On the side of darkness, infinity;
on the other, a sixty watt bulb.
Paul Hoover, “Darkness of the Subjunctive”
January is misbehaving:
The stars cough all night
Cold fragrant air
Rows of mean little houses
In subdued light
Peeking through the keyhole of her mind
into a stranger’s house
Her seduction gives way
to his destruction
Dissipating into happiness
The kind known from hearsay
Smiles and sighs follow one another
He the mind of winter
She: silent angular
A presence withdrawing
Still incalculably potent
The eyes:
A charm offensive
Dark so dark
Always a ‘yes’ hidden in them
Women of easy virtue and difficult vice:
They make a desert, and call it love.
How does he manage to get by
with only one sense of humour?
She asked
With all her soul in her eyes
Moving her lips
with vibrating intensity
as though reading a prayer secreto
He didn’t finish his answer
but the yearning of her look finished it for him
And nothing in the world stirred
But their own hearts
His pre-emptive emotions
And nuclear trigger
Worsted as the years went on
Always afraid of going away
Hugging and hating the solitude
Of his overcrowded mind
Measuring his days by nights
But even the night was never night enough
Lovers of half-shades
Her natural malice
His imaginal present
Lingering, tasting, digesting
Her vaginal future
Feeling the farewell
Could never really tell, because
Yes and No are lies
Believe it, make-believe it
I can’t choose! I can’t decide!
We might not suit one another.
If we do — then —
And all the thrill lay in that then…
All in the hope
The tremulous hope.
We do not know what we want
And we do not want what we know.
Like shadows hanging in air
Their threads of reality unravelling
Absenting themselves from the world:
She said time erases life,
He said let’s be timeless.
She said it would be dark,
He said he hated daylight.
She said it would be lonely,
He said he prostituted his mind talking to people.
She said he is mad,
He said may God preserve him from sanity.
She said: God will.
And God will.