Free Art & Lies by Jeanette Winterson

royal motto in a republic. The word was dressed in gorgeous stuffs, the word due homage. The word that walked ahead of princes, the word of power; Bible and Law. The ennobling word fit to dub a mouth a poet.
    Delicate words exhausted through over-use. Bawdy words made temperate by repetition. Enchanting and enchanted words wand broken. Words of the spirit forced into the flesh. Words of the flesh unlovely in a white gown. Slang in a sling shot hurled and hurled and hurled. That is the legacy of the dead.
    The dead are on their way to work, grey limbs rubbing together in an open grave, stack on stack in the metal containers of car, tube and train. The grisly carriages are painted bright colours, guillotine colours of tumbril and blade, execution-bright. Each man and woman goes to their particular scaffold, kneels, and is killed day after day. Each collects their severed head and catches the train home. Some say that they enjoy their work.
    Time mocks them but they do not hear. Their ears are full of the sports pages and the index of the Financial Times. Time sits in their ribs and mocks them but his language is old and they do not hear. Time does his work and leaves his manuscript for the worms.
    Why do the dead give up life? Pawn the hours that cannot be redeemed?
    FOR SALE: MY LIFE. HIGHEST BIDDER COLLECTS.
    Hand to hand combat between the living and the dead. Mouth to mouth resuscitation between the poet and the word. Kiss me with the hollow of your mouth, the excavation where the words are dug, the words sanded under time. Kiss me with the hollow of your mouth and I shall speak in tongues.
    *
     
    Her kiss; to caress or salute with the lips; of billiard balls that touch while moving; a drop of sealing wax.
    Her lips are grape-red, not ready, always promising. The full harvest is still months away. I fear frost, I fear hail, I fear mildew and blight. I fear I will be sleeping when the sun rises. Let the sun rise. Let it be the day when she ripens at my hand.
    Why do I long for another turn of time? Why do I want the clock to go faster when my life depends on holding back the hands? Why? I want to kiss you.
    Kiss me with the hollow of your mouth, the indentation of desire. Kiss me with the pulled-apart open space, demolition of propriety, rebuilding of a place of worship among an upright people.
    Kiss me on the green baize where I play you like a game.
    She kisses me. The words that there are, fly up from her lips, a flock of birds cawing at the sky. An engine of wings migrating through the world but she makes her home in me.
    Her lips form the words. She scalds me with them. The cold, clear mould of her, melts, and gives way, she pours the warm honey of a long night’s work.
    The word and the kiss are one.
    Is language sex? Say my name and you say sex.
    Say my name and you say white sand under a white sky white trammel of my thighs.
    My mouth on yours forms words I do not know. Shall I call your nipples hautboys? Shall I hide myself in the ombre of your throat? The rosary I find between your legs has made a bedesman out of me. What of the Hermes of your Ways? I part you like a crossroads and fear the god of eloquence and thieves. When you kissed me, my heart was in my mouth, you tore it out to read it, haruspex you. Leave me as a sacrifice to the rhytos of your hair.
    *
     
    Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.
    Time has skewered me through. I am the shadow that marks the sun dial. I am the hands of the clock. I am the clapper on the bell, the tiny body thrashed from side to side, clinging to the swinging wild bell. Dizzy overturning Time, giddy, leering fairground Time. The pleasures and illusions of the free ride on the Ferris wheel. The view from the top in the painted car, the sick drop down. The wheel turns. Roll up! Roll up! one place left! The people in front wave at me and