The first poem in the Violence Of The Morning
is called Minotaur Provides for this Paragraph.
Minotaur was the title of a periodical
that the great French thinker Bataille
was planning to edit, to produce,
but it never got off the ground.
And at the back of the text for his book, Inner Experience,
there are notes from Bataille with editorial comments
and so on.
I incorporated the notes of that editorial comments in brackets
in the poem, and I'm not going to make
brackets signs every time I come to one of those.
But maybe you'll be able to hear the difference.
The speaker then is Minotaur.
The ground very much eating, my death
is the breathing and the flower.
Pretty thing chopped up around its center,
edible somewhere above.
I close my eyes and walk out into the city on all fours
and on to the meadow.
Why?
It blushes to see me and give myself over to replaced by.
It's useless.
I get a dirty feeling right here.
I think these nerve endings are not nice.
My friends in the margins sacrificed.
Stand up, pulse, I say, even if one leg is
a field, and another, a condor.
I talk to myself this way to keep off
the smells of jagged, discursive life.
Look behind the first edition, air petting the blackberries.
They have nothing on us now.
The stories I tell my children, the library opens at 10:00.
The regulations I'd pass on to them crossed out.
My friends, I shall get to the heart of it all presently.
I've been put where I've been given
the plan of, plus the outside isn't in relationship really,
illegible, crossed out.
We give next these scattered notes.
Herodotus was wrong about an Egyptian reputed
to have the loudest voice in the world.
I myself have filled these 14 miles of corridors
with the sounds of troops shouting as they
kill, and my mother was human.
I should not be overlooked.
Dilating in darkness to be born, again, crossed out,
blind creature, start again.
Oh love, start again.
Her hair was yellow as the gold.
She was a jolly dame, and stoutly served me,
and I did love her for the same.
Verse is my passion.
It gets me out of here.
I sway my rump and get off my thoughts
for I was hither come to them.
I saw how from the slivered flowers, red drops of blood
did fall and how that shuddering horribly the branches.
I was addicted to rage, the doctor said.
He gave me a funny look.
My father called me names, penis envy probably, start again.
On me, I cannot stay focused in this gloom.
I saw the millions of data crowded on the head of a pin.
This was a dream.
I was shot into space.
This was a dream.
Bollocks brained, the doctor said, asses,
I blew them apart with one scream.
How many feet of sod on my roof?
Sometimes, I think I hear rain.
I patched together from the tarnished silver
sounds a slithery suit of glitter scales.
Oh, ladies, run your hands along my spine.
Yes, yes, I know, only a wild destruction shines.
On the other side, death is, in a sense,
an impostor crossed out, and when
the book is finished after which I tons of flesh
and its stupidity.
Stop, the collapse of time within me filthy,
bite the outstretched hand.