Faces (41)

(41) His eyes were reduced to two blackened half crescent shapes by the light's angle, a dark tired line underneath his eye sockets, his cheek bones diminished to two shadowy stains hidden under a sloping layer of fat that grew from his neck to his chin, crawling to cover the remaining top of his head, only a goatee of graying hair outlining the last contours of his jaws.

Night Poem: 231112

Midnight outside the Tesco Express on the Kingsland Road

Les Pensées (42)

Artaud danced along the room moved by the uncontrollable motion of love, until he crushed unto both his knees exhausted and in the realization that his greatest passion had just eluded him.

Night poem: 180112

In a yellow memoryless room
Beneath the ghosts of underwater voices, the
Coackroach creak of my neighours
Cars come not as a river tonight, but
Stopped and hollow as screams against the window

An empty wine bottle
And a dead radio
A vase to piss in
And loose thoughts on civilisation
And of progress

Then above me, the voices fall silent
Somewhere beyond their howls lies sleep
And in the morning darkness
And in the evening there is the room again
Yellow and alone

Faces (40)

(40) His scruffy red hair, once a darker blond, had formed lumps like bewildered snakes. His pockmarked cheeks had deformed from the scourging sun. His nose poked at everyone, crowned by a jewel of a wart that dangled at the tip. His eyes shyly turned away.

Faces (39)

(39) Her rosy cheeks shine in the dim light, her blond, wavy hair on fire with star dust, a tired line under the joyous mischief that hides in her dark eyes, the same mischief dances on her smiling lips, the wool of her sweater tickles my chin, the inducing smell of coconut tea.

Les Pensées (41)

Artaud sat on the waterside and admired the play of light and shadow on the water surface before him, reflecting the naked limbs of two girls swimming toward him. One looked pure and divine, the other pensive and keen. Artaud picked a flower and threw it in the water, following it with his gaze as it drifted away on the ripples following the two girls pass him.

Faces(38)

(38) For the first time, her smile was light, her glance flighty, and her dimples had never before flickered so gaily on the shiny surface of her happily bulging cheeks.

How lonely! Tonight beneath this
electic light
There is nothing but the cry of
passing vehicles
And an emptiness where no clock strikes

What a desolate banshee cry!

If you were here we would drink the bars of kingsland road
And in brotherhood, raise a glass...

Christ! D H Lawrence is dead. I only realise now the weight of those words
Auden
Dylan Thomas
Miller and Verlaine
All Dead!

The evening is buried
All sense stopped
And i try to call but..

When i think of everything that has ended in the last five years...
When i think of cool evenings in Buenos Aires
Or by the shore of the hudson, the salt tinged air and tango music and
my father driving away alone into the rain of kingsland road

And this cripling lonliness

If you were here i would
talk about the night poems we wrote on the roof
In the west village
The electric buzz of cockroaches
The river of traffic

When i think of Harlem Night Song, Langston Hughes
The fairy lights amongst the trees at Columbia University
Of buying bubble tea, hiding in libraries, or sleeping on college fields.... Oh! The bookstore on the corner of 115th, gone!

The light across the roofs of cornelia street, the sun dying -
Searching the corners of the room and dancing
Curtains sailing pinkly in the evening light
A stranger's piano
Carrying a painting the length of the 1 train the night after the bar

You gargling vodka the night before getting your tooth filled
Arriving in greenpoint on a summer's evening - children screaming from the park
Beer on the terrarce of Enids
Carrying furniture from an apartment on west end ave
Arriving home to find everything
So beautifully arranged on Prince street

Buying pizza near a plaza in mendoza
Stopping to picnic with our bikes and looking out across the fields

The henry miller museum

All cut short. Sudden as a breath.

Les Pensées (40)

Artaud had always loved the thrill of illicit pleasures so much that he confessed his shameful thoughts, to himself, then to everyone, until he had no more secrets to expose and he could only provoke other people with outrageous fantasies, until everything had become so normal that it bored him, and he could only find some final satisfaction in extracting the confession of a remote stranger, to whom he listened with the most sincere empathy and endless patience, reminiscent of an abandoned capacity to get excited by his own little common secrets that he had lost forever.