Saturday, December 25, 2004

Christmas Gift Part 3: Binary Counting

Binary Counting

A simple thing: “This is me, this is mine”.
And all done.

Two become one
and a two.

My fingers are shining in a halo
Lamp in the still of the turning
Groaning
World

O

I remember my feverish dreams of Mexico
Orange peel scent in the sweat of a virus
In the Red of blood the hibiscus blooms.

I remember a future of records and wine
In an elegant lone ness a cigarette poised
A one by one. A two by two.

My perfume coiling up in snatches like
A song long lost and my eyes fixed on
Horizon
Haze

I remember I was to be loved. In my
Most white lone ness I was to be a loved
One by one. Two by two.

I had a dream of myself as my mother.
She in natural shine and blue inscribed eye
In the heart of things I was her powder.

A one and a two and.

I am sitting in an hour of many hours
A night of many nights, a ship on the
Crest of
Time.

I am wrong and always will be.

O

A one and a one and a one and a one….

Christmas gift part 2: Dot

.

Don’t be a dot. tonight
Be a line lion I can lead
On a leash around the town to
Describe the edges of your form in footprints
Twisting about you like a licorice stick

Say Grr baby.

Do not be a dot dot: tonight
Do not ask me the meaning of “Our Frank”
Talk make me sweet in pushing the punch of
Your content and hot to the answers of your
Circular questions.

Say Grr Baby.

Do not be a dot dot dot…

Tonight we’ll pretend we have
Finite ends, firm means and motives,
I’ll pretend I’m you and you can pretend you’re Me.
As good as any
In a flash as hot as dark.

Christmas Gift part 1: Story

As my Christmas Gift to you all I am posting 3 new poems...including a "Christmas poem" that follows. I hope you all have had a good and warm time...I are getting ready for a huge Lasagna dinner, and enjoying the quiet. much love SR65 X

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STORY


She was big as can be, you see
Heavy and tired, with him
Kicking all night

The trip to see the taxman

To pay up and be counted

We started off as two
And ended up as three

The census was confounded.

“Is this my crown?” she screamed

She was so young then



He was so good. He walked along and let me lean
I was heavy and tired, with him
Kicking all night

A pain ran through my body,
From hands to feet and back,
And a ring of sweat beading round my head
Is this my crown? I screamed,

Now that’s a joke.
And us not yet married,
But not til then…

We started off as one and ended up as two.

I can’t remember so much anymore but…

But not til then…

We looked for somewhere to stop.
And me with a Nile inside about to break and wash
Up our little fish, our little lamb.

It was too late, no one would take us,
We sat in a barn thinking of what to do.

Joseph chewed a straw.
Then he was so young.
His hands were still soft,
And I loved every inch
Of flesh that held the
Best of souls.

Not til then did I know, for sure for
Certain…

When he finally came, and it took many
Hours I lay on the straw in my gore
I looked into the face of that body

The most beautiful face in the world



She looked into the face of that body the most
Beautiful face in the world, and was silent.
I wondered what she was thinking.
Then we were so young, so moved about
So shuffled and shifted but in the light of God
We thought, In the light of God.



He was so small, so pink in the warm night
I looked at that part of myself that is a miracle,
I thought, “This is my glory, this is my crown
This is my burden, this is my pain.”

I guess all mothers think that.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

manhattan mania

oh well. Home again home again. On Long Island safely ensconsed in something like a christmas snowglobe, feeling ok, ate a big slice of my favourite vanilla meringue cake at dinner, but also strange/ wondering why nobody's been writing to me...ho hum. Out to dinner today and saw a terrible musical...won't go into it...Christmas with the fam' has it's various rituals...some good some bad.

cookies good. musicals (especially modern ones), generally, bad. Going to the Opera after christmas though...and that I am looking forward to...OFFEnbaCH: TALEs OF HOFFMAN, WOW!!!! so exciting! i love the Opera, haven't been in over 4 years. haven't been to the Met' in about 12 years! SNOWFLAKE LIGHT FIXTURES....twinkle twinkle.

but now I need to do some work, and think about things.

Christmas is kind of eluding me this year. we walked by the tree in rockefeller center, and past windows bedecked and layered on 5th Avenue, and it kind of didn;t do much...maybe i am jaded. Which would be a great pity. Actually one of the things I value most is wonder. Or maybe it's just missing those I love. You know who you are.

