Work Text:
Idleness was a word often used by our condemners
One word among others, differently shaped that leaves peculiar aftertaste on the tongue
Chosen without great care but always hurled with asperity mixed with saliva
The syllables were slipping off their long tongues, like glistening pearls in a slippery downfall, a rainfall down their throats, spilling dark viscid bile, smearing their fat, painted rosy cheeks and short reptilian necks and constricted into too tight a cloth chests
Pooling down at their feet, making them drag their step and walk slowly, across endless corridors dressed with ancient tapestry and cold jewelled armours,
Pulling their weight grudgingly as they parade with their dark feathers adorning their dark clothes and their dark gazes
Masquerading giant venomous insects, which crawl and hiss and flap and hide under opaque shadows and furniture corners
But they saw us.
We were quick and light in our step,
Eager to run away, to dance, to ride in strangers’ cars to the countryside,
To pass by closed iron gates and abandoned, unlighted parks, drinking each other by dry fountains
You were always there, wearing your fancy perfectly tailored clothes and your smile and your smirk of derision,
Always asking for a cigarette, or a light by the agile hands of a young man, or both, or just for those agile hands
After the clattering and glimmering of all things dear and precious
We stumble still, then running drunk once again
How slipping the pink satin, how dangerously looped around your neck are these white and yellow pearls
As we watch the stars die out and turn to ashes before our very own eyes,
Scorching our fingertips and lips, while I carelessly sip the smoke from your mouth
The roads unfold before us
As we watch each other dance,
Twirl on the black and white marble floor
Your hands clinching around my waist, whispering urgently
Trying to find one another, distinguish familiar faces inside a crowd of torn faces of ecstasy or horror.
Horror without, without, without
Without
Without the need of the white line on the silver tray, that glistens, that reflects,
The chandelier light
Our faces illuminate,
Or has the rest of the world gone dark again?
When the musicians stand still, trembling hands suspended in mid air,
We dance together yet,
Because you promised
Promised
We’re only going to sleep when life is drenched out of us, snatched by a faithless thief.
When we are left bone dried,
like the empty shells that lie smoking on the green pastures now turned to sterile minefields
When we make the deathbed of anything kind, virtuous and just,
our home
Or perhaps, when the fire blaze inside us much alike the fire that painted the sky
And for once, we would be lucky
The end will find us tangled as I taste your hair and lick your mouth
While you touch my still unmarked face, remembering with each and every line
That there is no worse fate, than to watch ourselves stand still while the world goes down in flames.
Thus, we decided to go down with it,
And demand of the war that it will not finish until our vices are drunk in wine and in our ecstatic state we are;
quick to condemn
aloof in this wilderness