Thank you, Laynie.
Thank you to Laynie to Annie Guthrie
for bringing me from the airport to Gail
here at the Poetry Center.
And to Judith and Laura and Renee
for this strange and illuminated company today.
I am simply going to read from Schizophrene of which--
is that correct English?-- of which
a destructive, feral excerpt resides in the anthology.
I'll drown this book by which I mean
to say thinking in your piece, Renee,
I think you said blood making stem cells?
I tried in the anthology to combine sentences
used in my research for Humanimal
a work centering upon feral children.
I tried to link those to concepts
that appear in this book.
But listening to everything I thought, no,
that it's bad idea to read from the actual anthology.
So, I've converted myself instantly
into the person who might read this.
[LAUGHTER]
And, so, it's very short.
It's not much on every page and it's like 29 pages.
And we were invited to read between 15 and 20 minutes.
So, that's not going to take very long is it?
So, if I start talking about partial solar eclipses
we'll know it's gone on too long.
So, this, another dreadful book centering upon migration
and mental illness.
I'll just read from it.
And so good luck.
Good luck to all of you.
[LAUGHTER]
"Schizophrene."
"One, schizophrene.
I threw the book into the dark garden, the account
begun mid-ocean in a storm.
Immigrant, nothing happens.
Immigrant.
Below the aeroplane is the river.
Someone who could weight me down,
whether physically or with language,
in all the ports of call.
Athens in January, Munich in February, London in March,
immigrant.
There's nothing erotic about the 10 rupees in your pocket.
The account begins mid-ocean where even your boarding pass
is knotted in a handkerchief in your broken down suitcase
in the hold.
Dazzling you, I select your suitcase.
You watch it float over the railing and into the air.
Yellow lightning in the silver sky and the three sheets
of rain.
So bamboo, so cream.
Stupid man.
You watch your suitcase sink, burning up its requisite energy
simply by breathing.
Everything breathes, even you.
Breathe, immigrant.
Fly, immigrant.
Sail, immigrant.
Blue.
When I opened the door, there was a weird blue light
coming off the snow.
I threw the book into the snow.
The ship left Bombay at dawn, a pink smear, the sunlight
both a position and an entity.
The ship docked.
The ferry left Calais at dawn, a green sky.
I kept drawing the horizon, the static line somehow disk-like.
Near seven, I saw an intense set of orange red and gold lines
above the place where the sun would be.
The ship docked, and I found my home in the grid system.
The damp wouldn't stew in the bath, a slice of bread
with cheese on it, and so on.
All my life I've been trying to adhere
to the surface of your city, your three gray rectangles
split into four parts.
A red dot, the axis rotated 76 degrees and so on.
But then I threw the book into the grid.
It was a wet grid.
The snow wet the book then froze it like a passive sun.
These notes are directed towards the region I wanted to perceive
but could not.
Notes for schizophrene night, a schizophrene day,
a rapid sketch.
The book before writing, arcing once more
through the crisp dark air.
And the line the book makes is an axis,
a hunk of electromagnetic fur drawn
from the side of something still living
and thrown like a wire threaded a spark towards the grass.
A line for someone on their first voyage,
a non-contemporary subject, the woman or even the man.
The person with an articulate gender,
a flux where the body always is, who asks what's forbidden,
what's expected, in the annular zone in the airport,
on the Earth.
A veil, a harness, a rope.
Do psychiatrists register the complex and rich vibrations
produced by their dreaming subjects?
The indigo or emerald green crown
that coats the hair and shoulders
of an interviewee erasing distinctions
between what is outside the sky and what's beneath it.
What digs into the head.
The emanating structures appear in the light
that comes from the body.
And it is these structures that perform
a rudimentary narrative, a memory or two.
But to write this narrative is not to split it,
for which an antidote is commercially
produced in quantities that exceed populations.
A schizophrenic narrative cannot process the dynamic elements
of an image, any image, whether pleasant, enriching,
or already so bad it can't be tendered in the lexicon
of poses available to it.
I need a new pen.
An idea for a novel before it's shattered there on the bench
next to the fountain which is frozen,
deconstructed, in the air.
I walk the long way to the Tate from the Pimlico Tube,
a fact more intense each time I repeat it in my mind.
And erotics, a mad progression that
exceeds a central frame like seeing something then falling
down.
I break my walk at the fountain as I've
done since childhood, which is chromatography.
The white panels then the livid black.
It's already late.
A black world coming down from the heavens, black with stars.
They're walking into that, the darkness pouring
into their mouths when they reached the hills.
Coming down over the two of them, a man of about 60 that
read afternoon into evening.
The dirt of that place, a kind of orange brown,
and his granddaughter, eight years old that July.
A Londoner, she's wearing a blue and yellow dress
with a daisy print.
As for the man, he's dressed in a white cotton
dhoti and a kurta with an almond cake pale shawl embroidered
along its narrow border with maroon and turquoise paisley
swirls.
The upwelling of philosophy attends to what we can't see,
a light tent over the text.
Nevertheless, reading these words,
I can't have them in my house.
And so I open the door, flinching
from the blue fire of the individual blades of grass,
the bonds of the plant material that release
a color when they are crushed.
When the book hits the ground, a sub red spike without a sauce.
Can you play chess?
Late August, Pakistan.
The arms, the mud, dried now and flaking to the wrist.
He collapsed, screaming insensate
to the arrival of his wife a week later.
Her sari caked with blood, straining then
bucking in a makeshift cage.
We kept him in the cellar for a year.
A stem, wrapped in a thin blue and white checkered towel,
the salt used to wrap the earthenware pot of unset yogurt
again and again.
Arriving the rose, like a color just ahead of them.
The torch, she thinks, held there
and upright in her grandfather's grasp.
When they reached the jungle, the luminous stands of bamboo
sway in the rain, creaking and popping at their touch,
at the brush of their arms.
Darkness has truly fallen now, obliterating the city
below its population.
A man comes to the gate where they stop.
He walks into the fragrant gloom of the garden
and snaps the stem.
A green still visible at seven.
And I reach out my hand.
Tea?
And when the chessboard appears, diamond shape from where
she's sitting and copper edged in the Russian fashion,
the girl drifts.
I don't see her, I feel her.
Then as if he too can feel the mountains pulsing
through the walls of the house, her grandfather gets up.
She gets up.
And they go."