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You say to the boy open your eyes
When he opens his eyes
and sees the light
You make him cry out. Saying
O
Blue come forth
O Blue arise
O Blue
ascend
O Blue come in
I am sitting with some friends
in this cafe drinking coffee served by young refugees from Bosnia. The war rages
across the newspapers and through the ruined streets of
Sarajevo.
Tania said 'Your clothes are on back to front and inside
out". Since there were only two of us there I took them off and put them right
then and there. I am always here before the doors open.
What need
of so much news from abroad while all that concerns either life or death is all
transacting and at work within me.
I step off the kerb and a
cyclist nearly knocks me down. Flying in from the dark he nearly parted my
hair.
I step into a blue funk.
The doctor in St.
Bartholomew's Hospital thought he could detect lesions in my retina - the pupils
dilated with belladonna - the torch shone into them with a terrible blinding
light.
Look left
Look down
Look
up
Look right
Blue flashes in my
eyes.
Blue Bottle buzzing
Lazy
days
The sky blue butterfly
Sways on the
cornflower
Lost in the warmth
Of the blue heat
haze
Singing the blues
Quiet and
slowly
Blue of my heart
Blue of my
dreams
Slow blue love
Of delphinium
days
Blue is the universal love in which man bathes - it is the
terrestrial paradise.
I'm walking along the beach in a
howling gale -
Another year is passing
In the
roaring waters
I hear the voices of dead
friends
Love is life that lasts forever.
My hearts
memory turns to you
David.
Howard. Graham. Terry.
Paul....
But what if this present
Were the
world's last night
In the setting sun your love
fades
Dies in the moonlight
Fails to
rise
Thrice denied by cock crow
In the dawn's
first light
Look left
Look
down
Look up
Look right
The camera
flash
Atomic bright
Photos
The CMV
- a green moon then the world turns magenta
My
retina
Is a distant planet
A red
Mars
From a Boy's Own comic
With yellow
infection
Bubbling at the corner
I said this looks
like a planet
The doctor says - "Oh, I think
It
looks like a pizza"
The worst of the illness is uncertainty. I've
played this scenario back and forth each hour of the day for the last six
years.
Blue transcends the solemn geography of human
limits.
I am home with the blinds drawn
H.B.
is back from Newcastle
But gone out - the
washing
Machine is roaring away
And the fridge is
defrosting
These are his favourite sounds
I've been
given the option of being an in-patient at the hospital or to coming in twice a
day to be hooked to a drip. My vision will never come back.
The
retina is destroyed, though when the bleeding stops what is left of my sight
might improve. I have to come to terms with sightlessness.
If I
loose my sight will my vision be halved?
The virus rages fierce. I
have no friends now who are not dead or dying. Like a blue frost it caught them.
At work, at the cinema, on marches and beaches. In churches on their knees,
running, flying, silent or shouting protest.
It started with sweats
in the night and swollen glands. Then the black cancer spread across their faces
- as they fought for breath TB and pneumonia hammered their lungs, and Toxo at
the brain. Reflexes scrambled - sweat poured through hair matter like lianas in
the tropical forest. Voices slurred - and then were lost forever. My pen chased
this story across the page tossed this way and that in the
storm.
The blood of sensibility is blue
I
consecrate myself
To find its most perfect
expression
My sight failed a little more in the
night
H.B. offers me his blood
It will kill
everything he says
The drip of DHPG
Trills
like a canary
I am accompanied by a shadow into which H.B. appears
and disappears. I have lost the sight on the periphery of my right
eye.
I hold out my hands before me and slowly part them. At a
certain moment they disappear out of the corner of my eyes. This is how I used
to see. Now if I repeat the motion this is all I see.
I shall not
win the battle against the virus - in spite of the slogans like "Living with
AIDS". The virus was appropriated by the well - so we have to live with AIDS
while they spread the quilt for the moths of Ithaca across the wine dark
sea.
Awareness is heightened by this, but something else is lost. A
sense of reality drowned in theatre.
Thinking blind, becoming
blind.
In the hospital it is as quiet as a tomb. The nurse fights
to find a vein in my right arm. We give up after five attempts. Would you faint
if someone stuck a needle into your arm? I've got used to it - but I still shut
my eyes.
The Gautama Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness.
But he wasn't attached to a drip.
