Death of Margaret – the water’s curse



Beneath the shadow of the moon,
beneath the fracture of cries,
the dreams of the solitary stone.

Because you did not cry,
because you forgot to bow before the winds’ prophecies,
there lies the skull of God on your coffee table.

Lonely millionaire who played with rainbows,
your voice falls on the floor like dry bones.

Open the door in moonlight,
think twice before you turn the key
before the wild hands across the clock
trigger a spasm in your soul.

Because we have seen the night
fall and hide inside an old brown basket in an empty room,
because we have bleached our souls with lightening,
because we have died in a violet taxi at sunset,
I find it queer to hope.

Your hair tanned violet in rocks,
your gaze automatic like lust and music
across the sunlit pavements of silence,
The Ganges seeps into the naked body of the city
like the fat, cold monster of your rhymes.

Count the diadems, the blue dresses and the smiles,
count the smells of strange feet across the cobbled streets,
count the cigarettes, the lamp-posts and the naked bodies
throbbing with passion at sunsets,
count the orange lights change across the Ganges
like the dying squeals of animals under the butcher’s knife.


Because you hardly remember me,
(or you hardly pretend)
we shall settle the matter in whispers
like the coy ant across a lovely woman’s thighs.

Because your soul cried for Jews
when the faint strains of the mandolin lit up Park Street,
I shall tuck up my sleeves in the rain,
check into a hotel, have a shower and read Dante.

We might even kiss if you want,
(not that it matters much to me anymore)
but we might hide inside the faint mirror of the soul
and play a game of guesses.

No words spoken, no thoughts shared,
no disguises revealed, no gazes exchanged,
but just colour and shapes stripped naked
and smeared like paint across the walls and floors
like the liquid opera at dinner.

What is the evening hiding in its sleep
deep in her thoughts of an uncommon maternity?
The soft paw of the rising sun melts into you;
the soft, unwearied hours of existence
before thoughts set in and turn your desires
into dust and incest.

Slow death in a violet taxi at sunset
while the liquid opera splashes across the walls.


When you were crying for death
across the deafening thunder and reverberation of silence,
while time and spaces morphed till they ceased to make meaning,
when existence was relative to the shapes around,
your feet on the floor like melting wax-walls of time,
the taboo flourished on ice and pain
wild like revelations when you drop your gown and blush.

The evening is a soft martyr in your breath,
the melodrama heightens like your throbbing pulse in bed,
and the soft articles like ‘a’ or ‘the’ don’t make meaning,
the evening inside your arm-pit changes directions,
your breasts brushing across my rhyme,
a blush across the scar of time.

Then we play cards or pour out our souls
like broken eggs on the kitchen floor,
the telephone grins like a cannibal in your dreams
and we stuff the grey lights of the room
inside the cracked, blue glass of memories.

Margaret, on the sand, with memories.
Wild hat, blue glasses and ashes of the soul.

Eyelashes in desire,
like soft petals of the rising moon.

Clouds, blue towers in sleep,
the rhyme of the magic woman rising on your flute,

Sweaty palms,
World-wars fought in closets
the strange tune of the nightingale from Siberia,
peal of dry bells served with onions at breakfast,
strange lights of hotel rooms
and the curse of the water dreaming.

Soft music, fountain gush,
rivers awake in pleasure of sound and touch.

Hairs dressed with yellow flowers
and the dust and yawn of ageing trams
like the battles lost in stock markets or sleep;
yet the sherbet and the animal voice,
the colour and the letters at 4 pm
bring back memories of the speech of the dead cat.

“What are you doing on the cloud,
without any sense of your impaired vision?”
the cat said to the wind.

The wind replied: “I am doing
what you did to the water’s curse.”

“You are following dream in her own kingdom,
you are following shadows across the bridges of time
until they came with machines to murder sleep.”

