This just IS the best version.

aesop's fox breaks loose

it is in its ungoverned incessant picking and unpicking and working and that it resembles a small child and that even when the batteries have expired and will continue to tug at a thing and tease threads from it and until its eyes spill out and it is finally broken and expired and whirring itself down foolishly and on the Christmas carpet and/or if it was a live thing perhaps until it finally turned from so much persistent agitation and showed its teeth and so wearisome had the worrying become and that was only anyway inspired by this attitude of careless and though fervent working away and to some unreachable and irrelevant end and anyway now purely because it knows no other settlement and/or closure and simply cannot rest without further mischief caused that it might at least stir again inside itself and from this least and most spurious of all stimulations
.
.

4mm float

there was a voyeuristic humour in it that stretched like 1875 ectoplasm through the transatlantic wainscots and almost made him jump though it was certain that it in its gathering impulse
knew it not nor how it span it being the closest it had recently been to sexual delight such that all else was subsumed there in that earnestness and that scenting of conflicted pheromone hunger
.
.

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

—Nazi Reich Marshall Hermann Goerring.
.
.

Richie Havens—Freedom (Woodstock)

Jack's turtle (with errors)

What is that Kerouac haiku about a turtle floating on a log? Something like this, though I don't remember it perfectly:

turtle floating downstream
on a log—
looking up

I think this captures Kerouac's essence of the little satori of haiku. In those two words 'looking up' at the end the scene suddenly opens up and we get this glimpse of the serious wild heart of a turtle, its earnestness, our projected anthropomorphic pride and strength, its survival, its pragmatism and realism, its serious up-arching of the neck 'wondering' WTF is going on with this new transport...

It's comical in the sense that all creatures are comical in their necessary self-seriousness, and it conveys both the comedy and the quite wonderful tenderness of this scene with utter concision and brilliance. I am in that moment suddenly, and my heart pours out to it just because of the sheer innocence he conveys. And this is the thing... if you can focus the energy of words like that in haiku, then you create a little nexus through which people can drift into other realities. I am there floating and laughing and crying in turtle world, and somehow knowing something I didn't quite know before. It's worth a lot of struggle, this haiku stuff, just to hit one moment like that.

Apologies if I misremembered it. It was something pretty close.

Edit: Oh, now I just looked it up... It's actually this:

A turtle sailing along
on a log,
Head up

So I remembered it pretty badly, but in fact it makes the point far better in the original version than in my half-assed remembrance. Interesting use of punctuation and capitals there too, to solve some obvious haiku issues about pacing and spacing.

Anyway, I still think that that tiny line, 'Head up', in context, is one of the most moving and memorable and profound lines I've ever read in haiku, or maybe any other poetry for that matter. Haiku is like Sinatra's New York, I think. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere... Most of us can't make it. It's the three line pressure cooker.


.
.

I made hen noises
in the grandparents' henhouse—
the hens stopped dead
.
.

who now understands
the quiet of cluttered rooms—
how the heart listens
.
.

Number 2 by Xmas will do for me...

the snowman's nose
was a sweet potato—
sheep got it
.
.

sycamores grey
against confused sky—
warm damp winter
.
.

Vegas nerve

lacking the early association of horses & death—Madeleine Shine

.............—even without headlamps & swerves
.................. sweeping rowan silhouettes/vistas of pure light

[the way home already known to involve
a traversing of many weeps and freshets] but but

...............zen/y/atta mond/atta—
..................—look such waifs of the nostratic

but no he cried there so silly in firelight but no
—as though such admonishment might alter my feeling
for his sister and her collection

of strange dolls she spun into talking every hourless window
where in the attic her mother died slow
....................................................(oh still channelling throughout
....................................................her many pets would later claim)

slow as peaches rotting
down there in old desert cans

from the Crimea and the wastes I have for you such news such news

"Vegas?"—we even ask him that—"Vegas?"
.............how kindly he gaze in his crepuscules there

(they talk now all is
of psychism and drugs
—outside/the moon
at some perigee
& no longer even
purpose between us)

..............here at the flitting hour
..............where with such eyes/
..............he jumps forever in
..............the chests of the deceased

—I doubt all the perigee of it now

"Vagus" he says—"something different..."

