A New Year's display of delightful light by my cousin Pamela Parker. Click to make it bigger!

the parade of lagomorphs

and when he answered "your duty to your husband and children",
she demurred—Germaine Greer

fifty even forty years ago these women
are more or less dead [betrothal-scarring-wed of facial coverings//]
at this age sexless damp dishrags
of resentment in bags worn thin and blue as veins in Saxon-skin
by husbandry and the pounding of sheets
in some interior scullery just about kicking in dead sleet
petals and sand and sawdust and hacking spit
now look at them texting up as all outer pimped as reality TV
as though their duty to waste and shrink was somewhere cancelled
redacted between cream and the clash
gesture/furnace/glower at them expectant and sexual every one rodded up
with a pink battery roscoe of Thatcher-Solanas tripstick
somehow some right to fuck forever night etc

when did all these women/whore-hen/harrier of forest law/bust a flutter
from the blood-gutter so loose into all expectation?
[alle the nighte we heard that lytel demon mutter
and we there watched him from the pantry licke at the newe butter]

.

Some mad kids who are rather closely related to me...

harmonic precession (notes)

• new grass through late snow
• an error of 1/1000 of a second in the GPS time differential between satellite and receiver will result in a position displacement of up to 160 miles

the insect attack rate is the frequency at which you feel the departure of your fetch in the mornings out through the cracked green glass across the fields sweeps of rain grey like dead skin in a ditch long as Lustig beating with a hammer a devil in a bag it all circles in scatters of film penetrating the membrane the blows from without hair like corn trodden full of ergot a body found there in the tyre ruts flat and black and dispirited

[your currency is no longer legal tender here it is not intrinsically devalued just not desired, which is the same thing when the hammers ring and the corncrakes sing] when the mummer time is coming & the streets are softly keening all around the booming weather will we grow

glassy-O

her absence of inhibition does not indicate sexual intimacy only the loss of all acknowledgement of you as a mature male you are now in some overlapping Venn category with small children and animals and houseplants so why should she notice if she is semi-naked before you?

this requires an adjustment that only a few only a few people find impossible

Hwæt! if there is no life left in this brass god if another front gathers from the west if the cold wet air mass has overtaken and occluded the preceding relative warmth forcing it upwards into lumps and spikes depicted in iso-violet convention

between the hit or miss governor and the cones are three aluminium valves each resembling a round Greek shield in miniature each functioning as the mouth of a tiny god from which issue steam and several more or less toxic gases

hollow hollow all the beaten bag sounds from that dry devilskin

hot coals forced down the throat of the wolf in that mechanised myth

hollow hollow

imagine her there imagine the shift the sensation of it legs apart knees raised as for congress or delivery beneath the covers slide into focus the eclipse the usurpation the sudden brightness of a new comet all the pieces of you rain invisible as ash falling at night into wet fields your bag full of silver puffs out red spores

and if this is that as their white bellies flop in the shallows

then down & around & below & O all the bells of the barrelling Dead

.

love as practiced in the south

this night she had calm all over her
that quiet inhuman settlement
that they have before they jump

but she was approximate

I reached out for her there
she took my hand and came back

we ate a boiled cat together in the kitchen
then laughed till sunrise

now at noon she reads my tea-leavings

postcards fly in and out
and we mind them not

SHINE

after a few weeks of this new start

though she could see he was trying

she could also see that it wasn't working

oh she loved him and everything

but she couldn't keep living through this

like this for ever

& so one night when he was fucked up

she slipped the gun

into his open mouth

and blew his head all over the wall

behind the bed

where they had made their babies

she sat there afterwards for a while

cried a little

then made some cocoa

read a Stephen King novel

until she fell asleep next to him

in the night she cuddled him

in his dark uncomplicated wetness

.

poked with a stick

four and a half centuries
since last a poking with a stick
all the windows broken back then

paint covers the car
the police flee the scene

their faces frozen in horror
all over the papers
no one talks of anything else

everyone slowly grasps
the vulnerable human that lowers its window
waving like it is somehow still safe
morning coming up through the smoke

scenes of feral children eating rancid offal
in the tricoteuse trees

no one feels anything at all until later

oh everyone's god, this moment

.

or be damned

if we don't kill Julian Assange
any one of us could be fucked in the ass
at any time
during our sleep
even the most innocent rapist or child molester
or otherwise affrighted hare dancing in stolen skin
on the wide sunset
could find himself exposed needlessly
while washing his car one sunday am
looking thoughtfully into the hose rainbows
still full of TV and wine
suddenly a neighbour walking past looks askance
like the world was all changed and gone wrong

all of us fearful now
or perhaps

.

give it up

it is hard to know
the qualitative difference
outside of psychology
of penetration
or penetration
but in the twilight
one feels more like saying
yes I've been travelling over mountains
baby trying to get to you
slide slide
night and day running all the way
lay back open up
this is not any extra
exhortation only the wild dogs in the river
wanting interior commands
wanting to know
what gives

.

nearly walked in halioclines

as though descending into a heat sink
or synch of coldness reached by the going of stairs
the falling not the rising or the strings or nosings
or any others
he spent minutes in her wardrobe amongst her hangings
while she searched herself
it had a fascination like voyeurism or psychosis
like the fix of watching one's reflection in a toilet
all the while the music
this was moments before he inserted the neck of a wine bottle
into her and upended it
then used her as a drinking vessel
knowing her fierce and vivid spirit
would appreciate this intrusive act
of friendship and trust

of the thing in the wardrobe
was nothing much remembered then

the car half on the pavement revving until the engine
nearly blowing his hands in her hair then

this she said this I want to do in the long steam
but only he said yes like everything stretched and beat
in the steam of twilight bells as the day sinks it all

.

if I could be someone else

only last night in the little house
surrounded by ice
the radio began
and it ran and ran
with a story of a man
whose mother died when he was so young
that later his heart exploded while he was driving
on the way to an interview
where he could have become an adult

he never made it there
just everything blew up
across the road
at 9am all his heart coming down like rain
settling out like sad music
high trees on either side
like tall people watching
all of them grieving and concerned
their grief reaching like long dark hands

such was the moment and the shutters blowing
in a sudden wind that came in from the East
his car stopped waiting
wondering what might happen now
all of him just spread there like a soldier
who never got that far
just an exploded star
that came from afar

such are the messages from life and the sky
for one small human
that drove too high
I have made dreadful mistakes
and my heart fearful aches
to watch the outtakes
who doesn't wish

there was a god down the road
watching
while he made human cakes
for all our sakes?

and the music comes in
and it is striding and mournful
like a little angry god
with a hole in his head
where the seasons went
and where at times he would gather himself
and wish as hard as he could
that things had been made better

we are incrementally composed
of all the people and things
we have ever loved and hated
this is soft Politics
and every time is morning
washing up on the long beach
like a lover's hair in your dead hands
and her not yet ready
to ease them out
just lying like that
listening to the waves
neither of you moving
one that can't now
one that wants to lie forever
not moving in case something changes
this is how it will be
when your heart finally hits your head
whoever you are I want you there
to do that like one big word

gasping in the quiet morning all over me
loving this sandy death
that came in at last from the radio

the only question ever
is how to love (d*))000£


.

add lizard

this wind could you believe it
your face like a tree
looking out
the linden trees all astir
another moment I can't believe
and the drains all aghast

the fairies of language have settled here
(oh ah)

we are knocking about together

seeing how it feels

bellyup chumbawamba dancecrack

so much

was ill was not
sonnet
was pill was snot
scotch bonnet

slide see slide
see saw
see rupture see tear

#

.
though snot

(Val Lewton & the locked petticoat hurt) a submarine film review

the entire crew thrown askance by the presence of a female
things they wouldn't do they wear stalking "cologne"
reeks along the companionway bringing down cartoon deer

"cologne" of couscous algorithm for spermatic submarine
penetration she flutters trapped at the centre of this myth
&&& the difference in vapids between the shift the shroud

&&& the hurt everything depends on some intervention
of extraneous men who all of a sudden act strange run up challenges
hey where you from New York??? the man with a gun in his face

fuck you all you pigs

refuses to back off he says silent no I am of the desert places I
and my father I am panicked I will not scream or die the man
at the centre
of this myth dies like the woman in the former though his dying

must be what kumquat oh erectile &
oh pyro spirotechnic (for it is wished that it be known
these earlier (underline) toys themselves)))

[in earlier (underline) myth the dying is concomitant and always a secret
launched into a red future to encrypt in reverse the enigma
tic pulse—Dormier Duval: Dark Always Is The Way]

.

white houses
of shadow frost
—one bird hops

.

