Author: Stephen J. Williams

Some of the men cry, and many of the women
Make impossible devotions. Some others
Who are neither men nor women go about
Their work invisibly — or else, becoming.
And behind a wall the gymnast (having managed
To balance for a very long moment the spectators’
Fear of falling) thinks he sees a spinning wheel
And fire in the eye of a monster. The world
Is like this, he says, there is no need
For prophesy — it is all here.

Watching this trick was a man in the doorway
Now turning to leave and covered with sun.
I notice his quiet walk — the way he steps
On his shadow’s toe, lifting a foot and balancing
There each step in the light like a wire artist,
That close to the edge. Out in the streets
You can see if you look, the Hunger presents
Himself like a man in black suit and bow-tie;
A noble savage who’d rather dress than eat.

“I’ve been trying to say this for years
And find it like a spider on my lip:
Arriving, there’s a padlock on the door
Protecting nothing but a window
In one wall, and a double bed
Complete with holes—none of which I need.
My agent provides this free. The squalor
And the shit coming for me: hurt dogs
Squeal in the street below; Vespas spew smoke
Through every crack; and prostitutes repeat
Their life, life-long story in chopped up verse.

“I drop on the bed after a whole year travelling
— Noise, decay, clamour at shutters
As I sleep, and fan blades above me swing
In great circles

“At the centre of the world,
Two halves scraping unequal edges with each other.”

A woman with beans works
Uncomplaining, shuffling them
On wooden platters

Before the eye
Of a prying city
Turning to what’s believed

Is distant past,
Almost forgotten now,
Where all remains

Unchanged: how long
Do we suppose
This stroke of eye

Will leave us satisfied
With likeness,
Or her,

With likeness
To our unreal world,
Not troubled?

You can burn a book but a poem is
logically uninflammable. You can burn
your love letters, your diary, your house,
your volumes of nineteenth century French
pornography; any embarrassing, inexplicable,
unlikable thing that can burn, you can burn.
You can burn an argument by falling silent,
though a word is logically uninflammable.
You can burn the midnight oil, have a burning
ambition or burning desire, burn money or
burn time. Anything that burns, you can burn.
You can burn your dinner, burn the toast
or burn your bra. Burning is a primal power.
You can burn an opinion with censorship, or
burn authority by just not doing
what you’re supposed to do. —Try it sometime.
You’ll like it. A thing that burns recedes
in thought. You can burn Joan of Arc, though
the Church will still live, just to spite you.
You can burn parliaments, or the politicians
in their cars, but democracy will still
haunt you. You can burn Jews but then
there would be Nürnberg and unerasable guilt.
Anything that burns or does not burn,
you can burn. You can tie a nigger to a tree
and go to work with a blow-torch, though
there are now some people who would object.
Anything that burns or should not be burned,
you can burn. Burning is an absolute freedom.
You can burn someone else, burn yourself, or
yourself be burned. You can burn Dresden,
or burn Hiroshima, or burn the world.
Anything that burns or should not burn, that
you can burn, other people can burn, too.

25 years’ culture and girls in string bikinis
Crowd in on the tanned skin and muscles
Riding the big wave of nihilism.
SISYPHUS on a surfboard. CAMUS
In a card-board box. JEAN-PAUL
Turning a blind eye on the sex hungry
Teenagers paralysed with the sudden emotion
Of SENSURROUND, BIG SCREEN, NEW WAVE crashing
On the beach of full-color eternity.
White slides on blue in the corner of the room,
And hard-muscled boys, new to the world
Of DISNEYLAND mount the wave and dance
In the whorl of noiseless oblivion. Late at night
Senseless nothings of water and energy roll
On and on and over and over dead bodies
Banging on the ocean floor. Dawn screams
Its new morning service and television
Sends urgent messages in static S.O.S.
Across the carpet, as half the world drowns
In white, frothy surf.

Though I did not know you, or your daughters,
I know their friends: isobars of pain
Have run in lines of high and low through
All this isolation — you, your daughters,
Their friends, and me, the line connects us all.

I wonder how it felt, tempting the edge?
I see you spinning, in middle winter,
Your body wheeling on the fine ledge,
Platform for your final acts.
I can’t remember if it rained that day.

Train and rail and hot engines express
Their sympathy and warn: we are mindless muscle,
Taut and hard; we are sorry, but
We do not stop for suburbs of the heart.

“All this freedom, my God! What can I do?” —
Was pulling you like gravity, merciless
And the most natural thing in the world,
Toward yourself. How could you resist?

On a walkway between twin towers
Of the English Department, someone has a set of drums;
Others have guitars, tuba, a clarinet.
Walking through the South Lawn you can see heads
Without bodies gathering and talking on the walkway.

Inside some secretaries are bothered
And tutors interrupted mid-sentence in a novel
By Conrad, with that ungracious sound poised
On their commas. Those musicians up there
Come out singing: words fly up off the walkway.