Bronston Swindle


[I Demand the World Return to my Mouth]

I demand the world return to my mouth,
That this devil varnish be stripped  from things,
That objects cry out again to be touched and tasted.
I demand a language predicated on return from exile,
The release of tongues.
I demand a language unbroken and immediate,
That still resides in the objects it describes.
A language that still feels.
I demand my immediate release.

I demand that the records of my mind be unsealed.
And that each object be spoken for by a public voice.
That mere projections dissolve like a shroud of swamp mist at daybreak.
That each thing be reified.
The bed.  The lamp. The door. The cat. The book. The window.
Shall move out of the abandoned  corridors of  dead language.
And abandon themselves once more to the central pull,
Reel again in the inplacable dance of naked existence.
I demand  they tremble within this  fire-filled sheath of proteinate amory.

I demand that each thing become  encumbered with its age.
And I too am a thing. No more alive,  no less.
Filled with forceful voices.
Of  time, of age.
Thrown without asking among these islands of tissue and seas of crimson salt.
I demand that the world cry out
against its idealization and reclaim its thingness.
That
e a c h l e
t t e r b e c o m
e v i s i b l e a g a i n. .

I lay full upon this bed.
Heavy in every limb, the center of each nucleus
Rushing towards the center of the earth.                    
Splayed against woven fibers of tense linen.
Every small motion shedding a  storm of cells.
Heroic husks, their structure yet held...

I feel the tide of light rushing from the lamp, each calorie of the burning bulb,
Falling into the white undulousness of the comforter,
the golden heat.
That burns the folds of its definition.
The sepia and honey pools that lay among the folds.
I gather them around me, around the slight damp of my stretching feet.
And rise again into sleep.

                ---Bronston Swindle


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