["they persuaded me back
started me like an engine"]

(these are red tiles that lead nowhere)

grey wings enfold no no no
wings enfold................no are no wings................enfolding no enfold

facedown//harking//black mucus
something grey
...................... enfolds
.............. something/nothing

—I doubt all the tenderness of it now
,
,
,

this winter rite unflarfed

resolution: fifteen days from now an animal
will occur in your slow rollers & breakers

over and in and because of your misunderstood
will commence discriminately to devour

unpleasantness, pain of delivery, the sleek

[all this could be still changed
by a few firefox add-ons
some modules of latent proxy]

tigers nowhere now just the wholehearted of exo-skeleta
lost at dusk in the woods so complex

we have no longer time for anything

[those americans reviling the french
calling them those names]

when it really came out it was as lungs
not cartoon organs but actual and present
all purple and wet so like newborns///

now sex because of the nervous assault
seeming tantamount to some event

is only in fact a routine inflammation
fading quickly given the reach

of politics and bullying issues as still

an eventual monster continues to advance
with name labels at its little neck that we

find like ourselves in the wet morning
soon still able to love

.............................................the third waiting is soon over

foliage and of some creeping
continues to advance

now we see unclearly such an essence

that these are the most lightened
of days when the boy even in his caper

soon knows in his own flood and flux
that through the lens of a poem

is he unknown
he continues to advance
.
.

gorilla loose on highstreet

the body has gone underground due to widespread persecution - Madeleine Shine

in those times of the interior
of antimony
of ambergris
of kohl

of Zanzibar & Shendy
dig my grave I will dig yours such—in wet vellum we go stark laughing

it was reported ............huge grinning black men
...................covered in fur

........................rush/from behind trees
......................clutch/white*ladies/to them
................in fevers/of amorous shivering

..............Freud bitten himself to death oh fearful greek katyusha

.....................................................on a cigar of all nations

...................Reich askance the whole winter's edge fluting
............................................in orgone boxes invisible cancers

Jung suddenly addressed with fondness his stockpot in the tower
..........................and was unconscionably requited

(my half-brother now the fucking summertime duke fuck off
...........................into your...............walled garden!)

this ape thing and not universally acknowledged as myth

keep keep it for your aghast moments
.
.
.
.
(Published in The Cleave January 2009)

.

the daily mash and mr ratzinger

I love edgy stand-up

the fish give themselves one night a year

in some oblique similarity to Jules Verne
who stowed always a rope in case of fire
I assess women as potential partners
by how they might operate
adrift on an open boat

at night on the South Atlantic—
would they make pies
from triggerfish eyes
would they fill swim bladders
with broth made of dorados
hang them on such albatross air

as was then available
to sparkle about us as
Christmas approached &
would they administer
fish-oil enemas
to our clogged children

(the high protein
diet with little roughage is known to afflict
firstly the young) unluffing
the sail

with the other hand &
talking of William Bligh
of Poon Lim of secrets
of navigation

by the long atlantic swells
would they commit acts
of random sex during
our tossing sleep
at such a time
at such a time

in all things would they give themselves unstinting
to this new narrow life?

I think Alain Bombard
may now be the only girl for me
.
.

Alfie

your pain—
my knowing that I
can't help you
.

this winterval upscorch

Oh that is great I feel like a student writer sometimes—The Weaver

O that is now great i feel like
a student writer sometimes who
took hisself to the well the well and became
all of elephants so right so there
in such the updraught
that shook with stars
that wailed and shone
heaved hisself up and jumped
all for the searching the quest O
for that and for the wishful shuck of it
so he jumped and the jumping
was found to be good
and the falling was itself
a thing to be discerned and disregarded
the falling O the falling
abandoned of fetish and frailty
through moss and masonry
years had grown there
in the s[plashing]
the shadow
had grown
it reached it reaches it reacheth
out upon him over him at him grasping
though he unfolds like thighs like wings
burnished as all bewilder
he wrests again from it
these secrets of light
he thrusts he thrusts
down upon him rain stars
as into other worlds he flies
Sindbad and Husheng and Ahriman
Ahura Mazda god of lightbulbs
eat up with alacrity the bean soup
the fields of gold
spread before them
but his name is not that not that
only in his wanting
he flies now over waving emmer fields
over fertility and mooning fastnesses
marvels swirling at his tail
look only this he says coming
in the dust at her feet so laced so henna
I have seen all I will not tell of it
but will now breed sleek horses
for a career that I happen
and you will shine with me
O woman of shaking forest mist
I will clutch at you with my shine
my shake my shazam
like unto into we will shimmer loud ahence
for my name of names
forever now of wells and falling
so ended the period of his first great wanting
and lo a child was reared of the well
and its secrets were unguarded
and upon the land the curse
and the shining
and often she danced as a wild dog
and through the fogs and veils
and upon him
she laid herself to sleep
as a blue feather
.
.