Do people come back from Hell?

If you were in Hell and the Pope decided that the particular offence you had been damned for was no longer that bad in your particular case, would that mean you had to be released and allowed into Heaven? And would you be entitled to some compensation? Perhaps even therapy for the probable post-traumatic stress? I mean who goes through x years of unbearable torture without some psychological fallout? If you weren't rehabilitated in some way you could be a liability always starting fights with the cool floaty people in Heaven,, which they might not find very heavenly, and which could lead to complaints and 'problems' in the place without problems.

But maybe if your sins are still pending a final decision as to their scale of mortality etc, you don't go to Hell but rather to some sort of holding complex until the decision is made. This might be 100 or 1000 years in the future, but of course God will know that it's going to happen and won't let you be subjected to any torture for something which He will eventually turn out to have approved of when his various popes realise it. This holding complex will therefore necessarily be a nice place that isn't too different from Heaven.

While we're at it there's something else I'd like to know. If the crucifixion of Christ brought about a new covenant between humanity and God, whereby humans could now be redeemed of their sins and granted safe passage to Heaven upon repentance and acceptance of Christ, then wasn't it sort of the responsibility of God to advertise this to all humans at the point when it became available? I mean why did he only let a few people know about it? I know they told other people and gradually over 2000 years a lot of people found out, but a lot of people died in that time without knowing and must have gone to Hell. Actually, some people still don't know up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea or deep in the rainforest in South America. So are some people still going to Hell every day because they haven't been told they don't need to any more?

I don't mean to be awkward or anything, but this doesn't seem quite fair to me. Are there any theologians out there who can explain these things to me?

And, if God is omnipotent, can He prove He doesn't exist?

.

The Duodeniad

La Rage—sing, goddess, of the Rabies of Achilles

the Pope now has an HIV-infected Gay lover
—this has led to a considerable softening of his position
regarding the use of condoms

words that won't wash out: tubetrain/rucsack/Krak des Chevaliers

the Chinese eat cats like crackers
but that's nothing to the French
who drown young beaked boys in Armagnac
they bury in woodland in Spring let it all mulch down to thick soup
they swear by the fortifying properties

his vegetal body his machine massif
his midriff his central nervous plexus a clock
a barometer to be tapped and adjusted
it tracks responsively the snaking isobars set it in train
like a Victorian clockwork golem
trained to follow a bannister commit strangulation upon
a sleeper on the highest floor he intends instead
the meridians of psychic commerce every time that she
walks in the room rage sing of rage golem sing of
Aung San Suu Kyi at one end of a telescope
a little uniformed general with his mouth grinding the other
like a cat with nothing else

rage sing of rage he says all silly with a new bike and hat

North Utsire/South Utsire: a sea giant moderate to good
occasionally poor at first

who could love your face so full of interior disfigurement?

the Vatican explains that on a case by casis it has never opposed
the use of condoms if you have been kidnapped by Islamist baboons
force you to commit acts of disgusting coitus on a monkey
but regret that you will still attend the 7th Hell on the grounds
that to be able to commit said act you must have had something
going on

we took me and some friends took control of the world sometime yesterday
in ways too subtle to yet be understood

I have decided not to give up wanking
there is a pleasant place just outside Hell where you wait
until the Pope catches up
it's all just a formality now
papers and ID please how often did you do it
were you married no well in here please
try to cool it in the waiting room there will be opportunity later

the Vatican explains that it has never been opposed to the use of
trained monkeys for sex

The Papa has issued clarification-condoms

Hunkpapa winewall at the margo
in eery breathbasks

.
.

urgent cupboards unfold

let the hurt run deep

your hands poised there look at them
the big gun fretting at its work

there in the market mid-afternoon
buying wool for the evening
guffawing away into smoke

I looked down at my finger snapped off
the train coming in
the misty postcard light
rain of blood
is this perfect?

here I will diode
and shrink
like bee wolfs
thick and sharp
full of green

in the thick fear I think of breasts
I think I see them
coming at me
why the sad comfort of dripping eaves
as little cold mouths looking out?

this wine goes everywhere
nothing is elated

is there any difference
facing a bullet
standing on tiptoes
looking down at that fall
I am scared by your sex

love is a pattern recognition
I suppose
here in the wild hills we ride red goats
sleep in wet disaster
wake to explosions

you want to be us
you hate us for it

.

Fitzroy's Moral Collapse

alle kunst ist umsunst wenn der engel auf dem zundloch brunst
(all technology is in vain if the angel urinates on your musket)
—Austrian folk poem

it is stifled during that first marinading of the Congo
that a humongous Black Man encroached all in fur-lurks
in the ochres for white women
in vapid trails of fortnum ectoplastic whereupon
He wouldst rush to gripe upon their birdbones in transports
of shuddering & lissome delight

.....................................for such Christian middens
.....................................whose vapours always uppermost

& inveigled & even & unto the lateness of the Ireland
such fettled behoof is as those sauvages
squint inholy trees of trinity affront the passages of
.....................High English Women
....................upon whom to inrush

with many urges—eek now it is spake in sech North Americanas
where chestheaded men still lilt and loll in the frontwoods
of Vermouth and Moorish Caliphorn in long quackgrasses
as shy big birds parlay wildly for the extrusion

................................of bonneted females
................................from their wagons below
whence errant junglee wildness of this order saw also
Darwin observe in his fritter such a general finching
of life and aquatic erotortoise during his inchaunting
of the galapageese as would give him cause to flutter
and take heart—in the guise of a vast bird

..................he would stoop into Fitzroy's cabin there
..................to demand more pumpkins
be allocated to some dying damned lizards
on the foredeck
(where it is recorded that he would prefer to perform
his morning daunce of the galapagine finchfather)

Fitzroy's reply is from scripture & to the äffect that such
lézardice has now no place in the lives of elder men
whose wives yet abide
in their flossing bosoms of yeastertide

this in its askance
is his moral claps


(Published in Burning Gorgeous anthology 2010)

.

blouse a little stretched and face askance I estimate her shapes of disaster

this new assembly of inexplicable light
this alchemy of far things

churchheads in spate the animal forces
of electric the song as lungs of foam

look for it on the sides and flanks
look for it where the season sleeks

here are fairies again
every winter now
their tracks lead away
from the garden

around the bend in the hill

to the old house at the far place
where the dogs no longer bark at night

fairies in our hair
they struggle a little
before sliding in soft
just the long blown-out lanes
Russian horses in songs of wind
a whole new sky of Corsair ships

black approaches

.

Thinking about Nick Clegg...

"I have a set of ethics. If you don't like them I have another set."
—Groucho Marx.

Em and then open EADGBE tuning

it's firework night at the bloodhop

them kaisers need the bodies to earth their magic
—Madeleine Shine

(don't get me wrong I would eat a domestic cat
if that was the done thing in that place
I don't needlessly disdain convention)

but this magnetism this transmission
the body tissue radio that mudslides that spasms
hansels and gretels spilt all over chinatown
jerking there in the sweet dirt

down at the boondocks the mark twain the mark once
in shivers of skittish facehawking a lowly cat gawks
—Galileo of course had this covered suggested an experiment
whereby two men with lanterns on distant hilltops
sending signals of light would be a sure way to ascertain
the average size of a male Catholic dissent

man I find this Injun cream make your balls melt off
like stardust in thick rain with cats cryin low distance
an everythin blowin all round respect see respect
it is like some beautiful death like the marines he was talking
semper distemper—like this last time I see him
only in his filth and hat

a one such a one was he when first beheld

now look black owl now fuckin look at me

—ah now soft they survey with temperate currents & it is more of

a shift than is first apparent as though the fingers that disengaged
the cervical suncogs the lesser cogs these engineered fractals of steam
were exholding the fetch the whole field itself barking as they

wonders within from the exo-inner
you can't do anything reasonable
in fog like this—no one can, not now

we are thinner come the breaking it is a mechanical
detachment we practice here in the Origo Colony

(who is boondock?)
this and no more
we are inured at least to animal ruptures

they looked out on a gaseous future landscape
run by wild dogs,he said, all shifty like he was then

I couldn't believe their eyes

.

keyboards like teeth

the killer at the station
clutching the memory of his moth
mother the killer at the playstation
clutching the mammary of his
disease doubletap frenetic as all
get out of here he was here I at least
saw him writhe with such intent I saw him
walks up to a car window sticks the gun
there and smiles at this moment
don't you want to be this free
to abandon all of the future
what a slave the future makes of all of us
how much better to jump ship
to abandon oneself to the army of ants

listen
the crawling comes in
on the stair I hear it
slow creep and hoot

it is only 1876 in this time zone
far too early even to get up yet

everywhere you look in this hot house
dead people
sit up

downstairs their mother
bakes away her breasts

such love as this
arrives by parachute
through thick cloud

even I crawled in to feel
for a moment the heat

you, octopus, you

.

