Epigraph: "il n'y a pas de hors-texte"
- Jacques Derrida
Poem:
While we slept, the city crawled out of the night and became itself again; a drunkard
stumbling into blind traffic yelled prophecies onto the freeway glare, the newspapers
were all over it like dogtongue and dogteeth chewing and slurping on words hoping
they add up to something. They did add up to something while we slept; the world
and its pus oozing out of the bone in the broad void of midnight. A flick of the tongue,
a purse of the lips, parentheses on the run. Shadow after shadow on the brickwall,
the firewood guzzling scriptures down its throat, the night brimming with prophets
of protrusions. While we slept we were beautiful. Our twisted limbs and closed eyes
nudging closer (to God) than we have ever been, your name was a prayer and I
murmured it all night in a nightmare made up of all the times I told you I hate you.
A word travelled to the edge and fell right off the throat of the earth. Truth was
a portrait of asphalt dotted with potholes and pigeon carcass leading nowhere,
and the world I knew from when I was a child, grieved like a child lost in a metropolis
it knows nothing about; tears curled on the inside of their eye, the scleras of the world
crisp like a corpse, temples and mosques lined with logic in bad faith, slogans
like a wound beating on the ear, all in funeral for the word. While we slept, a metaphor outlived itself, so it became a cliche. Moonlight lovers were singing to each other
the sonnets of how we're beautiful because we're made of stardust when a loner
across the street screamed, "so was Hitler". Why do we do the things we do?
The world pondered while we slept. From Plato to Wittgenstein in a roundtable
conference, nitpicking on the grammar of things thread by thread, until someone sobbed, ‘my mother deserved more than just motherhood, she said
she’ll live for herself in the next life. Ergo, there has to be a next life’.
While we slept the world wept. Our mothers' scalps weaker by the night,
mehendi settling in the water by the window in moonlight. You were
in another country, and I kept the tab on letters we wrote to each other.
Their syntax of stumble and choke, of rush and drag through the sentences
hurling through the page clinging to the word love, and the leak in the cellar
while we slept, drip by drip into the night, syllables of dew bleeding
on swollen mahogany, our pages a drowned destiny of mash, the ink an act
of deliberate drag and time a haunt that was everywhere like a knot in the throat,
and yet we were timeless while we slept. So while we slept, the beginning was the end,
stumbling on pavements of the potholed boulevards, the earth was a drunkard's dream,
and he almost came clean but for his tied tongue and hollowed teeth, all he could
manage was a worn-out chuckle.
Dedication:
For T