The clock into which you stared as into a mother’s face now seen
as a time-factory under winter.
Year Zero the mistakes have yet to be invented and music--well it comes
down to inventing flowers.
This they do down at the flower factory over the bridge from the factory
where cherries rumble from the cherry-making machinery.
Nothing is true everything is the case.
Paused at the edge of the tub turning away wanting to be seen.
Morning apartment where the light has lost its yellow at the moment of
the sign.
Turns away wants to be seen.
Just then you turned to look--a sweetness with a hook on either end.
Surely it is the century of clouds?
A long walk across town with your social realist overcoat turned up: citizens
yawning on the passing train.
The train windows blurring past like movie frames run sideways starring
our exhausted revolutionary sweetheart whose head cracks open to swallow
the day.
We have made the world flat once again.
Meetings in the cold warehouse on the outskirts of the Year Zero.
In the red suburbs of the Year Zero.
In the other night on the other side of permission you could have her
or a police car on fire if you preferred the second you wore a black square
on your jacket or in your hair.
The machine flower the machine music blotted out all other sounds still
you could not get it loud enough.
Needs to know looks back.
Wants to be seen turns away.
Had meant to write the century of crowds.
And beneath it the gear-rooms of the calendar where tiny cracks have been
discovered in every hour time has started to trickle staunched with grease
and sweat a shudder a sadness at waking.
Now must begin again it must be new time.
In the morning of the sign lying in bed in cold Utopia and alone under
the black square.
Your ears swelled with flowers a corpse in your mouth.
You are free though a freedom with its ribs showing.
home