Oh do me Jacques Brel all night

ooze

the advance the slip the pitch
who can remember these words when needed?
or their human configurations it was a black place
it is late already there is a ladder against the wall
a backyard some cigarette butts a dog or two
no light enters here between the forehead
and the prehistoric I almost cannot speak of it
but am guided by owls
a tilt a summoning into the familiar
my name it speaks my name and how
can I do other but step down from all this
into all that the advance the slip the pitch
it came then the understanding
that this was a summons into a place
in which there was only drowning
blah fucking blah at night they shoot the owls
around here
I miss a train the cab driver has to stop to laugh
when I tell him where I have been
oh no he says oh no you are joking
but I am not joking I have been there
and like a paycock I am shot down later
with words and slow fire flapping
as in their caves they sit drooling
black blood
hating
knowing little else now
sure of themselves and their big bodies
that didn't open
not for a second

.

lyric blowouts

it's late and the trees

it's late and the trees are in hoot

it's late and the trees hot gather

sole cahoot

it's late

the man with the frog in his mouth halfway up the stair
the man the frog stairs something in the cloud frogged me out
the keyboard is a slow politics what tyranny
I am in awe of you your codes that fire up slow
as heath burns hot and wet for weeks after

like weasels something in my mouth I can't
speak it is late and the trees at the window what

was that you where is my mind one pixie more or less
you do this or you die

oomph it comes in
circle of waiting this is not a communicative grammar
that must be left for the catch no one will now
(they might have done then)

it's late and the trees are boiling
I can't keep my head on

have none of it
all of us aslice
flaming slowly this blowing out
(yeah night imagine)
our own black and horrible birthdays

all of you are dead
whipping like kites

.

.

An encounter at a waterfall in 1943 or maybe a year later

not to be abusive exactly
nor to be kind exactly
but to cut him down

they are not unkind

everything you need to know about this other human
can be understood from this congress of cavities
there is not much movement in it
by any geological considerations
but if you swim into it

oh put it here quick do it, she/he says in a voice
that opens him wide

he accepts it
as some crude distinction
at once limiting
and trivial -- O

think of this congress of the soft parts like excavated shellfish

warmed a little
sliding together in the twilight
a hum gathers over all of it
bells ring across the city at dawn
some emergency surely
they look for babies in the rubble
fog slides

their mouths move together
like shellfish now without shells
blind things mouthing without mouths

broken shell of a creature underfoot*

this is no longer confusing
he accepts it and goes far away
all the fight gone out of him
his mouth and his heart always ready
to say the same thing
if only it would be asked of him




* nothing

angels everywhere angels

You are lying; the fish have spoken—Paul Gauguin

in this myth you are the spray
from his mouth
the keyboard lies there empty
there are gods apparently there are gods
but they do not approach

He is almost fastened so avid is he
to her mouth
she will have soreness
a rough reddening
if he got it right she won't care
other considerations will override this one

at this point everything explodes
there are cars full of innocent strangers
but all of them die horribly

we don't care, we keep driving

somewhere down there is a place
where they sell alcohol and drugs until dawn

in the East a cow's head

oh now you are my baby and will be so
until the morning tremor

I was mistaken

speak to me in Spanish or shut up

Vamos a tomar una copa?

///

.

mortar shells in deep softness

so full am I so rain and low pressure
so cyclonic with the urge to love you
in mountains and across wet pools
(now tell me they contain redundancy
if you are so foolish)
anyway so full so wide I am all
of recent towertops and Gothics
my arch really is your arch
pointed are we together at the span
of night I have got it now
all across the bay I am in love
like any other starfish any squid
that muscles up close and sings
one last song

baby please listen
to the last song of the silent squid

.

if like this like this

hands in your hair

your hair your hair of olive wind
if a language flowing outward

if filaments of memory if even the trees
if everything here warm slow
wild and slow-wild if how you come to life

in my hands your hair flows out
if all morning so flowing out descending bright birds
inside us calling long ago this moment keens

your contours your hachures your rising and falling
your planes your whirling your little Sufi gasp

if like this, like this

heartbeat and breath and hollow ground
and midnight morning and all day and dusk that arcs between
blue spirit flames, radio crackles

and if along our hillsides
like this, like this, we start to collapse

in the fading red shadow of this our body

then this, this is the spray of night

[duende, red-black, in murmurs]

.

poem poem a straight poem

you will never understand this
because the sky does not lower
for examination
this magic rabbit more or less flies
over the road singing as he goes
no one knows now who threw him
oh yes guffaw I have written these notes
and no longer understand them
I am incomprehensible to myself
you have no chance
that rabbit look oh let us negotiate
I have drowned in myself
the same rabbit idiot on the hillside
the murderer enters in fancy dress
his ears aloft antennae switching
murder involves this acuity
you want to do it right

the best poet in the world doesn't write
she lives in a cave just below the surface
caressing her own breasts, weirdly

do you know that Atahualpa wore a shirt
made of hummingbird feathers? I'd like to think
it was a shirt of hummingbirds, and each of them
there by consent
what a humming
and a disturbance of the air
around that breast
just before Pizarro arrives and
starts to tread on them one by one.

Word sales run in inverse proportion to literary greatness
a shake over the river
seriously a wild moment of cloud and tremor
from the water a head rising
some vast island head of dragged green
all over it this same wet fury

this is not for you
it is all secret
even its words and footsteps
in all this silver shining night

.

Zoroastrian prayer

these lies these lies these lies
what are you thinking
you are a haze of flies in a field
somewhere I don't know where
maybe far away in some country
where lies are the thing the very thing
where games like this
are exactly the right stuff
explooosions take place in the night
we walk outside and marvel
at such egregious lies
look we cry open-mouthed
look oh God look at such bursting lies
if only we might emulate them
might travel to such fictions
find ourselves there amongst the stars
such superheroes such elevations
would we be there such constellate tridents
meanwhile you are a motherfucker
what got no wings

.

wild chunks of nightly love

tundra, nothing escaping this dream and gas

head whole head
you want more
I have only holding

so full of love am I

ript from the shades your headlove

infernal ah but greatest one

audience think not that something was absent

all of you in my hand collapsed

I can't help these flattened fifths

where are you now

you, your

the drear barn

oh nothing, I meant nothing

your head exploding

suicide love bomber cheese what?

brain everywhere now

such love I feel

your ass through the window

now this

this

is sex

.

Stephen Fry on Catholicism.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbvr0m_shortfilms

I want it to be earlier and then later

strange miracles of the world:

some interior Africa of the senses transported
it is 1870 within
the man with the toad in his mouth
sitting next to the woman
made of bricks
is unsure at this moment
whether it is more decorous
to drink on all fours
at the nearby waterhole
or to sip daintily from his own armpit
such are the complications of tradition
and sex politics
he conveys his uncertainty to the green giant
who answers only in prime numbers
upon whose advice he coughs up the large toad
and enters a new life as a hunter in the forest

you look strange, his friends tell him
more stray and feral by the day
it will soon be unlikely that we will invite you
to take syrups with us again

the man is unconcerned, even when the toad grows back
he feels he is on the right path

then a disaster overcomes him
his faculties are lost in some mucus
that floats down

at the last he thinks he sort of thinks
this at least is freedom
as he sinks he sort of sinks

his left bicep is found in a public pool
nearby are performing sharks
but no body is discovered in them
no one can prove anything

the whole bay seems to be full of secrets
you sense this from your room on the second floor
even through grey drapes of rain
but no one gasps enough
not enough to give anything away
,;0&==+tomorr%
the savage again the[]-oh christ this thing
of body easier at least with those animals
who have not gived birth several so forgiving
are they & all the while the tide
the mist the roll and slurry that it does

you what like just shot him when he needed help?
those guys oh those guys
what do we care really?

