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Dark Matter

available for only 1495 		Dark Matter, collection book front cover, 2008

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Down in the Dirt v054

this writing is in the collection book
Decrepit Remains
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 Decrepit Remains, the 2008 Down in the Dirt collection book
dog eye variations

David McLean

I.

there is no love but a slowly drying ground
where the vast sea went down,
no love but a bloody baneful strangeness
and pain lying there,
nothing but a name and a face
and their traces where i saw her;
a charred gladness and sad burning, a total absence.

there may be justice, more certainly punishment,
at least there’s a nothing;
a plain so loveless, a grief and a greyness.

i have seen this great desiccation, i have been it;
have suffered untouchedness
and heard the roaming finger of lonely
scrape the naked surface of days without growth,
have dreamt of grace and woken to ageless roman pain,
only been myself in this caravan of changes,
dreamt of someone else,
and woken faceless.

II.

the dread certainty of suffering is bone-white
and salt-clean with rinse of fears,
sneezing catharsis and gross weakness -
a prehistoric artefact as dry as a tear is.
my arrayed armies of failure in golden harness
have prayed this awakening,
and pay its price in habit unbecoming,
true armies of loving.

III.

the cold rails beneath the trains are friends together
conjoined in dismal separation,
both aware of their place,
each aware of her destination -
trapped by the lonely isolation of their respective stations.

IV.

how can a moist gland encase such a totality,
or an arid kindness be a monstrous cutting,
a hurt, an unexplained vector of torment?
the forests have lived for ages
without feeling lonely or knowing beauty,
without these strange rages of emotionalism,
they are placid in their passivity:
our active pain is the possibility that makes us happy,
the double outcome of the loving function.

V.

the dog eyes of affection are abraded and chafed
by empirical factuality,
the dog heart nobody wants,
the unasked chemical life of glands and violent hormones
leads to the casual brutality of the unloving loved
leads to Anna’s bazooka of smack

this is a dog life for the fish-eyed boys,
the wide-eyed eaters of figs,
inglorious inheritors of the lies of love
and disbarred from contentment,
seekers after the vain and receding truth
behind the broken-trumpet stutterings,
splinters of disharmony are the psalms we have left
from our inherited lies,
we fragments of metaphysics so desperate to be clever,
eager imitators of genius, broken down clowns,
ignorant and well-educated,
we displaced our love with our ethics,
our lives are wasted.

VI.

the houses just exist and stand there
so blankly offensive;
there’s no spirit behind their numbly outrageous being, their need,
just as there’s no soul behind her predetermined choices
that reject me and leave me loveless,
there’s no goodness here
just the nightmare sprinklings of free awareness
conscious of their own absurdity,
of being higher than facticity though imprisoned there:
terrified by encroaching nonentity, and dreaming,
the god-seeing self survives in spe,
entrenched in grace.

VII.

where a name was emblazoned such wide banners flew
openly and graciously embracing an empty madness,
a proud and daily expression of honour
engraved over the night’s own homely flavour,
a warm and brave enclosure there
when things lay so much nearer,
when one could touch the saviour.



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