all your openings

opening now to you
your new life your old

old life resprung
of waves and pulses

across warm wet
fields at night

of this of this
hurt of opening

we sing up disaster
opening still

eyes and pores
backlit with perception

of death the peeling back
of warm wet paper

from old walls
singing disaster

opening waveforms
into a woods

where you are open
peeling back as death

open as warm wet paper
lighted with perception

from old walls
waving with disaster

hurt of old wet walls
a lighted waveform

opening the waves
the pulses of fields

at night this open paper
pulling shapes of eyes

and pores new life in pulses
of waved walls collapsing lighted

as that kiss in waves and pulses
that tells all of collapses

of fields of waves
only this truth waving

of you wanting
what I want, like paper

to be here
in the same fields wanting

collapsing now
in light
.

.

Martha

three sheets to the wind

my parents are incontinent and known for it

everywhere they go or have-ever-been
are their leavings their extrusions

I don't get it
all this ordure everywhere

even at their own funerals
they'll be quietly sloughing

it into their boxes
we'll hear them in there

giggling about it
like it's still intoxicating, funny, joyous
after all this time

I'm sending them nappies
for Christmas
but I know they'll be sent back
......................full
.
.

casu marzu O seepage of unends

it wasn't lack of sensitivity or some inability
to surrender to the moment or to open wide

with some rushing of trains through sweeps
of open land in close Autumn it was just

that there was nothing in any of it to feel.

it was a sort of dead world it had created

in itself from which it glowered out upon
all of humanity with a look of machinery

that was running down towards collapse
that had somehow become aware of itself

that was displeased with the condition
that now wished pain upon others

in this way and others it had become
a rotten thing bringing violence

though those sponges and foliation
which had grown themselves to it




.
.

who is the best ever screamer?

notes about the island woman

he comes on their fifteenth anniversary says look I have done calculations you have since our wedding consumed one large deep wide lake of beer a rushing tributary of wine all of it now cold urine flowing down noxiously poisoning the ocean and its exotic life.

I know this is true she says but I was compelled at all times by an urge to fill myself against the fluttering emptiness which afflicts me like the stirring of a large blue fowl in my gut.

in addition he says you have smoked an entire arid volcanic outcrop a small Galapagos running with strange lizards of cigarettes whose smoke even now blackens and clangs at the brass troposphere.

she says I know this also and again the urge to be filled to my farthest extremities was the cause of all that incontinent sucking.

I have made for you he says an island a floating land a Sargasso of paper smoked tobacco ash filter wadding it floats on a lake of cold alcohol-rich urine nothing will live on this island not even the strange lizards nothing will grow in this lake you will drift there always alone with ashen winds.

she stands with her hands above her eyes like the peak of a cap that shields her from the sun but there is no sun as he pushes off the little leather boat and sculls away from the island. she feels her skin harden her face stretch falls to all fours her brain shrinking back reptilian runs to the lake's edge watches him receding her tongue flicks tasting the air a hiss between her teeth.

the wind comes. the rain is cool on her skin. she lives. she lives.
.
.
.
(Published in Chimaera, May 2008)

a man threw his shoes
at George Bush in Baghdad—
George never threw shoes
.
.

age six my brother
lifted the lids off the hives—
they got him alright
.
.

his impulse
was to celebrate winter—
the room waited
.
.

the girdle sensation

in that her presence was itself
.......................some zonesthesia past mere atmospheric cinch
he breathed......tight.....shallow......would not look
................................................................would not feel

noticeably different yet for a week or more.......... the girdle sensation/the swoon

of her a hive or several or more hives or hives of hives... that hemmed
..........................upon him
..........................as poetic asphyxia

