after collapsing at the plaza fountain in Turin Nietzsche gave up
coherent speech and stayed alive somewhere else for almost twelve years
his unmapped terrain resembled a canvas painted black in successive
luminous opacities of backlit abyss, if he turned on a television
this is what he saw, if he closed his eyes, if he looked out the window
again unshielded night
compressed into the unsayable witness of this sardonic-ecstatic
bituminous grey
labyrinth night
forested dark and fathomless
as eyes in Fayum portraits
what a relief
to have lost everything
the distance
between objects and soul
vanishes into
a small vertigo smudge
of not-blue
darkness stays awake
to keep the missing company
intently trees and stones
shiverlisten
what we touch
like a bird
fallen
from the nest
does not
always
survive
our
kind
ness
the hemstitched
anarchic edges
of the canvas
implore us
look at the skin of paint
how mortal it is
crows
in pairs
grooming
feather lice
if only
we had such attentiveness
in the space between leaving
and arriving
brightness of mica
will not fit on a page
winter storm steel-blue
waves thresh limbic troughs
all the handsome loose atoms
none of this
should balance
but like a crow in wind
thrives on emptiness
color
loves us
yet cannot
keep us
from
falling
ultramarine
at the rim of
أم الدماغ الصفيقة
we hover
in between dura mater and neo-cortex
like bees in a meat hive
can darkness see
can darkness see us
sparks of extinction lighting our way
later
a stubborn
pink lake
looks harder
at me
than I can bear
my eyes turn away
but it’s too late
the lake is
inside
me
the lake shines I/Thou
your eyes your yes
your music from broken things
