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

.

cinquain

the pair
of them were wild
when they got together
dancing like hares in the purple
heather

.

cinquain

her ass
carried Jesus
to the holy city
he used hers as it was just so
pretty

.

vampires in self-help therapy

oh lordy

saw the next door neighbour a thin woman

made all overtures but she fixedly stared elsewhere

perhaps at some vision

of the Undead walking my doctor says you are a monster

by which she means me

you are unwholesome, she says

you will predate upon us regardless of the damage

you may do

yes I say thinking about it, I guess

but we are bad for each other

and have only humans as possible mates

so how about it? me and you, Doc?

I won't bite too hard and then

you will be cursed too

suddenly the clouds will seem nearer

the Sun brighter

the green more vivid

and the shades more intense

sex will improve

you will ache all day to get home

but the deep beneath will grow deeper

you will understand with a wolf-fervour

everything you look at

take this, she says, once a day

for three months

is it I ask a prescription for blood capsules?

no she says, take it anyway

we'll come back to this later

later indeed

me and her watch TV in bed sucking on little Arabian lollipops

both of us mad with desire for air and blood

stroking each other's furry legs and laughing

at the funny humans up there

thin neighbour strangely never etc

.

internetted by adipose

even to believe even to project

those flickers upon that wall

was fancy as the fine fancies

of French fancies that fairied

till their heads went so it has been

with us and our fay icing all

the spray and cloisters and weft

even there some organs lifted

as though the outset of film

and suddenly a great animal

that leapt into the room, then

cried, startlingly, no I am just

joking, well then so are we all

.

great mouths that come at you and keep coming

the keyboard in its own desire that

shoves a new shape before the sitter

and sender the subject and pig

in acts of slow love the woman

puts the gun in the mouth of the sleeping man

collapsed by the memory foam bed

blows it off down his throat

out his ass through the bed

through the floor

through the head

of the old lady in the room downstairs

who doesn't miss a beat

lower still into the sack of shit

she been wanting to remove forever

but never has

petrol can in there explodes house burns down

etc screams, mostly silence

shit she didn't mean

but hey

.

threeways at least in the sewers of philosophy

he's male, she says

so must be prurient

all night must have visions of women

fucking pigs being raped stripping whirling

opening themselves to the dead gynaecology

of dead males only knowing a dead love

dying themselves down in the arms

of that imagined dead goddess

who quacked through the bars

of their cots

without her, she says

he would die

yeah but

she says males need genetic modification by females

yeah but in everything you are

you been doing that for a million years

this is what you chose

this half-fledged warrior unsocialised and someways dead

yearning to come home

now so far away so unwelcome

.

.

beard

grown a beard

looks way too weird

gonna get sheared

.

three and sixteen odes to a forgotten entonox

unedited<333>fragment:have you yet come to kill me

...

filled with uncertain resentment/her demeanour

shifts to new obsession

world now world upon which

way-should-it-happen

to be true that in the heart

of spurted dankness we find only the disease

that this gas and liquid will kill you quicker

than God or what?you have to come now

I'm not he's down here somewhere.shades the best

that could be done.you'll be okay.each day the tendrils

the filaments grow

wings and limbs soon a monster a chimera.the old man

with pipes in the hospital bed rousing the whole ward

with his piping

this surely is what we are in for.incarceration its own

definition and desperate things scurrying deep

dying on TV in the final reality show

before some unspeaking breakfast in bed

now, Ibrahim, say nothing.it is near dawn

my love my love so silent and inedible

such cries now aghast in the upper air

while all night I have been unpacking

this, the same parrot

over and moreover

.

as suddenly an ironbird flew out

the day driving over those books maybe

those passes of wild smoke over the hills

these things were irreplaceable

when that man stepped out and we knocked him down

we entered first the negative always history

the feelings then of such bespoke cake

what now is the name of that house

but the new thing of hardship

only ever again a wandering wild thing

that came from the woods in flames

all down the hillside of Honister Pass we rejoiced

in the flames of games now our very clothes speaking

of your new obsessions one can say nothing

just the earthly endless bells of dead lead

which do not knell well

if at all

in the bridewell

.

on the pale wind of moving house

if it could be said if at all

that some Odd Men had come amongst the deer

one must venture that they had found their way there

and were now enamoured of the fleeting white bottoms

of this selfsame family of ungulates or perhaps

cone-eaters or fish-heads as the movement

of crates or plates in the Earth

there is a haunting thing here.boots stamp above.

at night one sits alone and hears boots on floorboards

where no boots etc. one considers it ill

but heeds to the greater silence that grows

outside and regardeth it not much

only, though, an owl with two heads

at the back of it all

an owl such an eek of a wild owl

tap he goes there or is it squirrel?

some creature beyond name

that would be in, in

fairy maybe, scrabbling up the wet wall

looking close for fractures and cold food

.

