Radioromance Pt. 1

Ghost transmissions: echo from the screen
in an empty theater now forsaken to chronology,
with broken pilasters, crooked seats, dead dust,
paint and gold peeling, and the rust
as layers from a dream.

Her face: vignetted and soft in the glow of studio lighting
slowly decays, erased with time,
a living film: always shifting, ever changing,
the infinite and steady stare
  of grey and hollow eyes.

Her coat shudders: outside,
   in the cold breeze of final night,
  and the sky shifts with broken verses,
revealing echoes of moonlight.

the fatal wound, the cigarette,
the silent noir
of the final scene.
the buildings -- corpses, monuments so decayed,
this steady architecture of movement,
these hollow roads: memory.

~

The distressingly well-heeled and ill-at-ease
Aristocrats of the old Europe, of the Old World
Are passing away
From the streets of Salzburg and Vienna
Geneva and Ljubljana
The places you dimly remember (hence how they are lit)
That have become as one to you
That I loved so dearly
(And where did you think the wartime broadcasts came from
And who do you think is the ghost
The voice that whispered to you from the short wave
And seduced you?
With non-rhotics and ennuciations that
Served to emphasise
The gyroscopy of my tongue
And the elasticity of my lips
So thoroughly, determinedly and dementedly English
Even under the crackling
Even under the interference
And I must have known you were listening)
I have smoked away
The hastened fog
Of failing recollection –
Poetically succeeding,
You are beautiful even without the smoke
And so young,
Green youth,
I envy the visions of the starlet,
Age is no ruiner
Look at these cities
This amalgam of Gitanes, memories and me, the timeless girl you never spoke to, a conflated fantasy and in that
Differently infinite and far from secure
Under the coat there is nothing
I do not mean it sexually.
Unbutton my coat (as you will, as I will you will) and you will find nothing
I am less substantial than the twist of the cigarette
More transient than the glamour of smoking it
On the riverside, pouting and looking across the dark river
At gorgeous running lights
Shattering your basal ganglia
Without my noticing you
(Or more importantly, seeming not to
Even as I knew wherein I danced)
Why do you think I ridded us of the cities?
I have to hold on to that
Little piece of headspace
A hundred thousand variations of the coat-unbuttoning
To survive –
I live in those brass buttons
I live in that black felt
I live in that tobacco and the loose curl of that hair
I live in the flash of those blue eyes
And those gossamer calves.

~

Existing only as an echo,
in the tiny crevices between synapses --
I think of you, twirling cigarette, evening air, unbuttoning
your coat.
Cities burn beneath our gaze. The
atonal verse of shortwave static
christens your palm,
numeric codices halting in syncopated rhythm,
and my breathing, on the line, cold hand gripping the wire,
a morse code moratorium,
as you faded into noise.

I saw you in Novosibirsk, fading between bursts of
pale static. As well as in Akrotiri, where you hid between the numbers. And in Innsbruck, too, fleeting under
golden roofs, and between the wooden windows of the
old bridge, visible only through that
haze of Parisian smoke.

Your particles cling to the air. Your dust alights on my coat. And seemingly, I note:
every memory of you I have of you is only visible through that smoke.

I only remember you when I am remembering you.
Why is that?

I walk beneath
great aeolian harps of telegraph wire:
softly humming in the breeze,
with current, with gusto, these
atonal frequencies
giving depth to your image, your voice, a thinly reflected hue,
still hazed in the smoke of early morning Prague.

In that coat, that damned coat, unbuttoning and buttoning and unbuttoning again,
Living in those brass buttons, existing in those frail fingers. For me you held everything. Lincolnshire Poacher and a Swedish reverie. dot-dot-dash, "I am 143".

But where did you go on the night of the next? Did you disappear with the solar flare, did you fade into the ionosphere? These hollow frequencies still reverberate with image, but when I reach out to feel you the smoke never clears, and I have to think to recall
what it is that I am remembering.

I played you my violin,
   that night in Maribor, near the cathederal.
Those harmonics brought you alive. You danced in the moonlight. Hidden fundamentals permeated your being. You
  existed for the vibration of B flat, you
    reveled in F sharp.

