work

part of the work
is just giving

giving indiscriminately
whatever is asked

just giving
just being ready to give

when another little face
appears open-mouthed

no part of you
must be able to refuse

when it is asked

there will be times
when the giving

is like tearing

be ready
know that you'll never get back

what you gave
that's the deal

from here
to there

giving: that's what the work is.

John Foxx - Oceanic from the Winter

bilberry fever

Yorkshire rears mild gorillas
in beige cardigans
pulled-up beamers in laybys
tupperware and purple fingers
happy primates in the bilberries
two hours at least
for a reet good pie
there they are on the hillsides
lowing, enraptured
browsing away like the last million years
didn't quite happen.

the railway love (decrypting Auden)

The pavement were fields
of harvest

Wheat and down
by the brimming

River I heard a lover
sing under:

'An arch of the railway love has no ending'

Bristolstreet the crowds were fields
harvest brimming the pavement

Lover sing under Riverarch Down
arch as the railway love

Love has no sending under love
by the brimming River I

Under anarch of the railway love
all ending
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.
.
Read the original fragment - here

Or read Auden's original poem complete - here

Auden's poem was full of Eros and Thanatos anyway, but I felt it was a little poetic and cerebral, and wondered if there might be a less heady version lurking somewhere in there, a version that was more yeasty somehow. The more I explored it, the more depth I found in the original, until it became clear it was like a holograph with the message embedded in each fragment. That was probably what drew my attention to the possibility of using it in this way in the first place. I don't know if the Reaper is clearer in my version, but it feels closer to the surface to me, as does the speeding of time. I'm not in any way suggesting it as an improvement, just an exercise in responsive critique. And a bit of fun. And an homage.

wetting arc (à demi-flarf)

bead control, did you mean? maybe
she let her tongue travel
(deduced from heats)
in a Kirchhoff integral (WTF?) of stroking
repeated this a few times
a liquid-solid-interface
and soil cluster,
spreading wettability
and brazing the type of head
repeated stroking
any point
along the length, thickness
capillary, thickness:
'stroking equations'

Repeat unto distraction: and what if she just shoved him the love
she craved?


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.
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H.P. Lovecraft

They always out there sending out spiders and monkeys and a certain kind of iterating crab to read for signs of internet wildness, which shows itself through the unconscious overuse of certain key expressions. Next thing you know a grey wave envelops your blog and blogs like it, like a room slowly filling with sickness, and you know they triangulated your signal and came running through the mist. Someone somewhere is being held down in a bath, giving them names, dictating codes. You don't know it until it's too late, and then you find html where your pictures once interspersed text, like bones, like framework ripping through tissue, through wet frocks and the music is all corrupt files that eat at each other in analogues of hateful children in ditches on the way home suddenly waking to find their mouths untongued. In these circumstances it is always best to stay out of the rain and not try to be too clever. My prescription is always the same: a long fearful day in bed with biscuits and a book by H.P. Lovecraft.

Villanelle Zebub

horse-rid flak over a issue
SHE (long cahoot among mothers)
OF FLIES: a feminist tissue

he wouldn't know; or, knowing, dis' you
you among songbird smothers
horse-rid-flak-over (the issue).

...might be said not to miss you
all along..., here wreathed in wuthers
of wanting (lies a feminist) issue?

(wuthers: noun pl; erosions, breakingdowns, windsweepings, tormentings, halves of moorland fugues.)

grubby virgins - a teenage tenting from memory

80. But though I have wept

(san izal the bastard razorwipe
here a confluence of word-detritus
outflow from the engine
google (echoic resonant of plumbing)

and what it does cough up
a echoed cyclops
sit himself sheepish
like Rab the goosewiper
all the massaged up foie gras

all here shushed for secrets

whitewashed
for the people and stink)

of the san izal encampment
and teenage raining glory

language acquisition device - ongoing poem

the hewn trunk lies in the forest/instinctual dance/approximation/accuracy/failure/Chomsky falls in six rivers before nightfall/the singing child waits for the tiger to pass by

birdshapes here
exploding in shotgunned air
words drifting down

4 years old
a little less, here
LIKIDO/LYKYDOO
for a start
need phonemes here:
ARNTI
or
ARNTEYE
like a tree trunk
and a chainsaw
pagans in the woods
getting somewhere
but not getting it
but working it
but eliciting it
from undifferentiated tissue

how does it start
thing like this
a whatever
a song maybe
it's all song

joining in
an urge an urge
to get with it
applause

for it
no speciality
just special need
to join, partake
to frolic
roll around

just a feel, a reel, a rock,
a sing
a whole anastrophe
cutting wood in the distance
and getting closer, warmer,
getting there, homing in
sparks and shavings flying
around the head

lyre bird with a processor
treetop algorithms
iterating inta
the adultshould

all through songing along
for a kiss
hug
big smile over breakfast
where we all friends now
we? Miracles
coming real cheap.

