This morning I am going out and not coming
back until I have seen the birds that make all that noise
no—it really is noise, not your gentle chirping and swaggering song, but sure enough noise, deep clanging of medieval iron chains dragging them-
selves across marble floors in some old ruin is what it sounds
like to me, or it could be a tramp
steamer out of an old Conrad
novel, scene of personal failure then a struggle for redemption that
fails in the end,
my only clue to the
birdshit is what I hear
deep in the cursed shadows of
endless nights on striped
sheets still warm from the
sun that bakes my bed every
afternoon, or the sound could be an echo
of the blue Gulf whanging like the bell of doom, the shells
of urchins—no, crabs, those big ones that look pre-Cam-
brian, like that ancient fish they pulled out of the boiling sea off the
coast of Madagascar when I was a kid & showed pictures of in all the papers—
Coeolanth—that’s what the sound looks like, one ugly fish. In fact
that’s what the sound sounds like, if you work at it ko-eow
lanth, koeoLANTH, like that, dragging, worse and worse.
I may never come back.
don’t bother to wait up
take a Donormyl and
get a good night’s sleep
kO—eeo
LANTH again
and agai
studio arago 