~

Even still, I whisper:
'Hic vero tantus est totius mundi incitatissima conversione sonitus, ut eum aures hominum capere non possint, sicut intueri solem adversum nequitis, eiusque radiis acies vestra sensusque vincitur.'
The Queen's Latin,
Exercising precise diction in
Expounding Scipio's Dream, upon the World Service.

Why is it that you remember me at all?
Save by my will, perhaps.
Yes, that I have made my chains
In the harmonics, the sines looped around me
Keeping me prisoner within you
(For such sweet music,
Should and can not be forgotten
So as long as I am song,
I am bound within you, and bound
To remain and not to pass away)
You remember me just as an old song
Comes to you without you asking it,
The childhood melody that I've insinuated my way into.

And V for Victory, V for Victoria, V, the Vth, the 5th
I so prefer to talk in analog orchestrals than distorted
Electrics;
To sweep you up in music you're still too young to understand
Resounding with oscillations
Made by reeds, by timpani and the tympanic membrane, and yea,
Even by the consuming ionosphere.

I rattle in your walls, a mystery
To lure you in, sending the bouncing, distant
Narrowband
Signing in as ZC4, Zacharia,
Needing to be triangulated to some hippocampal co-ordinate,
But if I were to speak,
Like the ghost I am,
Clearly, directly to your face, to the inside of your ears
(To A1, to BA41-42)
Rather than to rostromedial prefrontal, to the heart of resonance,
You would spurn me, not
Be mystified;
If it becomes a matter of finding me,
You will look.

143: I love you, I love you, I love you
(So typical of you to
Ignore my aphorisms, ignore my rules,
The rules for survival that I chanced and kept
And brought me here,
One hundred and forty-three incantations of soul alignment, of
Attunement. Tuning myself into you. Tu(r)ning myself into you).

Call me Tatiana, call me Anna,
Call me Elena,
Call me Larisa and Uliyana:
I have been them and more
Disguised in the villages outside of Moscow
Ever fain to speak to you, ever feigning that
I might hold, in the buzz of my sealed mouth, the keys of death, might
Lay the dead hand upon your shoulder,
The caress of beautiful rotting Hel, as Doepler saw,
With all the intrigue of Russian agency
The gulag or death at my most merest word
(The nuclear war at my merest silence)
You find it fascinating,
And as long as I can intrigue you,
I will live and breathe, I shall survive
By attraction alone, by feeding the tidbits of hallowed mystery alone
Such as this:

Adria, my code name, Adria,
(And Publia, and Aelia)
The incarnation of those coastal towns,
Kommunismus
Who are staying out of the war,
Gambling that non-alignment is the trick of self-salvation
(The opposite of mine own bet)
The Romans of Pula, whose stones
Archaeologically summon concrete, the simple shapes of concrete
Where I wandered seditiously, my trick for voices
Aiding me with the Yugoslavian,
Since you know and I know that I am everyone and
Could look at you with any face,
Could speak to you with any voice –
Inhabit the body of any number of young women yet
Still be me.

The databurst that sparkles over your consciousness –
It is her, my nameless lover,
My midnight whisperer
The Face of Europa
The one I ever seek, and oft find
Only to lose once again, as she deresolves;
And I
Am
Waiting.
I know that I might be free, if only
You would hold to me, for long enough.

I fed you with the ripe cherries,
Filled your unwaking mind with summer,
The enchance of La Rive Gauche
The soft light of faded photographs
Sun-dried polaroids,
(And underwhich the microfiche, and underthat the microfilm)
Of girls dancing with cultural momentum
Untouched by the war
And chased by it only silent – yet
I was each of these:

A figure underwired by Duga-3,
But just wireframe,
Not resolved in Steel, not a woman of it,
Not secure enough to live on,
The frequencies of deathly radiation not yet the question,
Just my glances, over the horizon
Are they coming are they coming are they coming are they coming?
But somewhere I saw you, and got lost inside you,
Grabbed to photographs and radio broadcasts and
The individual spikes of the static
I must yet prevail;
I must yet see to the other side of the sky
Which is
Through your temples, through your forehead, through your skull,
Through your eyes,
Outwards,
Outwards:
No, I shall not be held in thee.