SR65

Friday, December 17, 2004

wo shuo: Yazhi Zaijian!

So the wisdom teeth are out...I have a face like a 6 year old chipmunk, and I didn;t get into the Vagina Monologues!! Can you believe it!!

anyway, just wanted to say goodbye to my teeth. and my wisdom, perhaps.

more later, when not full of codeine.

SR65X

Monday, December 13, 2004

When Lips Speak Together....

Apologies to Irigaray...it seems like I am always apologising to her actually, even though I disagree with her on so many things...actually while I am at it I will apologise to Kristeva too even though I hate what she says becaus I am so nasty about her in every class at every opportunity, and it's nearly CHristmas and I sholdn't be mean...I son't want to get a lump of coal for being a bad feminist....anyway...I am here announcing that I auditioned for the Harvard production of THe Vagina Monologues yesterday, and it went quite well...I am hopeful...so everybody keep your fingers crossed...maybe one day you'll see my name in lights....the lights of Loker Commons! GLAMOUR.

much love and lips.

SR65
X

Saturday, December 11, 2004

The British Embassy

Firstly, Hello to all thoose here whom I have not met, hopefuly one day we might..

So, Yesterday I went to the British Embassy Christmas Party (By the way I live in Beijing if any of you didn't know), I had mixed feelings as I walked in to the Pub inside the Embassy (the only embassy with a license to sell alcohol, says alot about English society), indeed it was a strange experience which after a while as I was being given mulled wine and guiness became beautifully surreal. There was a curtain drawn across the stage when the manager of the Embassy, this realy straight no nonsense guy, poked his head out and started singing the monty python song "I like chinese", the curtains were pulled back revealing three rotund guys dressed up in traditional chinese dress performing to the music in absolute perfect time. It was beatifully offensive, I'll have to try and find the lyrics and post them on here.

I havent quite digested what exactly was going on there in that bastion of Englishness, but whenever someone would say something that normaly would have made me feel like an unwanted misenthrope in England (should I be not offended when some one asks me "who the fuck are you?" just because they're drunk and irish? I don't know, I'll let you know the answer when I've worked it out) I was quietly reasurred that outside the walls of this building (classic 1960's foreign concession style) these confused feelings of nationhood and identity would quickly evaporate for me, but perhaps not for them.

Anyway, national identity looks all the more ridiculous when it's isolated and slightly defensive and indignant, that, I found quite empowering actualy. In any case, I think I've been hanging around with too many Canadians as I was told I had a North American twang to my accent, Ah well, I think there is something beautiful about having the people you love around you affect the very way you speak, not that its true though!

Friday, December 10, 2004

Practical Theater: Identity, Role and Acceptance in Stone Butch Blues

In the novel “Stone Butch Blues” and the accompanying pieces we have looked at this week we have been exploring the practicalities of living as a “Gender Outlaw” that we had begun to examine in “Boys Don’t Cry” we are facing issues of class and race, and moreover, again coming upon the practicability of living “without” norms, or normativity. I explored a lot of the issues of binary replication in classification of lesbian groups, and the need for solidarity that simultaneously arise for individuals treated as gender outlaws and so here I will be further examining these issues alongside the personal story created for the character Jess Goldberg by Leslie Feinberg in this novel.