....................the cincture the drowning the press
.......................which in such ways......accompanies

....................an attempt to perform
some delicate and intricate task at the very limit
.........................of ability. like that

........................................he wanted to smash it.
.
.
.
(Published in The Cleave Jan 2009)

some antidote at least

owls yapping crazy
all night outside—
my glum reflection

stuff about haiku

Haiku started as something different, an opening (called a hokku) to a renga (a sequence of linked strophes with specific form). It's become a thing in itself, and it's become quite a misunderstood thing. The idea that haiku involves some 5/7/5 syllable count is based upon a misunderstanding. Haiku uses 5/7/5 morae in Japanese, and morae are not exactly syllables. Japanese morae/moras can be consonants in some contexts, for instance. So Kerouac had the right idea when he invented the short freeform American haiku, as well as the pop haiku.

To write something approximating a traditional haiku, you need a phrase and a fragment, with some attempt at a kireiji (cutting word) between them. A trad haiku isn't all one sentence, and it's not three fragments, it's in two parts. Anyway, haiku doesn't need the syllable count, doesn't use capitalisation or punctuation (though em dashes can approximate kireiji), doesn't need anything other than being a short, pithy, three-lined poem about direct, concrete observation, though some sort of twist in the meaning is useful. (These rigid, capitalised, 5/7/5 English haiku are just clunky.) It should never really be too abstract, should not include references to time, and ideally should include some reference to the season.

my window open
to all the night—
sheep coughing out there

halfway through she stops—
she's rushing around
weaving secret things

forgot about the Roches...

listen out for Robert Fripp playing lead guitar...

Odetta dying just after Barack Obama gets elected feels somehow right, if it could ever feel right for her to die. At least she lived to see the moment, if not its outcome. The Neocons who lied to the world, who created Al Quaeda in show trials so that they could maintain the military hegemony of the US, who created the final ten years of the Cold War when it should have been long over, are gone, and probably for some time to come. Will it make things any better? Yes it will. At least for a while. Right now we need strong symbolism, and Obama is symbolism that all the world is reading with a little more hope. RIP Odetta. Sadness. But some optimism too.

Odetta: 1930 - Dec 2 2008. The passing of one very big voice.

john coltrane
piping the bright rats
to the falls
.

same room
same time

same stuff

sameness
is same enough
.

ten more cigarettes
and this old red wine—
night blowing bubbles
.
.

I think a person
just blew past on those high winds—
December breathes deep
.
.

helicopter yoghurt (to Alfie)

there on the world
they sit closed and tight
as dormice
with traffic zooming
around them

whup...........whup............look

even my mother ..................
with that................look it shines

I approach them carefully
with embraces
............................to sweep them back

they are skitterish as dustbowls
—gone wild around me
but damn it anyway that

they have come back to me
in such shuddering beds of soft acid
that

nothing but the old cries
to be with them through all nights
nothing now ....................but that
.
.

it seemed all so flat—
as I walked over the bridge, though,
the world changed

box by the window
where the night comes in—
i'm just gone now

i've got a silly hat
and i trust no one
—now an owl peers out

Made Uneasy

deserving or relevant or not they exploded
over the lakes and ponds
of the Western forests
while I always spoke always
.....................like that it was like stars
that ruptured little sacs and sent such rills streaming
and all night though we talked
while lights burned in water
one little event slicked throughout
and neither of us
could quite.............. say
what it was
though both of us remarked
when it arrived
.........................and both of us
saw it depart like an invisible person
who was now done with it
like the curling white smoke
of lavender on some limestone hillside very far away

.....................................she of course didn't question
but turned again to her flours
...............................with an impassiveness
at which I
could only marvel

knowing nothing but her weft of distant herbs
.
.

see into your own future

John Coltrane blows ashen wind at the stars

Jack and Bill and Allen
were so incontinent
so profligate
with their feelings
that even a dead cactus
crushed by the wreckage
of a fallen aircraft nearby
would not fail to arouse them

squatting there in the desert
in sudden angst
already turning yellow

fuck me says Bill
you see that?
not any more says Allen
oh do it anyway says Jack
and he laughs like stars
of quiet thunder
all down the road
from the New Jersey turnpike
to Santa Cruz

with their poems
just waiting to ship out

with those songs
of the open sea
arrayed before them

as so many fingers of quiet mescal
.
.

