Blurred Days

Blurred days wrapped around us. You doze on my shoulder. In heat so loud you can’t hear your own thoughts dripping. And they melt away. Dripping off. Does a stalagmite drip upward? In my tongue, yes. But tongues snap here. Intermingle. Taste one another. Hard to tell what was yesterday. And hard to tell. Hard to pick a tongue. Speech. Touch.

Blurred days wrapped around us. You doze on my shoulder. Decapitated trash cans lose their heads. That’s an anaphora. Now’s the season. Not for repeating. For losing heads. The Hydra laughs. More lost heads, please, more! A year ago? The heat was so thick we had to breathe with our tongue. Otherwise that train would never have arrived. Or would have left without us. And who wants to be the one left behind by the train? It doesn’t matter where it was headed. Perhaps an Albanian rattletrap overtaken even by a limping donkey. Perhaps a bird, Marinetti’s sweaty dream, frantically flying through the Andalusian wasteland. Fairer than the Nike of Samothrace. A winged defeat.

Blurred days wrapped around us. You doze on my shoulder. How those tongues come flooding back... Why polyglot? Why not polis-a-lot? Every added tongue is an added life. And every extra polis is a chance to die for impiety. Drink a headache. In my language, that herb is called headache. Tight-lipped English calls it hemlock. What does it lock? Hem? Socrates’ tunics? And didn’t Plato cling to it? Tooth and nail? And maybe even with his tongue. A good pupil of a good master.

Bleared days coiled around us. You slumber on my shoulder. And when you wake, there are distances in your eyes. And a fragment of Greece.

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