richard pierce contact on facebook bio dikt poetry blog home links

Voices There are thousands of voices in my head. Voices clambering out of the crimson of dawn. Voices fighting to be heard. And only one of them is yours. But which? These words, out of this closed room, reach out through the open window, down into the cool valley, waiting to find you. The night still rests down there, while here, high on the hill side, my voices race from the first rays of day to pound into my weary mind. An echo, a silent smattering of memory. The house is still, catching its breath, as the night has hunted and haunted me across its deserts, across its sleepless terrain, with the voices of terror and blind inspiration. There had to be something somewhere, didn't there? Just a tone, a hint of a melody, a calming soothing manacle of memory. If only I could have found it, here in this sanctuary, this prison, this hell. My hands ache. This search for the past has exhausted me beyond relief. In the garrets of madness I sought for you. Across the rivers of illusion and imagination I swam in my quest. Just as the book told me. And now, here in this quiet, still, breaking morning, I am yet fumbling to find the beginning to what is. To what is, and has always been, and always will be. And outside the lights. Above, dark shimmering, wavering crimson. It glides on the cool morning air, glittering as it falls, slowly and gradually, balanced on the cutting edge of the crystal atmosphere. Below, the artificial sentinels of the city, wavering through the haze of fading darkness. The orange street lights, the single lit windows of the early risers. A gentle breeze rises. I have always been here, waiting and watching each dawn, out through this wide window, with its panorama and its voices. Waiting and searching, searching and waiting. Sometime, somewhere. The memories always return. How had it been then? There, at what had been the beginning? It seems so long ago. Lingering caresses. The rush of the trains. The noise and the tumult of the station. Milan. It was glorious. Mid-summer and the threat of thunder. Huge beasts driven by electric currents. Low platforms, and the high climb into these heaving sweating carriages of progress. And you and I pilgrims, unknown to eachother, but drawn together by impulse, scent and destiny. It seems so long ago. Did it ever happen? I wish the voices would tell me. But only the morning rises slowly behind the mountain and takes my breath with its vehemence. Oh yes, the memories always return. How the train had pulled out slowly from that station, just as the sun exploded onto the land. And the foreign voices, excitable, excited, voluptuous, around us. You and I, for fate, in the form of some small boy in the ticket office, had placed us in the same compartment. Facing eachother next to the rushing window, and Italian eyes on us. I still don't know how much you understood of the clamouring that went on beside us. You never told me. And as the pictures outside picked up speed, I looked at you, measured you up, as the voracious deny they do. But they always do. I hadn't really noticed you. After all, you were just another person, in a country full of attractive people with poise and grace and style. Yet, as tried you, as I explored, surreptitiously, your face and your body, I began to take note, started to feel you, felt a spell, an unknown surge of power. Sense and sensuality. The clamouring faded, as the watcher started to cannibalise the life, the very flesh and imagined soul of an unknown. So many words, so many pictures. So many voices. It all seems so long ago. And now the light is stronger, breaking into this still room. These four walls of my prison cell. And the voices ebb and fade, as they always do when the night ends. They clamour one final time and disappear. The lights below go out, and the faint, rising breath of a city awaking, climbs up to my window ledge and leaves me searching for more, endlessly. And each dawn repeats, each night brings me one more fragment of fragrance, one more sweet shred of memory. I felt your eyes graze me several times in the first hour of that journey into destiny. Felt the embers of some unknown fire burning into my skin. Saw the fresh sex you carried under those eyes, the knowledge, the lost innocence, and what you must have held the few hours before you clambered aboard the train. And I wondered who you were, what you were. I still wonder. We never know those we are close to, least of all those we love. A suspension of disbelief. This was only what fantasies are meant to be like. But it really happened, or so I tell myself. You and your cropped black hair above your green eyes. And it was no fantasy, it was no dream. It was flesh and blood reality, noted on paper, made existent beyond the dream that all expect. It did happen, your lips did close on mine, the sounds did grow dim, you and I did become one. And so we thundered on down into Rome, changed to a first class carriage, curtains drawn, and words hoarsely whispered. And you making the moves. You telling me the stories of the times and places I had never seen, reaching deeply into me. Nothing I could have done would have stopped you, even if I had wanted to. And Italy rushed by, scented by you, borne with a fragrance I could never forget, a sense it would not have had if I had not met you. It could never have been any other way, I know that now. And what pictures we saw. In Rome I saw a child begging outside a shop that sold films, on a street corner. And on the Spanish Steps we looked down into the panorama of