This is a bildungsroman in the true sense. It talks about the layered and painful development of its protagonist Jess Golberg through h/her violent and in many senses circular trajectory through a working class life in the US and indeed through variously gendered and sexed bodies, and through the conceptual mire of gender itself. From the outset Jess is looking for home, a home within hi/herself and in a community of others who can accept her, as is exemplified by her childhood encounter with the mirror, or h/her early life in the company of a group of Native American women, and indeed, h/her early propulsion in the New York state bar scene. He/She seeks a harbor of recognition and safety represented in h/her dreams and daydreams in the form of a hut, a gathering circle, or a ring. Again and again we see the symbol of the circle manifest itself, whether representing a unity of workers, of butches, or an acceptance for a new body, or indeed the safe home offered by the arms of “high femme” (who at certain points embodies a kind of motherly ideal, interestingly), which in the end is the feature to which Jess is most attracted, regardless of “sex”. And it is striking that throughout the novel despite the evident and painful search for individual identity, the “type” as a group, a home, a locus of solidarity remains fairly strong. Jess strives heroically to create and recreate, to build and rebuild a home around and within h/herself, to nurture and be nurtured. But the strong association between femme and home between “wife” and home remains remarkably stable considering the precarious path jess walks through the gender minefield, as does the character and ideal of butchness, although that it seems that that is subject to more change than the former. These signifiers have a purpose: Edna is attracted to the qualities of “Butches” for example, the “butch heart”. In h/her reaction to h/her evident placement within a continuum of evidently fairly interchangeable butches and her striving for a lineage of the butch as is exemplified in h/her need to search out Butch Al, Jess aligns herself with a set of characteristics, a stereotype constructed inside Lesbianism itself. The political and emotional necessity for this tracing of a butch family tree for Jess, even though in the end he/she in many ways has transgressed even these boundaries, is understandable and evident. But again we must ask what the effect of such fixed binaries of “butch/femme” are within lesbian/gay groups…we see the horror with which Jess reacts to the relationship between two butches, in many ways echoing homophobic discourse, and we are faced with the consequences of a perpetuated politics of symmetrical complementariness along what truly are gender lines, now having been removed from their presumptive biological foundations. It is not my intention here to belittle the efforts of our resourceful and engaging principal character, who, after all stands as an example of an experience that in many ways is widespread. I believe however that it is precisely the aim of Leslie Feinberg in writing these situations into the novel that we should question the distinctions drawn, as Jess h/herself does in the end, even as we revel in the Kerouac-like “beat” and beaten grace of the Butch. We must conclude that in all events Jess walks a tight rope between an idealized trajectory of “self-realization” whether itself believed to be innate or in socially informed and socio-economic pressures in h/her journeys through gender, and that in any and all events he/she is engaging in a self-making practical theater of which he/she is at various points extremely conscious.

The novel itself, as well as being a document of development in the fog of gender war, is a sort of confessional. We are party to the most intimate and painful moments of Jess’ existence…the humiliating and horrifying rape, menacing beatings, private doubts and public embarrassments. The responsibility of the writer to create a relationship between the text and reader that is not engaging, or relying upon a sort of gender exoticism is extraordinary, and in fact Leslie Feinberg manages this well, we become a sort of lover to the character… We stand facing the image of the little girl in her father’s suit. It becomes our image and that of our fantasy, just as it is for Jess…we are made so intimately sympathetic to Jess that we cannot but identify with h/her, and in effect we are thus allowed to act as femme and “melt the Stone”. At the cool climax of this record of intimacies, at the end of the novel, we again find ourselves in within the circle… catapulted into a confession-within-a-confession that echoes the letter that begins the novel…and into the effects for the protagonist of a self-conscious confession before the crowd. Judith Halberstam speaks in her articles of a need to find a new language to describe the erotic life of the butch, the erotic life based on giving pleasure but remaining resistant to it oneself, what she actually identifies as a catalogue of “negative” sexuality based on “what is not done”. In fact this is the ultimate contradiction at the heart of the condition of being Butch with a capital “B”: in the moment that one admits, confesses, lets flow all that has been inside into discourse, in some senses one ceases to be a Stone Butch. However we view the political effectiveness in this sense of Jess’ articulation of h/her condition in public in the final pages of the novel, we are confronted with the joy and release it provides, and the perhaps necessary redrawing of
Jess as an individual in relation to categories of sex and gender within and in fact beyond heterosexual norms. Perhaps that is the ultimate endpoint of the ring.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Punctum/"You are my sweetest downfall"

It is after 4 in the morning and I am listening compulsively to Regina Spektor...this is "Samson". I am sitting in a pool of white light cast from the lamp on my desk and smoking a fag, making a spotlight in the darkness like a lighthouse on the sea off the South Coast. Thinking about something I read of Judith Butler's new book today...the idea of relationships, of love or mourning, passion, as an undoing, an unzipping of the soul, where we sit beside ourselves in abject ex-tasy or horror. I am sitting at the centre of the ennoument, wondering what is happening now across town, what boats are floating across the sea and what birds are picking through crumbs many many miles away. Light is spreading across the hazy clouds high over head. Peaceful sleep is sneaking in and out of the eyelids of 3 in an upstairs apartment, snacks are being eaten in bed by the light of a quiet cigarette, the cat is sleeping between a couple in Texas, weak sun is coming through the kitchen window of somebody's basement flat sparking off all the pots and pans, and the workday is dragging itself into its final waltz in a classroom and an office.The ends of the threads of my heart are spreading themselves out at 4am, at 4am we are all connected.

this is an audio post - click to play


You are all my sweetest downfall.

