Tags: Poetry
a conversation is two mouths
made one by a knot of string, strung taut and fluoridated
and hamstrung and tasting one singular voice.
one mouth indentures of the other to concur
with silence as an outturn pidgin emerges.
its decreolization subverts the first’s imagery and dreams of deification.
the sway of rasa is the theme of the space between
the mouths, like spaces between the teeth so gently complacent and
invidious – unknowing the violence of their translation.
a great contract was drawn in scratch and a generative grammar
capsuled within a sequestered fold of the cortex.
the bigger mouth reclaims with this pantograph the object of its iconolatry.
all vernaculars came out of Africa – the tritone of phone,
graph and morph in planes equal in number to the market value of the components therein.
You consume, barter, exchange, and eat
an imagined utopia. one with an imagined commune and
phantasmed plains lifted within a nulled land
far from sea or water and drilled and mined of its vivid colour and disinterred so the continent yawns
and out of your lap falls a map of nations all
submerged, hidden behind the ebullient tonsils of the biggest mouth
its diction bucolic and lurching ever forward and emitting a subterranean beam.
one generation assuming of the other to jive for its dignity
its mouth made to dance in exotic ways
and shucked oysters making the first mouth erect and poised to fetishize the subject of its open mouth gaze.
two mouths meet but only one does the licking.
this mouth is crust. the other a seabed, like how the Greeks lost their marbles
and split both sides of their bible like continents.
your accent violates my sanctum with the sensation
of an orgy of tongues pressed against the bed of nerves bracing the drum on which my mouth pivots –
keep time now, swing, step, march my rhythm!
an ancient highway traces the yatra of all things spoken and unsaid. all things having been said. our talk nostalgia for memories like water through my fingers like tipping an empty vessel. a ringing firman traces the emergent property, a gnomic thing, the feeling of knowing the words and the signs and the signification are émigré. primordial means the unthinking mouths, mouthing not speaking, but automatic and surreal and utterly mute all words thereafter epithets and spoils from a great theft. renounce the language. The remains are the face and the mouth slowly blowing like tones of an organ. the aporia of non-existence will speak softly and bare and the face will turn and ossify and crumble like a mirror polished from a vast black stone.