everywhere in the world is at war
far away I imagine what your mouth feels like

.

seven-league boots or something similar

so these few years it has lain there unused
its excitatory twist and hum unknown
all that splayed potential nestled dark
amongst folds and presses as of some dark inhuman interior
it is not a shibboleth it is just a thing
just an accident just a foolish gift
unpackaged now containing miraculous batteries
that somehow still make it writhe and drone
after years after several years
but never yet applied I am unfamiliar
with this new/old battery technology
I am behind the times my consciousness
stops at the drawer-front
beyond that is this other world of the future
which I do not wish to know

these miracles have fucked me
full of lies and magic batteries
the future past lies hidden
inside someone who knows nothing
of anything

at the first glimmer
she leaps over houses
chickens and kittens scatter
as she flies by

Rah Rah Rasputin
honest I was only urinating
through a letterbox
when the rain started

such messages I had within me

it lays there quiet and filled with dreams
sick now unto its magic batteries

.

oh you know some god that overslept

the server is not well found
look at the details
there at night the air itself at fault
you might imagine some scene of rocking
of the wind and sky travailed
but this is just a politic moment
in which he is flattened like sorghum
oh he cries too much
again I wake with a horse's head
instead of my own
but I am not of these mysteries of castration
though I would love to for a moment occupy
your time machine no no no
even in humanity a hit or miss governor
do you know nothing of mechanics?

after dark she they he all of them lilt like witches
of rivers and crossings
of the soft rains and squawks of doubt

morning eviscerates everything
he shudders soft in his wraps
wonders why he ever started something
that could never be ended

the sun rides him like a hammer

she takes over
she takes cover
she takes coverlets

raise your arms and think of the moon
something has just happened
something just dreadful

all down the Lune River a red streak

some hunched idiot in the rain tends a tiny fire
for years

it goes out
he is bewildered
he totters away

everything goes out now
even the animals go out

there is nothing here

tell you what
someone comes for me after this
they better come
with a storm in the heart
for I am finished with the simulations



.

Vanishing stability

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=975_1283799588

wild laughter somewhere on the train

this little dropping ash
all of my children are in it
I see them hit the floor and explode

there is nothing I can do to stop this

I feel like a small god asphyxiating
in late sunlight (urgent cries FFS)
thrashing in its own sheets

you can't write the sound
of children exploding

ash

a man from the front carriage hastens
to shake my hand

he makes me furious
I accost him with my tiny umbrella

eventually on the island
I come around to the fact
that it is all over

all night I wash like a coconut
with the waves coming in hard

a dark man is buried in the sand
the waves will uncover him by morning

he is a pirate at least a fetch

the lighthouse sinks acoustic

your language
is a disaster

what anyway is retrofit?

are you mad?

if I had not looked when you looked
and when the train

use this to make your title
i got no use for you fuck

.



.

goblin afar the thing

what is the epic form of Geology?

I have had enough of you, she says
I intend to shift to another layer

do you know that I can barely see?

some substrate has come between us
he.............................says
alone on the hill some cow of the vagabond future
fresh from weddings barely survived
says this

alone in the lias & layers I of all liars
lay least yeast
always looking in storms
to the east oh beast
that I am and unknowing
thankful that thin things at least
nothing was known

I am downhearted (she cries) at my new shape
i wish i could go beyond cowish things now
i wish i new what was

the epic form of meteorology
like you said rabbit child

I too down holes vanish
or of vanishing wish
.

rifle association

.
sit down you ugly scrape no I haven't
all the windows blasted in like that imagine
just a parrot that was all that was left
to speak for them the very sort of air and DNA
left there like that the high seas oh christ
just what a handcart rotten scraps am I
supposed to believe in history? the Clovis
I apologise all day on the same bench
no one knows this shit like my mate Charlie
he's your man for signing and stuff only
he is diseased now a air rifle out the back window
Georgie and Paul now that was no way to live
cans everywhere and a lawyer too then the Jazz starting
you're fucked mate yeah well only by your mother 3 to 2 they sledge
oh god attack attack my car got nicked
all day alone in the waterfall look an orange floating
in a million years you couldn't grab it
a little baby crow right in the middle
of Ambleside we had to stop the Runes
pressed us so he stripped off and went in
I was more cautious, less elevated

let me caress you such needs as I have

.

testing the banal reflex

.
what about you over the fence
with the wind whipping white about you
what about you?

all down the dingle the dell the dingle
dangle yards I collapse like reeling dreams

my house is full of the breathing of ghosts
I can't abide their nightly hoof
on the floor above the floor above O the latch
and the lantern and then
how about I live with you instead? where
is your other place
.............where I ///brush the animals at night///

moan of recent nuclear clouds O (how this is a folk song)

there you were (I couldn't understand it)
i had tryd evething
there you were (I at least serious could not
stand under it without you)

unsure of yourself
sure that you were a disaster of some kind
I was fucked up
I couldn't even hold your hand or touch your keys
on which it was my habit to spread

there were no volcanoes or earthquakes
lame shit like there were ever volcanoes or earthquakes
all of it was politics my chest heaved
itself out my lungs glocked purple
on your carpet but you were kind
you pretended not to notice
as my rats ran into you
you wanna smoke I asked then sure
you said why not let's both smoke
from all our holes at once? this is a movie

An Odysseus myth explaining the invention
of cigarettes: an all-consuming polythene sack
that contains endless moments
it whips there in the wind over the rags of fence

none of this is enough he is coming for me

over the church rooftop something animate cries
ripped away by bags of stark air
only just saw it, me
didn't see it at all just a flag a flit of something
fly there and the the the bells start up an inverse amnesty
of the innocent

diagram of ear wine glass wall episode loud unclear
late as elves the winewall of which glass pantoums

.

Deb Calverley poetry reading.

My poetry mate and fellow conspirator from Winnipeg, Debbie Calverley, is giving a reading of her stuff at the Winnipeg Art Gallery on September 25th. It's a little far for me to attend (3300 miles!), but if you are in the area check it out and give her some support. The details are here:

http://www.culturedays.ca/en/celebration-schedule/view/4c62b2a5-f8c4-4bd4-ada4-0db44c4a89be

.

Philishave & Violette

Thou shalt upon another forest set—John Donne

raising the sunken fleet a man at every pinnacle

such attenuated animosity

the only thing wrong with this building
is that there are places
from which it can be seen

Ho!

a giant pair of buttocks and a bus station

glint upon the eagle the late bell the backlit spume
all the earthly welter yours now

in code (the life that i have is yours &)
=francogerman erupt her name=
of course
face down in the attic bath
dot matrix
=wait for me and I'll return=
all the volga creek hey hey
a-wimoweh a wimoweh
in the pixels the quiet pixels
the bions leap to night

such a difference I suppose

.

Glock 26

fixed together at the lips like oysters
all the world sealed in a congress
without words or sound or silence

keep drawing it in keep only this
consciousness of mouth and eyes
in the dark world below fire

but only this shared space of mouth
eyes hollow ground heartbeat
breath fixed together at the hips

speak from below speak in no language
to and fro the air the mouth air
air of the hair and face hands around

a face and in the hair clutch
the air from within without sound
fix on this this kiss from here afar

all night one flute and a falling star

.

white heads in spate

the man rams his head down the toilet violently
bang bang splash bang fucking bang
it's late at night he has a gun up his ass
the man now coneheaded from the ramming
wet and stupid and bloody and all a fury of sewage
he shouts to James Joyce
Jim you Jim come back up I hadn't finished Jim
Jim it's shit but not as we know it

briefly Jim's head drifts up
but retreats at the first headbutt

the man now has to catch a train he rushes out
to the station
what's with you all wet and covered in shit they ask

I was arguing with Jim he says fuck you
he is my muse

next time leave your muse at home the station
master says
or I personally kill you by nail your head
to the track how you like that?

he is a big guy
the man doesn't want to mess
but he can't help it
sorry he says now is that a rare ocelot in that tree
yonder?

when his back is turned the man
the toilet James Joyce man
rushes from behind and his head

enters the ass of the station master
who issues a suitable gumph

now the man parades upon the platform blind
as a shouting lollipop of nothing

drosophila of stem cells of words

Jim's head both eyes hanging poised
in urgent sewers

all up the line the winter whistle blows as mad
as white bowls of butterflies & blood

.