parchment yellow brick and grey paving. The sun beat our brows. None knew or saw us. And you took me to a hotel I didn't know, in a backstreet I hadn't heard of. We walked around the Coliseum, much smaller than it looked in the pictures and inhabited by starving wild cats. The sun baked our minds and made us crazy, two strangers in one bed. The thought of the heat makes me shiver behind the bars back here. The fresh day hangs like cooled sweat in my face. My fingers are cold, and the breeze that floods in through the window wrestles with my starving lungs. The green here is so different from the parched greyness of those streets. There are times when the abyss in front of these windows tempts me. But the words, these bars, stop me. This existence is timeless, steeped as it is in memory. But never enough. We even went to the Vatican. I have a picture here, above my desk, St. Peter's Square behind me, and I with my hands in my pockets. My arms and face look dirty, covered by the sun and the travel. And as evening drew in, we forgot to see the Sistine Chapel, such was our hurry to get back to the room we made our own. Decorated with cut flowers, filled with their perfume and ours, littered with unwritten postcards. Two strangers sharing a room, making the bare walls hold more than air. It was cool at night, only a cotton sheet on our hot bodies, and the early morning sun on our faces. I cannot remember all the words we spoke. Only some. Little by little the voices of the dawn bring me new sentences of our days. Bit by bit I learn about us while night and day perform their agonisingly slow change of guards. It always takes too long. And it is always mid-May up here. Early light, but a wait for the warmth. The voices imprison me. Unknown voices, strangers, like you and I were. Voices that speak on impulse, like we did. Voices that scent of you, whoever you were. And that was Rome, uncountable days. Even there we found a hill, high above the Spanish Steps, climbed to its top and surveyed the white city as though it belonged to us. For those days it did. It was like one holiday after the other, or so it seemed. Milan for some time after that, on tickets that hadn't existed, living further on the fluid of love, walking the streets, losing and finding the Duomo, despite the maps we had. And pizzas and beer by the station, that monument to Fascism, as the evening drew itself in for the night. I have pictures of you and I, arms folded and strong, eyes glistening and alive, in front of the fountain catching the flashlight. And lingering caresses. Thus memories flow from the dying night. Even as the sun rises, the cold remains. And those voices ! Loud and shouting, babbling, drowning out the birdsong, bawling and squabbling. It is a mire of the soul, a real quagmire of conscience and unconsciousness. Yet I never sleep without you here. I always hope; hope and describe the dawn and the hill I live on. Make it tender, make it rich, this prisoner's death I am destined to die. The summit looks sharp, on the foothills of existence. Somewhere beyond, in another country, are mountains covered with snow in June. We were only small specks on the glacier in our time of lust, you with your hair and your narrow waist and your elegant trousers, and I with your reflection in my eyes. And still the dawn fails to rise to warmth. And still the voices taunt me. Your voices. And the red taste in my throat rises, twists my gullet with the dryness of the morning after. The metal bars draw closer, and the shadows throw a dirty light onto the fading papers of my memory. This is where the talking has stopped, where the fresh air grows stagnant, and my breath grows stale. The light travels on into the time that was, and the time that will be is the time that I cannot and will not count. There are more than breaths and touches and memories within these four walls. And each time the morning breaks more fragile than the last, and scatters my weary eyes to the depths of new despair. Those days passed so soon, so epically empty for actuality. We were anonymous, and the time closed, and we left where we had set out from. It was no more than a mad few months in a crazed life of passing emotions. Used sheets and the knowledge of death, and the sweat of the effort, and the scent of your lust and my fulfilment. We'll meet again, you said, six months down the road, maybe. And you gave me an address to send you a note, just a box number. And I gave you an address. We gave eachother the time, but no numbers to talk. I returned to the prison I called my own, putting thought into twenty-four hours of what was someone else's hobby, and you returned to where I don't know, and to what I don't know and shouldn't care. Pacing through months, playing truant to my own desire, calling into the sunrise with someone with a fraction of your attraction, it seemed normal. And yet, carving my name into another living forest of flesh and limb was stepping out of what I had accepted of myself before you had caught me in that train, before you had joined me to you on that altar of passion, in that cathedral of the body. I became someone else, and someone else again from the harvest you reaped and feasted your starvation from. Time was, and then a short note, five months later, as I rose from another night spent awake in another Satan's arms. A summons on plain white sheet of paper. And I could find no scent. Nothing but the stark black words calling me into your presence. I was to meet you at the hotel in the bay where the boats arrived at Dubrovnik. I was to be there at the end of