House Of Dust Poem by jim hogg

I said:
I'm becoming everyone I know.
Chains of them wrangle and snake
into a starless universe.
I close my eyes,
eclipse everything that's real,
un-bang eternity
and there I all am.
I can barely be me.
Except when I'm humming yesterdays
in the shower in darkness
-a seventeen year old girl at the piano,
fresh from palming her naked breasts
with these compliant hands.
She's playing These Foolish Things,
andante
and we're in God's house -
well, an outpost of it.
And I'm thinking of someone else.
I hear the hammers strike the wires
and some kind of beauty
cascades, engulfs.....
and I am Narcissus, illusion and saint in love
impaled on a perfectly sharpened thorn
a flowing moment of awe -
suddenly snapped by thought...


and I whisper to the darkness:
I am my own meme,
my own camouflage.
I am evolution;
I'm every part and every whole;
I am nothing, lost for limits,
in a log-jammed circle on the desert,
I spill over, am pushed over.
The circle's edge is an endless burning bush.
And I'm scorched by the ocean that repels,
that they clamour for all around me,
and I am wounded and they are whole
in their need, under their false stars,
and I patronise with pity, curse myself,
and fight my way back,
through muddied puddles to the starting line.
To the fiery silver white teeming of night
the child in me grasped falsely - or was it truly -
to the splashing crystal pools that happiness was,
and I say out loud:

I need a lot more time than this.
'Oh will you never let me be? '
There are things I have to change.
'Oh will you never set me free? '
- there's a fire on the hills -
'Oh how the ghost of you... '
silences the world..
And this is what it's come to:
a needlepoint of urge...
I listen for the breath of the stars
search for the signature that saves,
that blocks the fist of time
and I imagine infinity again.
Then all at once
all of it shrinks forever
and I expand at blinding speed,
then throw it all into reverse
to send me tumbling
down an ever narrowing street
down the driveway and down the path
into a house of dust,
where I whistle in her ear
-because I'm too shy to sing then-
'Oh how the ghost of you..'
and suddenly I'm thrown
outside the circle
a defiant soulless ember,
one 'lover on the street... '
of ash,
where the hammers
simply hit the wires...








(Quotes from These Foolish Things, Link, Marvel and Strachey 1930s) .