Transfigured Night

if i should take the word beauty

and shake it until a grainy kiss

occurring in a “secret location.”

(rainbeads stringing).

their lips have vanished

now they go where only they can follow

The doctor on his rounds looks at Magda and remembers the argument he had with his wife Magda earlier that morning. Astonishingly, she says that she, teacher of the history of alchemy at the local university, now believes financiers and their politicians and ideologists shit gold and that this is a true alchemical process. She asks him if any of his patients have gold shit. Not the doctor’s patient Magda for sure. The doctor hates these cases. Brusquely he sends the young woman to the night lost moon. And the old woman propped up against a pillow? He speaks rapidly at her, as though every word is barbed wire in his mouth. The hospital ward turns into a Santa’s Grotto, twinkling lights and sparkle everywhere. A Santa with a vast girth suggesting health issues which should not be the responsibility of the Taxpayer but rather of the self-inflictor, calls on him chuckling to follow. To his horror the doctor realises his body is turning to papier maché. He screams out for his brother the financier to save him. “You’ve been dreaming,” says his wife Magda. “Go to sleep. We’re not due at the prize fight for 7 hours yet.”

zärj ululationist, head-hod, hod-head.

grainy kisses in the just past dawn.

there’s a trick to locking the door, skill.

two lovers walk out onto a concrete site of

surveillance. she’s eating a cereal bar, they

kiss again and laugh at the crumb now in both their mouths.

It’s a situation where loneliness becomes multitudinous, and the room lit with a single bulb. There’s no one there except the one, of course, who is so lonely the one is zero limitlessly. Meanwhile, back in Santa’s Grotto. The doctor has fallen back to his bed, to dream of shit gold, but the big bellied Santa now leads on a goodly company of financiers, bankers, directors of private healthcare companies, assessors of fitness to work, politicians, police, ideologists, journalists, monarchs, all the Great of the World. There, before them, huddled in a cupboard part covered by tinsel are the poor, numberless after numberless. The goodly company frown. “Get these people out of this place, where they exist as uneconomic units.” With a fearful screech the Santa calls upon all the Santas in London who attack the goodly company, the Great of the World, gouging out their eyes, biting their throats wide open, ripping their stomachs with broken baubles, then chucking their wrecked and either lifeless or expiring and agonisingly twitching bodies down a rubbish chute, while the fifth creature cheers and dances a jig for the purest of joy.