Mina Loy




The Dead

We have flowed out of ourselves	
Beginning on the outside	
That shrivable skin	
Where you leave off	
 
Of infinite elastic	        
Walking the ceiling	
Our eyelashes polish stars	
 
Curled close in the youngest corpuscle	
Of a descendant	
We spit up our passions in our grand-dams	        
 
Fixing the extension of your reactions	
Our shadow lengthens	
In your fear	

You are so old	
Born in our immortality	        
Stuck fast as Life	
In one impalpable	
Omniprevalent Dimension	
 
We are turned inside out	
Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs	        
Street lights footle in our ocular darkness	
 
Having swallowed your irate hungers	
Satisfied before bread-breaking	
To your dissolution	
We splinter into Wholes	        
Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow	
Among the refuse of your unborn centuries	
In our busy ashbins	
Stink the melodies	
Of your	        
So easily reducible	
Adolescences	

Our tissue is of that which escapes you	
Birth-Breaths and orgasms	
The shattering tremor of the static	        
The far-shore of an instant	
The unsurpassable openness of the circle	
Legerdemain of God	
 
Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums	
Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves	        
Break on our edgeless contours	
 
The mouthed echoes of what	
has exuded to our companionship	
Is horrible to the ear	
Of the half that is left inside them.