The Girl with Topaz Eyes

For Clarice

“You’ve got a fast car…” Tracey Chapman

“Tell me was it rough time?” Song

“Nous meprissions l’ivresse imparfait de vivre” Yves Bonnefoy

We do not bleed the blood of others, that much is gapingly, gushingly, tearingly obvious, nor do we feel their pain, except in moments of terror, on dark roads, in dark lanes.

Can’t you guess?

The idiot girl longs for a kiss from her idiot boyfriend’s cherry-red lips, she wants what she’s missed in her eighteen years in Hades.

But at night all the dumb-boys and flunkeys turn keys in the locks

The idiot girl in the madhouse cries:

“I’m human, I’m human, I feel just like you, my thinking is much the same; I long to live but you can’t even see I’m alive, alive and living like a rat in a drain.

I’m exotic, I was beautiful, men loved me for my wit. Isn’t that obvious?

Can’t you guess?”

(This with a lot of teeth ripped out, skin rough from phenothiazines, face puffed, dress pink in the latest of the decade’s psychological fashions, to reduce the aggression in others and one’s own aggression.}

‘cause they’re hungry for fat fast cars that run like oxen into the fields of Elysium, to the American dream, out of the boxes their parents inhabited, bought off by promises of love.

The delicate girl in the madhouse cries and a half-moon of silver shines in her eyes while the stars spin around on the earth’s dark side, Assyrian velvet, Chimaerical tide flooding Sumeria, the Chaldees, the Kingdom of Khem, and Conan the Barbarian, live on Saturday night, with Airey Neave and the Beatles, and under the skin the resin of fright.

And all the dumb-boys and flunkeys go out on the town, locking her life in, locking out their own; she to the darkness and they to the sun while sussurating on their radios Pink Floyd plays on. The brilliant girl in the madhouse wore skirts of purple in her youth, when I knew her, when in very truth I loved her as only one working-class teenager can love another.

The beautiful girl in the madhouse wore t-shirts inscribed in Sanskrit as she put her shoulder to the wheel of the war-crazed West, the Juggernaut hell-bent on having the earth in money and dust. You can have the earth and billions on it, without a whisper from me, and here’s why:

They took this girl and put her away with liberal blandishments and talk of welfare, then they worked on her teeth, ripping one out at a time, while over in Asia Vietnam was pillaged and burnt.

So you can take all the tea in China, all the rice, all the wheat inland and all of Sumatra’s grass, and you can (text deleted); take all the teak in Burma and the wealth of nations and burn it, set it if you can to the Druidic hell on earth where they keep the innocent girl with the exotic eyes, yellow-brown like topaz, the lips I can scarcely describe, the yogic grace.

The lovely little woman in the madhouse sits near the wall; and stares, muttering as she attempts to relate to the creatures made of shale and hate, the nursey boys and girls, insensitive, insensate, bland and blunt, who love to berate her, love to sate their sadism and stupidity:

“I’m human! I’m human!’

(As if to say “You can’t do this to me!”)

“I’m young! I’m alive! I’m clever! I’m classless! I’m free!” and she sobs as she stares and chokes on the taste of another Marlboro shoved in her face, like ashing a smoke in a human skull, the stubs stomped to the calcified clay, the stumps of her teeth bloodied. I shared a smoke with her once just after a trip to the dentist, and it was like that, her mouth bloody, the smoke like flux on metal, her skin like solder closing on a gaping wound. And all the dumb-boys and flunkeys go out on the town seeking nights of ruinous passion, cocaine for their souls and rum balls at the slum balls where the nursey boys and girls go, complete with their sense of perfect freedom and ambition, and not a one of ‘em knows what it is to be a brutal little authoritarian cog in a machine, while the girl with topaz eyes and the moon in them whispers

“This is the way I am, these are the shells on the bottom of the sea that keep the Tyrian purple in them, this is the airless hole where burns a fire on the moon.”

Like magic the beautiful boy in the real bomber jacket rescued from a Liberator crashed in the sea returns with hope and calls for a tune but the tune runs out and soon as lightning winks on a mad wild day the tune runs

“Girl with no eyes! Who can she be?” And he knows she’s nameless, he knows she’s gone into the night and fog with the pearls of her eyes and the lust of her youth, the immediacy: she was my “angel of the morning.”

The girl whose breath was light and delight like pastels, like fragrance, like roses, lights another Marlboro, learns to forget, and Comrades, and Sisters, and Brothers, the smoke curls with all the despair of being the butt of a bad joke, something inhuman, all the despair of fire on an airless world, and all the dumb-boys and fun-boys come running up and say whatever they say, like as if she’s an object not of love or pity or sex, but simply detestation, and brutal domination, then they drag her and beat her and throw her in bed and set up for the night while the mad girl cries, like “the wind cry, the wave cry, porpoise and petrel,” that bleak, that grey, that chill under the wheel of the State on an Arctic day under Jagarnath, out of all sight, her mind out of all but my mind, in the deep purple night, recalled on nights ablaze with iridescence and the lunar wash on the tides, recalled with a sense of her mysticism and the uncanny pangs of her sorrow.