aeems to be seething stratified and heaving
until it bubbles and chokes my breath
there's not a blade oh god a single blade which . .. I'm in
heaven
and the rickety trees
which from here grow with their foliage downwards
caress me with their
roots
with such smooth snakelike gentleness
that I groan crazily I never killed
• I only lifted
the bodies from the traps and disentagled them from the wheel
from the trough of the guillotine I would always
lift the heads gently by the hair
and with a rag admittedly not always snowy white
I'd dab the neck and on one occasion I even
used a chamois leather to
polish
the glasses
of a certain scientist and only then
stitched the bespectacled head back on
Did I not personally
Daily by the gallows
water that bed of white roses
did I not graft and weed to beautify
the place where people said their last farewells
I never killed Only very occasionally
would I complete the strangling of the all-but-strangled
complete the breaking of a neck complete the axe-blow
but always only in the line of duty
in
order the sooner to mend and to heal
the wound of the dead Why then and by what right
do they invade my dreams- the white
the airless the croaking dry ones
the morphia addicts exhaled from the organ pipe
behind which sits self-vindictive hate
Why then and by what right do all those heads
winged heads resembling
bird~
come sweeping down on me
from the phantom realm of tumours and worms
why do they sweep across the low horizon
filling the sky from one end to the other
gyrating now
in
black concentric circles
around
my
head
I
did not cut them off
I only glued them back . . ..
