| THE MEGAPHONES OF PRAGUE (1996-) texts by louis armand THE SAINT VITUS DANCE "�pouvant� tu te vois dessin� dans les agates de saint-vit" --Apollinaire from the edifice of the real falling in a web of sudden geometries saint ignatius loyola it is not a dream this grotesque apparatus in which i wake morning in a urinal searching for lost veins or an eyemote twitching at the end of a blunt needle to see beyond this mundane physiognomy & cannibal solitude a room represents ______________________________ anatomy of a line through the collapsed zones the sky--that black wound blood-worded parturition mouthspilled --tu ressemble au lazare afoll� par le jour trepanned city: dawn the ecliptic-- through the windowed deserts, through the eyes of needles ... sur le pont d'avignon, l'on y danse ______________________________ where was i before you entered before you passed? through barred windows your kleptomaniac image stealing into my body ...? ______________________________ walled-in behind the clamouring of your mouths you were an un- uttered howl body without diaphragm without lungs without a larynx moutheye consumptive to tempt fate you swallowed your tongue each time with the chance of not throwing it up again ______________________________ wake in the fever ward--four a.m. amid the gaudy piet�s of failed suicides-- they're asking your name you can't remember-- groping in the fear you find nothing you scream in the interim midnight? a reflection stares into a mirror the (half/)real- isation that comes only after die stunde meines niederganges descending the intricate fugue geometries counting how many angels can balance at the end of a needle ______________________________ deep inside the canticle of used syringes there is a word you can't remember-- the morgue-lists of morning (it's cold i clench my teeth it doesn't work no matter how hard- ice between the windows) afterwards--learning to walk again--you enter the street through an inner lens of vertigo--fear of falling-- only a stairway to climb now--& memory--a name on a door & key to lock it with ... ______________________________ the walls & i know each other we gauge each other we enter each other's bones: among nights scattered debris there is a photograph of a boy destitute, frail you imagine him naked think of going into him further than yourself to where the wall roots itself solidified through contradiction in the concrete of nothingness (in the dark in the guilt that clings to the act that the body clings to & keeps the walls together with its fear ...) ______________________________ in the old square hollow laughter of ghosts & the face of a clock tower worn clear of its numbers useless hands loose from their arbitrary coils of black wires ______________________________ at the end of the room dead eyes are watching-the usual pantomime of naked & bored flesh scripting dis/locations of the neon frame-- behind the wombmask a machine gnashes its teeth a puppet's head falling from a broken umbilicus ... you are asking yourself about death you are constructing analogies "you think of an artery bursting a grenade bursting ..." at another time the sound of tensile wires snapping in the frozen stillness of air might have signified an end to suffering ... ______________________________ on the last stroke the knocking the burning aching the cracking of bone somewhere mind will pierce its brittle casement in a plume of nerve cords ... somewhere & yet nowhere repeating on the last stroke the knocking of the mind in its cage the death cell knocking as though in the beginning a shot that lunged through the body's arc & then nothing the vacant knocking in the skull silence knocking then silence again laughter � louis armand, 1996 |
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