The novel begins: two travellers, seagull
and star, see the night bus run empty.
Do you speak human? asked the Riverend
Alpheratz. I speak Joyce. The bus turns
the street to comic-strip. I am devoted to
the smooth running of internotional thought.
In dictionaries is defined what it is
we no longer have. A devil in the toenail,
mathing the voluminous timespace that
ends on the black of the page, askeletal
desplorer buzzsawing climaxes. Collapsed
Tetragrammaton did not act
rationally in writing these, his eyes bled
out of word and he explained in too
many voices, in glossed unterwelten of speech
that ladders did not reach, in the attic
when books swarm angrily from their boxes.
This is the song we empty as the head
heaves with inanotion. Populations
surge: in their hooked hands is sand,
siftwork, sieved the varioral textscape.
He shouts in his sleep he is stuck inside
time’s tomefoolery awaiting the age of mildew.
The people stand incredulous: they drilled
rubble to find an ancient library
in cinderends, within it buried the word
for you, ill in your vast bed. Whistle
the treeself, disarmer of night, driller:
under your darkness your undercovered travels
in leafed delyrical intercludes.
We forgot how the forest stretched
into a single twig or spire of dust.
Ghosts fit between pages, waiting for
the news to tell them we invented time to forget
eternity. Mistress of index, what she
cannot unearth, the sparsim tararas
under the carapace, I have eyes
to hurt myself with, a sense losing in the spill,
so sleep the words into the book, tunnel
a novel, erupt as bullethole or butt, aporia among
the embers, ideal reader, eat alive the pronouns
make fleshword, think open the sensefolds:
all pages are binding upon the reader.

Giles Goodland