My hands, my arms, my legs, my body and I
the immutable, indestructible, self, I.
The centre, the nucleus, the entire human cell culture.
Am I, is me in every cell?
Though hardly ‘I’ is the sum of the genetic material,
as if the music were lodged inside the radio’s wiring diagram.
Is there anything redundant, solidified, that can be peeled off, that can
be discarded like ballast, sandbags out of a free balloon?
Layer for layer, epidermis, mesenchyme and dermis, fibres, muscles,
tendons, flesh, capillaries, veins, blood vessels, fatty tissue, nerve tracts, bones,
marrow, skeleton. And where does what remain?
The ‘I’ makes claims as long as a tongue, a fidgeting hand
can claim ‘I’? And if possible, that too is claimed headlessly.
(Like cephalophors, with a single stroke, a head shorter)
Reduct!
What happens in love, outreaching oneself or overstepping, or
the numbness, up to a certain point, that point where still ‘something’ remains.
The hollow nut (that has not developed), anyway: development,
as if something had been enveloped, Ariadne’s thread, unrolled to its fullest length,
needing to be used up. Always along the wall, dead certain,
the way out of the garden, the garden maze.
I wander to while away time as if time might otherwise descend on me, like a scavenging beast.
Reduct!
Let’s just reduce the lot on a slow flame!
Reduct!
We peer into the stream of the perished now being swept down the passage of time,
through the delta towards the mouth, out into the gaping cosmic ocean.
Are there any more coming? Do corpses have something left to say?
Besides: Look! Scandal! We are they who you are still to become! We are there! You are not!
But death stays hated to all of human nature
it tears down hope almost to the ground
Reduct!
The foundations are in the wrong place, this house should have been set in the heavens,
so the gods can die, regularly and in temporally classical proportions.
The golden section through the throat of a venerable celestial body that
then, in short thrusts, ejaculates its divine blood into the seraphic summer morning,
because it is forever summer, until one or the other, me included, can say:
Finally, infinitely, left in peace, but moveable, free to make noise, without guilt!
Reduct!