Lee Morgan

“Read (Use) Me (You) Up

Do you still know how to let enchantment do you?
without fear despite it or because of it? It = Pain.

Do
not then read me like English
classes but instead pretend to drown
yourself first in a cold bucket
trussed up and used by me
in spread eagled heart vivisection
I want to eat your heart out till you
travel with my book
decompose onto it
somewhere in the wilderness
where they never find your body.

To
see you
playing with yourself
at the site of an old crime,
perplexed on street corners
at the vicissitudes of a turn of
my screw-phrase,
fidget-spinning yourself into the shape
of the abject and wanting to lick something
dirty. Dirty like cutting up my syntax
against my will
into rapid
stabs of meaning
till you read me
breathless.
”

“Hidden Folk

There is a hole opening
up in it’s back
they say like a grisly
weed root overturned
when the sod is lifted
like a sin
eater
oh!
he is too!
can’t get filled
up
puts all the food
somewhere
hidden
folk
lie
like eyes
in your hedgerows.
”

“The Alleyways of Venice

There are pigeons nesting in the walls
of me, crustaceans forming under
my fingernails because
I have been still below sea level for
too long I have followed the labyrinth
to the minotaur’s heart and been mounted
by mucous thick bull
cock and gorge rising
of this town
under late capitalism
yet forgot to turn back and
look upon him with the eyes
of love’s transforming gaze.
Now I must follow the salty guts
of this city to my barnacle-ghost
who rises in dripping wet opera clothes
out of the ancient spectral forests below our feet.

The Venetians think they wear masks
But the ocean wears them, wears them…
Wear me away, we are to you, the carnival
like the high water mark
revealing grimacing faces in the old wood
claimed by the giant hands of history
pulling (holding?) the city down (up?) .

I have looked for you down every alley
of this fading grandeur a strain grown tired
where we are all trying to lose the performance
of self to lay down the tired burden
into the equanimity of the great impersonal
to forget we speak human. Yet what do we find but the
eternally present absence of the beloved?
To the sound of the slow wearing away
of iron shoes I wander this globe
and find perhaps that we are
the always gone arriving one.
 
”