• Vol. 06
  • Chapter 11
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Après moi, le déluge

I have been reading Deleuze,
Whose soul has two floors.

I am told this is a mistake:
For his inextricable interliminals
Two score, twelve more inclusions

/monads/infinities/impenetrables.
God, walking across Woburn Square
In the almost crisp end of summer,
The plane trees rustling, God

Tells me personally, God, that
The soul has three floors, actually,
That the bottom is a coffee shop.
Where they serve teas and lattes:
Doppio Franziskaner Einspänner

Which is a word for a carriage,
And the iterations of that bustle,
A span of a Mandelbrot sprawl,
Footfalls and pence horses thuds upwards,
To the flat on the second floor,
Rented by a certain pensioner.

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Après moi, le déluge

A pensioner who takes the papers,
Interprets the senses, calls to complain
Only very occasionally about the cantatas,
But really it is the third resident, the third
Floor where it all goes down and faintly
Faintly still smells of coffee grounds,
But that’s all he’ll tell me really,

As he walks back across the square,
His brolly jaunty swinging cuts
The still-heavy air and then it’s just me,
The bench slats, and the book,
A paperback backpack matter-of-fact
Day in Bloomsbury, the stacked windows
Of the Squares, the marked up Deleuze,
Deluge, the hint of one, a single heavy drop of rain.

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