real bad toothache and maybe love

not until the wind rips the feet
leaves you face down gasping looking
into a tunnel you never knew
not until some volcano
streams down and you have nothing else
but to run madly
I mean not until face to face
eyes like waves of the turning tide
running madly in
not until there is nothing else
but this one thing
not ever
why would anyone?

,

.

Icebergs over Yorkshire

the meaning the involvement there is no meaning or involvement

she does it like the first chapter of a novel

sat there

in the bathroom

flicking through

like we have just arrived in incarnation

still flicking through catalogues

this house

this life

this routine

but this is the lie

she does this only because underneath

she knows

like everyone

that there is a heart pounding

like an insistent drum in the jungle night

leading always to that one

terrifying

inescapable

place

.

if ever again a haunted pavilion

this level of toxicology you feel the pulse
like someone hitting your fingertips with a hammer
all up your arms the little shocks

christmas morning and the room full of paper
the theme to The World at War in your head, yours
I can hear it
do you know that?
Lawrence Olivier?
I apologise
I have mistaken you
for this ghost

who now in the attics moans
the same old stuff
dolls, dust, rafters, stuffing, waking, rearing

wouldn't it be nicer to just get past it
fold each other in
fuck all day
interspersed by sleeps and holds
and deep clutches

the unending ghost-love, the fearful and needing reach
and surround, the endings of flesh

and such soft drinks?

.

84 ways of weird connection

the greatest thing in History
—President Harold Truman (referring to the atomic bomb), 1945
Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart—Marcus Aurelius
And thou wilt give thyself relief—Marcus Aurelius

WTF does that mean?—Madeleine Shine

with my body I thee worship

who now cares that much about
a Duke of Edinburgh?
all production values evaporated
one doesn't mean to be unkind

and if this could be that other world in which
[how would I love thee]

think again of biscuits, perhaps hardtack
perhaps weevils, the semaphore approach ever closer

eating through the colloid-language of the brain
only a mile or so to go in fathoms

one hour's drive in vertical distance
to Space imagine Space and space
it is not surprising then apparently even that if anyway
that influenza after 1918
should become mythic as pollen

did Marx or Engels ever stipulate personality as the centre?
oppression? one nation?
why do you think it has been tried and failed?
think again of the Baka Pygmies and their fishing toxins,
their egalitarian rain

that's a mistake, not a particle collision

the distance, they mean

but again if this were the subjunctive otherworld
in which you were adjustable
how much would I love
to adjust you again
your flesh itself the industry of concern

caper now, caper in the arches of night
she cries all flighty

[and now count the strays, for they are flooded
and under the bridges lurk strolls
for all us flocking antic goats] in so
and count/shriek again look how the eyes
have strolled again/grotesque look it up

you won't know what they mean, not grotesque
but of candles and resonant caverns
cans maybe afterwards/sex of

a vast goat uneatable with such love

,

sixteen sides of everything looking wrong

for a minute there I thought you meant me
how my fingers glide over the keys
how I stand in the schoolyard with my head
a pineapple when all is ice
and ideas
I thought you meant me
holding the hands of our children
running back to the car with moonbeams splitting
our little heads
in an instant the river
sucking whisky like that so shameless at dawn
by the long and outgrown lake the Isley Bros
harboured/harvested up from the winds
I did really think and thin that it was me
s'all in my mind guitar no no no
summer br dunno this verb
everything's not alright
jaz min wait etc you know this heave
swirling diph-fucking-thong well who
summer br dunno this next neural pathway

there was a word I needed to use
to do with cars and fields
but I lost it
Hank Williams came instead

.

Hitchens/nothing

like a bubble
for two seconds

look, if you think you are coming back

if you don't

whose life is worth more
badger, etc

.

.

Barbie hitches North Korea

real concern/any signs of unusual movement/other news/a video—BBC

the entire world is drowned in red wine

despite the whole world's interest
all the world

praises China
the Military is placed upon alert

uncertainty

not to use Violence against protesters
images of a woman being partially stripped by soldiers

calls upon all parties to refrain from violence

how hollow and thin all our warbling
in the trees
at dawn

look around

mist like belief breathes into the river banks
things live down there

a sort of sick politics grows here

I want to use this as a background for my tragedy
my western cult of isolate mere
it lit a fire out there in the woods
strange people rubbing their hands
a stink of new meat
you get a lot of open notes when
you use a capo

all night I listened how

dead things lifted from the gutters and drove away

oh something else happened far off
the eye-healer
the miracle-worker
became a keyboard
in particular

the occult personality demands a new instrument

it creates the eyeboard

by the river
lay the blanket on the ground

.

.

the sign whose wording is forgotten

there is the bell
a growling in the lonely house
steam trains along the river
some filament stretches
from here to here from here to there
who can count these days?
this part is all machine and this vegetal
here is a slow warbling
something is up
be it words or seas or the mere
announcement of consciousness and re-entering
docking, penetration, engagement, embrace
the erectile dissonance it is as though
the integument had been stripped and left
still pulsing on a wharf amongst
the old ropes and iron cleats
from here one day in 1947 the pontoons
drifted out burning into the serious parts
of the Mersey those undead places
that stir strangely at night and subside again
at daybreak when the phantom
of the One-O-clock-gun somehow shifted
deranged in time and not-time in the hours
the other silenced-strikes, fires, charges
dips, engages, penetrates the wet powder
or poudre of near-history there I was anyway
after midnight challenged and assayed
in the under-standing in the belief at least
standing under what is unknown but imagistic
of the dousing that attends awakening
as though cognition was the entering of some
spirit-fall or water-fall if spirit and activity
were waters and the turbulence out there
in the river's night from which things
could be brought back, clutched close
captured, painted if not in hues then in hachures
and contours but in almost every case
dead at the door, dead at the instant before penetration
and quite a weight from which to squirm out
from under think of it as a battle in which
you know the routine of dead men caught
beneath the body-weight of animals

with such feeble instruments
I can measure nothing

.