A wrist-flick at solitaire
Or fingers creeping across
The pad of my computer
(file not found; how apt)
A sigh, a lie
A turn through the fridge
Another try, a restless dream
Summoned back by a teasing
Spectre of disconsolate discontent.
A photo I took of the sublime, inscrutably beautiful Nefertiti,
in Berlin's Neues Museum. How King Akhenaten must have loved her,
and "how well the hand that sculpted, and the heart that fed."
The ache of TV Pavarotti
(Great fat man with God's great girth,
Nessun Dorma all over earth)
The awright ya of U2, Bop!*
Stale faces, and "I'm rich" mirth,
The drudgery of work,
And lethargy of this hourless Sunday.
The thin poverty of what I write
A message scrawled bright
Along the brick tunnel of the brain
So distant it's a prick of light
Screaming like a train 'bout
Love, and finite life, and Time,
Drooling over men,
A humourless beast with loveless chops.
Past fatales, and other fleeting things,
Skinny love, floating somewhere in the universe,
I cannot grasp, or name, or regain it.
Hale-Bopp! – how can something so on-the-way-out**
Outlast us all? A breath from Troy to here,
A mere 'once around,' and I am scratching with
– Confound it –
Love, or not love: Peace, or better not:
(Too blunting on ambition) –
Tranquility, decision – what? Scratching, blindly
At a scalding mirror of revelation
To find a message of... consolation. Instead
Tormented by Petra's constellation eyes,
her foal-youth, her trippy hippy smile,
And her weightless laugh...
...I take a bath.
Petra constructs,
"I lie on my bed, and smoke,
And wait for you to call."
("Is that a wise example of the present tense?!")
Or
"Pričam ti priču,"*** but the story only
Poises on her fruiting lips!
And I find that I am staring
as a hungry boy at a bowl of fruit:
– What's there that I can loot?
Some misfit moral gesture
Returns me whole to her promise of
"The future tense – next time."
Now Misery sloshes about me
Triumphant over my Joy
At being instructed by this she-star
sage. Did I ever cage hearts?
They say so, but why then shiver
As though I am ageing cold
Loveless, warless, artless, regardless,
In short, split from
All the less that makes men more?
When all I desire,
Is your touch, a light kiss and the light of your eyes
Shedding all over me, fondly,
Tippy-toe waiting my telephone call,
(Not post-screw after drunk night in bar
Grateful though I was Jasmina),
But for Joy
Or a little light, because my facial expressions
Or my gestures, bring a smile
To the object of... my imagination.****
Petra goes, my Serbo-Croatian improved
By a proverb, her thought, a plundered word
Me a little more frantic – she has left –
And I am unnerved. Left me,
To crawl around this apartment
Skate through the afternoon
Fidget with fantasy
Skirmish with sleep, and things to do,
And not to do. I'm not Hale-Bop.
There's once around, and I'm halfway through
My flight. And I wake with moments of fright,
Alert to the drowning night.
* U2 sang their first post-war convert in Sarajevo around this time
** I remember vividly the comet's passage over the night sky of Bosnia that year
***I tell you a story, which also implies deceiving somebody.
**** It was not confined to imagination. And Petra became a pre-eminent Bosnian scientist. Always sardonic, extremely intelligent, warm, funny, and with a smile like a glow worm's.
An image I took of a Roman fresco from the Sicilian villa of Casale