We explained slowly a word from a language
we could not be sure existed,
made from twigs and bailer-twine.
So go into the rain, its adjectives
will refresh you, but the lightning
is made of imperatives.
Do not go there.
These things we tell each other
are the kind of lies that taken together
make up an important precondition
for regular arrival at work;
start with the one about the person ending
where the skin does.
Each morning, I know a routine
called the laying on of clothes
while the words let me sing a few notes
of a song called the music
of the containments, in which
we are only jealous of other people
because their skin contains
a different space.
We eat breakfast with a sense of foreboding
matched by the snarl of morning traffic.
There’s always someone up before you,
busy adding extra yards to the bar
at the crematorium, to open in time for
you know who and his funeral. A happy hour
all to himself.
In one room the clock was interleaving seconds
with silence, in another the colour was
measured in television hours. Sometimes
the front door opens onto a lane to
the land of the dead.
In this film, we’re all trying to help god
understand something as blindingly obvious
as sunlight. We’ve had to crawl through
so many windows to get here,
each one was a day. All this time
the violins had been working away, but
it was important we should not have been
aware of them.