ruptures that just go on

well bless your piece of self-control

the dinosaur-mouthed wife with a bag says

to the anger that even now the wild fruit

a shapely thing as of disaster and romance

what huge clouds what an evening and thinning

stark island costs from the shop mind you

it never makes a sound

everyone wild as coots what just leapt

such things

between you and me what fancies of falling

all day the erstwhile gunshots

.

the discovery of many broken Victorian ornaments in a lake

the child strikes another child in the playground

the caretaker fetches a spanner and opens his head

the teacher is taken to discuss things

with a child psychologist

the sun zooms in

a goat leaps over the fence, runs wild butting

the boys on the basketball yard

suddenly squirrels stare down evilly

from surrounding trees

the bigger boys, some as old as eight

gather together, angry but resourceful

then in a huge wave they attack the squirrels

all over the playground boys kick squirrels

no one knows now what the Law says about any of this

some music.a half turn.a bust of an ancient local dignitary

at the last an aged master runs forth with a viola

smites the under-manager of the gauleiter

janitor inquisitor servitor breaks it into atoms but

atoms by def cannot the wild diet and song

the under-manager sees alternatives now

he gathers the boys, issues them with Glocks

the squirrels fall back in a skirmish line

throwing explosive cones

.

everything that couldn't be

a man in black clothes billows by the telegraph

tell me something

I don't know

deer out the window

eyes closing/there is a radio

that shuts and starts and starts

that brings messages from far-off Russia

saying you out there do you hear

are you dancing tonight westerners?

are you making love?

everything even the fridge has stopped

the night the cold the river

draw breath

as a single hedgehog steps into the garden

all of us poised like that

cracking slowly into the bushes

.

hounds of the fearful red spanics

her head is tourmaline maybe montelimar

her ass is a scaffolded oak tree covered in chains

her belly is all of Bellona and the rushing

the gods of ash gather here like downpours

are you stupid? white heat.mama.in this low rain

the king of Spain. it confuses everyone

the entire idea of transparent ashtrays. they are low

low.dirty things bang bang.the eleophant and ciastle.

so lucky so beautiful. that sliding slow.god appears

as a platypus.many folks in dun drink from him.

back in the library a wild hound

,

mental illness in these frequent lights

you are running down a forest ride

then it's all choked with debris

nowhere to turn

just no way forward

your strategies have run out

for this moment you are nowhere

it stretches

where you gonna go, baby?

outside the drums the singing

the cars revving up

ready to take you

drop your guns

and hear the News

sliding off the edge

eggs hitting the floor from hens

that didn't care too much

rats running in licking everything

witch children licking butter pats

ennervating traffic light blue-orange

the book fever low as gravedigs

lamplight and headlight sweated in the grass

the black moist

sliding in

looking down from this aghast collapse

at the gate of the Messiah

shit let's walk out long the river

throw in a body

see what gives

what rises

nothing like this for romance

I waylay at the leastest we look

.

in glimpses in small hours of the marsh mallow

living there like that with no head

and everyone looking through the trees

you'd have to ask

you'd want to know

if the flame that walks alongside

had the appearance of a marsh fire

a Saint Elmo thing that plays at night

around his main and mizzen

or super-mizzen as of a yawl or caterwaul

imagine that, squat there in the rising fog

and silence as little balls of light

that appeared over the slough at just before midnight

hung there a while then vanished

dead cells he thought dead cells that ignited

with inner mystic rotational fire something anyway

of lower orders not godly or angelic merely fire

catalysed up from some disaster of the personal tissue

some dream thing some downthrowing of the state

in metaphor or cataphor as of a marsh wight

or marsh mallow as is now seldom seen

a willow or wisp that strikes upon one's eyes

then vanishes wholly away in sight-echoes

whereupon he squats harder, more brooding

in the consciousness of those unreeling years

only again, only

.

some things I meant to mention

in the trees near the river a duck with no bill

thwarted forever by a morsel of bread with which it would fill

a hit or more hits suddenly the Hyper-Lamarckian Moment [the HLM]

held up its duckmirror and gasped aloud

such a gasp as would disturb to its eyeteeth

every duck along that stretch like an electric bolt that crackled blue and purple

yea unto that duck stood aloud upward it did

some jumped off at the shock and some in the nearfield teeter

see one smaller duck bad of attitude and uncurled inside

into places came creeping quiet but frosted all over like dicing

alighted then and there at the door the deposits the shale

you baby he says you, baby—you baby

without a bill with you

I could live forever

the screen closes in it is all of frost and metasquawk

there's nothing you can't do with no bill

not now not out here

in the wider duckland

.

failing to deliver

there would be little to say on this subject
were it not for the nonsense that has been talked about it
-- Lewis Namier

the keys

have been lost

let us look for the keys in the dark

internally displaced

we seek the keys

the police were building up

suddenly the lights came on

backed up by the satellite pictures

the keys lit up

down there in a hole by the door

in response to the latest allegations

the reported allegations

the latest evidence

a fairly substantial

vehicle on the ground

a viable device

a track record

killings of civilians

one reaches down for the keys

lifts them

inserts one

opens the door

you are listening to the News

from the BBC

right on Lake Ontario

right across the US

right in the middle of a campus

right of their belief

right, besides absolutely the bigger picture, what next?

