PunchMag

World Poetry/Prose Portfolio: I Am A Film

World Poetry/Prose Portfolio: I Am A Film

I am Rumi who climbs in my un-windowed wall 
I am Rilke who meets me up the deep stairwell


I am a film 
The forest of red spruce is burning inside me 
The gold of my intestines is a frozen lake of rain 
The tree in my eye is a thousand years old 
I am a film. The skins 
Of my dream are forty-five buffalo hides 
The urinal of heaven is resin burnt to dust. 

I am a film. 
A black line of nomads on a march of winter snow 
A vestige of nightmare in the core of a mountain ash
A collapsed sheep fed apricots above the tree line 
The mobility of resin in sleets of blood-berry time 
The dizzy gism of ancestor’s shadows 

I am a film. I am a shroud 
Over the face of a girl cornered by monotony. 
I am a shroud placed by the art of political morons. 
I am the flimsy space where breath can’t decay. 
I am the way where there never was a way. 
I am a film. 

I am the ewe’s milk sold from the shack 
The cheeses of despair out in the vodka ruts 
The archives left out on the rooves to dry 
The persistence to choose without knowing why 
The words that form in the slick of the liver 
The antonym of trauma in the road-edge hut 
This is language that forms in the gut 
I am a film. 

I am Rumi who climbs in my un-windowed wall 
I am Rilke who meets me up the deep stairwell
I’m Marina who gazes through my shut-eyed eye
I’m Jibanananda tossed high by a bus out of hell
I’m Cesar Vallejo in some burnt mestizo cell
I’m Chairil Anwar in the highest of high-rises
I’m despair on despair that climbers despise 
I am a film. 

I’m the sun seen through the belly of a horse 
I’m a foal un-foaled by the red mare’s nurse 
I’m a raft in the rapids, a curse in the floods 
I am vodka urns drunk down incessant muds 
I’m the moon that falls in the deep tureen 
I’m the meaning of meaning, the mean of
The mean, the algebra of language.
I am a film. 

The gabbeh of colour & the gabbeh of dream 
Five little children in a meadow of poppies 
A class-full of goats in a blue tent’s screen 
Five little children who wake up & scream 
Forty-five gabbehs laid to dry by a torrent 
Rags of colour tied to the trees 
I am a film. 

I am gorse that burns in the coconut air 
Coma crests of storm that march on the moor 
Shark’s teeth of islands across a burnt-out sea 
Displaced peasants beneath a monopoly flag
Legion on legion of exiled contadini
Paths to the shielings that run into bog-weed 
Scratches of song from a muted tongue 
I am a film. 

Four billion year-old mountains seen from a plane 
A shepherd’s language shared by fifteen men 
A whole earth held in a spun pool of water 
A vagina betrayed by a single red garter 
This is language that climbs from the aorta 
I am a film. 

A cone of wood for the making of charcoal 
Smoke rising straight from an emptied village 
Season on seizure in an unfinished ritual 
Thunder walls on an epic snow journey 
One warm commitment that is never enough 
I am a film. 

Children. A necklace 
From a war yet to come. 
Fragments. Scoriae. A rebuilt city. 
Ten thousand incomprehensible avenues. 
In the midst of this rehearsed world 
That only stuns with its affluence. 
Naturally we rejected the scars of 
A disremembered time. 
Memory that seeks out its scars. 
As if its bricks were bruised off air. 
As if the tenderest child were to 
Shed her own dear life. 
As if the Hanging Gardens were 
No longer hanging in green time. 
All the protesting nonsense of 
Intricate days burnt down to nothing. 
I am a film. 

Such pure faces, such masked 
Energies, such perverse visions. 
O angel 
Smile in the foetus of the world 
O smile of angels here in our now. 
Komitas the mad never made a film 
But nor did he not ever make a film. 
His whole unwayward life was one 
Unwavering commitment of film, 
A reel that …. 
…. 
Or when you put your eye 
So close up to a flower you can 
No longer make out what it is 
But a blur of blue and shape. 
But its filaments, its stamen 
Are still there, miraculous 
Growths of what can only be. 
Extraordinary world patterns: 
That from which we were made. 
Or like a chapel in the mountains 
Rorsached with winter snows. 
Or like the astonishing vortex of 
Crepe that a mouse makes her nest 
From, more complex than any 
Mathematical structure of our earth, 
Worked only by instinct & trust. 
Such nests I preserved in my home 
Until they were burnt accidentally 
In the cold winters of regeneration.  

Film is prosaic poetry only 
Because poetry is essentially 
Prosaic : what is quotidian still is 
The stuff of our daily bread. 
Pasolini knew that : but who 
Knows Pasolini in these days. 
In these days of autism & bliss. 
Who knows the urge of his rabbia
The contexts of his urgent rage 
Though we occupy glutton cities 
And try to energise new options. 
Pasolini knew poetry is work. 

Film, I tell you, is the most urgent & radical prosaic. 
Film is pure poetry in our beautifully impure world. 
Whirl of pattern in the innermost whorl of our brain. 
Vagrant tongues that curl meanings through walls. 
Women who can penetrate any wall without holes. 
Women who can breach any peace that betrays us. 
Zigzag of curdled energy in a rented meeting house. 
Sheets of dark snows approaching over the moors. 
Garbled language in bitter-tight coils of our world. 
Savage snowstorm in such lamentable mountains. 

Film, I tell you, is the most urgent & radical prosaic. 

Old woman living life yearlong in a raw baita. 
Her slowness vital yeast for our possible future.
Markets of pomegranate & peppers in thick rain. 
Futures mercantiled for blubber in great cities. 
Cynicisms choked back in bad-summer lattes. 
………………………………………………..................
Film, I tell you is the most urgent prosaic 
I am a film.

It was siege warfare 
They ate the leaves off the trees. 
White wolves surrounded the houses. 
All the villages & towns about razed. 
Severed heads held aloft by masked men. 
Absolute worlds of understanding never 
Meeting political ethics of raw fratricide. 
City of the sun splayed out in red deserts. 
Calm boulevards reduced to dirt rubbles. 
Little children screaming at their friends. 
We who yearn the lyric calm of courage. 
We who learn to cynic cornered outrage. 
We who charmed the birds down from 
The trees.  I am my own language.
My language is me. 
I am a film. 

When I bypassed the city in the desert. 
When I bypassed the hatreds in the senate. 
When I gabbled at the air in my intestines. 
When I garbled what matters in investing. 
When I fluked the selfie of some murder. 
When I puked the surfeit of my masters. 
When I said all of poetry’s cunning labour. 
When the city I’d bypassed self-exploded 
With the motive for its being unrecorded. 
Sun-city that’s exploding in the morning. 
Two different worlds of understanding.
White city of the sun! 
I am a film. 

Donate Now

Comments


*Comments will be moderated