What You Do Not See Is Not Necessarily Not There

I Take out the caked grimy faucet plug Let those unseen crawlies dive and duck under the rust-ridden slime stuck to phlegm and saliva globs dried blood and flaky semen shot through with crap The seen and the unseeable The sane and the goneforsaken This glob of virus a syruppy eggdash got rid of in a hurry close your thoughts to the raw genital-******l whiff of public lavatories the brothel closets’ stained sticky sheets the stink and the dirt and the stinging hell that comes from under pipes tanks drains sewers rivers all stuffed with fizzing fuming water cloacal wind and the aftershave lotion Nothing that wouldn't burn forever when we all disappear II Even if you slow your rhythm down to a stilled beat at rest haven't you heard your blood coursing through in a reckless lickety-split past the pinned ear in the pillow The silence of the hour outside your pulse down to a twenty-five or thirty listless cutaway from the clatterbanging engine within gushing whistling throttling wheezing jerking cartwheeling shunting beating a frenzied time racing round and round in a cataclysmic din Whoever jams it all from the eye hears its thunderous roar in the cells The cells that slither creep and ooze acidic enzymes down the washes of stuffed putrefying canals This the great manufacturer of what oozes in lethean sewers III cell into cells in the coursing blood the car jams the myriad alleyway mazes of city cells heartless traffic-lights valves that stop letpass white-red corpuscles In the city's centre is the heartless pulsing leviathan and through the aorta highway everybody alights on a wc cuvette and back through the ventricles the carnival parade of scabies herpes spittle and slime Die City Die like bodies and empires disease-clogged sewers funding plagues pandemics What is left from afar is a clouded-over scorched patch fossilised cellular forms under the microscope Who cares after a thousand billion years What went on during a trillion light years ago I care You care We care Do All ALL care © T. Wignesan, Paris, 1986 – 87. Rev. 2012 (from the collection : longhand notes : a binding of poems, 1999).