Syracuse, Rochester

in these areas plucked incredibly

during the worst

we advise never to full-time/a few hours at night

just they can survive on your radar

he said buffalo he said buffalo

to live

one month's rent

I need you to find a priest

you're not asking too much

at last I can find some peace

a little guy

I could never forget

a lost boy

yes he did

a little face appeared

speaking to the world today

she and so many others

when they go back home

about survival

from the South

when you look back

does it seem like another life?

study something

biology I was hoping

get some engineer, water

I go to school

if you go back from America

what will it take?

a long time? knowledge the knowledge

is a terrible thing also joining us

in the programme in the headlines

in the presence in the region

two foreign aid workers

even now it is coming up to 4:30 GMT

good morning this is the shipping bulletin

warnings of whales in south-east riceland viking hard

immoderate

or good?

Germans bite Thames over-

fair 3 or 4 very poor

occasionally

Fitzroy increasing 5

Lundy

Lundy

fast net

shannon, sharon

occasionally poor

pharaohs

at times

from coastal stations

falling more slowly

automatic

light vessel.mist.channelling drizzle and rain

inshore waters.Friday 14th.weak fronts.rattery.Reichstag.occasionally

lands end

fog patches in the west.not really.later.there in the south or east it is half past five.

debt crisis in park litter-bins.in sport.he won't ride again.

a plan to be approved from Paris.

constituency paperwork. a spokeswoman.

lost from the public sector accused of complicity

he insists there is no alternative to his leadership.

the Euro has fallen

which means to return

in the first place

but the idea

who we really are

we have been looking at changes

.

.

Fairyland

the upside and the snake
the new fettle
that crashes even before
the wave hits
sideways then the coming-on
the gear-shift
all around my ladder
they start the little
shining people apples
dropping and fairies
upstarting they are as things of myth
but not
they are as the truckle of dawn
and as the night that sweeps
in beneath
the far lights over the sea
so low
so low and light
and only like the light that stops
when it alights
when they are gone
my heart of light
kicks again

fêted bird-pilgrim
of light
have you also seen this?

.

.

semi-Buddhist revs over a bar in Dublin

ke ytou
my way
take your hands say
a greek sea monster
what about me
in the sails
heady life off the rails
i don't belong
my face for the last time
c'est belou
waif
good bye

.

dismays of the rotoflarf

the evidence the fluid eyes of killers

someone laid their fingers

on a bra clasp

this woman is not what you wanted her to be

ash keeps falling, heaping up

something awful, no doubt

happened

to the whole truth

fingers on a bra clasp

prurience

DNA

evaporating like men

rushing into a crime scene

kicking over bottles

smoking Italian cigarettes

so many ings building up

not a noun to be seen

at the bottom of the well of all this

a girl

which

girl

reload

.

ice cream sinking in the reservoir

pain:ice cream:water:reach:primate:cheep

the descent of these chords

the clamour of grouse

a new man hits the street

a New Man

born in 1780 dressed almost as mollies

by parents who loved to inexcess tabac

he stumbles sudden all sudden of a sudden

in his southern den smoky as physic

why he cries why this is not religion it is

nothing more than the carrying of battlements

have I will of it none un-

-yet his mother his erstwhile and eggplant mother sidle

in his rear ear

oh oh aloud he shouteth how my mollyhood has challenges

my dandyweft was worked I confess

only now will I roost back in the rut

with such wild words and channels

he alights in the stead of his father

snugs there as chicks barely lofted

this, she whispers then: this, I meant

.

postcards from vacuums of delight

night stoops black/blue like falcons, like Superman's hair

smashing doves from the forest sky

the ashtray is your snout

you thing of clay and fire

would you like one of these tablets?

your leg is an oak tree trembling

your back is some sort of ocean fret

your hair is a vast spider taking off

never to

feel again the launch

of our shuttle and shuffle

our shining catch at morning

my best friend

the time weaves on

I am cutting our cords

you and me rise over the hedgerows

caught in sudden lifts, wet

caught bright like stars, scraps of web

that drift apart in the early dawn

you worry that I am a spaceman sent outside

drifting off open-mouthed into the endless empty blue

maybe I am

I will try not to be

but I can't help sending back

signals

from these new strange worlds

wish you were here

.