June. I was there two days early. Out into the fury of the summer. It was before the war came. Dubrovnik, now vanquished. Then, the old city enclosed within its completed walls, and the pride of its people in their independence. I saw you stepping out of one of the many small boats that cross between the resorts and the city. Saw you walking across the terrace with one small case. You made me spill my coffee and drop too many Dinars on the table, such was my haste to give chase. It was cold in the shade, and the coffee was hot on my skin. The cool air caresses my face through the open window as I recollect this. It touches something inside me that I have not touched before, that no-one has ever touched before. It is early morning and the voices have become somnabulent visions and pictures. And the red taste in my mouth is a taste of you, and the breeze on my face a taste of that coolness, as the city subsides into brightness and the dawn clings to my clothes. Your elegance could never match my weariness, my look of being worn and torn and brought in by the last high tide and storm. You recognised me once I had caught you up. You had even asked for my name at the reception, as if you had expected me to book into a double room as a matter of course. The sheets had been changed. It was late morning, and they scented of fresh air, breathed an energised coolness into our bodies. And yet we were both hot, the heat of six months, the passion of a half life, and the wanting of a life time of lying. It was dark by the time we rose again, and the streets were fuller than the morning. There was more chatter than the day had held, and too much for the night to be spent resting. Thus we tried another language, and held the two poles of the world within our hearts. The old tiles glistened, and the murmur raged on, as we climbed the aging steps into the top of that city. And from there, breathless, we followed the quivering lights on their course through the darkness, and could not tell the blue of the sea from the black of the night. And in our daze we found somewhere to sell us two bottles of wine and some charred langoustinos. We broke them open for eachother and tasted the heat of the burning coals, the freshness of the sea, and the energy of the newly dead flesh. Here, under the stars, bright on the black, and breathing in the night. And the night grew still, far removed from the rest of the world and the wars raging therein. And it remained still for as long as we were up there, away from the crowd, hidden and far above. And it was still until you screamed at my caresses, shouted me the name of your Satan, and you became mine. It was a passion, an ecstasy, so intense so strong, as to become endless and pure in its perversity and madness. That was how we spent the weeks that you had set aside for us. Coffee on the terrace in the late hot mornings, watching the tourists, for by now we had become almost indigenous, tripping out of the boats. The coffee was served on a silver salver with a glass of water, bitter and refreshing at once. And the invigoration of it carried us back to our bed, stripped us naked, and let us roam in our discoveries to flesh we had never known. Thus we cried and laughed and tasted, wined and dined and sang, and never once questioned past nor present nor future. I have not, nor can I, remember all this at once. Some dawn may bring me only an atom of your aroma, yet another may bring me a whole minute of reflection, a whole mouthful of your ageless flesh. And I will put them all together, all into one vision, an eternal living, breathing, fragrance-filled Polaroid, to carry to my death with me. Now, even, you would ask me the sense of it all; this eternal reflection, this attempt to gather every shred of information of the past into my mind, to database it onto my computer for my posterity. And yet, as the calm of morning panics me, I cannot be any other way. I lost the soul for independence when you planted your seed within me, when you grabbed me from the midst of normality into a world that rejoiced in the flesh and bones of passion. And you knew me even before I knew myself. And you knew me better than I did you. There is the reason. To know myself, I languish in this prison, with names and voices taunting the despair into my soul, lashing out at me with their derision, with their teasing snippets of recollection. What good are these pictures without your voice? What good are they without your scent, without the herbness of your skin against mine, without the tumult outside as the festivals began? Back here, there is nothing left of Dubrovnik, nothing left of Milan and Rome, nothing left of the flesh we ate together, and the bread we broke over the brimming glasses of blood. All that remains is the stale room, the gasping morning growing old with me, and the dying blue of the sky. That is why, for you ,too, I try to paint these pictures again in these daily letters to you that I never send. That is why I bear out these voices, trying at last to find you, thinking that one morning I shall hear only yours. That is why I don't try to escape from this cell, but carry the bitterness with me from day to day. Because a second of being parted from you is like a lifetime without you. So now, as the sun finally warms my tired face, as it finally crashes into the wooden floor, I hear the footsteps outside the door. They grow closer as the seconds suddenly slow, as life halts. I know the sound so well, bare on the wood. I wait for the creak of the old hinge before I turn to face you. How long will it be this time?