I

The sun
cracked your blinds
in my absence
like a pistol shot
and light showered your shadow
with curses
no different than my coming.
In both our parting,
in our irretrievable going,
my sun sits, fraternal, impassive,
impaling all life
like my love,
on a tree cracked with ribs.
In this way, commissar, we
return our losses to the great void.
We, of all who are
all faceless in our unnaming,
a people of wind and air.
In this i make sense of
the tv and
the newspapers depart
disposable in our forgetting.
In this way my excesses are forgiven
and history buries the dead with the binding
of our tongues!
In all our melting absences
i have nailed this history to
the forest of our delusions.
i have nailed my life like
a sniper’s bullet to
the forehead of your blindness.
We have screamed at the dark long enough.
We have vomited the emptiness
like all hangovers
over the chaos of our being-together.
And nothing has changed.
My head is still cracked with lightbulbs
and murder.
My head is a great hunger burning
in its own fire.

II

In our sad biology, in this life
starving with carbohydrates,
in our sorrowful genetics,
there is no bodypart called loss.
This must be the house of our knots.
Here millions of cells arise,
division and subdivision of a single cell
in a democracy of lies.
Here without mother or father,
fusion of ovum and sperm with no parents,
the sun cracks your blinds with my curses.
We sleep forever.
No. Nothing has changed.
Not war, not rights, not revolution.
Nothing has changed the dead
from their dying.
Nothing can remove all this loss
from life.
And in this way i swell
the conflagration of my fingertips
to the points in your eyes,
i watch, shattering with streets,
the water run down your bare
back.
He is thinking,
traversing the chaos, both doctor and
gravedigger at birth,
of the last communard on the barricades
in ’71
with her last bullet in fury
at the end
of all injustice churning and
our blood wasted
in rivers and floods always
nameless in its prisoners,
as i walked
whistling with love,
surprised at how naked we had become,
reversing all my illusions
like a madman
with his head full of
one-way streets
willing all my tomorrows
half bone, in an abstraction of sea and sky,
half spirit.

– Séamas Carraher