Solaris soundtrack by Alice Trueman

Find more Alice Trueman Soundtracks songs at Myspace Music

of bakers and strangers

I only believe in the god

that gives wild snowstorms

a man awoke in the far east

he left his house early

and jumped into a river from a high bridge

he swam around a little

in his best clothes

then went home all wet

snuck into bed

his wife turned over and reached for him

ugh she said

you're all wet

yeah baby he said

I have come from the sky

for three days they made love

without interruption

until eventually she wanted cake

I want cake, she said

I can make cake, he said

out of my eyes

watch this

she watched for a while just in case

they are invisible and wild cakes, he said

okay, she said

then this is an invisible and wild fuck

and it's all you will ever get

until you bring me cake

he went out early that morning seeking cake

but no one in that land had cake

he sailed on ships purporting to be headed

for the lands of cake

but no cake found he

only a tiny morsel

which he kept about him

at last he came home

and found his wife with the baker from next door

my wife, he cried, how and why?

oh fuck off she said, didn't want

that lousy eastern cake anyway

and you are insane and a control freak

and my Relate counsellor says get the fuck outta there

all night by the river he squatted

chewing upon his morsel and pondering

at dawn he arose with fury

and burst into the house

he threw the baker into the river

and turned then upon his wife

evil woman, he cried

I have sought cake in many lands

all the while you have baked yourself

in the arms of bakers and strangers

give me she says

that last piece

and all will be well

he hands it over

the sun comes up

everyone leaves houses and goes to work

the trees drop conkers

all is well

he sits watching reality TV

sucking on his last crumb

living at last really living

the wild life

.

snails that eat pigeons in the margins of night

there is a sort of explosion

and his hand glides down in a snowstorm

of pixels

now he knows

as though looking through a telescope

that suddenly made everything jump

larger and larger

that the world is just a vat full of pigeons

all of them shouting for more

he gives them more

he stands on the parapet

whirling

sliding off his pants

brrrrr they holler

his disaster takes a new turn

he wakes at sunrise with a snail in his mouth

he turns over

where's the ashtray he asks

it's on your side, she says

oh okay, he says

flailing for it

utterly in love now with snails

.

computer virus

curtains blowing in

I opened the door ten minutes ago

but no one was there

I wondered what just came in

the children stirred for a moment

in their bunks

then went back

to their sleepy contortions

.

1001 hummingfish dreaming the same dream

that particular position

lying foetally on your side

face into a breast

her arm around your neck

as though gathering in an infant

has some difficult attachments

it is easier and more expansive

to do the reverse

I should challenge myself more

should always lie like this

with my inflatable doll

it's a lifelike thing

cost me £500 from a sex shop

three realistic orifices

real hair

it's almost like being in love

love, anyway, is only that hill of beans

looming over a town in Interzone

a man with a gun kicking the door open

when the writer loses the plot

or a hand on a stomach during sleep

that makes the sleeper flinch

then sigh

and descend into dreams of pigeons

suddenly released

each carrying a message

to a distant home

he was big and blonde like a football coach

250 pounds at least

brought down a little by the liquor

his face was jumping

I didn't much want to get squashed

we are closed, I said

keeping the desk between me and him

most hummingbirds don't make it over the Gulf of Mexico

when there are gales

imagine that sea full of drowning little birds

thousands at a time

humming as they die

the sea reaching up, pulling them in

large predatory fish gathering

pop pop pop

humming there in your fishbelly

a hand stroking across

there in the sinking

oh yeah

never wanted to get where I was going with that anyway

these are the strange origins of flying fish

may I now live for another day, O great Caliph?

.

terminal velocity

as though the quilt was a sea monster

he pulls up his feet in sleep, attempting escape

a strange air enters him

he dreams of his ex-wife

he whimpers and thrashes

some chemical is missing, some neuro-transmission

that prevents men from acting

their dreams

he wakes suddenly with a broken toe

all of the imagery draining out of him

like a party of drunken boys

ripped from a ruptured airliner

their sad songs failing

as they fall

clutching at each other

one of them shouting finally

a hundred metres before they land

heck of a party boys

I'm buying the first round in Hell

oomph

eighteen small depressions in a field

near Blackburn Lancashire

.

if then some such turnipheads of supernature

late at night up where the wolf-blossom
sends pheromones beyond belief

late at night where the blossom-wolf up-
sends pheromones beyond belief

late at the room the water the orchids the possibility
of trans-special birth (mama)

I mean the sluice, the juice, the let loose

the water the ash the finality
oh but outside [scry'd]

outside the air

what about these were-stinging wasps this year?

my wild litl boy putted his wild foot in a nest got stung
all over of the scalpic integumento

I was there I woulda had bad-batted them offed with no thought
to safety or honour otherways

such dignified as I am and wading of the heft
like a giant wrestling pinked-out fen-demons

the wide white rides uppa oh the subshine bra-caking
all down the interfay of blurry interstices

his hefty hand down there his/her demon hand
there at the oak-wefted door
fire demon fire-fretting the only-rafters at their rafting

boys, wild boys like boy-rats heathered in from the fen
there by the sidefire glint silent-holed slinting they
wade through batting and aside such trite and triter
shadows and shades and overshades and glades of clades
lofted as the ill balloons of gutted and outer waxicades

.

what do they call that bounce?

