The Valley and I
Then
drifting along the rooftops
the night overflowing in the street.
Time measured in dollars per gram
faces that say ‘for lease.’
Miami at The Zoo
deep fried quail after a Chinatown queue.
Retail staff that give away a phone number
with every purchase
and even the pleasure caste has loyalty cards
offering fly buys on every corner
until the heart of Brunswick Street
is severed; an inner-city triple bypass.
Now
glasses are filled in espresso bars
where time is measured in numbers
through the door. Every second shopfront
says ‘for lease’ in six languages;
everyone nips out for a Brazilian
and everyone has a forwarding address
for someone else.
Downstairs, traffic is calmed.
The voiceless line footpaths
shouting at passers-by in their sleep
while upstairs, withered haves
draw the curtains at nine
as live venues play Silent Night.
Self portrait
95% of a beard, a flattened back and punched-in chin.
Skin that doesn’t brown easily.
I study my body’s surface like a cartographer
cataloguing its changes, creating a topographic map.
But I’ll never know my aortic arch,
corpus callosum, or denticulate ligaments.
To visit the islets of Langerhans, travel
the eustachian tube, sail the palatine canal.
I can hear my heart if I choose
but don’t; its constancy sounds so fragile.
Wounds knit and heal with my knowledge
but without direction; scars remind of my limits.
I don’t feel any of the impulses that arc within;
perhaps it would hurt if I did, every thought a pinprick.
If I had a say, I’d stop my lenses hardening
to blurredness, decide which memories to keep.
I don’t know myself at all;
an organism subordinate to itself.
And on a day in winter, or spring, perhaps a Saturday
in old age, something will fail, or I’ll be invaded
from the outside, or from within, and I will cease
reluctantly.
Rwanda, 1994
eight
hundred
thousand
people
divided
by
one
hundred
days
equals
eight
thousand
people
every
single
day