Fate is the
strongest
Fate Fated Fatal
I resign myself to
Fate
Blind Fate
The drip stings
A
lump swells up in my arm
Out comes the drip
An
electric shock sparks up my arm
How can I walk away with a
drip attached to me?
How am I going to walk away from
this?
I fill this room with the echo of many
voices
Who passed time here
Voices unlocked from
the blue of the long dried paint
The sun comes and floods this
empty room
I call it my room
My room has welcomed
many summers
Embraced laughter and tears
Can it
fill itself with your laughter
Each word a
sunbeam
Glancing in the light
This is the song of
My Room
Blue stretches, yawns and is awake.
There is a
photo in the newspaper this morning of refugees leaving Bosnia. They look out of
time. Peasant women with scarves and black dresses stepped from the pages of an
older Europe. One of them has lost her three children.
Lightning
flickers through the hospital window - at the door an elderly woman stands
waiting for the rain to clear. I ask her if I can give her a lift, I've hailed a
taxi. "Can you take me to Holborn tube?" On the way she breaks down in tears.
She has come from Edinburgh. Her son is in the ward - he has meningitis and has
lost the use of his legs - I'm helpless as the tears flow. I can't see her. Just
the sound of her sobbing.
One know the whole
world
Without stirring abroad
Without looking out
of the window
One can see the way of heaven
The
further one goes
The less one knows
In the
pandemonium of image
I present you with the universal
Blue
Blue an open door to soul
An infinite
possibility
Becoming tangible
Here I am again in the
waiting room. Hell on Earth is a waiting room. Here you know you are not in
control of yourself, waiting for your name to be called: "712213". Here you have
no name, confidentiality is nameless. Where is 666? Am I sitting opposite
him/her? Maybe 666 is the demented woman switching the channels on the
TV.
What do I see
Past the gates of
conscience
Activists invading Sunday Mass
In the
cathedral
An epic Czar Ivan denouncing
the
Patriarch of Moscow
A moon-faced boy who spits
and repeatedly
Crosses himself - as he
genuflects
Will the pearly gates slam shut in
The
faces of the devout
The demented woman is discussing needles -
there is always a discussion here. She has a line put into her
neck.
How are we perceived, if we are to be perceived at all? For the
most part we are invisible.
If the doors of perception were
cleansed then everything would be seen as it is.
The dog barks, the
caravan passes.
Marco Polo stumbles across the Blue
Mountain.
Marco Polo stops and sits on a lapis throne by the River
Oxus while he is ministered to by the descendants of Alexander the Great. The
caravan approaches, blue canvasses fluttering in the wind. Blue people from over
the sea - ultramarine - have come to collect the lapis with its flecks of
gold.
The road to the city of Aqua Vitae is protected by a labyrinth
built from crystals and mirrors which in the sunlight cause terrible blindness.
The mirrors reflect each of your betrayals, magnify them and drive you into
madness.
Blue walks into the labyrinth. Absolute silence is
demanded to all its visitors, so their presence does not disturb the poets who
are directing the excavations. Digging can only proceed on the calmest of days
as rain and wind destroy the finds.
The archaeology of sound has
only just been perfected and the systematic cataloguing of words has until
recently been undertaken in a haphazard way. Blue watched as a word or phrase
materialised in scintillating sparks, a poetry of fire which casts everything
into darkness with the brightness of its reflections.
As a teenager
I used to work for the Royal National Institute for the Blind on their Christmas
appeal for radios, with dear miss Punch, seventy years old, who used to arrive
each morning on her Harley Davidson.
She kept us on our toes. Her
job as a gardener gave her time to spare in January. Miss Punch Leather Woman
was the first out dyke I ever met. Closeted and frightened by my sexuality she
was my hope. "Climb on, let's go for a ride." She looked like Edith Piaf, a
sparrow, and wore a cock-eyed beret at a saucy angle. She bossed all the other
old girls who came back year after year for her company.
In the
paper today. Three quarters of the AIDS organisations are not providing safer
sex information. One district said they had no queers in their community, but
you might try district X - they have a theatre.
My sight seems to
have closed in. The hospital is even quieter this morning. Hushed. I have a
sinking feeling in my stomach. I feel defeated. My mind bright as a button but
my body falling apart - a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room. There is
death in the air here but we are not talking about it. But I know the silence
might be broken by distraught visitors screaming, "Help, Sister! Help Nurse!"
followed by the sound of feet rushing along the corridor. Then
silence.
