Twinning Worcester with Gaza City

It was naturally suspected that the Worcester town councillors were motivated more by the idea of free holidays to the world's most exciting adventure playground than by any notions of altruism or cultural exchange.

quiet surge (based on statements made by the Taliban and Al Qaeda)

This is surge lite—Maj. Gen. Ret. Bob Scales (2009)

Don't give me another Vietnam—George.H.W. Bush (1990)

Chinese HN-5 anti-aircraft missiles are with the Taliban, we know this... and we are worried where do the Taliban get them, some of these weapons have been made recently in Chinese factories—Unidentified senior Afghan government official reported by the BBC (2009)

the new president
the apostate president
whose grandfather's soul
cries from his grave
for the blood of the unbeliever
who brings shame upon his house
this new president
says he will surge quietly
in Logar, in Wardak and Helmand
in the holy provinces
where the Russians sent their sons
to die miserably fighting our fathers
where the British
sent their sons to die miserably
fighting our great grandfathers

our weapons are from China
the old USSR the US the UK
(we like the weapons of our enemies)
from our brothers in Syria
in Saudi Arabia and Iran

surge quietly Hussein Obama
this land will eat you quietly
we will be here when you have gone
when you have taken the flag-wrapped
bodies of your sons
home in shame and defeat

you will never be enough
you will never have long enough
before your nation weakens
grows weary again

send us your unwanted sons
Hussein Obama
this dry earth needs their blood
surge lite surge quiet
we will devour all of you
lite and quiet and slow

insha' Allah
.
.

(Publication forthcoming in the next issue of New Verse News)

we lost her
in the high autumn winds—
goodbye little cat
.
.

what will become
of our old bent apple tree?
sweet-scented smoke
.
.

Gerald Kaufman telling it like it is about Israeli war crimes.

kittens

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1296126090432829344

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/12/worlddispatch.brianwhitaker

no longer yourself

in the room with all the boxes
ghosts are scratching

she waits there three days without food
light or the sound of waterfalls
flooding in her stopped ears
and then knows
she's done with it

outside in late afternoon cherry
trees hang white with dreams
.
.

the secret policeman speaks of gnosis

after fucking drunkenly in the haunted gymnasium
& evacuating at dawn it seemed most likely
we would go back to being strangers.
I looked after her car as she drove airily away waving
mosquitoes and toxins from her face. I imagined both of us
felt a little awkward in such pale circumstances.

at the radio check-in the secret policeman looked into my bag
with an instrument that detected
& measured enmity and significance.
you are officially no one & nothing he told me smiling.
your spirit doesn't even trip the needle you are nothing.
you are the equivalent of a dead person
who did nothing and meant nothing during life
who left no traces even
in the dream-behaviours of those he knew.

this does not make you anonymous or free.
it's not a psychodynamic void by which you will transcend
your customary submissive resignation into the exultant
furniture of one who finally knows a mystic extinction
of all ego and identity breaking into new levels
of gnosis—it is merely a label we employ
to describe those we regard as least
manifest for our monitoring purposes.
you are free to go. have a nice life. he waved me through
like a ghost like something that could be easily
transmitted through all further official inspections
with just a flutter of his small blue hand. there was more importance
& significance in his little wave than I had ever achieved
in life or would achieve in death.

collecting my papers I ran to the incoming sign
where she had promised to meet me all those years ago.
there would be no gymnasiums this time. no waving away. I vowed
that before anything else we would buy a hotbed, would
take it with us to the ten fertile shines where we would spend
the next year or so preparing. others in our background
would do most of the animate parts of all this.
we were almost entirely spirit now
lost in our own body cavities, stroking our nerve endings
into shimmering fields of revolutionary parallax.

her flight upended gently in the wet fields at dusk. we ran
with arms outstretched to wave each other into readiness.
.
.