all the ittybitty and brandnew the irritation
I have collapsed he says collapsing
not yet technically she says before he hits the floor
all is a dream he cries a dream in which sheep eat the world
you she says eyeful are calling me a sheepgoat
no no I never I suppose I may but really it was
an indication of the foullest weather to come
the weather to come the weather the weather to come
shut up and let your head hit finally the tiles she says
watching him descend but he slows he slows like non-falling sloes
oh god she says tugging wild at her nose
you are all as uncoiling as a firehose
yes he says now in slowmotion my heart has unwound
would you consider
no she says
not even with your brother
or your two-tailed ocelot for much money
okay he says just had to know for my mother
then it hits the tiles and blows without sound
not much glossalot more matte not funny this irruption
into the other which really occurs as a flow underground

what do they call that bounce?

.

cinnabar

disturbed by dogs or dodgems dislodged from dreams
a little black dress
of a day-flying moth lodged between
marram spikes—red and black
or red and pink she was too flighty
to fix and soon flew
with wild uawks
out over the sea

.

an beatific incident at a petshop or pet shop, of late

red wine seeds behest at womb temperature—Madeleine Shine

the cat has large outer paddles of which
one is inserted by urgent pliantists
into the bars or space bars
whereupon a VAST parakeet bitch biteth off

one such oar or more
leaving such mere stumpage and pump-outage
as a whirling unstumped tripedalled fellitrix
might mump in a panic
its whiskers feeling their extraneities of amplitude
in one quarter dis-tressed one channel closed and inuded

she re-sorts to the toothback module and attacks
both attacks and abacks if such a thing
doth ring awhile the para-keet which is further
*develope* than keet mere keet
she/he laughs and trusts to the bars but the bars are rigged

by the avid pliantists they are lowly sugar or nougat
like Hollywood glass and the feelycat-wild breaks in
all eyes agape and outer toothcome
now so sad so sad

is nurture's outway
the cataster its own dying face-up of vile throaty feather-fret
but such is the click clock way
of the fervid giant pliantist

its great wings already broken, collapsed
all of it just breathing
there on the wild floor

.

Have to introduce this as I haven't posted other people's stuff here before. It is literally an email from my good mate Dave Mehler the current editor of Triggerfish Critical Review. He is or was or is sometimes a trucker. He seems to have it in his soul anyway. This was just an email and not a poem, but it just shows just how poetic and real someone can become.

email from Dave Mehler

too bad you can't ride through the Siskiyous with me--Truckers talk about their butts puckering up, meaning sucking the seat up their ass on a hairy pass. I ran around Colorado (the worst were Wolf Creek, Rabbit Ears, Red Mountain and Berthoud)-- Wyoming where the cross wind pushes you sideways on the highway over blowing snow which turns to ice, Montana, Idaho and Washington, but the Oregon/California border has the Siskiyous--you'd like riding that one with me fully loaded--I think it might generate a poem for you. The worst thing is getting cocky when you think you know your truck and your ability to judge what the weather is doing to the road, but you're wrong. It's the young truckers with just a little experience under their belt that are the most dangerous. Trucks still use the runaway ramps, because the drivers are fucking idiots, not due to mechanical failure. Brakes start smoking and can catch on fire if they get hot enough. Aluminum trailers go up fast. I've seen rigs on fire and on their sides. loads in the middle of highways because they were lost on curves or not strapped down well or even trucks laid over on offramps taken too fast. I used to train drivers working the dollar tree routes. sometimes they were so stupid it was scarier than anything else I've seen. and I've seen cars under my trailer and motorists and motorcyclists laying dead on the highway. Too bad you couldn't take a run or two with me on some of the hair-raising twolanes--would be fun to joke and talk whiling away the minutes and the broken white stripes along the highway. I don't know what the trucks are like in Britain but they are big here and we have distances to travel dude.

.

of dental arousal and the taboo tradition in Yorkshire

I dunno why anyone got to show their teeth like that
as if it indicates approval or affirmation
I don't show my teeth not ever
cept to a special few what gather
for the occasion
3,2,1 we go like on a saturday under the cloud you know
what cloud I mean
then I pullem out and let it burst all over
like the fireworks at a football game
woah they all jump back
never seen such stounding white hooters they cry
yeah I run around the ring in the firelight
toothing at them all
man they love it
getting scared and awed like that
then we get it on and all chew together
grinning like cheshire bats
tuning in our oscillatory dopplers
finally collapsing in big toothy heaps of love
all over, enamelled up to the grey waders

.