politics of the hipglass outcrowded

a young man a quite innocent man only really a bypasser

stops at the shop window to examine a display
horrorstruck he sees from the back of the shop
another man a naked man [maybe the naked shopkeeper
maybe a god in a low guise a satyr or pederast]
with an erection oh christ a look of delight run towards him
he crashes into the glass in slow motion the glass
the glass rises now in millibars of hectopascals of analects
of love and time's first forgotten disorient
crazes and maps itself cobwebs and meridians
of disaster spread now this is meaning slide into this
the whole street shimmy everything in birds of fracture
rupture around this flow this node of impact
perhaps made of steel first exits into the street
while from another world a different time register a crow
swoops in it pecks with fury at the shopkeeper's cock
he screams brings down the rest of the mosaic
in blinding jigsaw shatters the sky the entire sky
fatally injured spasms there in the street there & there
nods and collapses there the innocent young man the crow
the shopkeeper hover in CCTV glass falls around them
waterfalls & cataracts blind the moment the shopman
reaches for others a crow in his mouth blood runs
down his chest this now this he cries is politics at its best

.

the press

it is an iron plate applied as The Question the question it is a fear
and a iron miner's miracule
(why do flies sink in lakes he asks well because of their spiracule)
of light and fission a fission of faces that now look
the fire the inquisitory press beneath which most things
cease to struggle or digress it is a rusty iron level
a heavy flat of a fatherhand but the witch stuff in this fug
the chug chug burd aloft jug jug bird O gone soft
is entirely contraband outwards eyeballs squeeze
inwards air doth rush upon the flags that gutter there
some ichor now doth gush and geeze & wheeze & fleas
O fleas: Mark, butt these fleas...

it is a heaviness and heft dragged up from in a delf
it is a squeak of kick and cock collapsed upon itself
a leaden place of heat and beat and it is then a river
slowed almost now to death
there skinned unto a sliver

now nothing can be known as true
as this press yet obtains
now sideward slick the sluices-oh
now outward slide the brains

I look upon myself anews
as planar kangaroo
what I awready knew's
in hi-winds i has blew

xxx

the trombone loneliness of the hammer monkey

gradually he became nothing
his voice lost its harmonics and grew thin
his friends dropped away
this was Buddhism he thought
this was the ranking southgate weatherfront farce of escape I will kill you
he says I will kill you with my smother my idiot submerging overcoat
out in the garden I fire over and over
many have I killed

you fucking scrape, he said
why are you there always?

in a stinking den a man grew a beard

look at me now
look at me

in the night he cogitates highly
real love is not that love that lasts forever
that is circumspection, survival
real love is the thing that lasts
for three weeks and brings you close to suicide
you are an electric cable
connected at one end
but not at the other
you are a boy in the rain sick of choirs
throwing a trombone
off a clifftop
somehow the wind gushes through its tunnel
it screams out low magma

it is a slow day
three boys are beating a monkey to death
by the roadside
with small bronze hammers

why would kudos be considered a plural anyway
and who would think such a thing?

and who would think such a thing

there are markers, coordinates
you are no longer ordinary
your time has not arrived

the man with the beard smelt bad
all night we stared at each other
but nothing was resolved

it was a city full of holes back then
left by the Luftwaffe
even years later
the holes unfilled
imagine the entire place in love
with nothing
just desperate now
to connect that other end of itself
to a grid that is understandable
for which there is a name

in such ways we have died like monkeys
at the hands of boys
who were unconnected

every generation the same
every god failing to ignite

a brass shadow falling

a low screech as the hammers climax

my little love
come hither

.

Fitzroy's Moral Collapse (a reading)

Fitzroy's Moral Collapse

supermarket terrorist consciousness

it is a bad time in the season of your throat

this is not that gag about Linda

Linda don't inflect yourself
on the crabshelf of lingual attack

a brother points age 4 says look
there there is a lady a tiny lady at night

she is just there across the water
you could almost have reached her with your fibres
but then nothing this is not that nun thing
that done thing that fling that they sing about warm beer
not there but here you hear

in far rooms the hoovers come and go
humming of Michael I worked in a hotel
in Israel
we plundered their fridges oh hell
feasted on their remains
the MFO and UN boys from the North
their scrota emptied into the well of Eilat
flat-feeling uncertain they went back
leaving steak and beer and plastic gin

always better after they leave she told us
their money left behind with their semen
floating out towards Aqaba
and the animals all running dry not that
it mattered cigarettes are cheap and days are long
full of whiteness everyone speaks a white sibilant
language under the breath and no one here
ever quite gets to it—occasionally the outburst
but that is nothing just the soldiers come home
late at night with lost keys for headbutting the door
open competitions the Norwegians were best
at this for their running up while the Americans
didn't wish for the same bruises but would be cruel
to the feral kittens round the lobby one morning

the Golden Gate got sploded all to bits we almost
but then a bag by its alone in the bus station

bricked up the Dung Gate long aloof
only spiders now listen ahoof listen early one morning
the gate explode the sire got shraps and flaffs
all up hizarm

he don't blame no one for not comin back
it's late after all
was just hopin for a party
he an Linda an Mike

once on a beach my sister belinda she pissed out the winda

the wind erased it all

anyone wanna fuckin arm wrassle
see him with the arm
lookin out on the bay
with all that attitude

the pigeons come here to drink they would say
they go back there to shit

no way of knowing what's best
not ever

.

"There's an interesting piece just here about erectile dysfunction...look..."

A Youtube Channel for readings from the Burning Gorgeous anthology

We now have a Youtube channel for readings from the anthology. I am still feeling my way into this stuff at the moment, but I hope to improve. Anyway, it brings the characters to life a little and is worth a look:

CLICK HERE

Some readings from Burning Gorgeous

I Instruct My Two Leads by Greg Grummer

Ontological Considerations by Greg Grummer

Outwitting Your Angels by David Mehler

found object

the centaur I once owned, No 3245, had an access ply hatch, screwed down, easy to remove for repair, after, springing a leak, always drain down in the winter, and remember, the force, exerted by the mass of water displaced, when slamming into turbulent seaway, useful to have access

.

while we are drunk prime numbers eat our beloved pets

those idiot neighbours are rutting again
their grey drub like a monkey chained to a radiator
through the middle of it all a thick slick of clay
down which cattle
long ago
in the rain
puddled out a canal—in The Handbook of Wild Animals
of Britain and Europe it states that 'the situation is different
in the Baltic', of which one has little doubt
—it goes on to say that 'many large insects are eaten'
but this too is obvious in the circumstances

all day on the hilltops the grey slick mustered
and slid
he sat there on the road waiting for the lahar
which might release him from this intolerable banging
all night every night the same clanking of some ghost
locking doors his face in the pillow unshaven now
his breath all beer and barbecue and smoke
she lies awake for a long time afterwards wondering
about the headlights that spread magic lanterns
across her curtains and over the ceiling
Politics she thinks that's all it is
men just smell bad and snore
in the morning he wants more he is still drunk
but by now the barbecue has guttered and gone sour
on his breath
his advances are halfhearted and she buys him off with tea
and TV and the invigorating memories of who did what
there in the garden

the book says that 'they race through the treetops
and leap prodigiously'

she reads it in the shower watching the pages darken
clutching the cat tight against her stomach
in less than a minute it stops struggling
and the blood from the raking of her abdomen
swirls down into the plug
these are these are the moments she thinks
for which as children we yearned these are
the pregnant cat showers from which
there could be no return

almost without thinking she padlocks herself
to the radiator
starts to beat it with the cat a dead sort of clang
against the wall rings rang this she sighs yes
will give them things of which to think she thought she sang

he's still up there face down in his morning stink
she'll clean it all up later maybe his blink
if there's time
if the bells again
don't start to chime

.

nocturne

imagine a journey on a ship
and the ship is on fire
okay forget that you are floating
on clouds and you are a Hindu god
in the bushes off to the left something
is waiting for you and you are about to die

what does 'datejust' mean?

a man on a ship humiliates himself
he leaps on the table while drunk
and urinates in someone's soup
this is an old time steamer between
Liverpool and New York and your Mother
and he gets on stage and this is not
a Graham Greene novel—for some reason

