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--- G I L E S G O O D L A N D Through the sheets of night we traveled, and the road bore no trace. Tail-lights blushed, the road was unclear. We held our ideas, assumed silence, set out for the world. Cities pushed light under the clouds, then the flashback of a thrown cigarette. An edge-of-vision tree, a spent moon. We rested without interest, coins ageing like the face of the Queen. Once in a word we traveled and in a country without definition plants found rootholds in names on the map where we could see roads lean. Aimed at dawn, we traveled. Night populated the cars, years hid their heads in cloud-vapour. Our heads parted midge-clouds, the path fleshed under our feet. A lot of language was caught between car-parks, seagulls in pre-orgasm cutting the corner of scream. A road-machine and its ice anointed us, there was no solving your particles. Under pillows we travelled and through laughing mines as faces illuminated under their spectacles, the air shone, the clouds were atmospheric, memory was dust behind a motorbike. Our dreams cracked and spilt matter through sleep-shaped holes. In another inflection of this we cried out and lost many languages as the road gathered gravel in its fist, enemies waiting in their hands, we believed, the shebang of night staring in. The trees laughed off their leaves as if time was heavy and light folded on us. We came to translate words as thin as mist, fingers boded, we traveled nautical miles and undergrounds, bedrocks and ice-sheets, ogres groped from icy skyscrapers, slivers of sunlight melted in our hair across contingents and under ozones where soldiers danced one another to death. We paced the stars and snacked the moon like a crisp and pulled the sky open, we paused for a lengthy termination and hospitals opened days and planes scorned the mountains as busses came unnumbered and we traveled through forests of consequence. Sometimes we could see through the haze that miles are made of nothing but thought and iambic rivers fall from light. Parts of us were carried away by mosquitoes, piles of us were left for sleep. The frozen skin on the dead was as firm as the rind of a rosehip, we stood in camps and were sorted into species. So we traveled, and the skin wore to leather and pieces of us fell overboard and we left our bodies in rags, and traveled the intricacies of air. |
© crossconnect, inc 1995-2006
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published in association with the
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university of pennsylvania's
kelly writers house
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