ICHTHYOLATRY

now I feel like someone

shoved a huge fish into my throat
if you look into my gaping mouth

you can just make out
its pucker just see the glint

of its eyes back there
a monstrous glottal stop

I look out it looks out
those are my eyes too

in there my eyes its eyes
mouth in mouth it wriggles

it freaks I am in the stink of it
all down my oesophagal culverts

its tail flaps from my cloaca
visible even within new trousers

cut for concealment
I now waddle with its cold

between my outer legs
maybe I was always a bit fishy

but this, this, O my people
is something new

.

a moth in your mouth a moth oh good god

on the way home from the pub
a guy accosts me
in a alley
a dirty high hat
breathing it up like an alpaca
or some other stern beast
think you are a poet he says
I am going to kill you poet fuck
tell me how the night sky
add up to nothing how the wind
blow everyone apart
tell me biggest secret
you know
thinks you are so special you
stick a gun cold in my eye
tell me tell me or quickly die
I can't help think
this is the great moment
the whole dirty history of poetry
I have the answer ready
always same answer
ooze from everyone's belly
silence beyond everything
for its expression
I got nothing I say
I am just go home in a cold and stiff wind
please don't harm me
or I will herewith uncoil and eat at your whole fucking head
for I am already known as the gravedigger
even amongst the merest flowers

of evil at which he smiles and becomes now my friend
hand in hand we beguile the night
around us buildings collapse softly
we squat together eat butterflies
that druggle in the mouth
both of us glint
like Autumn storms coming in
leaked low & let loose
.

cows of a the causeway 2

she comes in from the rain
says hey what’s for dinner
says hey..........I'm thinking
of having sex with him next door
at weekends just a sort of arrangement
I haven't told him yet
thought I'd slip it past you first
..................sure he says

he likes you &
his wife would watch
if there was nothing on TV
while we're at it I should tell you

I have a similar deal
....................with your Dad
sometimes your Mother watches
not always sometimes she turns
away............... to gaze at the wall
that writhes with damp and cold
tides of old wallpaper windows
of seaglass ghosts and head-high nettles
..............................the drowning of children

sudden outside voices now stilled O
I dream about such walls as that
..................don't you?
yeah oh yeah she says she slides closer
he feels her moving around inside
but can think of nothing to say
................................—to sum it up neatly:
outside in the garden a gale
whips the washing line
into wild skipping rope cycles
that rip at the long unmown grass
ghost children spring up
beating time.............. into stars

everything is unkempt and ugly
for a few seconds
he bursts over himself
laughs a little awkwardly
shrugs it off
smooths himself
back into place

his face a blue skull
he steps he dances the slow starfish
he veers

aloud to her incoming

rock-and-roll-radio
.

tea coal (self mortrait at dawn after delayed flight)

I sat up all night smoking looking
into some distance as though awful faces
there in the night looked back I wonder
sometimes if I will smoke until
it dries me up like an old timber stood
derelict above the tideline desolate
until I am well enough of myself
desiccated in my own salt and voice
just a thing that looks out
from a pile of frass
feeling for myself in stutters of radio
—it is at these times

that I am at my most inhuman as though
I might rush out and engage
in some act
motivated entirely by silence
by something there in the mist
which I do not even feel
sometimes this is an elevating thing
that makes me climb rooftops in darkness
an animal wired to the night

in that arching pilot rictus
it is in pain that I appear most real
watch the needle
I look to find myself there
in the scattered leaves of late October
look here it is already in the coming repetition
of late hunt it down
for this is an interactive animal
barely brushed by late winds
folded in like a baby that sucks
its own shadow
knowing no other mother to clutch

the sensation is that of a cold moss that seeps
behind the face somewhere
in the olfactory wall the haunted cavities
of pre-language it runs down
through the thoracic circle the abdomen
with its distant cries and heave
it eddies and corrupts in the genitals
settles finally as a dying reptile
in the ossified knee joints

stifled and unspeaking
its tiny mouth stuffed with mothers
stretched in death's happy alarm
over and forgotten
snuff

but feel free to add
your little fucking soft
afterdark breath in your ear
handsliding alerts

& be aware that you dance with the dead people
you are in the presence
of the dead
the sexy dead people

for one night only O
the blinding lights are blowing below



.

