Wake Games (Every Name in History)

-- for Catherine Sullivan

"Questioner: Where are you going now?
Reply: Stealing the goats from Hell.
Questioner: Swear that you are.
Reply: I swear that I am."

Convince ourselves
We are not dead
That we are pretending
To be dead
We are
Dead children we are
Dead we play
Dead to be alive
We play dead
To be alive again

Pretend impulses
To act
On impulse
Or
Not act
Re-action
Makes all
The difference
“Swear that you are”
“I swear that I am”

The actor makes
The world wearing
Both masks
Noontide
Of that obscurer
Crystal
That dark night
The burden
Of mirrors
To scratch their tains

A mirror of sorts
The backside
To act
Is a mirror of sorts
For the world to be two
Split in two
And to take you with me
Into “the fire
of our future”
The actor is
An abyss of repetition

The actor played
By impulse
By not acting
On these words
Our words
Are masks
We are masks too
Growing
Out of crystal
Parousia of
Our history

Our impulses
Are the memory
Of time itself
Crosses of
Night over
Night
“where the sun don’t
ever shine”
Crises of mid-
Night
Over the shoulder in
Backward
Motions of the mind

Orpheus-like
Or Eurydice
Or Rachael
Orphans wake to
Mimetic withdrawals
Percept of this
Emotion to act
Out the names
Is to become them

Sovereign emotion
This will take time
The names of events
In time my angel
Of repetition night
Indifferent from light
When one has acted
When one
Has yet to act

To create the world again
The fire of this theater
The bombs
Of this theater the
Threatening gas
To create
This world again
Incendiary an angel says yes
Children play dead

As history falsens
Angels say yes
Say no to say yes
As history falsened
Radiant apparition (Docetic)
Split in this mirror
Inward dwelt and informed
Disassociated by fragments
The fragments of fragments
For the Whole

Split in this mirror
This is the present face and
The present wrist
This is the present split
The repeated gestures of song
Presupposing what the
Actor will say
An hysteric mood
Of their gestures

Empty of foci
To form the dark
Perceptive dark
Of that fork and her water
Speechless speeches
Perceptive emptying
Of mimesis withdrawing
The foci of first words
First gestures
Made for all time
The trade an imminent
Trade in persona

Beyond extension
Beyond any particular
Extensity
Of the hand
Any comprehending
A gesture
The backward
Motion of the hand
As the hand reflects itself
Discontinuously
A continuous motion
Of all time
To be or not to be
To be felt
Singing oneself to sleep
To pose this problem first

Of first-ness this-ness
And parody
Of the hand
The hand
Twisting in parousia
Paradise of history
Your traumas are
For all time
All time trying
To be born again
Pretending to all identities
No one.