Miles Davis is on this ship
and when the man starts urinating
in his soup he reaches up with fingers
almost each a foot long and takes him by the throat
pulls him down and says listen

but the man by now is too drunk and does not listen
he goes on to attack the captain who is looking
for ice and ought not to be assailed so

he shows his buttocks to the ladies in cabin 339
laughing as he does it oh life on a ship is such fun

but worst of all he sidles alongside the chaplain
who has by now spotted the ice and has no time to waste
hey you wanna do it he asks
not now not now says the chaplain

in the morning the man remembers little of this
but signals come in
by noon he knows enough
and something within him starts to die
his good intentions fail and he cannot
find it in him to venture on deck and apologise
to the other passengers

not that Miles wants an apology
Miles thinks he is a fuck and isn't interested today
in a fuck
while he rows through the bodies

the Purser's daughter's body was not violated
but the intentions had been clear enough
at 2am when he approached her bed
with suggestions of Jazz music

the man doesn't know how to return from this escapade
and he retires to his bunk
where he lies urinating in his own soup
buzzing like a kazoo

something has died in him from this confluence
of events
and he would rather now that he went down
with the ship
whose lights are even now going out

I have fucked up again he thinks
so profoundly this time
that though the ship sinks
I will lie here and mime
for you just can't keep doing
this pissing in soup
not if you want
to stay in the group

Miles sculls softly onward
imagine him there blowing and sculling
in the cold
nothing left
the Carpathia arriving hours later
asking
where's the president?
a great sea monster welling beneath
a m onkey a t the prow laughing its arse
off

oh just imagine the birth of Jazz on the frozen sea

little pixies in Elmo blue dancing everywhere
bears drowning on all sides coughing as they go
you ever see someone drown they cough then go quiet

but I love you you know I do

keep your hands off me

something went wrong

.


.

maybe Iran 1940 everything starting to die

dead und dgrdtion//i hf nu avid avid what do you look like
you fool
you ful some yu fool the collision was awready happen
over and above the consequences there were
to be considered the humans
my parrot what this parrot here?
I will kill it now with a stick by God I will
if you want to be friends then stroke better
and carefuller like look
a picture has now emerged from the oil shapes-----
this company is not fucked though buy shares now quick
divers divers down davit down
there remotely people how lonely
their legs caUght in clam clutches how they saw/away/ey
their limbs and everyone such a limb/mb
such moments as these
not ever in one's lifetime not ever
robots not relied on
I never expected that it wouldn't get erect
I mean it's never happened before
I can't imagine what she thinks of me now
all that big-titted oil and everything
It's out there like a reputation
everyone sitting round
.....................hating

everyone sitting round like it is an orgy
she even using her teeth and none of us sure
alla them are like fish with the mouth full up
with shit not one a them a good thing to say
here I am face down agasp why do you not
care

come back to bed honey
it's not our business

.

at owl bridge a hanging

she sits there in front of me
she has all the assumption of authority
& I am only here to be told what to do
guided you want to put it like that
adjudicated upon you want to put it
through the desk I can't help think
this is a porn movie set she is quite large
her bare arms ripple slightly like long tulips
I can do it anyway if required merely
a kiss can set me off like a kite
she looks to me forty eight alcoholic unhealthy
bitter she looks I imagine her lying back
over the desk like cheese somehow
my shades descending but these moments
of fantasy pass and love now comes upon me
I love you I tell her I love you
I wish we had met earlier when I was still young
I understand that she feels challenged by my love
but I don't know what is script and what is me
are you mad she says
I don't know I say I thought you would tell me
okay she says I will chance everything
come and show me how mad you are
her little dog yaps at our feet as we do it
there on the Rubella leaflets and free condoms
she takes on a neck flush as we separate
yes she says
you are mad
I will refer you
to the madness people
oh I say
I thought maybe I was
but wasn't sure
as my madness settles down
into my lower limbs
like flamingoes upon a lake
waves and wind flowing out
she a sheer octopus
feeling herself quick to see what's missing
our mouths somehow
stuck together fright
all over us like turtles heading
out into the deep blue
frightened by a song offshore
oh baby I say
fuck she says and the frets
already rolling

.

lights over the Lune

is it true that when Beefheart then a vacuum cleaner salesman
by chaQNCe met the Grea=t Aldous Huxley on a doorstep
and in a moment of fear and amoksha did point to a specimen
of his wares and cry aloud sir this sucks? <<>> aldous being blind
took this as a general utterance of discontent and admonished
gently the disaffected young man he saw hanging in his thoughts
above a blue pool wherein did disport various fishes and mokshamen
a gulf then there was with only an unseen vacuum to fill it
Mr Beefheart sensing this whipped up once more his dogs & swung north

.

Vliet

the desert lilt of it as though some ethereal caravan
was crashing nearby tinkerbells above the deep Omission
his finger his hat pointing cactus needle speculum and spike
you anther you anther at some point every man must consider
the transplanting of body parts must yearn for the hastening
of stem cell reality wire me up O that I may emerge fixed
but no he didn't think like that come on though oh come on
who would you be who given the chance but no he who didn't
in his caravan of souls what cliché pointing stabbing grabbing
heat and air what from the body is it possible he says is it active
is it a head on a stick that we might or might now not well is it?
or has this been tested how many years do you want taken away
captain my captain of wavetops & outcrops here he says hold
it for me & feel free to pump for it is loaded already but this
is not how our sink comes about startled as an ass at dawn
oh this discovery that every which and all anyway on the roof
all of us hold tight to our little things lest sucked away
we get and overcome sick as little dogs red red strawberry
douse it now before fire emerges from the forceps you you
he says again you it is you of whom I speak devil clutch for
I will at candle hour remember those lost watches
soft as out they outgas

.

Just felt like this again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CkHXxlzDcg

Yoshimi

half-assed poetry reading with Crowleyan headgear

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzvJUNVz7n0

Keep meaning to get around to doing more of these, and doing it better. This was the first Youtube one anyway.

Steve.

the move around

a man walking by sees the burning
of course he remarks upon it to his companion
who happens to be his wife who he met years ago
at a student party it was touch and go back then
because he was unimpressed by her physique
similarly she was less than impressed
and thought he was a drunkard who shouted
in kitchens further back she was anyway
not inclined to give him a break
because of his association with shouty boys and he was
wow disinclined to approach
in the later lamplight they lurked and lurked
now and though they are all of love and
love's secrets look at them there
in the firelight attack
which of them would you prefer to be?
the long haired hassassin or the woman
who has no boundaries cloud
me I got no preference any old shit
will do in this life at the edge of the waterfall
clutching my cock
running out greenfaced greatcoat fungal hark
scaring the kids
I am a bad man of paper paper
you should hang on your wall
beans all down my face
how about you you in love or what?

been a while

.

some elevations of the limpet in fierce cloud

a thing like limpets in the wash
as the whole ocean floods over
mouth to mouth can you imagine?
really mouth and the world
how important this can seem
no it is too vast to pass over
in the heather in the streams
the flutters that run down
opened out into sunlight as
they widen now here branches
stop it look again look at it
at night the rivers go quiet
still mouths [singing] as though
the waters that made them
were not yet finished like
survival was this last flick
of the body on the field
no no if this doesn't work
now cling with your mouth


.

lost loves dance in Time

the flower the steel and titanium flower
that opens inside the man who is looking
as hard as he can at his lover's breasts

pornography is known to wreck humans
there's no way out of this

.

song for Richard and Karen

seemed like Quantum Mechanics had entered a social scene
in the firelight each of us suspiciously attempting support
he sat there wretched in it all she was out there somewhere
looking for him he felt her like a searchlight over Cologne
with Song For Karen playing in the back he laughed even he
had to laugh when it said goodbye Richard it was like an omen
he must look back on this time and shiver for a door had opened
in the wind and he had only half stepped through it there he
wavered between these magnetic forces trivially swaying
like any of us attempting to lighten the unbearable she arrived
vigorously and took him home I don't know what happened next
but the other woman Jo I think went back to her dentistry alone
down the arches of our slender adulthood small forces rang out
some violation over the lake across the fields far back in the woods
this woman sitting in a bath covered in feathers it is hard to believe
but there amongst the terraces these really were such times

.

marvels from the East

so underwater as they are make me dream
of octopus—Madeleine Shine

oh god oh god he keeps saying and this
is half an hour after the fact no reason that he should still
be thrashing and moaning like that oh god oh god oh shut up
she lies there waiting for this to subside
eventually she says oh look I have to sleep now
yes he says but I can't stop something has happened
I can't stop coming and look and here he whips up
the sheets and says look how the head of my cock
now glows greeny blue and fluorescent it is because
now I understand all things all politics and all of nature
this is now my node and my zone and my antenna
what have you done to me I feel that I am now
almost a god oh god oh god
yes she says almost a god you are darlin
now tell me about it in the morning
now turn your dick off please for at all times I hate blue lights

into the night alone oh god
.

