The Pen

The Pen
wasn't sure which of them was doing the other:
the writer or the writing.

The words, 'the world is not a binary opposition'
stopped saying the writer and followed her
to the machine which typed into her the ingredients;
the wineglass flung the writer to the floor,
cracking her, while the stemmed receptacle
swilled her round before gulping her down the throat,
watching the melted bottle pour the writer into a dirty glass,
and greasy fingerprints carefully remove her from the bulb;

dark ink was slowly sucking up the writer into the split nib
and the pencil's rubber, opposite, end was erasing her
rhythmically, breathing her relics off the ledge
whilst the page kept moving beneath the pencil's
a coffin scratching trapped fingernails, lightly, lightly,
remembering again and again the salt mill's later gesture
carrying the writer from sentence to plate,
grinding her all over her unwritten words.

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Huba

Days and words open on themselves and won't quite shut.

The tide receded in the dream.
It was centuries ago,
before the guns and waters rose.
She levitated to the ceiling;
looked at her feet to wake up.

Are we afraid to look at things
because we fear they will fade
with our sight upon them?

If that's true, it follows that they disappear
when we look them in the eye;
but what of the things that stay?

Meanings reside
in the difference repetition makes
when arrival is neither sought nor desired,
or in symbols reaching beyond our comprehension

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Qualia

Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication =96 Godard

Frozen in a salty equinox of loam and sea,
together with land's consciousness I counter:

if instead of our memories,
we were made of our forgettings,

if instead of seeing what we did,
we reconstructed what we missed in our blinks,

if instead of secreting what we thought,
we drew a circle and stepped inside?

Teeth lightning weeps bleeding branches.
A dead bird has fallen from the goblet.

I collect phonemes from the dream,
assemble them into a coloured graph.

Cinefilm tram-rattles industrial scapes.
A diagonal hat; red walls; machines.

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KNITTING

All was still – connected through disconnection:
shapes of the alphabet / invisibility / three ladders;
found objects: a dime / a button / a flower / a fork in the road /
a paper key / a crayon / a candle / the garden of tomatoes.
We want the definition, when the feeling starts to go.
Or to grow. Receiving the clues, I go out to buy wool.

Conversations in dreams leave us, feeling knowing.
If we un-remember, a blink or an encountered sign
contain the faded message from tomorrow,
like a poem or letter yet to be written because we are
the poem, still between ink, parchment and movement,
still in the pen. I calculate the linguistic stitches.

In code, a fallen fridge-magnet word tells me to hesitate.
Car registration plate consonants tell me a friend is there.
Themed days present me with twins and synchronicities.
Gentle hints tell me I must seek symbols and make myth.
Threadsuns hold the language; your name I begin to knit
in numbers – thousands of eyes in webbed cloth. Of late,

when I glance at my watch, I keep seeing the time in doubles:
10.10, 13.13, even 22.22 says hello, teaching me that all time
is two-fold, at least, or bound up in a looped aporia,
like presence and absence together: a sense of prabsence.
Prabsence, paralleling the mirror, yields to nothing and becomes it,
so tells me a postcard of upside-down paintstripes and brushes.

I will knit your absence into presence with numbers, needles and rows.
With numbers, needles and rows, I will knit your absence into presence.

With numbers and needles, with needles and numbers,
with needles and rows, with rows and needles,
with rows and numbers, with numbers and rows,
with numbers and needles, with needles and rows.

With numbers and needles, with needles and rows,
with needles and rows, with rows and numbers,
with rows and numbers, with numbers and needles,
with numbers and needles, with needles and rows.

With numbers, with numbers, with needles and numbers,
with rows, with rows, with numbers and rows,
with needles, with needles, with rows and needles,
with numbers and needles, with needles and rows

I will knit your absence into presence.

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Copyrights @ Malgorzata Kitowski

KEY

In fragments and mystery they gathered, murmuring
of a fissure breaking in and out, tearing eclipses.
Dice clack in the ludo-cup; deciduous hide peels back.