idyll something maybe hexagram 23

all in a freakin whirl
out the window
corn/wheat
Po
what ugh23
it split on me
in the night
music in your little one singin
all the way down singin
songz of love

heart
LOL
white hart zoomin
like a fat quarry
my burden
ugh
down all down

this burn this steam of rooftop gold

just a quick blur of already dead

she's smoking more now she's pregnant
like a tacit protest
every bite on it like a grimace
in a baby's face
you, you, you, why

you got any cravings at all she asks
answers herself:
just cigs, me, that's all
they stick their hand right up
case of a cord prolapse
hurts like fuck and last time
it was a great big nigger

word hangs like that
the air all weaving
a knot around it
the word a huge bloody hand up
the back of a human puppet
squeezing its face up
whup whup whup
baby with no oxygen
and a cord round its neck

midnight
under poplars
all in a quick blur
of already dead

slept with him and him
and this and that
he's not up to much
don't ask -- just the fags, the cigs, me
a baby's head
breathe like that breathe
someone ought to say something here
like a baby's head in a plastic bag
someone ought to
full of smoke an' that,
breathe like you wasn't born
you was only shat
someone

knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel

augoeides
augment adon
shining one my
firefox extension
add on converse
converse alignment
adjunct
adject
augoeides
break the words down into
self becoming self
other above brother
extra flowing let it
understanding standing under
like a rabbit in a ray
in a lit wood humming
with temporal lobe elision
in a fit would bumming
me out radar station
watchtower of the top beyond it
all a bit good at becoming
above chakra station 1
trepanation without tools
language trepanation
and the very essence flop
I googled augoeides and this:
and I already had trepanation above
so I sensed the Houseman test
at work the synchronous turn
yes the essence flop
like jelly cartoon stuff
like a belly a spoon
an arriving soon
into and all down you
I'm here all the time the way
here your update
run software now?
Remind me in 0 days
Remind me in 10 minus 10 days
run now run
the Christo-Krishna-Adon
extension
run baby run baby run
I'm gaggin for it

Yahweh

So Yahweh can do anything
but He hasn't yet done everything
and one day He gets this idea
that starts eating at Him
what if
what if
after all He can do anything, so
He can do this thing
He can prove that He doesn't exist
and like an obsession it eats Him up

and after a while He just thinks fuck it
let's see

and He gets Himself some graph paper
and a slide rule
and starts calculating probability
as honestly as He can
all the while with that feeling
that you get on a cliff edge
almost wanting to jump
and the air kind of crackling
with suicide
and He sees the outcome
before He even writes in the last number
sees it coming
and can't stop Himself
because it's just what is
and you can't get out of the way
of yourself when you're hurtling
towards what you just are
or are not

and then He's just not there
like a book falling from a sleeping hand
hitting the bedroom floor, closing

no pain, no smoke, no earthquakes - nothing
just a dead story.
The End.

Broken-hearted Buddha - first draft

So the Buddha gets the flash
that is something like the onset of labour
and he thinks this is it, the real thing
but it moves on and he is suddenly aware
of the air shaking with birds
and the earth moving to the distant drumming
of elephants feet in the forest
and then he is aware that there are more orgasms
than he can count happening in that second
and the world swoons with bliss
and it's something he's never quite considered before
all that feeling, that experience lighting up
across the world. It's quite heady.
But then something else phases in,
and he becomes aware of all the pain
of a billion creatures dying in torment
the world filled with their cries,
and this almost sweeps him away, almost
pushes him into madness, and he remembers
some old movie about a man who has X-ray eyes
and can see through everything, and it's too much.
He feels like that, sitting there with this future
memory shaking him, and he feels something go,
something snap in his chest like a bowstring
and he knows his heart just broke, and at that instant
he feels something like lightning shoot up his spine
and burst out the top of his head, and then he gets it
the pain the joy the heartbreak, and then he knows
that without the pain he's just a smartass, without
the pain he's no Buddha.
And then he knows
he's got to stay
then he starts to get it
the Buddha thing.

