A Poem by Seamas Carraher

The Spoon in My Eye

     for Cesar Vallejo

"I want to be free no matter what sacrifices I must make.  In being free, I sometimes feel
surrounded by the most frightening ridicule,
like a child who mistakenly lifts his spoon up to his nose."

                                                    -- Cesar Vallejo
                                                   EPISTOLARIO GENERAL

The spoon in my eye
now sparkling with sense, i reverse!
daywards, weeping worlds
with their shoulders
that stutter into storms.
My morning all mist
raises these walls to my head.
In this dull space i have been abolished.
In this dull space i come back again.
Unfreeing my debts i call out.
Such sorrow to be human
to beg in our being, cramped
into thin air
like a world blank.
In this place words eat themselves
with my hunger.
Permanent, cyclical, my unruling
now in its bones and syntheses.
Here, dialogically, and written in economies,
ripped to shreds and savaged by lovers
our growing with abundance and
convulsing in riots,
here, erased in my vomiting and wounded
by weather
i throw the dog, my last friend in the temporary,
on my shoulders,
and enter the rain.

Rooms fill in my beautiful abolition.
"i have not been here," they say,
(like the end of a vendetta, or a civil war.)
"I have not seen him," she grieves, solemnly.
(Her eyes black with the daylight.)
In here life limps in wires and personalities.
There is no one home to collect my longing.
i am not, yet.  In lungs filled to choking.
In fingers whose funerals are wreathed
in cigarette smoke.
In armies denouncing the rights of man.
In shovels heaping their criticism with friendliness.
This spoon shakes my eye
in its instinct to be born.
My walls fall in their clocks and calendars.
Such war!
in my disarming, mouth disembodied,
my meaning now matters!

This child is my little man, stunning in escapes.
He eats, with solitude, the wind
of my whistling.
We are stilling the day to cement our dead.
My debts pile up, in courtcases and laws.
In waiting and endlessness.
We are dying by radio, in newspapers,
in secrets
struggling
to cross the universe of our feet,
red and raw with their agitating.
Our secret history and its life full of louts!
i call out, to the spoon in my eye,
let me go.  Let me go!
(in this war filled with skeletons).
Only the dog
shows me his nose in my crippled friendships.
i cannot eat the silence.
i am shouting at my self, as large as an abattoir.
In this way, with coffee and cigarette, with
all the dead
dancing on my tongue,
and the living littering my life with their dying,
i denounce my friends crippled with icepicks,
i denounce all enemies with the price of my hate.

i see him born rolling in an unceasing complexity
and in all my grim abolitions,
my denouncements,
and intrigues,
in all this whipping weather, and
the depth of my dog in depressions,
in all these governments and juntas,
and my funerals in bed,
(in all these lithe women with their masks made up with air)
and in this spring of a new year,
and with the spoon in my eye, loosening its syllables,
in all our fleeing, among reflections,
in our history, their hunting, and our shapelessness,
my daylight calls out its mourning:

now here is his incorporation in chestfulls,
witness like a resurrection, all
springtime to my easters,
my exploding corpses.  Both self, and you,
and our othering.




Seamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956.  He lives on the Ballyogan estate, in South County Dublin, Ireland, at present.  Kind of a Hurricane Press published his chapbook South Dakota Suite online, in July 2014.   http://www.seamascarraher.blogspot.ie/