murk Unending Absence Equation For Planets And Medicine Illness Of Water And Loss

My dirty dog dark I need water I need stark I need my cold head full this letter for lusting and freezing new rain for seeing and this open window a raw gaunt shield of bracken body for taking down flumes of old hell and torn baggies of light and chambers of brushing sublimated trains aghast with wormflies hastening and broadening to fill yon voided bed oh mimics with candy oh breach of imperfect trust and secret world sans atom or atmosphere collude with igneous houses gathered in emptiness I flank and cranes wreck the gone bib and yellow dress relays quiet moats forward of winter bastions earthy black ponds of bursting metonymy.

Some Morning

It’s this leaky boat, these hundred horses in my herd, this bag of corpse knuckles. They keep taking me up and down the line and the ocean writes Thursday. The trade is the grown message infects everything. I am supposed to produce children now, with vigor, and instead only stanzas say. Strophes with faces and lasting hand impressions like my hands she once adored and held. I have broken bones on myself and on boards, karate boards, in early articulations of cracking up. Red morning sky and that red hair and haunting glance all briefly see and look away. I am at my sink thinking of my happiness.

of nothing

god of nothing I made me petals something I made me perhaps the trill of a thrush day made me saying lilt and up wayward town the men in me go genuflecting everything is toward her teeth everything bursting from clocks banging on sheets on metal and crying for pinkish gauzy ghosts that bring summer into crooked coldish places the heart in me the hearts the bratty arcing headlong dash at long legs laughter people staggering out of cars city ceilings buckling under moss dangling ringlets and noses in ears nor do I worry nor do I rush this thought is slow in rising that is fine that is this longish moment

The Thinnest Thread

Burnt and burning and the return of hows that heap the fire. Yellow leaves do the candle thing. This is not that. This is not the papier-mâché world we clotted up and rolled, our arms dirty and sand in cracks. This heaven thing: memory of a blue song in the hollow of an attic guitar. You play for me, I gather my belongings, sit and listen. The world is all alive with little Shinto creatures, humming in corners, everywhere softing. I have tea, we look at the designs on your arm, the meat is served and it is all very grand. The thinnest thread is all I need from thee, muse.

Seven Words Have Done It

The storms have thrashed these houses, these streets. It is winter and yet feels like flowers from what we say. The snow is in my head already. But your words are deciding things. We have said sleep and lying down and other things like how the world might go. The passage over mountains has made things. We have turned and seen each other looking. I like that you look for me, and I like to look for you. I taste orange in my mouth after a wish. It does the opposite of sting. We might look at the numbers on my door as we walk out. Stucco grey cloud heads roll in to see our earth arms. It will keep happening, this hat of desire. It will happen and keep relocating in our limbs, the tapes, laughter between us. Not the ones that got away but the ones that got to go, we’ll find far and foreign flavors and bring them back. As the dust that fills the world makes it old and new and clay each day, so will I make you new.

Marcella Riordan does Molly Bloom's closing soliloquy

...God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows or the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and 0 that awful deepdown torrent 0 and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (Excerpt from episode 18 of Ulysses by James Joyce)