Στοίχοι: Current 93. Hypnagogue.
I
Behind my walls are my Cats. And behind my Cats is a Peacock singing to me of my death and yours. I said to her "In the silence of an eye, I shall smile and arise, and see someone I used to know sleeping; in her room in her bed in her body I was in Paradise." I am awake in the sound of roses and a young girl's voice. We are drowning in the approaching shadows. I am dreaming and cannot hold it. I have seen.
(Dear Christ: the silence and the loss; we are born and fall. Dear Christ, you too are broken and lost and hanging like a Roman standard over us all.)
II
Behind the line of my skull that hides behind my hair and skin, I see the selfsame skull of my father, and beyond the skull of my father, the skull of my grandfather, and the skull of my great grandfather, whom I never knew. And so on this line unto the alpha and omega point at infinity. With my eye - this fire, this fly, that sees everything and smiles, and comprehends nothing, and dies - I see all around my head and that end. I have invented myself; I have created myself; I am just a form of dream English, words stretched with skin and fear. From my eyes in my skull my father observes this immense and kaleidoscopic dream. By birth I am other than this. The mosquitoes rejoice in my skin. The lizard is on the ceiling above me. The shallow water pots deny the ants routes to food. There is no silence ever. The cicadas are omnipotent sound. The kampong is dark and still. I am not what I thought I was. I am not what I seem. Most of all, I am not what I am. I thought it was the news rushing down the wires, happy in death and fashion, spinning yo-yos and clacking its jaw, raising its eyes, mimicking dogs at play. The sun shuts down, and erases birdlight. And in this stunted eclipse I saw myself, some darkness at last tenously visible, love as the sweetest thing. Al Bowlly, Jack Buchanan, sing on, dreaming of the lamps and the beautiful ladies, bowed lips packed with blood, the staged kisses trembling under the placid stars, the coffee taken with cream and scones under the Viennese Moon; whilst we are weighed, we are judged, and twist in this storm like birds over sails.
III
I have caught the dead again: I click my eyes
And there they are, mercurial ghosts, formed
And moving; so the dead do move, and shout,
And pray, and cry, and suffer
And the eye click on and one: the one shut
Catches the dead. The clouds pass by.
God hovers over us and shrieks
We don't hear the slightest crackle
Can't see the slightest smiles
And we blur into our death and the second great death
Whilst we chase chicks and dream of a paradise without wings or sorrow, Christ's tears fall over Jerusalem. The curtains are groggy with damp, and the rails, and the tracks and the tacks, and the black and the bats, and the shrivelled shrill lights trip and laugh over the weeds and the blossoms, and throats open shut and sigh. I am the moon and the sun, the rising and the setting, the first and final breaths, and the product of the stars. I am some immortal and pointless dust.
Two bodies lie in bed for their brief moment together in eternity; the memory holds still; we watch the fireflies kiss the night and turn their backs on the Milky Way forever, as our eyes shower sweetness upon each other.
IV
I caught a glimpse of your eyes
Last night in a restless dream
Awaking out of green field blue seas stars
Your eyes arose like the spectres of flowers
I turned out the light and clicked fast the door
The book fell
I had so many thoughts, so many signs
I made sense of nothing at all
This green dream was unreal; the crickets sing
Across deserts and plains the lost feast
Whose shimmering teeth are marking the passing of time
A cloud falls; a bird shivers and sings, its beak stained with night
Pure gold: the dark is waiting, the darkness is hungry,
The deep is angry, and the telephone rings on
A film screen descends, and the silent movies play
Buster Keaton falls and rots, as Big Ben sings and boils
On an endless swamp; the silence is treacle thick
And calls us to prayer: paint God with your blood
And fill haunted women with knives and kites
And gauges and valves and make them weep long hymns
To gaseous and clumsy mortality whilst fish descend
Remember, remember the burning ember
Embedded in your chest: the soul watches TV
And gorges itself on blood and popcorn
Now that's what I call decay decline and hard times
Hard times, very hard times, Mr. Lindsay,
Hard times and winter so croool: you have stopped my watch
At the stroke of three and call for the police
But there's a time for tea and a time for expiring
And the notice to quit is in the post:
And you should know: your
Little cow and calf is gonna die
V
I was awake, dreaming
Of new dystopias to run to and hide within
And new faces to wear
And new bodies to inhabit
And new lies to guzzle
And how I loved
The moon, and its sheets of seeds
The moon tiding in your body
The smell of your blood breathing
And its taste in the sea in the south shining my feet
Till it seemed as if they were made of dew
With pearls of huge beauty
Whilst your mouselike breath was
The hand upon my clock
And one each breath I came nearer
To my silly and shining end
VI
All long summer long
Under the fly-dance and the thumbthick twilight
The thought of you smiling
And laughing with children
Crippled me
Typecast and forlorn
Smudged ghost gorgeous:
There is a love so profound
So broken and risen:
Torment, black valley
Slumbering between our lips
And the lies we thoughtlessly wove
I knew your essence once
At our time when the sunset and I touched you
In the slanting room, just south of the past
Between your belly and thighs:
This was a temporary deceitful paradise.
