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The Dead

Mina Loy

1920

We have flowed out of ourselves

Beginning on the outside

That shrivvable 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.

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