Dead Building.
My only large scale poem.
Dedicated to Samuel R Delany.
Anyone who knows his work knows why.
Like a rat that can visit a sinking ship
I enter the barren tower.
Like an abandoned reactor it dies,
decaying by the hour.
I am not welcome here.
I feel like the last vulture at the corpse.
On many floors is asbestos which probably killed it.
Its mangled windpipe draws no breath
to the ruptured iron lungs at its core.
Its veins plunge, wrenched and wretched,
sheer from the seventh floor,
and a slick of its lifeblood congeals in the basement.
Its camera eyes have been ripped off.
Its nerves are shocked and flayed and burnt out.
Its metal's been scrapped, and the windows are trashed,
and the wreckers have battered its bones.
I drift through this brittle shell
of silent memory, reading well
the patterns of people traced like ghosts
on the wind-scoured walls.
I follow the trails of vulture's lust
barefooted on treacherous carpets of dust,
picking for scrap by the fractured posts
in the glass-littered halls.
There must be something better than trash;
even in death, there is something of life.
Even a lift shaft's power lines can be a makeshift holy grail.
No scrapper's had those away, and only one has dared to try!
The lift shaft isn't too high,
the steel wires won't backlash,
but any fall would smash me against an edge like a jagged knife.
I'd finish there, an oozing mess like guts hung on a nail.
I grasp the gantry rail.
I am calm, and my hands are dry.
I release the cables while climbing, with pain like a fevered rash,
but I don't give up. I like it here, and it's worth the strife.
Yet this wild high-life,
veiled from the glitz trail,
is a weird sort of challenge, not knowing what I defy,
so I work instead, till a screw jams tight, for the cash.
Then my efforts crash,
and a phantom fife
of panic shrieks like a silent gale,
and my strength is gone; I must leave, or die.
________________________
I've gone as far as I can go,
but still I haven't arrived.
I must take what I can and be content,
and be glad that I survived.
I'm feeling humble now.
I reel, turning wearily to the stairs
where I sit, waiting for nothing;
waiting in a trance of searing silence,
idling with a sense of pause
while the silence whirls in, then away.
The air feels tranquil, transcendental,
weaving with patterns of sound from the restless city,
and my vision spreads as the glare yields colour and shape.
I've regained my strength. I'm scared, but I enter the shaft.
I hack at the wire as terror clings
like light on the saw cut's rim.
I look down, chilled by the steel and the rising draught,
and chilled by the way the cable swings;
slow, like a drowned limb.
It lashes twices as I break it,
and I hold it suspended:
a snake poised ready to strike.
I drop it;
and metal is screeching,
is bitten and slammed,
then silent.
The other one twists when I take it,
but it hangs there, extended
straight as a surgical spike.
I drop it,
And it plunges; reaching.
Its ending is grand,
and violent:
The cable rams the fallen cage,
standing and startling,
quivering like a stricken boxer
or a tree at the last cut.
It bows out,
crashing across a broken floor.
That ends the long and dangerous stage.
It's something to write about;
frightening, yet comforting.
It's true, but,
if I watch myself act this out for longer
I think there will be something more.
I feel a happiness free of age.
I love this damage and disorder!
I feel devout,
enjoying my raving,
eroding the righteous rut
as I plunder this building's grimy core.
The work gets awkward; I flare in rage
but my mind is shut.
I give the bundle a clout,
and pound it flat with a concrete boulder,
ending at an opening;
a shattered cave mouth for a door.
________________________
Yet caught out of time, I cannot leave.
It does no good to try.
I stash my scrap in a pipe hatch, returning
to hunt for a reason why.
I move like a passing wraith
searching through the lost corridors of a dream.
I turn back down a vulture's track
more dead than the one that was there before.
It is an insistent, intimate death,
with asbestos like ash in a world of grey,
and holes over hell just ten feet down,
yet beyond, it is light and alive.
I go to that light.
I am reverent; the light, reverberant,
cascading through a vision.
Exposed to the outside and hollow within,
a square spiral column where the stray wind moans.
It soars without handrails, the sun blazing in;
a skeletal stairway of seven ridged bones.
I am climbing, not thinking,
the next I know,
and I brave the one place
I swore I'd never go.
I'm caught in a vortex
beginning to grow:
a whirl of destruction
churning slow
yet fading, falling,
receding below;
then abruptly, gone
is my self-certain glow.
The world roars loud,
and the lean winds blow.
My feelings writhe in chaos round me,
shrieking with the wandering air,
but I will not let them be damned.
I will not join the curse below.
On lurching steps through angled space
I reach the top, the landing pad,
and smoothly walk away.
________________________
An imploding shockwave shift occurs;
an earthquake in my head.
I know that I alone can hear,
but it ought to wake the dead!
It moves like air to a flame,
rising in pure awareness like a blaze.
It spreads a wave of wondering
in fiery flowers of realised thought
and feeling growing like a sunrise.
It fills the vault of sky.
I find the grail's abstract gold
suspended from the timeless cold
of being lonely, searching wildly,
being lost in others' lives.
I know this building lives, somehow;
its pattern resonates, and now
my fearful self is resting mildly,
something deep beyond me thrives.
I find a high place,
and I join with the mystery,
sitting like a watchful hawk
silently talking with a graveyard's ghost.
I see the trails of mystery
in flashes of the falling sun
caught in windows moving miles away.
I see it in the ranks of concrete.
It whispers in the wind.
It touches, in a twist of wind
against my back, across my arms,
warning me to go now.
A grail is meant for others, too:
I cannot hold it all.
I shift with a shake like a ruffle of feathers.
I head for home to live with what I have.
________________________
The air hangs vibrant; full, not void.
There is wonder in the stones of walls.
A flash of fire on silver wings
casts shadowed hints of dreams enjoyed,
and four great shock-waves fast and low
come under the sky; and the silence sings
like a warm string fade as the world-winds grow,
and with them I live as the darkness falls.
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