Listen to this and find a quiet centre in your heart.

SR65X


Sunday, December 05, 2004

the italian icon

scaryMichelepastaface
scaryMichelepastaface,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.
So I know Dimaco is going to kill me for putting this on, but I couldn't help it, it's the ultimate italian stereotype...I think Dimaco's friend who came to visit in London took the picture and set it up so that his parents wouldn't worry that his italian-ness was being corrupted by living in the UK so long. "Here Mama, don't worry about me." So I think we should all get our wife beaters on, smother ourselves in Parmigiano...grano baby grano, and bring out our inner italian in honour of Dimaco as a fine italian man.

Ciao!

fairylights

fairylights
fairylights,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.
I am tired...what, more work???
watch me slump...fag in hand.
But note well my new fairy light halo...Aren't they great??? getting ready for the holiday season...have had discussions about Yule, Xmas and Hannukah today, so I know that the season is upon me.

Also it's fucking freezing which is usually a good sign.

Will I ever get to bed??

Saturday, December 04, 2004

V

Show and Tell: Drag/Passing/Performing/Being

1. Drawing the same circle a thousand times: Repetition and Synthesis

This week we have been exploring the idea of performativity in a number of different contexts and valences (hereafter referred to by the synecdoche V), the extent to which performativity constitutes identity, or fails to as the borders of same escape the edges of the performance necessitating repetition. Further some of the texts and film we have looked at explores conscious performance and the implications on that on the necessity of the subject to “pass”, without revealing any split between their assigned sex and assigned gender so as to prop up the conceit of continuity between and within the two categories even as its logic undermines the very primacy of the original. Judith Butler posits a link not only between all gender and drag, but also between repetition and constitution, in effect concluding that gender is a kind of spell made true by repeated incantation, a mantra with no original form that both is and does.

2. V for Vicious

Implicit in the idea of this mantra of gender/sex is the idea of passing, for though, as the film Boys Don’t Cry (and countless other examples) shows there are members of the gender/sex continuum whose process of “passing” is more acute, more dangerous, practically violent and filled with trepidation, we all “pass” to a lesser or greater extent, and not only in terms of our physical appearance. Indeed it is perhaps less of a case of “womanliness” as masquerade as it is “personhood” as masquerade, where, however the mask and the face are part of one another, as I have argued elsewhere. In semantic groups, in grouping within groupings we reduce the variety of the individual as a flow of social and biological into logical and workable groups for better or worse, and this fact becomes particularly noticeable in those places where our own logic shows its multitude of flaws, and disrupts the epistemological net upon which phallogocentricity is supported. These more potent points of confrontation between the conceit of the natural and the (not-necessarily-self-identified-as…) subversive performative, are perhaps the very loci of which Butler speaks where there may be a “political imperative to use…necessary error or category mistakes” to reuse names that divide sharply… like “gay” and “lesbian”, “butch” and “femme” but I consider that it can be a thorny problem; essentially we face the perennial difficulty of using such dichotomous logics in attempting to disrupt them, we try to keep a subversive hand on the wheel, though the road ahead seems straight, but that is not to say that such terms are not useful at times. Processes of thought, modes of expression are all converted for acceptable use within dichotomies of “pro” and “anti”, “left” and “right” within which we may or may not feel comfortable, indeed much psychotherapy whether focused on the sexual strata of psychoanalysis or on cognitive behavior is about learning to “pass” comfortably in society. To return to the idea of gender in particular, as an aspect of this self-constitutive process, and to the parallel concepts of drag and passing, first let us consider what is involved in drag, in dragging. Whether we are seeking to emulate the “male” the “female” or a vision of ourselves, constituting oneself can always be seen as a process of becoming the other, since the ideal is the mirror image, the imago and thus not the self, but a vision entering into the realm of desire, and therefore, ultimately, an impossibility. Thus to a degree we are all cross-dressers, perhaps. But in the process of acting a “gender” or “type” this process becomes more obvious, and the potentials and pitfalls of the dressing, the drag and the detail are revealed. In repetition, as Butler argues, we can see the self, or impossibility of a Self balking at a label, so that the label like some band-aid on a swimming child’s knee needs to be attached and reattached to cover the wound where move, change and growth is happening. In fact, this re-iteration of category is, even in those who willingly conform to heteronorms, obviously and evidently unstable…a person’s vision and presentation of themselves is in fact expected to change over time, as age and experience of various kinds act upon us, and we upon them, but the limitations of this expected to change are interestingly closed off…for someone to seem to become less or more masculine or feminine, if moving “away” from their proscribed sex ( a sex that is socially inscribed and constituted in this other to which they move) would be considered unacceptable or suspect, as can be seen in the attacks on the perceived “masculinization” that occurs in menopause as Anne Fausto Sterling explores it in Myths of Gender. In the repetition, and the inability to produce a stable definition, or even a truly reliable copy, we can see the potential disruptive and creative force within the layered gender. We can also see how the effect of this incantation is to make it seem natural, and internal, because in fact, it is no more external than internal, it is no more other than self, since as indicated above the other and the self are linked across a fluid chain. When “re-performing” a “gender” or “type” however, certain other problems come to the fore…although such performance may have disruptive power to the idea of the primacy of the natural as implicated in gender performance, the cluster of concepts around the gender remain fairly fixed, and the dichotomy is repeated. To act like a woman, even for a man remains to be ladylike, emotional, and concerned with personal grooming, among other things, so to be a woman still carries this baggage with it, clearly. Thus although the being of a woman may have become disengaged from a “female” body per se, what it is to have a female body and to be a woman is still circumscribed within the focus of the performance…the “real” that is striven for but that is precisely not real. While it may be true that there is “no proper gender, a gender that is proper to one sex but not another” in practical terms, in problems like the “urinary segregation” spoken of by Judith Halberstam et al. we see that the unstable perimeters that circulate sex, gender and self are constantly policed through a network of hegemony, and that they are policed precisely because they are unstable, and it is for this reason that drag may at once signify a valence that is v for vicious and a v for victory in both directions.

