A Cut Per Border

-after Guy Ben-Ner

If your eyes will believe
And I believe they must
Believe there is no swindle
Just the proof of our being

And not being here just
The proof of this apartheid
Love is a trip that blinks
That lisps with each word

Owing to travel rhyming
Like artifice unravels like a
Plot device my life as if
Anyone could be writing this

Anyone but you anyone
But I we don't mean to be
Shakespearian we just are
Like some regret I had

Leaving this border in
The rhyme scheme in the
Splice how can we not be
Forced our comings

And goings force vanishes
Fantasy is the face we
Give it dejected never
Satisfied with movement

I don't want to reenact
This fantasy without a
Face without a mask I want
To pre-enact the way

We will have been keeping
Our promises in animal
Grace before we made
Contracts a pound of flesh

For every debt the world
Subsidizes for being 'live'
Having divine contact
We are in a time of demi-

gods of kings and queens
Lesser artists kiss their
Rings this is the thing
The night goes on

In privacy or one's
Imagined public trying
Merely to subsist on money
And power which feels

False take the piss
Out of economy by funding
Love as though in more
Feudal times shitting

I mean blooming in
Your mouth I mean this
Intense national longing
To always be doubly

Exchangeable a promise
Kept to no one a stain
On the screen of my love
My tele-present love

That perverts any notion
Of possession love
The anti-territory love
The always already disaster

We are not where we are
Displaced by wanting
Life and art to be the same
To partake of the same

Substance how to get laid
And how to get out of
This country always the
Victim never the victimizer

The mouth says distantly
Kissing any distance that
Would let it any place-
holder or whatever

Mother-tongue would
Not rhyme with history
Leaving damages unclaimed
The nowhere that is.