I want to go to this place.

chunks cavort

goal in this world is to sell you all some fucking
—Flarf

seems like I can tear chunks
off my head now I don't remember
which bottle is mine but the peach fragments

keep uprooting coming out in handfuls
of moss and dreck it's like tearing an old
teddy apart watching the sponge fly

bye bye like I'm mining in mining in
bottles everywhere sparkling full of urine
and old wiles oh that was a big one

made me jump as a cantilever unearthed
silence beneath it in cell-earths sleep
it takes tools after a time to get further

under the dream layers so sticky so thick
with proximal fervour and tall sways
of lightning trees and the jumping shakes

I have such tools you don't believe me
but I have removed my own teeth
a swift gargle with vodka and a leverage

a short shouting pain is nothing to me and
two more hours and we'll reach the soul
hiding there under twigs waiting finally

for the rescue when the river drains out
that's all we're waiting on here that river
running out through the eyes ears mouth

of mouths be with me now in the wind
of excavation let the spine unwind
as a toy into the sheath of itself untaxed

now fuck your pratka buddha
fuck fuck the pratka buddha
loudly will we shudder
fuck the pratka buddha

.
.

inkarette

you could hear the black smokers guffaw
deep down on the ocean's broken floor
a chapter of starfish all winked above
that wild night Squid Black inked love
.
.

A cleave version of How can it be that the gas chamber door opens inwards—click to view

(Published in The Cleave March 2009)

the night's travel

in and now out the same door
like all knives whirling
our utter politics in collisions
of limestone pavements

across all this she travailed
with sepia sandbags
of County Clare

all sailroads to traverse
and only 8 O clock
by the whale's chime

this big hand by the night's wild travel
points to 12
the little hand
flickers and stops

iris of heart attack hope
and love of small things
and wild places

be certain now be sure

it's that time
in between
where the hands don't count

it's okay to be scared here
to lie down and breathe
to lie a little
before waking
.
.
.
(Published in Poetry SZ March 2009)

Oh this was good...

How old was Titian when he died then...

urges

twenty ton steel boat
shaking with engine urges—
meltwater rises
.
.

speak ill of the dead

They are the exalted birds and their intercession is required indeed
—Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

the Blitz by May 1941.......43,000 civilians
many of them horribly
as cellars filled with sewage escaping
from burst heads that lay with the corn
dollies of Dresden whose skin grew vapid
as tubers of fire and wind whose horses
were silhouettes capering on sidewalks
of armour and ashen ghosts whose Pompeiis
cooked down like stock unstuck in time
and there in the rising of the Thames
and the Elbe the horses at night
that came to feed on the shadows
.......................................of the dead

.....................that a three year old child
............................................in Gaza City
who dies with a broken back (of rivers that run hard
......................into deltas far as though that only)
..............over two days in the rising of the Thames in shattered concrete
.....................and heat her mouth (with petals and song)
.....................filled only with dust (on the banks white & green
............folds aloft in the arms of mothers and the history
............of mothers and the mothers of mothers and of the baking of bread at dawn
.....................................and at the going down of the sun will we consume thee)

...........................................knows or cares anything (thy flesh now bread
.....................the glory (white phosphorus coins they inserted in the loaves)(of Intifada
......its cosmic [for the raising of the drowned from rivers](of history)
......dimension

............ [like vast catfish rising dark]at the going down
......................................her own eternal place (the drowned in dust)
.................co-opted face-down—be still and do not fight (as the horses that fed
...........it will be over the sooner—into that glory thrust (upon shadow
..........................................aloft exalted and on high and in the upper air and on the heights

...............in cannonades and loaves at dawn they seek the drowned

.............why one child//whose skin grew vapid
...........of another race//as tubers of fire
...........worth so many of hers just/unable to move her arms
..........................................................
.........................she will never know of snow)(and one Catfish King
...................................nor feel in her mouth)(says Jim to Tom is much
.............................................. in its taste )(like another and all of them
........................................of cold soft iron )(no damn good

......................with little arms of Elbes on the riverbank (by the mark thrice
.....................little face-down snow angel there for the baking and the history
(and for the leavening—feathers and bitumen for the mouths—

.........of those drowned)( all unknowing)( in dry rivers of glory)

reprise

.
.
(A cleave version of this poem was published in The Cleave in February 2009)

cinquain

I flush
the dead goldfish
she smites a kettle drum
the kids watch the funeral rites
struck dumb
.