2. The Insightment(sic) to look

In her article “Decking Out: Performing Identities” Butler speaks of the content of this interstitial space between and inside self and sex in the following terms...”Part of what constitutes sexuality is precisely that which does not appear and that which to some degree, can never appear”(p.25). The tensions between the unseen nature of this realm and its status as part and parcel, and indeed centre to an economy of desire is at the heart of both the creation of sexualities that run along a continuum in relation to social sex designation and sex object, and to the contradictory desire to see what is not there, that is found in the bathroom drama described in Halberstam’s essays, and in the dialogue of revealing, both violent and “voluntary” that takes place in Boys Don’t Cry. In this film the audience is made party to a series of revelations on the nature of Tina/Brandon’s “Sexual Identity Crisis”, we are put in a position to see the line of cleavage, to his menstrual drama, and to his forced confessions. But in the end though at times we are in intimate and sympathetic relation to the character, we are party to his undoing, we are implied in his rape, and are forced, like Lana to look at his genitals which have no bearing whatever to his conception of himself. We are made culpable and our gaze is involved in a visual rape that prefigures the physical rape to which we are also invited. To add insult to injury perhaps, we are then presumed to have seen the truth of Tina/Brandon’s sexual status as a woman, a lesbian, as is evidenced by the lesbian lovemaking seen, where Brandon takes on an incongruous female role , which seems preposterous, (a result of his being taught by the phallic eye and the rape, perhaps a “true” role?) especially in relation to his nearly immediately preceding rape. The rape, the necessity to rape as a punishment for transgressing gender roles is in fact a site of the more violent aspect of this afore mentioned policing of gender. The rape, the use of the penis as weapon, seems to be the only way in which the characters, in this film can regain a sense of the importance of this organ after the true castration they undergo upon discovering that Brandon does not happen to have one. This castration is absolute, rather than physical or phantastic, because it reveals the true semantic distance between phallus and penis, and the import or LACK(sic) of same, in the organ in the making of masculinity.