Another awful politics cliche back on the rise, and another nice old word about to become unusable.

The Minton Report into the Trafigura Ivory Coast contamination incident

Darvaz: the Door to Hell

this vanishing act runs dry

around of midday I arrives at your house
I don't says much
but swans around there in your backyard

all the while fixes you with wild faces
like a goat
suddenly released into a cinema
couldn't find its way out
got angry sat up on stage glaring out at the crowd
like the devil its elf
bleching out fury
Casablanca running like the sea
white and black
across its hairy toggenberg face

O beard of the prophet now sweep down
this could be the beginning of a uh beautiful elation

"such people we saw the like of there
such glory and fineness walking"

yes oh yes we on Sunday visited him
we found him much diminished
in both cognition and physical ability

you have no idea what's happening now

you, I say, you

I stuff your letterbox with petroleum jelly
I will dance hoofing like a wild buffalo on your car

on your doormat you find
an offer of marriage
a broken balloon
but what care I for your goosefeather bed?

oh if only these words
had fallen suddenly like dead sparrows in China
into ponds all over town

.

teaching a boy /θ/ to enunciate

(the boy with the blue hat under the wailing-tree
finds himself in a wasp world maddeningly abuzz

swirls of dental fricatives hold him electrically crucified
shimmering above the plain
he has therefore no meaning and must withdraw quickly

for into such confusion we sashay like vampires
stopping camp upon the half stair half turned insistent
that this is the music such children made
of what the night
Bela Belial undone teaching the unboy to enunciate peripheral
phonemes of the edges of the mythos grosso I wanted
to hack my way through dream conquistadores
drift upon high the philosopher's tone
the alkahest)

all of it out of reach drowned in articles
in dense green capillary the delta swoon
silver guitar amazon pirarucu sucking in prey
it has teeth everywhere grinding teeth
it has no language
the trees now deep in black water it waits
in the roots always wakeful

the thing
black as water lapping
waiting always

any real poem should come up close
breathe hard in your face
threaten
to murder your family

after that it's as if a boat was cut loose
by drunken strangers at midnight

crashing in your dreams

tomorrow and


.

Edith

have you even any idea?

and what if a young boy just had enough
6 years old he saw a TV thing
that said this is the age of the self
your parents no longer feel a sense of duty
he quite reasonably buys the hour
of the hoot as the dawnwash
elevated he flows let me O god let me
garrotte this hollow
that in his hollow he dives
straight through into the schwa between
where the rats
such a thing such a thing
such a thin and awful thing

hi he says I'm new here
to a piratical fetch on a drippage
both of them squat where
watches below the slow

point he gets that he is the Buddha
he sees that work below him
flowers and new bread emanate
he p[onders] becomes intoxicated
he jumps
he enters the swim
years later
he wakes still there poised

what then he asks
what now
what

he curls back in
understanding the impossibility of everything
I will eat bananas then he says
I will eat biscuits
and gaze from on high
waving my uncut wand
playing with it gently
waxing it up

or I will slough gently into it all
either way
I think my cock just dropped off
anyway
maybe it's time to start
a riotous religion of reeling rats
all of whom now fall to their feet

Christ only knows
where they were before

this acrobatic stuff

aeroscape nude encounter
now you endless (I don't mean
just don't even bask
for again I'm fucked out with the full flood
squawks of
little miss skygod
hacking (to be honeytoed) all night
christ no

moresongs of love i hate love now just like you

me washing in on
the stupid blue beach
a big bird eye watching
over

repeat after me
such anthems of
stark /sorrow/ treelines
snow has gone bad

he wakes again with his gun
to the Buddha's head
everone in the building has a hardon
to see what come next

things slide now
into the cage

the Terror and not the Terror

"offer yourself to him" -- Withnail and I

.

fucking a ship in a bottle of world peace

so he is just washing his dick
and gets to concentrating on that little hole
through which it looks out
and sprays the world
and he digs into it just to see
like what's down there
he keeps going
are there animals maybe
a shrieking jungle thing of genital interior
caverns of bloody white crystal
in he goes digging they find him later
head down stuck airtight in his own hole
feet quivering up in the air
asphyxiated
nothing

.