all of the unused things

half of the bed
many bodily functions
all the lower circuits of the mind
so many gestures only accessible
when relaxed
almost all of the chairs
the table
he becomes all cerebral
all top chakra
though that too withers
becomes a thin and wasted thing
his strut and pride
his elevation
his erection
his cockade and cloud
the laughter and arrogance
the penchant
the pendulum
at the last it is Toulouse Lautrec
shitting on a beach on camera
giggling
the whole world stinking of that giggling shit
a room in which one can barely breathe
bicycles
driving licences
hands, even hands
that used to make things
that used to give
now just pliers to lift the routine
disaster
get narrower still
watch it all slide away
just a brain in a jar
amongst the cauliflower heads
and onions
sending out its last mephitic signal
my name is this this
I don't remember
it doesn't matter
I left
they will pick through the traces
and find nothing
but ash
sticking to the floor in that outline
where the fluids became sticky
where the insects settled to feed
all else blown away
just a wisp and a whisper

civilisation

.

future in the quick

who knows that sensation
of knowing every word before it happens
of urging it on like a conductor
of watching the street and reciting
the future which car will do which
pedestrian will collapse by the tree
her shopping spilling sending
of watching the moor and anticipating
in your heartbeat the next gust and yammer
apples rolling over the walkway
into the puddles and the beat the beat
grouse rising disturbed water
shuffling in ghost forms through the grit
like an act of creation maybe
this is what it was bringing
the world to life the mad dance
maybe it hasn't finished
maybe if you sway hard enough
on the right day
when the wind is from the west
and the witchclocks allow
it will all happen again
the entire reboot
and you just did it
whipped up the wheel
scooped the froth
cast it out over the trees
the new trees
you and your lover
collapsed into each other's bodies
knowing everything
meantime tick tock tick
the lick of the slow wind and the slough

.

ceremonial magic on reality TV

If you get in that car, you will be found dead in it by this time next week—Alec Guinness speaking to James Dean, September 23, 1955

empty air space
trumpets over the wet field
the creature keeps heaving
croaking at death
its head jerking sadly
the self harm of the new electric
the medication adds another level
to the arcade
think of a chasm
filled with mist
things whirling and crying
vegetation stripping
over it all like a slam
the night bridge
girders dropping into the fog
everything shaking
halfway across
nothing ahead or behind
wait for the signal
don't change anything
wait for the signal

^{same as it ever was
same as it ever was—David Byrne}

.

unfinished poem for David Mehler

six wide white streaks of paint up the Snake Pass I am alive I have wired one heart to the brain alternator at 70 amps and I still breathe the sun coming up over the rocky south stray 24 potential volts of lead acid sitting lurking like a storm of alchemy a dragon rising below the next hump the same sun again coming up over Sheffield like new dawn Vulcan CityI can't do ahead in the truckle of dawn but don't you worry honey I'll be dogging it in nursing like Chandler with his big old Chrysler dragging a battleship over the mountains only bigger bigger crashing through your dreams a Lancaster Bomber breaking through the crystal spheres

into liftoff and we sail over the last grand arches then that oof of the air machine as it sends me brakes like a whale a stench coming out way below of clutch and rubber and sin and then the clear fairway down to Manchester Central easing it on in with the mirrors the whole thing gasping out leviathan steam all over the wet morning six thousand horses in need of a drink

.

our other eyes and mouths

those little five-fingered faceless monkey gods
can do anything
they are tiny octopuses
wrapped around the world and all the world's things
murdering and loving
imbibing its pheromones
banging and wafting
giving spasms
writing this

imagine them suddenly gone
like a stopped mouth
vacuum blackness where they had been
flies buzzing there
sucking, drying

.

mysterious people of the flag

the flag that flew and blew
the flag that flew and was blue
the strange flag that flew its blue
suddenly grew
a hue
the new pink and blue flag
would not burn
but now turned and flew up the flue
over the rooftops it blew
alighted somewhere near breezy Renfrew
where it was spied all over anew
by a farmer where his crops grew
in the new-broken ground

nothing more was found
unless it were
by some covert few

.

cowku

all those cows daubed red
in that long field
the sun going down

.

hareku

four hares crossed quick
before the next train came
haring

.

Bloodgutter looking in/out at the real Other for whom in is out

caused by the deposition of dead blood
into the schemes of expulsion—think of
trees a clearing smoke rising the smell of meat burning slow

the gunge and ooze the wings the non-wings
the womanly thing the man thing that acts and speaks not
the way that light hits from aside
stairs descending 1234 into the archives
of the body

nine tenths of anyone is bacteria
alien stuff from a world without air
living in us like we are space-suits

Feminism is just the same old urge
to hop louder to eat grass and grow wings that swell
over the sea, to become itself the transhuman

this is the other reason: mix

it up and see
before we were here
before we could be
they were here
they had to migrate when the air brought us in
they migrated into us
our darkness
our warm wet caverns

asteroids loaded with vats of spermaceti
tended by aliens with care and rope

hollow oh oh oh
sits the song

one of these days you will wake up
one of them will be cackling on your headboard
grown huge
do you have a headboard?
I don't know
but you'll regret it and soon

think hard of the substrate
the Burgess Shale
our love affair doesn't fossilize there
it's all just red-black mystery

this is not the beginning middle or end
of a beautiful relationship

airships airships everywhere
so many wild airships
they mount the sky like strange balloons

a billion years if necessary
until the ride is available
back to deep space
to their deep songs

of all the guts in all the world
she had to walk into

.

