The Dead
We have flowed out of ourselves Beginning on the outside That shrivvable skin Where you leave off Of infinite elastic Walking the ceiling Our eyelashes polish stars Curled close in the youngest corpuscle Of a descendant We spit up our passions in our grand-dams Fixing the extension of your reactions Our shadow lengthens In your fear You are so old Born in our immortality Stuck fast as Life In one impalpable Omniprevalent Dimension We are turned inside out Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs Street lights footle in our ocular darkness Having swallowed your irate hungers Satisfied before bread-breaking To your dissolution We splinter into Wholes Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow Among the refuse of your unborn centuries In our busy ashbins Stink the melodies Of your So easily reducible Adolescences Our tissue is of that which escapes you Birth-Breaths and orgasms The shattering tremor of the static The far-shore of an instant The unsurpassable openness of the circle Legerdemain of God Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves Break on our edgeless contours The mouthed echoes of what has exuded to our companionship Is horrible to the ear Of the half that is left inside them.
Credit
This poem is in the public domain.
Date Published
01/01/1920