An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a
sulphureous lustre over all
- Poe
Pulling down a black sheet of feathers
A wall of oiled tarpaulin like intercostal skin and scales
Battens between the mausoleums tremble
A diagonal fracture from wall to water
Crumbling powder from the roof beams
Where the purple birds hide
Dark beneath the floors
Above medallion stains in the ancestral mouldings
The separating pipes and tubes fill with footsteps
And falling forms of flooded flowers
Breathing hard like nails against the rippled metal
A glittering nightwinged beetle suddenly appears
Clattering, creeping and dying at my feet
There are no more muscle boundaries
My heart oesophagus lungs spleen kidneys liver brain stomach
pancreas appendix gallbladder colon bladder glands and glands
Blur, fall together
Merge softly with the painful shudder of bones
The crepitus of masonry, the grate of flashing and metalwork
The rending of timber
and the howling of the displaced night fauna that were
hiding all the time
And looking back into the marshy twilight
There is only now the glossy formless
Thing that remains
The ticking dials of the million faces now one
The shimmering shadow that rolls out
In every direction like a spilled cloud
Swamplight burning unseen beneath its impenetrable surfaces
