Belongings

(for T.S. Eliot)

Faustus: Stay Mephastophilis! and tell me what good
Will my soul do thy lord?
Mephastophilis: Enlarge his kingdom
Faustus: Is that the reason why he tempts us thus?
Mephastophilis: Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris

Let us go then, you and I,
Where the adverts are writ large across the sky
(The gospel truth to tell us what to buy)
Let us go to fill the hole
To find the things we never knew we needed
(Pour découvrir comment combler
La troue que ce matin j’ai trouvé
Quand, à côté de toi, je me suis reveillé)
Oh, do not ask ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.

Let us go
Before it gets to closing time
‘Tis not too late to seek a better world.

In the street the people come and go
Basking in the afterglow

The yellow sun that spills in through the window,
The yellow sun that paws his way in through the window,
Busy old fool, he shows up every crease
In this flawed landscape of skin and sin and sheets
(Ainsi qu’un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange
Le sein martyrisé d’une antique catin)
And comes around again to break our peace.
Let us go then, with no talk of what has been:
There will be time tonight to falter and begin.

In the street the people come and go
Basking in the afterglow

The shops serve up their promises
To restless eyes, where everything’s for sale.
Reverent steps shuffle past stocked windows,
Dream from the same stock of dreams,
The same branded fantasies, carefully spun
From common denominators; content to be contained.

And all the girls come out to play
To spread their wares on a Saturday night
Make their special offers
(Two for one if you get lucky)
And come with a good will or come not at all

And all the boys go body shopping
Pick up their partners on sale-or-return
Take a zero-tolerance line on attachment
(Statutory masculinity never affected)
And everything’s alright.

And indeed there will be time
To make a narrative out of it all
To anatomise each near miss
Each kiss
That ended the fairytale
And time yet to make all the same mistakes again.

There will be time, there will be time
To sing the bitter song of my experience;
To watch revelations spark and falter in your eyes
And wonder do I dare, and do I dare
To share the trudge and sweat and ache of days
Spent edging round an overwhelming question,
And learning to forget the sting of years
Spent wondering what the years are for
And losing faith with every revolution
Blunt to the purpose, my resolution wearing thin?

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

For I have known them all already, known them all
I have seen the tourists on the Berlin wall
I have measured out my life in ballot slips
And watched the poison spill from power’s lips.
I have self-medicated with the rest
‘Til memory itself became a fume.
So how shall I presume?

And I have known the words already, known them all
The chants that falter with a dying fall
Before the promise of a pay-rise; stall
Beside the longing for an easy life
And turn to groans as comfort twists the knife
Stuck deep in now, integral to the flesh
That forms and ripens in a lover’s womb.
And how should I presume?

And I have known the pain already, known it all,
I have seen the trail of losses left behind
To mark my passing; chewed the bitter rind
For the last savour of the fruit, and drunk
The backwash of my pleasures,
And counted myself lucky to have been so blessed.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Should I tell you that this brave new world
Is new only to thee?

Besides, the afternoon, the evening comes on so peacefully.
Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy:
We’ll take this as our motto. You and me
Could make a virtue of necessity;
Keep our heads down safe beneath the watchful eyes.
For I have seen them crack the whip
From Genoa to the Gaza strip.
I have seen what I have left to lose
And in short I am afraid.

And what would it mean, this common man’s dream
(To mortgage himself somewhere out in suburbia,
Sign his pact with normalcy,
Start a family)
If one were to say
“That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it at all”

And where could it lead, in this common-denominated world
Of serialised monogamy,
Fiscal responsibility,
If one, resting her chin on her hands
With her eyes full of other places,
Reaching out across the space between us
Were to say
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all”.

No! Orpheus, I will not follow you.
I ‘gin to grow aweary of the sun!

Let us go then, you and I,
Through crowds who never look up at the sky,
Until, consumer-chosen
And carefully customer serviced,
We have acquired a taste for modern life
Completed our course of retail therapy
(Faisons les courses, ma chèrie)
And done our duty for queen and economy.

Possessed of our possessions
And occupied by our occupations
(La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine,
Occupent nos ésprits et travaillent nos corps)
We will be taken in the day’s takings
And belong through our belongings.

We’ll smile and wave in our 15 minutes of fame
And realise in the end perhaps we were
Not waving but drowning.

Thus comfort doth make cowards of us all.

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