BLACK HOLE
OF YOUR HEART

part one:

SEPARATE AMPUTATIONS

unsequential quatrains by

  Susi Farkas


dedicated to the memory of Omar Khayyam

The words that poets weave are spun from skeins
of shoddy shredded from the planet's screams,
and whether in Belfast or Naishapur
they make the tent that shrouds men in what seems.

We are the shape and the colour of dying,
coffin-shaped, the pinkish blue-grey
which we call white - the colour of lying.
The taste in our groins is the taste of decay.

A lamb skips gaily round the field
and romps to its mother's belly.
A farmer drives from dawn to dusk
and then he gapes at the telly.

Who wash the water
I have pissed in
dam the world
to luxury.

He lost his fur
in a storm, and, instead
of letting more grow,
he's been trying to change the weather.

When brain is blasphemy
of body
touch is the only
revelation.

Communications
are the maggots -
and the corpse is
Man.

The beauty
of duty
is the apotheosis
of neurosis.

As a bubble in water, by its own levitation
rises up to its own, in its own is destroyed,
sex is a rupture continuous as creation
whose season ceases in consummate void.

The continuous sirens
of the city
sounding the endless pursuit
of happiness.

Each springing, wringing death which starts and ends a dream
of glowing forest fungi glowing soft and secretly
to claim the hands which touch the clutching flesh impatiently
squeezes out the groin like soft and warm ice-cream.

Supermen
are not what men will be
but those they killed
so they might want the more.

All that meat -
the babies
that no-one
will eat.

When we die
may you and I
be as two buttons
on God's fly.

A poem in praise of Brown Betty
who is not the lover I wish for,
strong and wilful and sweaty -
but a pudding I just need a dish for.

Please god
don't let me die
until I've finished
the Damson Pie.

Man's inhumanity
to man's a natural
result of man's inanimality
to animal.

My poor poems
are piglets
cast before
dead, cultured pearls.

Factory-farmers say
unhappy animals
will not produce -
but just look at human beings!

We stamp on happiness
trying all the while
to give unhappiness
meaning, form and style.

They say Grace
before the animal
who was the grace
that they pretend to seek.

I sneak
into public gardens
before they open and after they close so I can peek
at plants without the people.

My dog:
he heard
the sky
bark.

There are cities of corn
where corn tramples the earth.
Where there are fields of men
the corn too is trampled.

Hygienic
people
smell
of murder.

|

You write a poem.
stop, then silence.
The silence is
a better poem.

There is a snowflake
in my heart
and I must keep
it warm.

|

The sensitive are driven by normality
to refuges of second-best
which connoisseurs call art, doctors call madness,
and saints call ecstasy (when they are impressed).

Pascal/Rimbaud
O castles! O seasons!
What heart has not its treasons ?
O castles! O seasons!
What heart has not its reasons ?

Success
is a hoarding
behind which hide
desperate competitions.

Paris. Today I saw
a thousand people
and a dog.
And only the dog smiled.

Love is an egg
broken in half
to hatch a purpose
for loving.

When we have lost
the twilight
all that we have
is loss.

|

This is what
the dawn
is called:
Death.

When need
turns to greed
the heart
turns to art.

Charity is
a hedgehog
turned inside
out.

Art is the craft of display
in which the great are greatly alone
and the rest are merely
arrogant.

The clockwork mouse grew bigger and became a rat,
a bigger rat, a monstrous clockwork rat
in a vast mechanical trap.
This is the age of the toy.

I cannot be
until I have
only my life
to lose.

The influential people
that I've never met
are the bushel that my light
must hide beneath.

When relationships hold us in thrall
and money establishes worth
it's the strongest who go to the wall
and the bleak who inherit the earth.

The mind is
cancer in the
Crab-man:
Nature's hubris.

As ten thousand species are destroyed
and the world is rent by civil wars
scientists in Los Angeles
discuss the foresting of Mars.

Before the coming
of Ragnarök
and homo sapiens' sad remnants also quit the scene
I hope in desperation.

The Rights of Man only seem to be negative:
the right to be illiterate
the right to wear nothing
the right to have no name.

Some of us rule
and most of us serve
but still a few
have the humanity to do neither.

Spending our lives
cleaning all the things we use...
Is dirt more filthy
than the concept of purity ?

Amazing mathematics
make immense and magic fires.
Tribes of pale neurotics
use electric hair-dryers.

We are dealers in pities
senile before we are old.
We have discovered since cities
only poison and gold.

Playing with lies
as diners play with cruets
are the would-be spies
who are merely poets.

All poems are translations
and all life interpretations
of existence
and of substance.

Old men are callous to be old
who should have died of sorrow
knowing there is no And Yet
and no Perhaps Tomorrow.

Please god
don't let me die
before I start on
this great poem which I....

We operate
soullessly, and soullessly expect
our separate
amputations to connect.

(1970-2000)