Seven Stones

Ten bucks tastes like whiskey on the Seine with thunder coming in over the city and the light coming on like the afterglow of a drug binge. The rhythm of a nasty bump and grind splaying out the jukebox like a horn section lead by Gabriel and the legend unwitting in the still tenor with the mute and the pause and the further out flavour of a spastic embolism, clawing back the past ten, the past five, the past fleeting second for a moment longer and no bass line to save it from the reel of a dirge rattling the bars of the jail holding every angel trapped after the war for heaven. Baby, baby, he says and baby, baby he says, and baby I'm just another longing to take the kiss for one more finish and another chance at another end and another passed winding of a boy knocked about with the fever of hope and hanging on the cross to woo her all over again.

I'm all right and I'm all right and I'm a mess in a clatter and clang and the passed and passing all over again. No man a measure of the time that made him mad, with the wisp of wishing it all were really true and in fact it is really and actually true. In the moments preceding the acceptance of defeat, sure only in the simple fact that really, no honestly, really it all is true. Bring it on, baby, for once a wisher a well a being in tune, and once more for sadness, and once more for joy. Baby tell me it's not over, and baby, he said, tell her it's not over with the peevish pause, the silence a hammer, and another day lost to the passion of killing it where now it's a fissure, or now it's a cavern, and now, now it's only dead.

he had this idea that in summation, the judge a bacchanal, a Pan, a pure and pandering pavement, swaggering through the breakdown on the main street of all the towns he had ever seen. Can you hear it now? the countdown to the end of the page is nothing to gauge the precious and the fragile moment of putting it all out in the twisted chasm between the place he was and the time he is, and in the breakdown on main street, can you hear the song? precious and fragile with the slow meter a measured resource, an angel and a pin, dancing for the pleasure of wishing it still. I wish I could take it here, making a home where all the projections of what he thinks you are overlap with the weakness that you conjure with the sadness that you deal. Why can't you just come home?

nattering at the edge of a reason, the reason, the reasoning at the edge of hoping for it, what if none of your dreams come true? so sly sadness, creeping up in the blind spot behind thinking, where you think you've got it together, and you think you've got it together, and then the animus of pain exploding from the heather behind you and all the pain you've ever felt a jape for everything that pain could aspire to. reasonable to grasp it, that really everything you've ever thought hurt and everything that ever tore you limb from limb, and everything that bound you to the painfully human, so inconsequential in the aftermath that you can't even begin to measure these two things like pain and solace, and words no longer a conveyance for the stark yearning of not having anything anymore, in the sense that there's no longer any capacity for possession -- like a loss of the capacity for compassion; even where every turn a torture, or every step a slaughter, no more reasonable response -- guessing as you go screaming into the quiet desperation of total absurd madness, raving in the absence of definition, no longer tethered to the pier you waltz off across the harbour sinking every ship that had ever been moored there.

Stamping feet, clapping hands, drinking down the long draught through Hippocrates Sleeve. Starving in the streets through which you have cast yourself, without the map to find your self, or the sense that it would matter when you arrived. This bitter remnant a soft and solipsistic sadism, coiling in without the hope of letting go, of snapping back, coiling in to break the spring upon the anvil of the tension that it contains. Starting to doubt that the pain is the usurper and starting to believe that Love is the poison that has laid you out and starting to believe that everything that lead you here has been a horrible, a hideous, mistake.

so seven stones for sadness, baby, and seven stones for pain. seven slivers for silence and seven more for leaving stains. All this the mindless suffering where all you seem to be is the receptacle for something caustic, bitters rusting out the crucible and standing still for life. Never nevers future, a prediction, the future is always prediction, the future is a void you used to rush towards, and now it's a vacuum before which you recoil, coiling down the days of wishing something else for someone living only in memory, a ghost of the present where she steps lithely, padding like a cat, into the beam reach of a prayed for day where the sun comes on over the river like honey over laughter and ten bucks tastes like lilac wine under the blue vault of higher hoping hopes for freedom, a release from a long night and no promise of calm.




© Brian O'Reilly
Last modified: Wed Aug 9 14:42:01 CEST 2006