Lost as we created it
And destroyed in tasting
So much blood is lacking now
I dreamt for your bit lips, haunted like waves
In the ecstatic arch of evening:
You and the night, you and the mountain
You and tomorrow, you and the tomorrow:
Stay away: stay away: stay away:
What we want we cannot have
And wanting all the more
I slept on words and lines and texts
Of useless want, staring at the time
And finally lost you finally finally lost you finally
As the moon swept down and wept.
VII
Good morning: How are you?
I have called to say
I saw you dreaming of conquests
Of large wars, bigger walls:
But:
I am pleased to say:
Your houses are dead
Your children are full of flame
The horses are dead and the butterflies fall
God is abroad
The wind is in the air
And from the depths
I point at us all
Good morning
The clouds of smoke arise
Arise arise full of eyes of eyes
Your sons are suffocating their sisters
And painting eyes on the walls
With tongues dipped in blood
Arise arise full of eyes of eyes
And from the depths
I call to us all
Good morning
I have seen the face that lies
I have seen the lips that smile
With false smiles arise arise
Look look: I have read a book a book
That has spelt out the future
And from the depths
I see a king arise arise
With on his forehead many eyes eyes
And he is on a horse a horse a horse
With a train of smoke behind its hooves
And I must say from my depths
I have seen a story emerge from a cloud of wings
Arise arise from eyes from eyes
And a number is sss6een is sss6een is sss6een
From the depths beauty
And from the depths loss
From the depths from the depths
I have called and added and have seen you all
Your children are dead and waiting for you
VIII
The sun has already just set
You said
And behind it the moondfaced disc
Blue; pearl; white: opaline mouth
Sack of hopes, of dreams, of fur
Catching the moths that
Trail dust in the dusk
Caused you to open alone and sign
Goodbye to us all in the white room
In the eyewhite, skullwhite room
In the bed,
Amongst the dead:
Santa Rita, ora pro nobis
I looked at you
And touched the earth
Hid under concrete and cruelty
Credo quia impossibile est
That the dead rise, rise, rise
And in the blink, in the twink
Of your eye, Santa Rita,
I saw you dart, dark as an eclipse
Whilst the twilight made a rainbow
All around your passing
And I saw and was saved
IX
In dream:
You are there
As the tip of the tongue collapses towards the teeth
And the waters of dream mass around
You are there: You are there
Suddenly and silently
You are the force of the wave
And birds, all birds, reel in the distance
Their face at dawn
Where profound and terrible armies surge
And foreign towns collapse under the weight of prophesied terrors
All the dead advance, great armies,
Martyrs for the Blood, the Sign, the Wound
And time
The animals all sorted Fishes too
I have eaten judge me at
God's right hand
And the cats that arise from the dirt and the filth
And the starving and the scabby
The tortured the tortured the tortured
I see them at night before I drift
During my sleep they gambol and play
And chase Balls or Children or Giants
They play cards and click their eyes
They laugh, and take tea at six
They laugh as they tumble
And have TEETH the size of cloudbursts
And grip us and take us down to the Deep
And we sigh and expire and
seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
silenceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
sssssssssmilliiiiiiiiiiiiinggggggggggggggg
I cannot bear this all any more. Not enough silence. But in the desert I sometimes see ships and hear the black diamond express near the station before mine. Caesar: where are you going? He said to me, grinning:
You will reach the Kingdom
With a bow and a sweep
You will reach the Kingdom
I have caught and tortured Time
And I ARISE
We are surrounded for the last 2000 years by a VAST EMPIRE OF DEATH and EMPIRE OF BLOOD: this was all after the Crucifixion:
i uflow tou yeou: plhrhw xaritow kai elhyeiaw.
So try to remove whatever may dream or spill or seed or spread on your breath:
Or your silence will seep into the something you wished to avoid
It will be seen some fine day, all right, yes, all right:
"I will make you mine,", just you and I, whilst our breaths pass between us and spiral off to mausoleums of desires and hopes.
