The Black Ocean

A Brief Oral Account of Torture Pulled Down Out of the Wind

54 A Brief Oral Account of Torture Pulled Down Out of the Wind [What the Hood Whispers to the Head] friend I grow more alive with you each day I drink up your sweat your spit your tears I drink up your grey phlegm and the blistered coagulations of blood minerals once a part of you fizz between us like cold starlight scouring the desert and when you drown in the long keelhaul of electricity I suck in your breath that prickly chandelier of wind shuddering from your throat believe me when I say that there are things you do not want to see your body is eating itself and still they grin they strike a pose for the camera when they wring me out they’ll know I held your dreams like a bell holds the iron ghost of sound 55 [What the Dog Whispers to the Shape Cowering in the Corner] and now I’m drenched at the end of my chain truculent implacable circling inside the shape your fear makes lunging toward that cloudy omphalos of scent that plumbs you like a poisoned well tang of urine tang of sweat blowback of pheromones rising in corpuscles of oil ripe with the soured colostrum of your beginning this is our first and only dalliance for we’re off and running headlong downhill through some bottomless perdition statues topple songbirds plummet from the sky generals hide beneath their overcoats clouds boil then blot out the sun whole continents fall away beneath our feet and when you turn to face me at last you will face the gnawed synapses of memory rising mercurial from the deep brine-flooded folds of your own brain gathering into a throbbing body of froth gathering into a windbent wound sprouting teeth 56 you will weep you will call it dog you will kneel and rise and kneel again you will devour yourself in your dreams 57 [What the Boot Whispers to the Heart Beneath Its Heel] at night through the crack below the door I’ve glimpsed you floating in the air above the body drenched with a vermillion glow the whole cell gliding beneath your light I’ve dreamt of throngs of you rising unabated through the calm of sleep hearts of string and papier-mâché stuffed with the offal of goats or chickens humming chanting stammering on the vulgar parlance of the backward and the dead of devious sodomites that starve themselves for their sins of djinns sidling through subway tunnels drawing their bristling tails up beneath their robes one flinch and the hemispheres are riven sliding into the hardscrabble abyss of your caesura one flinch and whole civilizations are buried in sand believe me when I say that such figments of the imagination will be squashed with impunity I will kick you back across the precipice of illusion I will marry you to the earth or hold you down squirming until my master places you in the middle of a cold tray 58 fool you have neither wings nor feet and I have no heart yet see how I gleam without it 59 [What the Torturer Whispers to Himself in the Mirror] whence the fuck have we come to this place to this godawful understory of the unrighteous where the nightsky looks like some putrid ocean drying up and the air itself stops up the breath like wading through static through a thousand broken voices a scourge of suffocating ghosts languishing in the heat and despite it all we sleep the sleep of the just dreaming of the cunts of Istanbul a whole harem calling out to us wraithlike across mountains and the vast expanse of empty desert whispering to us through a veil of hookah smoke and silk scarves until we rise in darkness at last without rebuke hardened by what we forego invoking the fear of our people invoking the columns of fire and ash even as the low concussions in the east reverberate bellowing those spineless simians from their mudhuts and holes those muddleheaded mopes that they bring here to cower and slobber and sink into a pile of their own shit listen we are beholden to no one we are without peer without recompense we have pledged our troth to the one god and the one country and to each other [3...