and we here, watching documentaries
where they call wars, times of
tension, where vertigo contains the
reasons for feeling, where you can
catch the energy of Leonardo da
Vinci in your mouth depending on your
appetite (where things are gradual and the
ultra-right seduced by cannibalism); here
in the distant space between imitation and
life where we are hoping money can
buy that element of existence on which
individuality depends never noticing that
irregularity is full of desire in this Alex
Pope half world of fools
 
 

and the many-headed amanuensis
watches advertisements in her
painted nails changing their colour
as often as she is told, in the flickering
light her skin like stretched glass, hot
and showing the soul, fingers
tapering her off into the shock of
hardening air -- but do not find in her
Medusa, no snakes but the future close
as a new language, her thoughts, cleverly
dead, letting a paragraph wriggle out
of her mouth: "My plans for being myself
tomorrow night remain unchanged, but
you are not the sun
 
 

and I am not the moon" and Pluto
we are informed was discovered in
1930 -- where it was before that is the
subject of conflicting reports from eye-
witnesses with bad memories, with
memories like nostalgia, Spring in
Autumn (orange groves?) and
farewells from the platform -- mystery,
with her inscrutable fire, has burned all
the pages before scientific discovery
for prior to the beginning of the
nineteenth century it was believed
female orgasm had to take place
for conception to occur
 
 

and the newsreader said "The
incident was as dramatic as it looks
in these pictures" and we stare with the
flattered eyes of those who have come
late to telling lies about the imagination;
now there is no way of knowing who owns
the bodies on the screen -- the voice-
over accompanies us to the bathroom
where we let the water run ("We have the
rights over artificial mice") -- and if
the knowledge of our age is empathy,
we are ignorant; this day is a day wholly
within the hugeness of itself: if you close
your eyes you'll miss it
 
 

and how could we not live here? -- after
the leftovers have sat for three days in
the fridge I throw them out; imagine if it
happened to our coastline?; my husband
and I don't speak for days over the brand
of a television -- here with our cheap
imports, here where we're warning fans
to watch out for fake souvenirs (for
good quality fake souvenirs), and I go
to a gym for five hundred a year because
I don't know what to do with the fat in my
wallet... with supermarkets so full they
have to stay open 24 hours a day; with
the security of my door
 
 

and the wolves are sleeping but have
left 10 000 footprints on the way to
their dreams: at work I ask Brendan
in the printroom, can you do me 10 000
copies before you leave (he is retrenched)
-- at all times we are speaking (white
takes what is not white from black so black
remains) and I want him to know that the
universe stops with every man, this
discourse of stars -- it's half a word we
speak to a well-bred person; when it gets
inside it becomes whole -- this is a proverb
about proverbs... and at night for 10 000
nights I dream of dreams
 
 

and pilfering the manners of
civilization; an army of gorillas
dancing in the jungle past, dinosaurs
in my hair and a plane, like a splinter,
entering the sky and in the next seat a man
inserts his words into 10 000 feet of mid-
air: "It's not a fucking kite you know, they use
dogs in the cockpits -- to train pilots, to bite
them if they touch the controls" and we
circle the sphere of modernity but
keeping our cutlasses sheathed against
the piracy of necessity, against the
privacy of necessity, keeping secret
our inability not to consent