When my friends pass into the great goodbye before my eyes
And I too move with them: without sound, just words
Left floating through the streets, and the ears:
And the souls of the people who were with me: I was in them
And they were in me. And off they go, a pint in their hands,
A glint in their eye, and I see tambourines drearily clapping out
The pavine carnival march: "now you see'em, now you don't"
I did not want the world to stop; and I have seen it rush past me
As a ferocious fury, but such angelic fury, and I was taking the Temperature of a thousand changes of mind: I might take you now, but perhaps I shall wait till the postman comes for toast and - With notes of the obsequies at 12 -
With your teeth on edge at the faint sound of the swans charging at the trees that you built swings on and killed under and dreamt under
With your beloved in that first and last virginal Summer
When you entered this world of blood and belief
And coupled under the Tropical Sun
And gave birth to children in your cries
I am born to die.
I am born to die.
I am born to die.
"Jesus snorted; he was moved to his guts;" and the dust was everywhere, and Pilate arose in his fury. You have a boat waiting, friend, and it is time to board: all aboard, all aboard. "We don't save the living here." (The cyclamen opens at evening, and the world was gentle tonight; summery, hints of rose and rouge in the sky in the north over the dome of the glassgreenhouse.) Pilate arose. And washed his hands. I washed my hands; I cleared dust of them; I can see specks of blood laughing upon them. Pilate washes his hands. He arose and washed his hands. And the sword fell.
Meanwhile, in the house with nothing at home: in the cafe with plates of liver and kidneys and offal; in the slaughterhouse near the schoolyard; in the damaged rooms of the schoold ma'am at rest; in the fallen arches of the brilliant silence, coloured at dawn, and twilit by the twittering of birds; in the moon shining down on the shrew on my step; at the freshly cut grass; at the sound of the bell making toast or tea or time buzz by with loud whoops of shouting "I am here I am there; catch me if you can, catch me if you dare". At all th4ese moments, and all these daydreams, and all our breaths which dream idly into deaths, deaths: at all these deaths, I remember you beautiful with love and fear with swooping hair biting the words our of your mind, and delivering them to me hating to pass the time, which swept by, as proud as a ghost, whilst we tossed coins to see who would disappear first.
Behind my walls are my Cats. And behind my Cats is a Peacock singing to me of my death and yours. I said to her "In the silence of an eye, I shall smile and arise, and see someone I used to know sleeping; in her room in her bed in her body I was in Paradise." I am awake in the sound of roses and a young girl's voice. We are drowning in the approaching shadows. I am dreaming and cannot hold it. I have seen.
(Dear Christ: the silence and the loss; we are born and fall. Dear Christ, you too are broken and lost and hanging like a Roman standard over us all.)
II
Behind the line of my skull that hides behind my hair and skin, I see the selfsame skull of my father, and beyond the skull of my father, the skull of my grandfather, and the skull of my great grandfather, whom I never knew. And so on this line unto the alpha and omega point at infinity. With my eye - this fire, this fly, that sees everything and smiles, and comprehends nothing, and dies - I see all around my head and that end. I have invented myself; I have created myself; I am just a form of dream English, words stretched with skin and fear. From my eyes in my skull my father observes this immense and kaleidoscopic dream. By birth I am other than this. The mosquitoes rejoice in my skin. The lizard is on the ceiling above me. The shallow water pots deny the ants routes to food. There is no silence ever. The cicadas are omnipotent sound. The kampong is dark and still. I am not what I thought I was. I am not what I seem. Most of all, I am not what I am. I thought it was the news rushing down the wires, happy in death and fashion, spinning yo-yos and clacking its jaw, raising its eyes, mimicking dogs at play. The sun shuts down, and erases birdlight. And in this stunted eclipse I saw myself, some darkness at last tenously visible, love as the sweetest thing. Al Bowlly, Jack Buchanan, sing on, dreaming of the lamps and the beautiful ladies, bowed lips packed with blood, the staged kisses trembling under the placid stars, the coffee taken with cream and scones under the Viennese Moon; whilst we are weighed, we are judged, and twist in this storm like birds over sails.
III
I have caught the dead again: I click my eyes
And there they are, mercurial ghosts, formed
And moving; so the dead do move, and shout,
And pray, and cry, and suffer
And the eye click on and one: the one shut
Catches the dead. The clouds pass by.