As Zheleznyakov said,
'No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge.'
My revenge is to
Let the warheads rot,
And my purposes fade,
But my beauty remain, my enigma
To catch your throat, to lift the hairs
Like music does, the distant music
That our wireless has played
To childlike ears, to your former selves, rank upon rank,
All lost, like me,
Still hanging on
By being so tragically beautiful.

(perhaps she died in the Cold War
And is resurrected by the new-Millennium numbers station
With the rise of the internet)
That's what they'll say of me,
The chroniclers whose minds I'll capture,
Who'll enchant those others with me
They'll hear your voice and I'll
Need harrow you no more
But soar to unbounded reaches,
Touch the ether and the aether and the ether-radio
Up and up,
Above and beyond,
Up and up
On thermals and solar winds
Not impeded by solar flares, not
Distorted,
But truly who I am,
Above and beyond your constraint –

The new direction - now I dance
Amongst Juliet and Ophelia,
The Anser Indicus of stars and ions,
Overcoming the mounts of Miranda
And the dark god Setebos, who has
Done a finer job of Desdemona and Titania
In lunar tones, to catch their darkness
Glinting from the foul ices,
The crystals which bear my imprint,
The radio that has made its way,
Deeply there, far beyond your boundaries,
Still only in your dreams.

~

Why do you linger? Why do you delay? Held so infinitely within the holds
of this sepulchral decay. Reverberating, resonating, off of every surface and every bone.
Temporal. Pareital. I measure your passion in amperes. Your resistance, in Ohms.

My acute
paracusia of you,
as exacerbated by my persistent hypagogia, bidding your
pale image adieu. Descending into subconsciousness. This sleep of a dream
so long overdue.

Dreaming always of you.
Always in that dress,
Tatiana, Elena, Anna, Larisa,
the red silk of tragic stardom and those
halogen-lit eyes,
that burned so firmly into my
extrastraite cortex,
seductively schisming the squamosal suture,
where you undoubtedly entered, with
those lips. That hair. That
devilish stare.
Unrelenting. Infinitely lamenting. The
transformation of your silken voice into
mere echoes in the air.

And was it the static
that wrote your face, into the
atmosphere,
burning a scar across my
Ora serrata,
directly interfacing with the anterior chamber,
Inevitably deceiving,
and rapidly receding,
as with the image of you,
and your fragile voice,
cracking, crackling, with sonorous syllables,
softly writ, as if to incant
a vibration on these sines, a
pulse across these wavelengths.

Outside, the
rain still collects,
in puddles, as if to catch
your myriad reflections. I button my coat, turn the dial, scan the frequencies, waiting always and
always waiting
for you

Inevitably, you're everywhere I go, and everywhere I look,
your faintly fading visage visible in every wall, every signal, every
hall. The anchor on the morning news smiles at me and I can't handle it. I descend into the subway, and every sound is you.

I need to hold on to
this little piece of headspace:
rapidly deteriorating.
And you,
hopelessly resonating,
consistently awaiting your
eventual decay,
red lips of summer, lasciviously translating:
your movements, your intentions, your
softly supple sound. This coil to catch your resonance,
hopelessly wound around
synapses that drowned in
current, in static, in your own entrancing
sound, copper wires to catch your mood. Everything I do hopelessly skewed
in your direction.

I follow your every inflection:
   the rise and fall of your
     every modulation:

The sinister noise of your infinite narration.
The delta wave, the databurst,
  at a steady
   40kHz,
matching my resonance. Or, a
subaural drone just beneath the ranges
of my perception, yet
still there, driving, beating:

You're everywhere I go.

And truthfully, too, there is the noise.
Always persistent, distorting your
poise. You waver. I delay.
Eventually I, too, will decay.
And with that process (confessed) in progress,
  I transgress (nonetheless) the need for sleep.

Because when I dream, it is replete
with images of you, always incomplete, a
faint shadow of a song,
flickering. Fading. There is image, but the
pieces don't belong. When I awake you are gone
until I think to look for you again, and I can not recall
what it is that I've been (remembering).

You always, it seems, catch me adrift in
  a reverie.
For instance, that time when
    I was thinking of how you
      always faded into streets of dying afternoon,
     your red dress / regressed
   into the timid sunset. Which, itself
Burned with a peculiar sort of noise,
the background radiation from your
broadcasted voice.

