Antigonick

O filth of Death

who can clean you out

O laugh of Death

you crack me

the bolt leaving the wall

the sword sinking up to its own mouth

O my queen

I did not see

a state of exception

marks the limit of the law

this violent thing

this fragile thing

try to unclench

we said to her

she never did

there is no stanza of human life that

I would praise or blame

luck sends your powerboat up or

down the waves at any given moment

no seer can see what’s next

Kreon (I thought) was an enviable man

for he saved this land of Kadmos

he got his hands on monarchy

he sailed it straight and furrows of children flourished around him

now all that’s gone

when joy betrays you

I do not count your life alive

a corpse is more alive

be as rich as you like be absolute

if your joy goes

I wouldn’t buy you for a shadow of smoke

you’ve put the living underground

and kept the dead up here

that is so wrong

that is so wrong

Teiresias [to Kreon]: you’re standing on a razor

I hear the birds they’re bebarbarizmenized they’re

making monster sounds

the fires won’t light

the rites go wrong

you know my technologies you know

the failing of the sign is in itself a sign

from you a sickness

from you a suppuration

from you a surfeit

comes out upon the city

this pile of rot that was the son of Oidipous

the boy is dead stop killing him

they go mad

you change the levels of a person’s mind

this Haimon crisis is all your doing

you shook his blood

you glow on girls’ eyelids

who cares about the laws of the land

Aphrodite, you play with us you

play

Eros, no one can fight you

Eros, you clamp down on every living thing

on girls’ cheeks on oceans on wild fields

not even an immortal can evade you

certainly not a creature of the day

why

sayest thou so, well now well now I say

thou shalt revile me to thy cost

fetch out the loathéd creature

let her die hard against her bridegroom now this very instant before his eyes

father, the gods grow minds in men

as the most precious equipment they have

yet I could not would not do not know how to

say you are wrong