Date: 02-Sep-10
Author: Luke Whitington

In a numbered room
The walls of inoffensive green,
All shades of colour fail to disturb
An orderly bringing together of man's
Secular habits, his appendices, his abandoned dog tags,
His short-lived bits of significant history,
The muted shades and instants of momentary insanity,

Sunlight across an object uncovers
The dry enduring obstinacy,
Some vibrant brightness helps to disturb
The still, dustless sheen on things,
And the suns' energy pouring in here
Flickering its quicksilver over things,
Will outshine all this immortal suspension.
 
Yet another portentous room full of oddments
Vague explorations brought together,
Criss-crossings from eccentric wanderings,
Fragments found as living proof of life
Beyond the quotidian worlds of evidence and fact.

Knowledge inscribed by golden titles
And dormant beside scattered tokens,
Pools of sane or insane thoughts
Caught furtive in this room by sunlight,
A realm of existence,
A collection of worthy implements,
A box of several civilizations' broken toys.

Beyond the line of upright titles,
Reaffirming as I read them how I really am,
Sunlight rubs a slow obstinacy
Against the north end of this building,
Even in the winter, a time for lazing hibernations,
And wears down the place, from one side, little bit by little bit,
In the surviving corner I am, yes, I am, still here,
Still preserved, still intact, nose above gravity and dust,

And in the meantime another form of erosion occurs
As most of the time we robustly agree, to disagree,
All our confessions, or all our usual replies,
Formed and informed by mutual misunderstandings,

No one can give anyone advice,
On how long anything will last or go on
Like this, or like that, or by default otherwise,
Life trickles forwards, downwards, in miniscule bits
And then we quietly die or slide out unnoticed by another door.

Sanity and other more transparent proofs of madness,
Have been by our coercions,
Given over to religions, or godless politics, or to clean or dirty hobbies,
In our mass, or early matins and communions,
Abject, mind, bare footed, down on our two sensitive knees, we celebrate
The things priests seek to have us keep ourselves in our place, in our common lot,
 
Through more gentle, sobbing forms of madness, through phenomena called prayer,
After which we are once more invigorated,
We breathe again, inured as we were before,
And we adopt, eventually, the quivering ritual for what it is --

A fresher start to better madness, another shaking, living grasp of faith,
A polite form of mismanagement, the governance of our wilder, ranting, insights -

Arriving at the final grey-beige room, I observe to my lover,
All this and yet still no angle,
No quiet cul de sac, for the archive of the heart,
No display case for heartbreak, or the shrivelled scraps of love,
Here we have almost everything, including certificates for war and peace,
Many are the remnants of failure, signed for the dead who cannot speak,
But nothing has been left here in this museum about that thing called love,

Perhaps, my lover says, love is too contemporary, really much too new
To set down here in rooms of the past, these archives of frozen hopes, of lives,

And so not finding what we came for,
We turn about and leave,
Stepping back into the street, into the noise of life,

I mutter 'its now surely up to us',
My lover shakes her head,
Her sunlit swirls of hair, sweeping across her shoulders,
Us? Up to? Now? Surely? Sorry dear?
Sorry, no, you're right, probably. Nothing my love, except,

How will you manage me my dearest in our refreshed madness; love,
And I, in my turn, how will I take good care of all our future deliriums.

Luke Whitington