God hovers over us and shrieks
We don't hear the slightest crackle
Can't see the slightest smiles
And we blur into our death and the second great death
Whilst we chase chicks and dream of a paradise without wings or sorrow, Christ's tears fall over Jerusalem. The curtains are groggy with damp, and the rails, and the tracks and the tacks, and the black and the bats, and the shrivelled shrill lights trip and laugh over the weeds and the blossoms, and throats open shut and sigh. I am the moon and the sun, the rising and the setting, the first and final breaths, and the product of the stars. I am some immortal and pointless dust.
Two bodies lie in bed for their brief moment together in eternity; the memory holds still; we watch the fireflies kiss the night and turn their backs on the Milky Way forever, as our eyes shower sweetness upon each other.
IV
I caught a glimpse of your eyes
Last night in a restless dream
Awaking out of green field blue seas stars
Your eyes arose like the spectres of flowers
I turned out the light and clicked fast the door
The book fell
I had so many thoughts, so many signs
I made sense of nothing at all
This green dream was unreal; the crickets sing
Across deserts and plains the lost feast
Whose shimmering teeth are marking the passing of time
A cloud falls; a bird shivers and sings, its beak stained with night
Pure gold: the dark is waiting, the darkness is hungry,
The deep is angry, and the telephone rings on
A film screen descends, and the silent movies play
Buster Keaton falls and rots, as Big Ben sings and boils
On an endless swamp; the silence is treacle thick
And calls us to prayer: paint God with your blood
And fill haunted women with knives and kites
And gauges and valves and make them weep long hymns
To gaseous and clumsy mortality whilst fish descend
Remember, remember the burning ember
Embedded in your chest: the soul watches TV
And gorges itself on blood and popcorn
Now that's what I call decay decline and hard times
Hard times, very hard times, Mr. Lindsay,
Hard times and winter so croool: you have stopped my watch
At the stroke of three and call for the police
But there's a time for tea and a time for expiring
And the notice to quit is in the post:
And you should know: your
Little cow and calf is gonna die
V
I was awake, dreaming
Of new dystopias to run to and hide within
And new faces to wear
And new bodies to inhabit
And new lies to guzzle
And how I loved
The moon, and its sheets of seeds
The moon tiding in your body
The smell of your blood breathing
And its taste in the sea in the south shining my feet
Till it seemed as if they were made of dew
With pearls of huge beauty
Whilst your mouselike breath was
The hand upon my clock
And one each breath I came nearer
To my silly and shining end
VI
All long summer long
Under the fly-dance and the thumbthick twilight
The thought of you smiling
And laughing with children
Crippled me
Typecast and forlorn
Smudged ghost gorgeous:
There is a love so profound
So broken and risen:
Torment, black valley
Slumbering between our lips
And the lies we thoughtlessly wove
I knew your essence once
At our time when the sunset and I touched you
In the slanting room, just south of the past
Between your belly and thighs:
This was a temporary deceitful paradise.
Lost as we created it
And destroyed in tasting
So much blood is lacking now
I dreamt for your bit lips, haunted like waves
In the ecstatic arch of evening:
You and the night, you and the mountain
You and tomorrow, you and the tomorrow:
Stay away: stay away: stay away:
What we want we cannot have
And wanting all the more
I slept on words and lines and texts
Of useless want, staring at the time
And finally lost you finally finally lost you finally
As the moon swept down and wept.
VII
Good morning: How are you?