The name I repeat I repeat, the name I repeat
took me close to the light, so close
it singed the edges of my dream -
twisting wire into a silhouette and pinbursting eyes.

On pavements beige they gathered, whispering
of consuming chronology, alphabets and analogies of shapes.
The dice are already loaded yet we rattle-mix with fingers crossed.

The percussionist hurriedly moves about:
drums, glockenspiel (with two different kinds of stick), triangle.
Three notes in quick succession; trombone and violin. Gong.
Adagio. Moderato. Fonts of music dance.
Consciousness was the art of connecting, once.

In dreams and days they gathered, singing
of the game of transparency untuning the earth
in mirth and music, surrendering to the new cuneiform.

We know this draught of time's rude hand and hymnody
because we have been a conversation,
disclosing ourselves to a realm where the words were
suddenly spoken, there, free in the air
as if they were solid metal blocks of print,
then bronze pagodas, then guardians, then cutlery,
then water and lung and drowning.

This must be read in the dark, next the speech burned.
This must be read to no audience.

You turn the door, the key remains.
You turn the locks, you turn the wall,
You turn the handle, the key remains.

NUGGETS

1
Tree twigs clot egg-marbled sky
as day is scraped away
into scents of evening lime.
Clouds intimate as they move:
it's dangerous to get used to people.

In the morning, the car is splattered
with bird shit. Since birds cannot speak,
they communicate through other means,
trying to warn, trying to mark.



2
The narrator tells me your favourite childhood toy
is meant to reflect you when you're older:
Action Man fanatic becomes soldier.

I poured sand from one bucket into another,
or, when it rained, decanted rice or pearl barley
from saucepan to bowl on the kitchen floor.

Gestures speak louder than actions,
but movements betray the secrets you think.


3
He is describing something and changes
from the indefinite to the definite article,
which seems to be significant,
whilst I continue to address an envelope
that doesn't yet know its destination.

These days I look over people's shoulders
on trains, to read the top lines of their books.

It can be the left or right page, depending where I stand.
Today it is: "and shone a torch at the door."



4
Water-memory knows to blink
back and forth between the coves,
washing sand eyes to see.

Recently I have started giving things away:
books to strangers; poems to beggars;
gifts bought and not given; skin.
I've had this for too long, I say.

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Eye

The ice is melting and so are the words.
The water is evaporating and so am I.
The air is solidifying and so are the words.

When I cracklesinged my eyelashes with a match,
I broke a bone and wished them to grow.
Hairs grew: shiny, thick and curved,
arcing backwards like a touched body.

The stems extended still, long and longing,
pushing through themselves into a sweeping curtain
I pinned behind my ear with a dried rose,
so in my field of vision I could see the past clearly.

My lashes are sprouting shoots and strange buds:
little welts upon their unblinking branches.
I wear a patch and weave young boughs
into my head, plaiting new leaf with tangled hair.

Eating bread and Stilton,
I tightroped along a vein of mould.
It led me to a dream.
I found a box of engraved fossils and toffee.
The moonpail needed emptying
in sky clotted with purple marbles and fur,
and nothing remained of those who live in monotony.
I rippled when I moved, like a soundwave.

I pluck the round weights and stay indoors
to make good things with my fruit.
I baked an apple charlotte with pastry
I cut myself. You would come to the house of eyes
and I fed you because I wanted you
to eat my apples, eat the gifts of my eyes, eat me.

Only then would you see the truth.

Nobody comes to the house anymore.
Nobody eats my apples, apples
that come from no season, from no planted tree.
I cannot move for the burden of the fruit:
nobody unloads the truths anymore.

The whispers of the ripening, decaying apples
frighten me: their low song is too much to contain
for one being. My eyelid has stretched far now,
reaching my knee in a skirt of skin membrane.

Weeping salt, I climb inside the thin cloak of my eye’s skin
like a pip, waiting in the eye-hammock and darkness
for the apples to stop murmuring semaphore truths,
waiting for the twigs and trunks to entomb me with apple arms.

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