Blue protects white from
innocence
Blue drags black with it
Blue is
darkness made visible
Blue protects white from
innocence
Blue drags black with it
Blue is
darkness made visible
Over the mountains is the shrine to Rita,
where all at the end of the line call. Rita is the Saint of the Lost Cause. The
saint of all who are at their wit's end, who are hedged in and trapped by the
facts of the world. These facts, detached from cause, trapped the Blue Eyed Boy
in a system of unreality. Would all these blurred facts that deceive
dissolve in his last breath? For accustomed to believing in image, an absolute
idea of value, his world had forgotten the command of essence: Thou Shall
Not Create Unto Thyself Any Graven Image, although you know the task is to fill
the empty page. From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released from
image.
Time is what keeps the light from reaching
us.
The image is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your
education, your vices and aspirations, your qualities, your psychological
world.
I have walked behind the sky.
For what
are you seeking?
The fathomless blue of Bliss.
To be
an astronaut of the void, leave the comfortable house that imprisons you with
reassurance.
Remember,
To be going and to have are not
eternal - fight the fear that engenders the beginning, the middle and the
end.
For Blue there are no boundaries or
solutions.
How did my friends cross the cobalt river, with what did
they pay the ferryman? As they set out for the indigo shore under this jet-black
sky - some died on their feet with a backward glance. Did they see Death with
the hell hounds pulling a dark chariot, bruised blue-black growing dark in the
absence of light, did they hear the blast of trumpets?
David ran
home panicked on the train from Waterloo, brought back exhausted and unconscious
to die that night. Terry who mumbled incoherently into his incontinent tears.
Others faded like flowers cut by the scythe of the Blue Bearded Reaper, parched
as the waters of life receded. Howard turned slowly to stone, petrified day by
day, his mind imprisoned in a concrete fortress until all we could hear were his
groans on the telephone circling the globe.
Mad Vincent sits on his
yellow chair clasping his knees to his chest - Bananas. The sunflowers wilt in
the empty pot, bone dry, skeletal, the black seeds picked into the staring face
of a Halloween pumpkin. He is unaware of Blue standing in the corner. Fevered
eyes glare at the jaundiced corn, caw of the jet-black crows spiralling in the
yellow. The lemon goblin stares from the unwanted canvasses thrown in a corner.
Sourpuss suicide screams with evil - clasping cowardly Yellowbelly, slit
eyed.
Blue fights diseased Yellowbelly whose fetid breath scorches
the trees yellow with ague. Betrayal is the oxygen of his devilry. He'll stab
you in the back. Yellowbelly places a jaundiced kiss in the air, the stink of
pubs blinds Blue's eyes. Evil swims in the yellow bile. Yellowbelly's snake eyes
poison. He crawls over Eve's rotting apple wasp-like. Quick as a flash he stings
Blue in the mouth - "AAAUGH!" - his hellish legion buzz and chuckle in the
mustard gas. They'll piss all over you. Sharp nicotine-stained fangs bared. Blue
transformed into an insectocutor, his Blue aura frying the
foes.
We all contemplated suicide
We hoped for
euthanasia
We were lulled into believing
Morphine
dispelled pain
Rather than making it tangible
Like
a mad Disney cartoon
Transforming itself
into
Every conceivable nightmare
Karl killed himself
- how did he do it? I never asked. It seemed incidental. What did it matter if
he swigged prussic acid or shot himself in the eye. Maybe he dived into the
streets from high up in the cloud lapped skyscrapers.
The nurse
explains the implant. You mix the drugs and drip yourself once a day. The drugs
are kept in a small fridge they give you. Can you imagine travelling around with
that? The metal implant will set the bomb detector off in airports, and I can
just see myself travelling to Berlin with a fridge under my
arm.
Impatient youths of the sun
Burning with
many colours
Flick combs through hair
In bathroom
mirrors
Fucking with fusion and fashion
Dance in
the beams of emerald lasers
Mating on suburban
duvets
Cum splattered nuclear breeders
What a time
that was.
The drip ticks out the seconds, the source of a stream
along which the minutes flow, to join the river of hours, the sea of years and
the timeless ocean.