I have called to say
I saw you dreaming of conquests
Of large wars, bigger walls:
But:
I am pleased to say:
Your houses are dead
Your children are full of flame
The horses are dead and the butterflies fall
God is abroad
The wind is in the air
And from the depths
I point at us all
Good morning
The clouds of smoke arise
Arise arise full of eyes of eyes
Your sons are suffocating their sisters
And painting eyes on the walls
With tongues dipped in blood
Arise arise full of eyes of eyes
And from the depths
I call to us all
Good morning
I have seen the face that lies
I have seen the lips that smile
With false smiles arise arise
Look look: I have read a book a book
That has spelt out the future
And from the depths
I see a king arise arise
With on his forehead many eyes eyes
And he is on a horse a horse a horse
With a train of smoke behind its hooves
And I must say from my depths
I have seen a story emerge from a cloud of wings
Arise arise from eyes from eyes
And a number is sss6een is sss6een is sss6een
From the depths beauty
And from the depths loss
From the depths from the depths
I have called and added and have seen you all
Your children are dead and waiting for you
VIII
The sun has already just set
You said
And behind it the moondfaced disc
Blue; pearl; white: opaline mouth
Sack of hopes, of dreams, of fur
Catching the moths that
Trail dust in the dusk
Caused you to open alone and sign
Goodbye to us all in the white room
In the eyewhite, skullwhite room
In the bed,
Amongst the dead:
Santa Rita, ora pro nobis
I looked at you
And touched the earth
Hid under concrete and cruelty
Credo quia impossibile est
That the dead rise, rise, rise
And in the blink, in the twink
Of your eye, Santa Rita,
I saw you dart, dark as an eclipse
Whilst the twilight made a rainbow
All around your passing
And I saw and was saved
IX
In dream:
You are there
As the tip of the tongue collapses towards the teeth
And the waters of dream mass around
You are there: You are there
Suddenly and silently
You are the force of the wave
And birds, all birds, reel in the distance
Their face at dawn
Where profound and terrible armies surge
And foreign towns collapse under the weight of prophesied terrors
All the dead advance, great armies,
Martyrs for the Blood, the Sign, the Wound
And time
The animals all sorted Fishes too
I have eaten judge me at
God's right hand
And the cats that arise from the dirt and the filth
And the starving and the scabby
The tortured the tortured the tortured
I see them at night before I drift
During my sleep they gambol and play
And chase Balls or Children or Giants
They play cards and click their eyes
They laugh, and take tea at six
They laugh as they tumble
And have TEETH the size of cloudbursts
And grip us and take us down to the Deep
And we sigh and expire and
seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
silenceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
sssssssssmilliiiiiiiiiiiiinggggggggggggggg
I cannot bear this all any more. Not enough silence. But in the desert I sometimes see ships and hear the black diamond express near the station before mine. Caesar: where are you going? He said to me, grinning:
You will reach the Kingdom
With a bow and a sweep
You will reach the Kingdom
I have caught and tortured Time
And I ARISE
We are surrounded for the last 2000 years by a VAST EMPIRE OF DEATH and EMPIRE OF BLOOD: this was all after the Crucifixion:
i uflow tou yeou: plhrhw xaritow kai elhyeiaw.
So try to remove whatever may dream or spill or seed or spread on your breath:
Or your silence will seep into the something you wished to avoid
It will be seen some fine day, all right, yes, all right:
"I will make you mine,", just you and I, whilst our breaths pass between us and spiral off to mausoleums of desires and hopes.
When my friends pass into the great goodbye before my eyes
And I too move with them: without sound, just words
Left floating through the streets, and the ears:
And the souls of the people who were with me: I was in them
And they were in me. And off they go, a pint in their hands,
A glint in their eye, and I see tambourines drearily clapping out
The pavine carnival march: "now you see'em, now you don't"
I did not want the world to stop; and I have seen it rush past me
As a ferocious fury, but such angelic fury, and I was taking the Temperature of a thousand changes of mind: I might take you now, but perhaps I shall wait till the postman comes for toast and - With notes of the obsequies at 12 -
With your teeth on edge at the faint sound of the swans charging at the trees that you built swings on and killed under and dreamt under
With your beloved in that first and last virginal Summer
When you entered this world of blood and belief
And coupled under the Tropical Sun
And gave birth to children in your cries
I am born to die.
I am born to die.
I am born to die.
"Jesus snorted; he was moved to his guts;" and the dust was everywhere, and Pilate arose in his fury. You have a boat waiting, friend, and it is time to board: all aboard, all aboard. "We don't save the living here." (The cyclamen opens at evening, and the world was gentle tonight; summery, hints of rose and rouge in the sky in the north over the dome of the glassgreenhouse.) Pilate arose. And washed his hands. I washed my hands; I cleared dust of them; I can see specks of blood laughing upon them. Pilate washes his hands. He arose and washed his hands. And the sword fell.
Meanwhile, in the house with nothing at home: in the cafe with plates of liver and kidneys and offal; in the slaughterhouse near the schoolyard; in the damaged rooms of the schoold ma'am at rest; in the fallen arches of the brilliant silence, coloured at dawn, and twilit by the twittering of birds; in the moon shining down on the shrew on my step; at the freshly cut grass; at the sound of the bell making toast or tea or time buzz by with loud whoops of shouting "I am here I am there; catch me if you can, catch me if you dare". At all th4ese moments, and all these daydreams, and all our breaths which dream idly into deaths, deaths: at all these deaths, I remember you beautiful with love and fear with swooping hair biting the words our of your mind, and delivering them to me hating to pass the time, which swept by, as proud as a ghost, whilst we tossed coins to see who would disappear first.
Current-93
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