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
.