.

man of the flies

oh you get sick but you try to make it right
by thinking hard of kings and Viking ships
maybe History could make the difference
the assumption is that there is a Thing
out there somewhere in there somewhere
that everyone knows
to which they can be summoned
before which they will stand deflated
outside of which
all of us are flies

this is the thing with Justice
its gears
its voice

but there's nothing
but the clamour

as the flies home in

a week from now
your family will recoil
when they lift the sheet

I live by the river—Joe Strummer

.

hands like a rabbit

Chipul tau si dragostea tin dei (your face and the love from the linden trees)
—O-Zone

always the/a momentum of love the flywheel as though credit
were bestowed by belief alone the subjunctive barnacle penis
coiled in the head now unflipped in the tracks of back brain flick
a small dog by the back door of a vacated house waits
I saunter deep past in the pool room like everything is easy
still every nuance laden with water running in everywhere
by Friday we are up to our throats to sustain the conversation
we eat flies we discuss the solitary sex habits of Karl Marx
and Margaret Thatcher we know Death is near but Love
really dreamed up by Japanese students as a sensible alternative
to ripping out the aliment in shame(baba)no one now remembers
no don't stop keep running the tape I can't stop believing
not yet

.

history of the kite riff

little boys under the tree in ragged shorts legs stung to fuck at night the sheets
heavy almost wetted with damp the walls thick as dawn hillfog stifling the sheep
cries six layers of wool blanket and the mortar falling out white and limey porridge
every morning the range coughs up a stirring mother thin as a wooden spoon
cracked down the middle from want a boy in a hammock our only toy a net
laden spinning between trees stop it he cries at night mice on your chest so tame
you can pick them up but not the rats my brother gets his thumbnail bitten off
waking to a big one you smell them under the floorboards rotting with the Warfarin
can't drink it burns them deep but you can't dig them out fucking hippies dancing
up there on the hilltop drugged as rats in head-high nettles just think what they
are doing in the mist Granddad on the roof making his last kite just think she said
miles it went out across the valley far as aeroplanes we never knew such kite flight
as this RM Ballantyne rescued from a burnt house scorched but wild dogs the coral
the stitched sacking you know how many rats in a hay barn gather they cry now
with pitchforks the last bale lifted they start running a tine through the middle they
hiss and bite like overdone porridge bubbling its last bloody geology the woman
stands there impervious to hot spitting thin and surrendered martyred, spooned out mother.

huzzah silver surfer

the bearded guy so unlike the weather
with the fat ketch by the outer wall
only caught this in the corner of my eye
kept popping up hey I cried at last
are you the rat from that story
he popped down he said nothing
hey I shouted it's too late now
too late the waves already were coming in
he was riding on them silver surfer
his glistening back I saw
as it zinged past hurrah I did shout
I popped back down it seemed only right

.

prose monsters unforgiven

your head oh flit past that
baby you little darling you
have seen as I have the triumphant state
but really both of us heads down
know nothing of politics now
it is just not enough
to roll one's tongue in such
circumstances
really there must be more technique
more consideration given
to the basic frictions and their complexities
for either of us to surface from these tissues
holding together a head intact
these are the days of love
all of us shoved full of Love
one day we will walk clear
jesus does no one understand me yet
here in the ash rivers I bestride
sucking at the only things
the only things I know

.

of the care for the complexes of partners

so would rather see women
get fat on the seashore
pull the heads off crabs
stuff the wings into their cheeks
suck at the gills
little legs writhe out of their ears
talk passion about sand
glass and vitrification
under the barnacles the weedy timbers
at night some adolescent flow comes in
assume like slow murmillone fish
the adipose corners of this tissue
you you you he bubbles out at the last
were not as I thought
you thought nothing she scales left
perceiving new brightness
in the cave roofs along which bells
of the bottletop church advance

.

tomorrow everything changes

there's a bad man on the loose

first reports

the neighbours said something about deer
that yap like owls

no one can believe the neighbours

go further go fact-finding ugh

why doesn't every river have a water wheel?

Oh I dunno

guess they lapsed the waterwheelers
used to try so hard
when there was wool and canals

now there is a bad man on the loose
in the old house on the hilltop you see
his flicker cooking monsters quick call Black Bob

get him dancing on a treadmill why isn't every
exercise bike every pec-deck loaded to the grid?

this was never an honest nation
now we are just birthday cake waiting

the neighbours will deck their garden
suffocating one hundred years of nature
oh what the fuck
he is a fat guy who barbecues chicken
and rides motorcycles
she doesn't much care for him but at least
he is constant in his racist throes
and she ain't a Paki

a boy hid here in the apple tree
below him in the pond there were newts
sometimes he came down and watched them
with a torch while the sirens blew

nothing changed
the newts died when the decking went down

every world
sucking itself in
hollow
emptied out
flying
into the fog

thank fuck for newts that squat
wet as night on the sandstone
looking up
not even wondering

.

the inside of an elephant

Carl Jung and James Joyce are the same person
both of them fucking an elephant
up a ladder in German fetish latex
the elephant restrained but peeved
man if I was there I would shout get down and stop that
Jim would probably crap on my head
Carlos would keep going
sure that somewhere in there
there was a light

fuck, there ain't no lights
it's all just elephant ass

.

(improvising &) burned to the fingertips

(warning: contains strong languages)

sick sounds through the wall hubble

start easy: everyone includin you is stupid
baby you has that skeleton feel today
like the hilltop clock running down to war flutes
(imaGine war as a soft blessing that comes
and comes at night in the snow like Tracey)
oh god I most clapses hear again the voice
Zen in the art of Eostre keep it shut

that door-hacking god-egg harking oof like nothing
was ever wrong where is your mother then?
your mama she decrees disasts (spit advection spread) of the planes
injuns wholly
Joe I gots nowheres even to go but the caves now
me/can you save ha? the pine-poplars not jocules not at all string it out
man-moss all over electric
all over the 3 high winds no you ain't comin in sweet Loretta
but she was an Otherman in your face he waves it
in your face an you all sick an nowhere the thought the sheer thought

no trouble I swear
over and over I promise not
false as high cyclonic winds spreading out
there is always trouble with me

look even when he is not sick
he is still contagious as an elf lighting cars
down the whistling alley we walked away years waiting
(shine baby shine) now no more
the linnet's song of night is stop't
within the little throat

.

flexicon reef

word definitions if for instance a school
in the Soviet Union is was biswas known only by a number
a cumber of say nine school nine
and the football team scream
says we are nine if they make a myth out of nine
if formations accrue like sealife around nine
then nine becomes nine times nine or more
open to the seafloor on the Lynch roads
somewhere Karl Popper's head explodes

Kierkegaard flips like an obsolete god
at the eruption of Popper's headwad

but if nine is this world then what
is next it is not ten curled
this monkey has not gone the 100th monkey
nine get it nine
or ten

it's not zen or eight
all of it growing in the sensorium like teen sex-
argot ergot in the wet quackgrass
this is the big bang eight no wait not eight nor frass
yes eight not seven forever the secret seven
this mandrill's gone to heaven
a greet ya in the sky
what word is that then
honey pie?


.

a rearing of sea cocks

what is scooters what is vacation what is fall?

you are who again?