Photo Opportunity at the G8 Summit

George Bush Junior
has a bottle of alcohol-free beer
poured into a glass
and it's poured badly
and it all fizzes up
and the froth runs down
the outside of the glass
onto the table
and he sits there
with the world-leaders
in front of the cameras
and he puts the glass
to his mouth
and takes a little sip
only it's not a sip
because it's all froth
so he takes whatever it is
that you take
when you suck in froth
and I'm wondering what he's doing
sucking froth like that
not waiting for it to settle
and become beer again
like maybe he thinks
we wouldn't notice the froth
and think he's just taken a slug
of lager in the sunshine
grinning and chatting
in between changing the world
for the better
but that's not what's happening
he's sucking froth
all lather and head
and he thinks we don't know.

Anthropic Rimbaud

Rimbaud is 10 to the power of 500 potential word clusters massing in Parisian night

it's not possible that this rain could fall here at this time

not even one of these words brought here by no mistral will never not fall nowhere near

and no one out late on a drunked up bender of black glass streetfalls could ever hit this combination by chance not by mere drumming of dead fingers on the tables at the rue des chiens

bodies of the impossible
drift

deep in dark river
trailing digits
mud
all of nothing

mouthless

ugly fact:
nature
a dead cat
wake all night

songs of itself
no longer
roaring

over pebbles
.
.
.
.
.
.

(les pierres/les cloches/les silences)

wind giant blow poem with a virtually unreadable and painful abdominal mid-section for Francois Rabelais - only a riff at present.

the wind giant was pretty much invisible to humans as they couldn't really resolve him other than as a sort of disturbance of the air a thing that shook the night and stilled birds in the day -- he came on with whirlwinds and zephyrs playing about his shaggy head came onward and was gone

when they caught him and got him down he lay stretched on the sand suddenly still and calmed but watchful silent visible from the flurries of grit that delineated him while they tried to force him to speak

what he finally said was forced coaxed nursed cajoled
expectorated with haunting liquors

stroked tortured summoned forth like a djinn falling for an old trick
humoured joked with fishwives
beaten persuaded reasoned

argued tricked snicked snecked
bullied patronised matronised

god-bothered belly-laughed
grated greeted groated

mocked caught up in webs of wheedle words browbeaten weaseled

fleeted tempted pre-empted
gutshot left to all but rot

batted unhatted desquamated

peeled like pigeons in pie
elicited
charged down like an elk weak with laughter berated blethered

bleated unravelled torn worn
worshipped shamed flamed unreeled bezeeled wittered

withered bored blah-blahed clawed
pontificated unto until desperation set in unfolded unfurled
desiccated like a mummy with a natron hangover

extracted
impacted
distracted

headed off at the pass

rambled on bambled distressed
pressed into lipservice wearied with all night besettings by small animals

blearied tugged fugged bugged
blugged like a ballan wrasse prising away limpets

unwound browned ripped unzipped as though with a rusty blade
flipped cripped and lipped

with great linguistic derangements of his person
with mighty bloody assaults upon his towers of air
with appeals to citizens to hurl upon him symbolic fruits
with witty ensnarings of his logical faculties
with entrapments and clever paintings into corners
with befriendings and amorous words followed by precipitous violent assaults
with many encirclings and sudden rushes forth
with pleasing and righteous finality

fleeced and flayed and fucked like a dugout canoe and fretted and fondled and frigged like sixteen sheets to a bad wind and fingered like injuns and forced like there was nothing for it and fleshed all out of him boned with bear traps only one reluctant squeak only one enfeebled fart of a faff of a word:

'Blow'.

He said nothing else and quickly dissipated into his own shimmering and was gone leaving no one who could understand his one little word that sat there between them all in the hot air like a petulant firefly -- and then on the horizon miles away they watched his silhouette forming up towering black and storming over the dunes heading north where a big blow was gathering busy with his own thoughts his own heading his own long deep important and most urgently requested windblowing of his anabatic storming and isobaric weathercock.

all you aren't love poem

all you aren't love poem
all you aren't got me bad
all the gap a mouth eats
my looking in
for it swallow my

approach let me

-- awakened then to
the-then-looked-away and --

then like this, like:

all day in everything she moves

away half away all away
this: away that: away

(alls them above ^ is vectors of mouth
is strophic notations of fingers)

nothing now I look all over you

and nowhere now none of it
till my shout runs back out
and my share now gone of it

dust of unwanting uninterest
underscored all you aren't

Here:

nothing now, all over you
.
.
.
.