4. VVVVVVVVVVWV
There are many more questions to be asked about the nature of identities that, like Brandon’s self describe within the binary dichotomy of male and female even as they challenge them. The objects of desires, and natures of desires can be seen to create a multiplicity of different identity formations within the realm of “gay” and “lesbian” in a way that can be an effective tool for reflecting the reification of desire in the heteronorm if they can be excised in part from dichotomous schemes of their own, so as to highlight the constitutive and synthetic functions of repetition and to allow perhaps some basis for practical movement on these issues that so violently impact the lives of many.

Friday, December 03, 2004

"Us":by Regina Spektor

"We're living in a den of thieves...rummaging for answers in the pages."

New music...the album,"Soviet Kitsch" is great, something that I got recently after hearing it on local radio...for all you voyeurs out there (and I know you're out there you gorgeous perverts... you tell me!) keep an eye for Regina wherever you are, and enjoy.

more later,

SR65
X

this is an audio post - click to play

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Neruda: poem of the day///

So the morning was rather beautiful today and this Pablo Neruda poem came into my head...visions of verdant crepescular plants and memento mori et al. what follows is a spanish version without accents...sorry, and then a translated version, which I am not one hundred percent certain about...any suggestions welcome, that;s what you get from th inernet, what can I say.

Anyway, Enjoy,

SR65
X
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CABALLO DE LOS SUENOS

Innecessario, viendome en los espejos
con un gusto a semanas, a biografos,a papeles
arranco de mi corazon al capitan del infierno,
establezco clausulas indefinidamente tristes.

Vago de un punto a otro, absorbo illusiones,
convero con los sastras en sus nidos:
ellos, a menudo, con voz fatal y fria
cantan y hacen huir los maleficios

Hay un pais extenso en el cielo
con las supersticiosas alfombras del arco-iris
Y con vegetaciones vesperales:
hacia alli me dirijo, no sin cierta fatiga,
pisando una tierra removida de sepulcros un tanto frescos,
Yo sueno entre esas plantas de legumbre confusa.

Paso entre documentos disfrutados,entre origenes,'
vestido como un ser original y abatido:
amo la miel gastada del respeto,
el dulche catecismo entre cuynas hojas
duermen violetas envejecides, desvanecidas,
y las escobas, commovedoras de auxilio:
en su apariencia hay, sin duda, pesadumbre y certeza.
Yo destruyo la rosa que silba y la ansiedad raptora:
Yo rompo extremos queridos: y aun mas,
aguardo el tiempo uniforme, sin medida:
un sabor que tengo en el alma m edeprime.

Que dia ha sobrevenido! Que espesa luz de leche,
compacta, digital, me favorece!
He oido relinchar su rojo caballo
desnudo sin herraduras y radiante.

Atravieso con el sobre las iglesias,
gallopo los cuarteles desiertos de soldados
y un ejercito impuro me persigue.
Sus ojos de eucaliptus roban sombra,
su cuerpo de compana galopa y golpea.

Yo necesito un relampago de fulgor persistente,
un deudo festival que asuma mis herencias.

--------------------------------------

Needlessly, watching my looking-glass image,
With its passion for papers and cinemas, days of the week,
I pluck from my heart my hell's captain
and order the clauses, equivocally sad.

I drift between this point and that, absorbing illusions,
converse in the nest of tailors:
sometimes the voices are glacial and deadly-
they sing and the sorcery goes.

There's a country spread out in the sky,
a credulous carpet of rainbows
and crepuscular plants:
I move toward it just a bit haggardly
trampling a gravedigger's rubble still moist from the spade
To dream in a bedlam of vegetables.

I walk between origins, beneficient documents
chopfallen, dressed like a natural: I want
the spent honey of deference,
the sweets of the catechism under whose leaves
drained violets drowse and grow old;
and those bustling abettors, the brooms, in whose image,
assuredly, sorrow and certainty join.
I plunder the whistle of roses, the thieving anxiety:
I smash the attractive extremes-worst of all,
I await a symmetrical time beyond measure:
The taste of my spirit disheartens me.

What a morning is here! What a milk-heavy glow
in the air, integral, all of a piece,
Intending some good! I have heard its red horses
naked to bridle and iron, shimmering, whinnying there.

Mounted, I soar over churches,
gallop the garrisons empty of soldiers
While a dissolute army pursues me.
Eucalyptus, its eyes race the darkness
and the bell of its galloping body strikes home.

I need but a spark of that perduring brightness,
my jubilant kindred to claim my inheritance.

____________________________________________________________