A typewriter guilty with love

A Typewriter Guilty with Love is a suite of ‘found’ poems created by remixing words and phrases from the 1945 poetic novella By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Canadian author Elizabeth Smart. The book was inspired by Smart’s intense and tumultuous love affair with English poet George Barker. Their scandalous relationship spanned two decades and resulted in Smart having four of Barker’s children while he remained married and  fathered three children with his first wife.

ACT I

1
I am waiting for He
whom I have waited
so long, to disgorge from the bus,
every drop of my blood
vibrating with shameless intention.

Then She (whom I never expected)
peers out, with Madonna eyes
that hypnotize, her flood of hair falling
in damp mourning-
weeds of lament and foreboding.

She is his dear heart; He, my beloved;
and I, their treacherous host.
The triangular net of our fate is cast —

O forgive my imminent sin!

The poisonous seed of his love
has already mortally pierced my skin.

2
I pray for forbearance
but my jungled sex is infested by desire.

Beneath veils of trivial propinquity
he draws me in like gravity —
seducing me with cyphers
on a typewriter guilty with love.

Under my tunic of chaste behaviour,
a fox devours a dove.

3
Love, like a refugee, has sailed
and nature, God’s perpetual whore,
has seduced all shame away.

My angel beguiled me with sadist eyes
while I bathed beneath the waterfall
and has left me floating flagrant
on a wild inside sea.

I am muse of this new-found land,
delirious as a high, round note —
nothing can ever be more than now,
he has pierced the very centre of my soul.

Let my flood of milk and honey feed the world!

IT is done. I am nothing.
And all the earth solicits me with joy.

ACT II

4
Hungry in the Ford under the desert sun
we cross the border into tragedy —
police sirens warning, Turn Back, Turn Back —
because of love, only too much love.

Did you intend to commit fornication?
Did intercourse take place?

(It did, Inspector, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.)

Be quiet! Don’t try to lure me!

They are taking me away from my beloved,
prosecuting me for what was in our eyes.

My sin is noted on fourteen virgin sheets
and filed away, six carbon copies of each,
as punishment for my coquetry
in this country, corrupt with hypocrisy.

5
Through the fall sunshine
a prodigal daughter
the world in her pocket
contrary as a tree
comes hurrying home
face like a prayer
asking for no one’s forgiveness.

6
Father’s desk massively symbolic between us,
the long cold of his measuring eye.

Mother a harpy of relentlessness:
I want nothing to do with you!

In decency’s court, what is my defense
but one, small, nude word?

Love? Stuff and nonsense!
(Don’t cry — tears only increase the crime.)

Desolated by unbelievers, I long
for the pleasure of our illegal kiss.
Neither duty nor reason nor guilt
can incline me anywhere away from you.

Let the jealous peer from behind drab curtains,
our passion can conquer the world.

The fates grow weary of my procrastination;
I must salvage our love from this blood.

7
His apple-tree face
is straightjacketed to the bed
and he is chewing a frightful drug.

Is this a hospital or a goal?
It’s a nightmare rendezvous.

Go on, says the nurse, his wife is already in there.
(But didn’t he say I was the one?)
I’ve done it twice today, he sighs,
once with her and once with you.

You Cad!

You c—t!
Women are so possessive.

(But aren’t you serving two?)

Rubber corridors — could you tell me
the way out of here? — stairs spiraling
down for hours.

Careful, dearest.
I can carry love like Saint Christopher,
but will drown in this sea of suspicion.

8
Doubt, like a Harpy, claws
at the chemical coverings of my brain.
My heart, buried by unpunctuated hours,
has utterly collapsed.
It is near dawn, and for ten brutal days
he has not come back.

The creeping fingers of dissuasion
type holes in my naive game.
Miles away, in Pity’s name, it is
her hair falling like grief on his chest
as he burrows like a baby at her breast.

He has sinned most dangerously against me.
He has betrayed love, which love will not allow.
I wonder if he notices that I am dead?
Walls of gloom grow in my caged head.

But I do not bleed;
instead, I cradle his seed
and in a bed as black as the grave,
try to synthesize hope in my Hour-of-Need.

ACT III

9
This breast that once burned from far away
is frozen over like Everest.
I am a coma of sedative monotony,
stricken stiff, beyond longing.

I wander, like Dido,
chaste, ecclesiastical, praying
for Him to fill my bed.

Cold bones!
The unborn embryo withers on my coils.
I can feel the little bastard moving
but my loneliness grows greater than the child.

Forty days in the wilderness and not one holy vision.
I am nature’s seedbag, waiting
for the kiss I must have or die.

10
I will not be placated by mechanical existence
or acquiesce to suicide, pimp of death.
My undammed grief craves violence!

Neon’s flash relentlessly
as I race disaster down Third Avenue,
wailing under her window
for him to descend and stroke my hair.

A usurper has been in the temple, O God,
bribing him with her ten-cent tears.
The hand that once revived me is paralyzed;
I slip beneath the flood.

Now polestars decay into falling stars,  
hope gushes from my arterial wound,
dreams dissolve into water,
and I am drowned alive.

Only the child still pins me to this
turning world — nailed
on the conjunction of passion and pity,
our petrified legend is crucified.

Let him write the postmortem
that will acquit him of these murders.
I hemorrhage my sorrow into this notebook,
dying for the language of love.