By the Sound of a Voice After a long silence that seemed An eternity, There came a turbulent noise, A spirited noise. No, it was a voice, A loud voice Lashing up a storm, Singing intense, singing hot. And in the violence Of that voice, Whirled seeds of sound, Fragments of sense, Half-words, Commas & accents, Rhythm & image, Inclining towards poetry. And the LORD bent His ear To hear spoken The moon & sun & stars – & there was a dark saying too, Sung by

# LanguageSpeaks ! A man carrying a voice recorder pauses at the door, enters. He looks a lot like Kafka but has the eyes of Tennyson. He possesses a picture of Saturn, and you don’t. It is green. If you like you can say the same. You can’t blame me for this. I am merely the host. The party has just begun. Enjoy yourself. He should have brought wine instead. Some people like voice recorders, some don’t. It’s not an issue. ‘Turn it down,’ he shouts. ‘I can’t

Words like mosquitoes swarming / Around me, pestering

The Subject Is a Being without a Nature Once, nature: being without a subject. Now, the subject: a being without a nature. Once, fullness & animal dumbness. Now, language, tongue, la, signifying illness, emptiness. La, a foreign verb bound to other verbs, other selves, all in a chain, unending, infinite, rhetorical. Larynx a tool of persuasion. LaLangue: master; I, its slave. Yet words are not things I wish to talk about. I speak, but it is not I. The eye looks

Outposts on the Edge of a Haunting By speech and by text we launch our raids against the unknown, yet never succeed in capturing what we pursue. Such expeditions are doomed from the start: there is nothing, no one, to seize. Only a ghost, a rumour haunting our stations at the frontier of a vast territory stretching behind us. Lately there has been talk of strange sounds arising in the in-between spaces, in the gaps between outposts we call words. But when we li

Shouting in Brackets I here we are (1) sitting in a circle transmitting silences to each other and waiting (+1) for beginning to announce its ending (= 2) yesterday a mouth declared: “I am starving” (-1) but tomorrow was found wanting (-1) (= 0) II Bracketed, subjects recede into concealment & a clearing presents itself in which speech is revealed via objects III “What’s to understand but a bunch of nerves?” “A plastic oesophagus is a canal in an unusual context.