In a room of clothes in a room of eyes
if fear is the house and the resident a folk hero
then I am the Masterbuilder

The dew–cremation of a pure subject begins here
when you are heterologous in uniform states
the woozy influenza (largo largo largo) playing through you
hot breath flaring down the barrel of a silver flute
a corps–smoke of you suitable in autumn
waiting to put on the clothes of an idea
a thin pale blue glaze on bone china
like the last alcohol in the beaker–morning September
a starshaped hole in a broken pane
melancholia's meisterwerk all your possession
all you have of all you remember…

The theoretician is saying the construction by division of space
into what one might call ontological compartments is of
but fear of narration has long since begun to interrupt him
and the flame–flame of the lotus–ball
of your own naked foot in your gaze
leaves glass ash in an in vitro urn
a message emptiness sends through the small open windows of things
(the stale scent of forgetfulness in bottles of Heineken and Pils)
to last night ending totally crashed out
on the polished wooden floor
listening to Spiritualized Ladies and Gentlemen
We are Floating in Space in faded Levis

Now the I–violence of building begins again
the fluttering lashes of your baby's sleep
the Jew–silence of my footsteps across early morning grass
and you in your three-thousand-thousandfold great world of light
and frost and mist, your five-month-old daughter's
ur-song, ur-law, ur-lovesong, ur-call
while this, my American real estate poem goes on
developing a condo in Florida a beach house in Malibu
my clearcut torso summer refines
and the sun–gone properties of my command
thought forming in the mind, bread rising in the oven
the passover of belonging, inhuman in love

I am the ruins of your will — I, the Masterbuilder
(or, literally, it is the ruins of your will — it, the Masterbuilder')
in the bombed Nagasaki of syntax
the guidebook will tell you to pause and admire certain features
in the coming winter of this year
lost in some facile simile of a maze
like your deep reflection in a shattered lake or a mirror
filling a suitcase with earth before being marched into exile
or overlooked in Eden, the ghost in the machine
staking your claim to the truth and the garden
in this, the endless hyperGenesis of names

It will be another fine day and I will be blameless
my life racing my death, my sun racing my moon
and hazily regretting more bad decisions in the Happy Hour
half-sleeping within the fragile walls of an insomniac mortgage
with no significant other, my state
fractious and semi-fictitious shaky and querulous
like a deconstructed essay on a minor part in Shakespeare
or the black applause of the crow in an untranslated haiku
my head cocktailed on lust and substances
my glittering PoMo tower rising and falling (it
still being notional) on ever-revised
projections of raised capital
its shapely retro sci-fi Chrysler curves
informed by the design skills of the Masterbuilder
while my life unravels far from the party
my badly clothed emptiness (like the whole in Schubert)
coming apart at the seams in the pursuit of happiness

All night the construction workers laboured
and the war between the virus and the immune system went on
the fire demon with the pink grin melting
into a grimace of pain, but not mine, somebody else's
if the supreme babel of place the genius loci falls up
I flash my ID as I turn my back
its map of tattoos torn by your eyes
to 'ugly' 'indifferent' 'narcissus' 'retreat'
the haunted condition of meaning your choice of flesh
like the vapourised states of Palestine, Czechoslovakia

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.