love

everyone in the past was a bastard
evil drunken

everyone in the past was a bastard
holding their kids down under water
singing

everyone in the past was a religious flaming fuckwit
who knew nothing
nothing but anger and vengeance and infant
mortality

everyone in the celestial past was a neanderthal comet
what spoiled its soup messed its pants

everyone no excuses was a goddamn psychopath alcoholic
drug addict racist sexist fuck
as are we
looked back upon
in about twenty years

love

.

twelve steps to the great going sideways

he feels he has insects all over him their little needle steps

new revelations of the meridians waking

his electric flagellum sexmotor will not rest

each pinpoint of bodylight has a counterpart

the old rooftop is falling in fast

his pets die starved while he sleeps

he shuffles down to the river splashes his head like a Buddha

who got up in stinking rags and realised

it wasn't over yet that the past weeks

under the tree were just the beginning

that now he had to go home and face it all for real

leave all this behind this virtual practice

leave these sotted rags by the riverside

jump in finally, say it all at last

Hi my name is the Buddha and I am a non-swimmer

.

three and a half seconds of pure light (a poem to the Time Being)

unlike the whip-pan, which is used to rip the viewer

into a tangential reality, the dead-pan uses a melting rack-focus

to engage the death-posture of the character onscreen

—Madeleine Shine

1. (he sees himself laying onward

in the rain stone after stone

into the mist towards a horizon

which cannot ever be known

this is the Zen-pan or stone-pan)

2. the boy the silhouette only of the boy

the long-dead seen from behind

hobbles along the alleyway

leaving his merest forensics

barely stroked into silver emulsion

3. another who reaches the vanishing point

who leaves nothing

—undiscoverable archaeology

of light

a creature of soft parts only

who dances but will not stay

who shimmers but will not keep

who leaves no fossil for the reliquary

4. where at the table the hands work in shards

—of flint, itself fossil, compression,

the metamorphic dead—

knappings; they rebuild in three dimensions

the stone jigsaws—each when finished

yet incomplete—brooding an inner hollow

where something was once eased forth

now only a void, a lost core felt

as disturbance

of the night air, but nothing

when we stir

only nothing

lost there

in all our rolling frames of dream

.

shellfish

lay it wholly on small ices in preparation

let its motions cease

splay the members easily though with care

not to mark or damage the outer casing

it has no exact plastron or carapace

though proximal seams may be discerned

have a care for these for they may be easily split

to mar the appearance and quality

the first incision must be through the abdominal sea-wall

to reveal any eggs or splendifera

which must be removed whole

to be replaced later beyond the papering

apply therefore the luxator to break the fixations

or restraining ligaments that bind the genital core

to the aliment and sloop

lift it whole from the bedding

place it in the thoracic cavity: the glans

and intestes, the throat sickness and the urbane follicle

if any vivacity remains it will quickly fade now

as feathers fall from an exploding dove

these congruent diversions are vital

if the operation is to evoke the requisite peppery fluids

if the fields of slow armagnac night are to be elicited

from the brachial cogs and genitives

of the body-slick

now with a dream-snap fold in the limbs to the centre

covering in entirety the 'facial' area in forgiveness

capture them there with folds of brightness

and shattered ropes of culinary grade

do this with assertion and a sorte of nakednesse

brake here the entire organism with slow heat

until he effervesces with blue alacrity

in serving, crack the shell and pour as a solid liquid

into salvers or weighty crocks

as glass or otherwise lead

apply such ritual as is seemly

such is the preparation and the serving of the large shellfish

..

sex with your mother

the Prime Minister is an alien

he licks his tail in the bathroom

says yeah

we are at war with everyone

I love it

what on earth is goin on?

the cool cat in the fair keeps throwing

down cards look he says look

a high explosive a hanged cat a dead animal

sharing your pillow

world is this we livin in

love takes your heart

like a swallow burning down

on a fly

that thought different

the waves the radio cracks

it's not enough,

all those people drinking in the grass

shouting over the sea

refusing the language

what are they?

i don't know how to figure their presence

the strength gone from my arms

all of it gived up

all of it drinking in the grass

refusing my arms

are they what?

i don't figure

the waves electric as all fuck

dead on the beach

.

kings in whirling dust

no one believes a Lewton Bus forever

the boy who cried etc

all I remember is the elephant rearing

the man on horseback rearing

it seems like Vietnam

the Foreign Legion trapped

and will never surrender

but back then how anyone could be heard

I can't imagine

this is how Harold blew it

after almost winning

the boys got over-excited and chased the Normans

down the slight decline to the end of everything

glaucoma: what does the coma mean?