The side effects of DHPG, the drug for which I
have to come into hospital to be dripped twice a day, are: Low white blood cell
count, increased risk of infection, low platelet count which may increase the
risk of bleeding, low red blood cell count (anaemia), fever, rush, abnormal
liver function, chills, swelling of the body (oedema), infections, malaise,
irregular heart beat, high blood pressure (hypertension), low blood pressure
(hypotension), abnormal thoughts or dreams, loss of balance (ataxia), come,
confusion, dizziness, headache, nervousness, damage to nerves (peristhecia),
psychosis, sleepiness (somnolence), shaking, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite
(anorexia), diarrhoea, bleeding from the stomach or intestine (intestinal
haemorrhage), abdominal pain, increased number of one type of white blood cell,
low blood sugar, shortness of breath, hair loss (alopecia), itching (pruritus),
hives, blood in the urine, abnormal kidney functions, increased blood urea,
redness (inflammation), pain or irritation (phlebitis).
Retinal
detachments have been observed in patients both before and after initiation of
therapy. The drug has caused decreased sperm production in animals and may cause
infertility in humans, and birth defects in animals. Although there is no
information in human studies, it should be considered a potential carcinogen
since it causes tumours in animals.
If you are concerned about any
of the above side-effects or if you would like any further information, please
ask your doctor.
In order to be put on the drug you have to sign a
piece of paper stating you understand that all these illnesses are a
possibility.
I really can't see what I am to do. I am going to sign
it.
The darkness comes in with the tide
The
year slips on the calendar
Your kiss flares
A
match struck in the night
Flares and dies
My
slumber broken
Kiss me again
Kiss
me
Kiss me again
And again
Never
enough
Greedy lips
Speedwell
eyes
Blue skies
A man sits in his wheelchair, his
awry, munching through a packet of dry biscuits, slow and deliberate as a
praying mantis. He speaks enthusiastically but sometimes incoherently of the
hospice. he says, "You can't be too careful who you mix with there, there's no
way of telling the visitors, patients or staff apart. The staff have nothing to
identify them except they are all in leather. The place is like an S&M
club". This hospice has been built by charity, the names of the donors displayed
for all to see.
Charity has allowed the uncaring to appear to care
and is terrible for those dependent on it. It has become big business as the
government shirks its responsibilities in these uncaring times. We go along with
this, so the rich and powerful who fucked us over once fuck us over again and
get it both ways. We have always been mistreated, so if anyone gives us the
slightest sympathy we overreact with our thanks.
I am a
mannish
Muff diving
Size queen
With
bad attitude
An arse
licking
Psychofag
Molesting the flies of
privacy
Balling lesbian boys
A perverted
heterodemon
Crossing purpose with death
I am a
cock sucking
Straight acting
Lesbian
man
With ball crushing bad manners
Laddish
nymphomaniac politics
Spunky sexist desires
of
incestuous inversion and
Incorrect terminology
I
am a Not Gay
H.B. is in the kitchen
Greasing
his hair
He guards the space
Against
me
He calls it his office
At nine we leave for the
hospital
H.B. comes back from the eye
dept
Where all my notes are muddled
He
says
It's like Romania in there
Two light
bulbs
Grimly illuminate
The flaking
walls
There is a box of dolls
In the
corner
Indescribably grim
The doctor
says
Well of course
The kids don't see
them
There are no resources
To brighten the place
up
My eyes sting from the drops
The infection
has halted
The flash leaves
Scarlet after
image
Of the blood vessels in my eye
Teeth
chattering February
Cold as death
Pushes at the
bedsheets
An aching cold
Interminable as
marble
My mind
Frosted with drugs ices
up
A drift of empty snowflakes
Whiting out
memory
A blinkered twister
Circling in
spirals
Cross-eyed meddlesome consciousness
Shall
I? Will I?
Doodling death watch
Mind how you
go
Oral DHPG is consumed by the liver, so they have tweaked a
molecule to fool the system. What risk is there? If I had to live forty years
blind, I might think twice. Treat my illness like the dodgems: music, bright
lights, bumps and throw yourself into life again.
The pills are the
most difficult, some taste bitter, others are too large. I'm taking about thirty
a day, a walking chemical laboratory. I gag on them as I swallow them and they
come up half dissolved in the coughing and the spluttering.
My
skins sits on me like the shirt of Nessus. My face irritates, as do my back and
legs at night. I toss and turn, scratching, unable to sleep. I get up, turn on
the light. Stagger to the bathroom. If I become so tired, maybe I'll sleep.