We are both vibrations along the same tenuous string,
the fundamentals, the frequencies, the
persistent resonating.
Inevitably connected by wire and by voice,
a markéd lack of choice, as we
both strafed the sines, following trajectorial
lines, which would come to define (by
triangulation, location, even
              incantation): our respective aims.
Even now, as I remain,
Held within the
  arcane and rhythmic movements of
your lips, your hips, your spine, your own
  lunar eclipse. I wonder if you
speak to me from sunspots, or perhaps
bounce your voice from satellites, or if
you merely are, however flawed, however erased,
a simple figure carved into the light of day,
But perhaps still you are merely a product of that
array of wireframe, the antenna tilt, the ionosphere
(if not in existence at least in perception).
Oh, how you show yourself to me,
in voice, in broadcasts, in eulogies
for all that you once were, perhaps now relegated
only to memory:
A fading image. A deteriorating voice. Perpetually lost in
the patterns in the noise.

The cities are collapsing. We are
  relapsing.
And memory flickers and fades, your face begins to
   erase, and the rain
never stops falling, as
white noise across the pavement.

And these false divisions of
cities, as summoned by
speech, archaeologically summon
fake concrete, and I
continue to walk through barren
streets, hollowed out shells of buildings,
of wireframe, of you, of
moviescreens and satellites and
empty rooms,  
of everything you
could be, are, was, will be,
forever nevermore.
And my eyes drift,
your voice spins,
(in concentric rings of increasing magnitude,
perpetually receding) transiently
   completing: you. The
     indistinct, indefinite image,
   burning and
brea k i ng
into the at mo sphere:
  fr agm en ting. F_rgetting…

<sub>[[[ every way in which
     your dress is  cut off at mid-thigh,
     sloping at mid-back,
     revealing touches of    
     spectral skin
        (at least to me, in dreams
        that would linger, and then rapidly recede)
     And again with the undressing. Slowly, slowly, revealing
     traces of thigh, of
     light, or rather moreso of
     shadow (The hollowness of your eye sockets. The
     emptiness of your retinas. This void I
     stare into,
     impenetrably,
     indeterminately,
     infallibly yours.) The
     shores of
     Saint-Jean de Luz summon
     white noise and
     a superimposed facsimile of you against the waves,
     always faint, always
     fain to
     speak
     of every little transgression
     between you and the state, the building that kept you, the
     wires that snaked their way
     across the floor and around your skin, your neck, your
     mouth, your
  voice,

[     ARE WE ALL     /                                   ]
[     MERE GHOSTS IN THE LINE NOISE?      ]

  these coils wound so
  firmly around your
  perfect esophagus,
  conjuring notions of
  tarantism in you,
  choking the dust straight
  out of your static, reducing
  you to
  the morning news,
  an empty shell to hold your voice up,
  to hold your voice up to the skies, to the
  satellites, to
  every framework of
  receptive metal, to
  every ear that would never listen, to
  every lost transmission, every gap in
  the wavelengths, and
  every sound that never was. ]]]]</sub>
     
Every turn of
the dial / leads me, inexorably, to
you. And every turn of
my head / inevitably construes
persistence of vision, of
smoke against the receding noon.

_{[[[ t h e r e   a r e   n o i s e s   i n   t h e   w a l l s ]]]}

Outside, the
rain still collects,
in puddles, as if to catch
_{[[[ anything at all ]]]}
(perhaps a memory, perhaps a face,
the enchance of La Rive Gauche, this persistent
illusion of place) I am still erased. Or at least my
perception tells me as such, in
every dream I've ever had.
Only an image. Fleeting vestige,
growing older, forever older, and
forever, forever

      f a i  n   t.

the window outside
pours perpetual Blank.
_{[[[   and Even when I find you, I'm
       still too late, because by the
       time I do, you
       echo or Reverberate,
       to some other pLace, just outside the
       boundarIes
       of  my own somNolence, my own sleep, and still quite so forever
          only in my dreams, doomed to, doomed to,
           n e v e r   b e   c o m p l e t e)    ]]]}

You resonate like a cathedral, you
fill my head with noise.

Your image blurs, burns, flickers, fades, your
red dress disappears
into the fog of fading recollection.

I look for you in oceans,
a requiem for every sound,
perpetually receding.

~