so rational creationism and celery salt

so i overheard this bunch of lads in a pub
talking about girls

how haughty they were
how superior
how intoxicated with all of it
(either of them—it doesn't matter)

it could have been ten thousand years ago
circling kopjes on the veldt
hammering out the music of fear

imagine that

imagine dancing
dressed as a wolf

hoping she watches closely

your bare feet in dust in firelight
in ochre and spit
in shapes
in love with this moment
all your fathers
before you
buried in your mother's chest

so many nutrients
for the spirit that is quiet

fierce as shaking trees

as the stone drums spiral in

so big so little, all of it forever

forever yours
.
.

poetry your most ardent enemy

children of the night
what music they make — Dracula


//what is it with tragedy//

how the world flows out in strings
that remain unmanifest
known only by their edges

in 1000 years this will appear ridiculous

but Ur Nammu was a keen archaeologist
who delighted in discovery

the very first Gulf War
is between Yahweh and all humanity

O how little how fervent we scrape
for such broken vessels
containing such nothing

the louder you scream
the faster we go

oh all night she kept at it
rubbing away like that

.................................................let's sing it again
.................................................with real feeling
forever

love and nothing

now bring yourself here
and shut up

we are almost cooked

we are doing all of history
in a sudden flurry of skirts

she seemed almost unaware of her legs

and Mediterranean salt
(a mile deep they say)

hush

or you will wake my creatures
.
.

song to the siren

this could really be 3000 years ago

kiss riff

this little gentle kiss arcing
from the sky
as she reached down
and that reaching itself
that lowering
her eclipsing of the world
the sky the sun
the coolness that came with her
the sudden warmth and coolness
her smell of grass and daylight
her aura of wild birds
her seriousness
that floated there
her weight suddenly
her reality and closeness
her focus
her sheer engagement
the whirling of all of that
which was beyond all sex
and all confinement
and category
all he wanted to do
was hold her face
and kiss it
with the gratitude
of outer planets

until rain made it slowly stop
.
.

edges riff (notes for a poem)

'in the middle of the night
we go walking in our sleep' - Billy Joel

not understanding that the feeding of infants
involves an ancient revolution
of the spirit
I didn't know
that my neural pathways
had faded into choked forest trails
and that I was being regarded
with some impatience
by something infinitely older
than myself
from the shrieking treetops

he stamped his huge tiny feet
and threw food in my face

until I learned better manners
.
.

blue and silver lights
around my field of vision—
neuritis is back

Cliché and meta-awareness in poetry.

The thing is to avoid as far as possible unconsciousness and that drifting into cliché that comes from being hypnotised into one's own poetic fervour. If it feels nice and warm and proud, you know that somewhere it seeped in while you slept. Cliché is all sorts of things; it's not just known phrases or constructs; it can be in the feel or the atmosphere; it can be in the reference to a mood. Some poems are entirely cliché in that they depend wholly upon warm tracts that approximate other warm tracts elsewhere, and they are effectively unconscious paraphrasings of earlier poems. This is almost a universal malaise in poetry, especially poetry that situates itself at some earlier position in the canon. (And why would anyone ever want to do that, if not to avail him/herself of the scenic portfolio of that point in history?)

But if it IS conscious, then of course something else is happening, or rather is being done. And that is the essence of it— is being done, not is happening... The poet is actually active in this, not just sleepwalking with elves. And that activity says that the poet is still alive, has managed to keep one eye just about focused on the oncoming monstrosity and bafflement of life, and has just about managed to scrawl something honest to send back. There's almost no way to achieve this other than to write obliquely and in some coded fashion. In that there is at least the hope that something will get through without interference, that someone somewhere will somehow arrive at the appropriate nexus to decode something from the static.

If you lapse into cliché then no one will ever know exactly what it was that you were transmitting, as all cliché is effectively dead language with hopelessly imprecise meaning. If it has ever been used in more than one context, then it has become ambiguous, and all precision has been subverted. This is why the deliberately imprecise and ambiguous is the only real accuracy available in language. It allows, finally, the reader to receive his/her own message through the medium of another human. That makes true poetry a form of divination for the reader; and that requires the reader to bring accuracy, courage, concern and honesty to the reading. It is no longer about entertainment, it is about the consciousness of warfare and flesh and mortality, and the reader is now the writer, without whom no poem is ever completed.

