simonhlilly

SPEAKING IN TONGUES (dream stream)

Drag it through, wiped, stained, dyed, a sop.
This brush awkward,
the hand suffers from doubt,
stutters laden with gold black signs.

The words to use, the words not to use, the ordering of words, the letters of the law.
Stumbling into gaps, minding the gaps, the howling winds, the imminent rain. It changes everything and nothing. A shaman’s song summoning, departing on the wind. Three worlds by far is not enough, is too much. The twelve halls of the Aesir, joy and feasting in each one, even Ullr’s dark vale.

This script unlocks avenues,
makes actors vapours,
vapours actors.

Howling time, death-watch seconds. Do we care which demons are summoned, so long as they stream in and tell us: now it is real, now those wishes will become ripe and fall, now there will become meaning to all the suffering.
Who is it who sings, no sirens, no silkies, no fatuus igni? The chimes, the bells across the fields mingling with the blackbirds. In the cooling evening so silently the apple blossom peels seconds apart, minute by minute, statuesque, the light holds back, turns solid.

The song is not and is,
Each word offering gifts of meaning
Obscuring invention
Reducing points to lines
The gap, the space,
The disenchanted exquisiteness of it
Enough to breed madness
Or eloquence
Or a flutter of coincidence
The coming together of likes.
The burning of division.
A drum of words, rhythm and shock, imitation of emotion, the ruin of time.
Belonging to, not belonging to, lists, listen to the names,
Each name
a thousand new names,

Each placed here and here in the dark body ’til it glistens, quickens, revives, re-dreams those vast cascades. Smallest shattering of lives, fragmenting to combine into consonant and vowel, the thousand names of every god, every hall, every realm, every storm over the enchanted forest where the golden boys play, the golden boys with golden hair, who watch but take no part in each inevitable slaughter.

A dream only,
a day of dream,
a feast of dream,
an amusement of titans,
a hypothesis of worlds.
The heart singing alone.
The soul’s shape as song.
An ululation.
A speaking in tongues.