Violentia

Smattercrash, glass shattered, left your hand,
projectile at the cooker – and turning round that twisted
grin, that ‘see’ , that
---
I didn’t see it coming, talking, a kind of talking,
wrists resting over the rim of the wheel, trying to make
sense of the slant of the bonnet, trying to be on another
sea. The knuckles in my face, left-hand smash; it’s
not the pain, not the knobs and knuckles of glasses driven
into nose, into the ridge of bone that will show when this
currency and remorselessness, this thinking, is just and empty
shell; it’s the shattering of space, of presence
---
That time, the blows landed like dull mortar shocks
on cranium-back, head-back, and my asking ‘why?’, ‘why?’
‘why do it?’ in a dull repetition & irregularity that matched the strikes,
and the twisted grin that walked itself away and
turned with gleam prospect of one more responance
in the ringing dome of self, blaring, abstaining,
as the innocent watch, barefaced,
ashenfoot, tombs at the glare
---
That, that time, and that time, each one
stringing back, driven down, hammered down, from
openness and presence of
mind
---
Each fragment of self refragmented, that now when
I open the door to me and look in, I see a
shattered glass, I see myself reflected back in shards. Like a helmet,
that skates along the tarmac, drawing the body behind it,
all you can do is crack in tiny splinters beneath some still scraped
and shiny self. You cannot hit back – because then each last print and vestige
of what was once is gone – no glass, no ridge, no
presence. They know that. They know that as
you can only make sense of a button as you refrain
on another – another sea. They know
that shame of sort of acquiescence
holds you in your noose of choked-up silence. No
ease. No flow. No scope for beauty. Just staccato
and inner garbling. Atmospheres,
apparitions, an inner Ligeti.