René Harrison

OBJECTIVITY

Listen to the audio version.

With no face to save
I walk the desert
to touch a pyramid

Girls distant as stars
hide their secrets from me
hold the future aloft

as I tap, tap, tap,
and stir stir stir,
the entrails with my cane

you give back an echo
A staircase of sound

In this ideal shape
you are naked but decorated
cut down to your bare self

A triangle of material is sewn to your jacket
pink for the pederasts
black for the saboteurs
and green for the ordinary criminals

We're a real proletariat here
imagining our separate worlds
wrapped in maternal hallucination
warm and visceral
as the shoreline of sun
Mummifies
our fluids
together

I examine our dried up vacancies
under the pressure of my fingers
Palpate
skin resembling coarse, hard leather
recall the beauty of your sunken face
beside which a cat lies
coiled up as if asleep.

Modest Humanitarian, philanthropist, and Glamorous adventurer, Mr. Harrison began writing poetry at the age of five, when he mistook a fog covered magnolia tree outside his bedroom window for the three Graeae sisters of medusa. His poems inhabit the history, rhetoric, and mythologies of blindness; they have appeared in Takahe, Poetry New Zealand, Shot glass journal, and Brief, as well as other places. He currently malingers in Auckland, New Zealand.