But all of this is also untrue. As it says at the door to the Magic Theatre, 'Price of admission, your mind'... (Hermann Hesse -- Steppenwolf)

Etc.
.
.

yet another light
drops from the ceiling--
someone stop me

killers shaiku

somebody told me
that you had a boyfriend—
who looked like a girlfriend?
.................................................

reading my new book
of Kerouac haiku—
the night smells of sick

in the desert's heave
I read of Demeter—
a bee walks on my hand
.
.

she's already weaving
at first light—
my little spider

baptism riff (poem about a local murder of a random taxi driver)

face fruz in so animate rictus
in ices of grief see him ....................slicked hard
..................................................from Haworth to Keighley
.................[crime shine/ring/eject/spasm/spush
.........[through brass the hedges............shiver of night

there by The Merry Melon

.............man .............under streetlight /sur les pierres/
.............a screwdriver and a hammer /quand le cloche sonnait douze/
.............................................a pound of bananas /les blancs debarquent/
........waiting to choke for a taxi some set of box spanners
........ratchet/drosophila/molehead/cervix


.................................... just so damn dazzling he cries shortly after this
^{GSOH but frigid and unkempt seeks defining event}

[preferably Pakistani
or Bangladeshi]

......................... /in grey wainscot green cctv his hands grow/up it came upon me like TV signal fire of the lambs swaying so the light-cortex of orchidectomy/petals inside wolves/lycanthropes agrasp the

dancing body in a ditch let alone like teeth they flamed drug wars and grooming
........................................ young white girls fucked hare's running
.........................................across car bonnets 240 they bet starters for Spring

.............................amphetamines/paedophilia (rivers
...............................of white blood) nous devons soumettre

.......................battered blind with a hammer tenderised such with sea salt
and rosemary his heart wall punctured balsamic au bapteme
.......................................................................to fluxes of inviability with a slothead
.who violated girls also poisoned sleepy aryan children in rivers and once drowned a dog with his
batchelors even of jism in the air so nascent a corruption how swirl like sex-stuff in a bath solid as stringy semen-soap calorised into aspic of the murder melon he hovers golden as flower boxes

look always this flurry of glissades


................................................................................vindicate with this stuffing

..............................................of half o clock lies
...................................................is all sweptaway titters of dead petals for the keeper
.
.
.

ten guinea fowls
on warm tiles round the chimney—
all scared of the snow

a slate slid from the roof
& took off his ear—
high winds tonight

all night
they couldn't figure
the quiet treasure map

electricity
and frosted grass—
the night air whirls with leaves

she has that look
of distant need—
our clothes flutter like flags

hammering from next door
—bare trees like river deltas
viewed from space

under a flurry
of teals—clouds
of eager tadpoles

haiku

under thick grey ice
tiny hearts slowing—
those frogs are not dead
.
.

gorilla

vast splashing black
and silver pique—
gorilla in the bath
.
.

the death between us

...............................................I was in two minds
both of them sucking swallows off power lines
........................grunting
there in the wet fields
........................but wait

—no means no—
O this winter will carry secrets to the grave—
a look of transpiration about him through the smog-ice—

Pshaw! it means this in English but he don't grasp
.............between this and this
...............................some other event

...............................back and forth back and
..................................it dances
................like some evil child in memory

.........................this means this
.........................but no not now

like...... this....... he ........picked at her
threw her into some myth
that would shortly expire

look I was watching you fall into it
......moments stuttering by
........... a car across the road scared/counting

...................waiting now for the blow
.........the glass flooding ....out

... was always............... coming,
there in tumbledown oils of language
dry.................... doors flapping

in winds/winds

[there in the bath covered in hair
sitting upright looking at him
malevolent, matted, masticating]

........................monster

.........................where you got shoved and shaved
...........................................................wriggled like a

O jolly it up sweetheart
with your inner fires

.......................[yes even this fetish
...............he has of light]

now we are stifled kittens
murmuring lastly in the barrel

.........now so sudden you need to know
....................................all of it

.............................................now

..................my last tooth already gone

........................through the cranial arch
..........................................of the dearest
.
.
.