Films chase through my mind. Once in a while I dream a dream as magnificent as
the Taj Mahal. I cross southern India with a young spirit guide - India the land
of my dreaming childhood. The souvenirs in Moslem's peach and grey living room.
Granny called Moselle, called 'Girly', called May. An orphan who lost her name,
which was Ruben. jade, monkeys, ivory miniatures, mah-jongg. The winds and
bamboos of China.
All the old taboos of
Blood
lines and blood banks
Blue blood and bad blood
Our
blood and your blood
I sit here - you sit there
As I
slept a jet slammed into a tower block. The jet was almost empty but two hundred
people were fried in their sleep.
The earth is dying and we do not
notice it.
A young man frail as Belsen
Walks
slowly down the corridor
His pale green hospital
pyjamas
Hanging off him
It's very
quiet
Just the distant coughing
My jugs eye blots
out the
Young man who has just walked past
My
field of vision
This illness knocks you for
six
Just as you start to forget it
A bullet in the
back of my head
Might be easier
You know, you can
take longer than
The second world war to get to the
grave.
Ages and Aeons quit the room
Exploding
into timelessness
No entrances or exits now
No
need for obituaries or final judgements
We knew that time would
end
After tomorrow at sunrise
We scrubbed the
floors
And did the washing up
It would not catch
us unawares
The white flashes you are experiencing in your eyes are
common when the retina is damaged.
The damaged retina has started
to peel away leaving the innumerable black floaters, like a flock of starlings
around in the twilight.
I am back at St Mary's to have my eyes looked
at by the specialist. The place is the same, but there is new staff. How
relieved I am not to have the operation this morning to have a tap put into my
chest. I must try and cheer up H.B. as he has had a hell of a fortnight. In the
waiting room a little grey man over the way is fretting as he has to get to
Sussex. He says, "I am going blind, I cannot read any longer".
A
little later he picks up a newspaper, struggles with it for a moment and throws
it back on the table. My stinging eye-drops have stopped me reading, so I write
this in a haze of belladonna. The little grey man's face has fallen into
tragedy. He looks like Jean Cocteau without the poet's refined arrogance. The
room is full of men and women squinting into the dark in different states of
illness. Some barely able to walk, distress and anger on every face and then a
terrible resignation.
Jean Cocteau takes off his glasses, he looks
about him with an undescribable meanness. He has black slip-on shoes, blue
socks, grey trousers, a Fairisle sweater and a herringbone jacket. The posters
that plaster the walls above him have endless question marks, HIV/AIDS?, AIDS?,
HIV?, ARE YOU INFECTED BY HIV/AIDS?,ARC?, HIV? This is a hard wait. The
shattering bright light of the eye specialist's camera leaves that empty sky
blue after-image. Did I really see green the first time? The after-image
dissolves in a second. As the photographs progress, colours change to pink and
the light turns to orange. The process is a torture, but the result, stable
eyesight, worth the price and the twelve pills I have to take a day. Sometimes
looking at them I fell nauseous and want to skip them. It must be my association
with H.B., lover of the computer and king of the keyboard that brought my luck
on the computer which chose my name for this drug trial. I nearly forgot as I
left St Mary's I smiled at Jean Cocteau. He gave a sweet smile
back.
I caught myself looking at shoes in a shop window. I thought
of going in and buying a pair, but stopped myself. The shoes I am wearing at the
moment should be sufficient to walk me out of life.
Pearl
fishers
In azure seas
Deep
waters
Washing the isle of the dead
In coral
harbours
Amphora
Spill
Gold
Across the still seabed
We lie
there
Fanned by the billowing
Sails of forgotten
ships
Tossed by the mournful winds
Of the
deep
Lost Boys
Sleep forever
In a
dear embrace
Salt lips touching
In submarine
gardens
Cool marble fingers
Touch an antique
smile
Shell sounds
Whisper
Deep
love drifting on the tide forever
The smell of
him
Dead good looking
In beauty's
summer
His blue jeans
Around his
ankles
Bliss in my ghostly eye
Kiss
me
On the lips
On the eyes
Our name
will be forgotten
In time
No one will remember our
work
Our life will pass like the traces of a
cloud
And be scattered like
Mist that is chased by
the
Rays of the sun
For our time is the
passing of a shadow
And our lives will run
like
Sparks through the stubble.
I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave
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