I didn't catch the reader I mean not that but heard it was
n't up to much not that I trust anyone
but you how are you in yourself parrot fiction
the friction of the slow heft always so

have you become like a parakeet down there in the hollow ooze?

so I have heard not that I and war was again a thing of the close
shave
at the very threshold I he she they is written this
in fervour
of this assembly hopes this
is okay with you darling
but would like to know who

has grasped the mud O in such fields we flew

[down to Gorky Park etc a climb a route
on Cyrn Las called Lubyanka
the Skull
The Grooves]

(O we will murder you given half the chance)

in the wind what was that name again
such cockrocking
it comes into focus this covered in kisses
you upside down pretty much
this TV screen closing in like a mythic bridge
with its beard falling into the river

given half the chance

even old people
like to fuck in rivers
and throw pineapples at each other
agonizing really how they cavort so

given the chance even people
like to climb the stairs and say yeah what
I won't be like this forever
so get me while you can

this radio burned long since

how are you in yourself
(without a question mark)

.

everyone you haven't slept with since

I can give a cat an orgasm—Germaine Greer

what that little tent was all about:

Mr Wolf allegedly to be summoned
by code-knocking on the fire surround
—in the tool store a World War Two
Commando assault craft—mephitis
of perished rubber she had crinkly hair
affected still—the derelict flapper look
what that little tent was all about
in front of the gas fire after the bath
—black and white TV memory 1969
the Eagle landing one small tent
for a man—cigarette smoke that stuck
to the cold bathwater—1930s perfume
the boy sat there—Craven A cigarettes
in some adult game wearing just underwear
which boy maybe both boys years apart
heard hollow of the little tent its connection
in wolves and Vikings maybe both
from opposite ends of the tunnel
looked down and became frightened
of George a heavy fancyman with iron grip
at the flappers the rubber wolf
that scratches in the night hole behind
—the wall where men in perished static
from St Nazaire at shoal depth we cringe
back from the night's defences away
...from the history behind the knocking

from the little tent both of us panicky
awkward across years fumbling to break the signal


.

my brother's drum

all night I had to beat my way in
with some old arcane stickhand-
rhythm of fireplaces and hash ash
that sent out the windows until

this drum jumped up grabbed my throat
grew a little mouth like a bullet exit
all bitty and crystalline stuff mingled cock attaché
with the darkle of tissue

you can't see inside this Sufi drum it is sealed
it is how I know my brother's head is still in it

.

tuning in to Radio Silence

at night you see the hands
rise from the heather

somewhere around here let's find out
follow the sounds of water underground there is a shape
that comes over us towards midnight

the radio starts up far off we want to run

keep digging here someone says

here is where they last saw themselves
here where the shape

put your ear to the damp ground you hear
chambers open out into worlds of wetness

under the gurgle of dream tiny voices
we are on a hillside when the dawn crawls in amongst us

we have found nothing we insist
nothing here in the night

in the night these are hands reaching from the moor
no one can hold all of these hands
each of us leaves with loss with the loss
of all hands

having at last excavated nothing

.

diary entry under wet

it is now and the wave is coming through
from the back of the head it enters the orbifrontal cortex
the outcome is inevitable and I refuse to express it

the flowers are not dead but neither are they enthusiastic
it is the future and Carry On films are now the basis
of the Global political system the voice of Kenneth Williams
issues from black and white TV screens throughout the precinct if you want
a vision
imagine a nasal bray camping
on a human face forever

it is no future and my position is that everyone knows everything
until it is taken from them by science

it future despite my anger my children
can unlock me like a big wet cake

who will you be when you die further?

in such waves we alert the future

a plumber has reduced the size of my bathroom
by boarding one wall
he tells me my new bath is the wrong size it won't fit
but it was fine it was the right size before I say no no
it won't fit you got the wrong size bath

why am i saying this. no reason. gaze how small the even epic.

at 11pm my boy wakes and gets out of his little bed
he calls me and tells me he is a little tired
I put him back to bed. he sleeps. he is a little tired.

I am a little tired.

you can't keep calling something a crisis
when it is twenty thirty years later. the opportunities
are all sucked out they are crowded with fossils.

look I say to him in his [radio] sleep. father this is now
what the world is. bone. dance. don't think you will wake somewhere else.

he doesn't understand his options yet. he is not going to wake
not even to tell me stood there in his pyjamas filled
with the world-concern of little boys lost at night
that he has woken to tell me as late as it is risen
from his bed his little bed that he has woken to tell me
that he my son my father I am a little tired

[rafted mad rafted like licks at tombs
(trumpet intro: if today was all we believed
we would not go looking on the moors
at night for ourselves
would not go barking outside
would not find emptiness
crawling on our skin
we would listen close by the old wireless
we would curl up
we would go to sleep)

I don't understand my options
I am a little tired
I can't go home]

sad as rafters in the circus haunt several
dark upon the chance happening late one above all
who feared most


.

dead chinook overfall so wide is love

holes in the city
where the Luftwaffe came over
how much we hated the Germans in our backyards
gasmasks everyone even in the 1960s had a gasmask
one day some boys

a firework a fireworld laid down by
rubble the verbs seep only
baby baby in the future you weren't there
I looked everywhere until my heart cold

as penguin poetry flew out they tied it to me
lit it and ran off I got it off just in time
oh Airey Neave never did so but what

legs blown off dead of the loss of blood
no vital organs blown up just the conduits
in that they were cheering that night
there was no mistaking what that was for
over the South Atlantic oilfields

whose water is this? who


.

nettles riff nettles the big tree

there at the confluence of radiators the boy sings

I knew you when you were small
you remember back in the old days
a father from outside swinging
a man with a glider who said now then

now then what? someone they said did homosex stuff
in a cinema after chopping nettles all day
this was a betrayal of his wife/mother
all day this was a betrayal

the boy was in bed with biscuits
a torch
the cold the deep cold

by the age of eight I was inured to cold
I can take cold like I can take rejection
warmth I see as too much frivolous politics

ancestral shame I can't help your Grandfather
who in a laudanum frenzy
maybe it is not right to speak of the favourite goat
whose spirit appeared over and over
in the guise of a maiden
always at dusk clutching a glass
of chartreuse asking in chitin

to be served in the hemispherical bread oven
where the bones were found behind the wall broken

later his girlfriends found these discoveries challenging
uh uh uh uh uh she would say from her book
he held so avid at night beneath the blankets
in the torchlight uh uh uh uh uh he
would say back in English Naval umaphore

tomorrow both of them scything nettles in the old garden
at each other scarcely looking



.
(Second place in the IBPC March 2010 hurray!)

a creek in the neckriff

the grinning fossilized foetus elephant (mammoth) flat-cycles across the skin
—the sea-skin seen from Space

the half human exults in the drowning vessel
watches the men go down

the infinite verse your mother has slept

the seagod counts to the number Graham then falters wonders can there be another
—there is: Graham plus one is called the elephant embryo cycle
it is a seagate
at which lonely verses wait lonely-(verses) two lonely verses

but wait cannot compare
with the little embryo elephant
smiling in its great circle
.

item this

item 250556951567 on ebay is the head of a panther
red mouthed panther gold eyed mounted item this item
is the powdered skull of a panther taken as a prize
by an Algonquin in 1840 in a near miss he found it hiding
out in a hollow log from the mist and magic of Yellow Rain Snakes
a coyote also a coyote he found at lurk amongst the population
poking in a burning he stick he found in the lightning to drive
out the lurkful watch of panthers from the hollows within
the panther and anther powder comes in a phial a secret phial
it can easily be added to a drink to prolong life all along to make strong
the vigour the virile force the vital esprit de corps or used as an ichor
to augment the eye's core the coyote also was taken though the extraction
of his thereaway member from the hollows with which he had tried
to flush the panther puma brought about disaster on the Algonquin
whose head powder is also of the listed items 250570583394
in sudden defaults of dizzy fits the Algonquin a man then found
himself though still proud quite weak and sick and died there
in the arms of panthers and coyotes alone from all his humans
it is why the power has massed up here alongside in the skull powder
in tides of light dust it may have become radioactive and then bad
to the touch

.

tiny fish

all day I felt like a waterfall was breaking through my chest

that birds flew in and out of the rainbow spray

nothing assailed this vision
nothing became stagnant or blackened

the water that fell there ran white down to the sea
with tiny fish borne along speaking in bubbles

and there it dived beyond human comprehension
into deep trenches
where unknown creatures wafted and swayed

I alone of the pirates
had made it back

.

licorice for this small act

the man gets drunk stands on the table and pisses
all over the velvet jacket of his frizzy host
he is ostracised for this small act he tells himself I am a bad man

much later he grows a beard he takes to eating mice
sitting by the river all Autumn look the delightful
cavorting of young otters just before they reach his net

in which he and they swell
red and bloody tumulus

always certain from childhood
that one day he would be eaten alive upside down
in the shades by his own cock

.

politic heliocline

100 metres down everyone becomes Mickey Mouse

look a nudibranch poster

if there was ever life here it is bread now with giant hands
mulching it squeezing it into the mouth
it comes on like that as though illness was a fashion

you agree with me he says over and over you agree you do

the whole nation gets excited
whenever a politician is caught fucking a sheep
but really it is a young willing sheep
that pushes back

there is now nothing to answer

.