They came with machines
to kill the water’s curse
and the lust of crows
rose like ripples on Margaret’s lips.
Dreams fell with the sound of roses in sleep
and purgation sang inside her eyes’ nest,
blue tornadoes on library selves with French dictionaries
and Italian restaurants that served mirrors while you slept.

Meet me at 9 pm. On the bridge across the Ganges.

When the lights and the curse fade.

Hide your skin from the moonbeams in daggers of sleep
and restore to me in secrecy
(hidden deep inside the house of death)
the vanished power of a kiss.

Your hair, trees, lights decay.

And inside my memories of the violet taxi rusting at sunset,
the night is always unfinished and famished for touch.


Margaret flows
like a soft ripple on my lips.

The soft curse on your lips
that rises like the north-west wind but refuses to die.

Margaret on a July morning beneath the charmed tree,
hair disheveled like the feather floating away from fingers,
or the pianola wildly streaming away from the fingers she loves,
her eyes foraying deep like the nimble feet of dancers
into the imagery of the morning star.

The water splashed across her blue soul
and claiming her to its bosom
raised a demonic cry of exultation.

The opera splashed across her cries
like the unsung fragments of the evening on the windscreen
of the violet taxi at sunset.

The violet taxi slithering at high tide
through the curse in your dream,
the jittery afterthoughts of the bad evening
and songs from multiplex invade you
like purple jaws of the lonely wind.
Who walks across my dream at sunset?

Who bared her bosom to the water’s curse
and walked naked into bed?

Don’t run your tongue along the fringes of the dream. It hurts.
Don’t walk the border between the blue wind and the curse.
Don’t let the eagle light up the coffee house
with a circuit to desire.

And when your flesh sings,
put the meat on the stove to roast
and turn out the light.


Because you want to spend the evening
practicing death with hollow men,

because the 6 pm movie lights up the corner of your eyes
with rebel spirit and feminism,
you play with your tortured soul in the fog.

Light of the blue flower in the petticoat;
Margaret’s grief rises like a demon cry across the Ganges,
over the waters, boats and fading orange light
and the soul of the dead cat who sang to the wind:

Dancers of heaven, dancers of light
wild inside the leopard in your armpit
and electric wires melting in snow
in the heap of a million rejected newspapers
lies your splashed opera and the face of God.
Magician of the rivers, perched on sands of time
the pianola crumbles through her hair
and makes love to evening fallacies.

Just the lazy, midnight hangover,
the language of white oyster shells
cleans the dust of yellow light from your breast,
the moon hiding inside cycles of the womb
in your little dream town of Israel.

The wisdom of the snow in late November breeze,
your nipples hardening between my fingers
like Time in an old Indian jar,
and ancient rituals on the banks of the Galaxy;
we kiss away desire across mirror fragments of the nation-state
and lying down beside the dark lake,
kneel in prayer before the language of the dead.

Margaret, my dewdrop on the blades of time,
my sigh across the holy fires of the bones of the sky.

Don’t document your lust
or the chronic poetry of your fingers on time.

Let the island flap in her wings
in the name of unusual love or pedantic vulgarity.

Across the epitaph of the sea,
we record dream time in the fleeting soul
of an unfinished sentence.

Memories of the sphinx who died in your opera,
and our violet taxi across fringes of a dreaming city.

(Then we all collapse into the hole of time,
and the purple vision of Alice in her dream

Are you in my dream, Margaret
Or me in yours?)

Moonlight on the Yamuna,
unreal spaces change fast in sleep.

Dante, like an angel, comes to me in my dreams.

You look beautiful tonight in sleep
my little origami princess, with the paper flowers of your dreams,
as the blue smoke rises in your kingdom of music
and we melt deeper into flesh and time.

Do up your hair a bit more
(as you walk in trance like the waxworks of time),
a little bit of make-up will perhaps suit you fine.

Put on the lights, the hungry lid of the camera eyes,
and your costumes (for it’s time to dream).

We have a good cast this season;
if the stage inclines and God smiles,
we might just go on and make a name.

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