Swimming with the Fishes

My ideas never come to this except on nights with stars,
and every day runs into nights with tears and emptiness.
In the Starlit Garden last evening the rain allowed us,
I sat with ideas running like a river through my head
and saw my own life's end in shaking trees beyond;
their branches flattened by the dark to black and paper.
This love of sadness crushes me and everyone; we lie
to make ourselves seem happier in company and die
without an end to press upon the world.

This could be set to musics never heard before,
the olympian delight of deities and singers to the air,
the Nymphs of fields and weather, lost to our world.
It is music made to show your heart, the love of one
or many, made real by tears you cry at passion,
a gesture crushed by darkness in the world,
that you made real five hundred years ago.
The medics of the other worlds will shadow you
and steal your blood for their own untelegraphed affairs.

There is a ghost in this house, dogging me with evil,
her teeth set wide to keep her smiling, a sweet house ghost.
One who steals my keys and sparks around the doorposts
like a deep-sea fish, lighted from within with chemicals.
I see her bait the spirits of all who ever lived here,
until they swim unbidden into the rivers of her throat
and drown this night and every night but being dead already,
are resurrected for her pleasure and her dark ideas.
They have no memory and I have no concern.

Out along the stony path to everything outside the garden,
I walk and trip, to find the court of anything remembered here.
The fish swim at my shoulders as I follow friendly stars,
they love me for nothing more than all the food I bring
and would swim the earth for me for just one mouthful.
This must be dreaming; I wish myself awake and lie shaking
with the images of underwater worlds that end it all.
The world dances round and sets itself into familiar shapes
and colours while the stars set one last time again.



recorded live again - 12:20 - 12:58