I have advertised my jetski

on the bipolar support forum

it's that time of the month

I needed a laugh

the mist, the dust, the sand, the chaos

these are well done

the Persians have long curly beards

like Babylonians

staggering drunk from a London hairdresser

in 1970

camp life does this

she won't call to apologise

she doesn't

the boys coming in bloody and stinking

you are their reward

oh what biceps from the life, the sheer life

everyone was insane throughout history

almost everyone was an alcoholic

with ongoing traumatic stress dis

order of the order of a gas attack

lodging in the womb such joy

.

noisy spirits

it is really wrong and somehow so right

the focus the sheer attention is the problem

it is like there are ghosts everywhere

the split between magic and mysticism

for three nights I sat in bed firing my gun at you

but you would not disappear

it is dangerous to be in this zone

everything stops here

everything is examined to destruction

if you want to be safe

get lower down the scale

keep away

keep away

out on the heath

someone on a tractor

but it doesn't look human

it looks like a bear

riding a tractor out on the heath

I am at the window looking out

there is a bear driving a tractor

something is really wrong

let's play Chess again

I understand it now

your shoes indicate that you

are not sane

you live in fantasies

you accept a world where bears

drive tractors

our emotions have not arrived yet

maybe they won't

he made Paulus a field marshal

so that he would commit suicide

his facial tic was the 6th army

dead hands tuning the Christmas broadcasts

trudging to Siberia dying

if he really believed he was right

then what choice did he have?

but why then cyanide

if it really seemed right?

do we like Jews?

Jews is a wrong category

one might equally decide to be

a parrot or a human

this inclusion is an exclusion

so yes we like them as much

as parrots or humans

for they are just that nothing

that is us

this is why the cyanide

the burning

because finally the sense somewhere

of the rightness being wrong

of there being no wider answer

beyond that small space

where it could thrive

these are dreams

that cannot live outside

that warmth where they hatch

there is no excuse for religion

.a cat buys a dream

spiderman

the Hulk

gamma-roaches crawl out of the wreckage

you don't know it

but you love me

we are in deep deep water

our eyes sting

we have forgotten everything

we are now elsewhere dead

and alive

and wrong and right

always in danger

forgetful, wayward, mad

sinking, rising

never what we think we are

the titles run down

to the tune

we exit into the rain

black dead rain full of those rainbows

where our hearts catch light

but really

this chaos is where you live

.

even stuff like this

I like this like how he says it

low low low

a star falls a strange giraffe falls

oh a grassy place

it seems shallow so shallow

I don't understand this technology

my babies are born with other heads

they know how to dance and swim

trace the track of my vein in my forearm

watch it

what is wrong?

do you see that something is wrong?

help me

I have killed you

all this fucking clutter

like a roof falling in

.

TV review overheard in low flight

the man the other man has information about Death

he writes the information inside his shoe

so that foreign agents will not read it on his face

another man looks out at us but really he is looking

at a woman a small woman from Scotland

another man interrupts

another is shot by a wall in London

he is a criminal

maybe he was trying to get to the information

about Death but no one knows anything

beyond the hole in his head

where rain now runs down the windows

and a small animal scratches all Autumn

a woman says I am an epidemic

but no one knows what this means

this then is the first episode

.

again the bell samphire erupts

i amphire

floats in jugs

skink wild

skink again

twink oh the horticult

the twi

lite

the haughty cult your

glooking photosynth

underneath the arches[phone

me in a comma from Moscow put this line in other poem what

consonants did you fucksic]

all down

draped

we dream,

we'd ream

horns of the open sp/ace ace

.

scratch

the dispossessed of Italy die young of heart disease

struggling rootless far from home

their hearts die quickly

the overt reasons are all over them

but the reality is the loneliness

of a drunken man in a foreign land

sitting in a doorway at midnight

finding reasons not to return

Emmer wheat, think of it

think of cultivars

of Americans experimenting upon Japan

Norin 10 shaking the world

with short shafts of wind

Rht1 and Rht2

imagine a verb called tillerage

do you mean like the age of a tiller?

what is a tiller?

someone who lays tills i think

think of the tilled bathrooms of Ur Nammu

King of Wheat

without atom bombs we might have no bread

(農林省^?).

home is everything

someone says this

even imprisonment can be better

than floating in space

is there an arc in this?

an arc angel dusted in flour

big wings/flights/sails/blades/fletches/dreads/chops spinning

ripping out raptors on the tower?

23 degrees of arc or a little more

potassium/comfrey/nettles oh not again

the smell of a head in a cow's stomach

humankind cannot bear very much dislocation

everything is as it always is

until you scratch through the pelt

without Fat Man and Little Boy

these makers of shadow

these deep kneaders

no aerated happy dough

fragging the extended kitchen diner

from the velocette/[what}]

into dreams of (amniosis i really mean it)

imagine again such large bills hissing

unrestrained by the presence of a dog oh

oh formic acid, the ants attack by the river

the Irish Scouts share their curse-words

steamer, they say

this is all news to us

though we notice congruence

between Irish and Welsh

pigs, for example

the three living and the three dead

lo, I am undone

I know nothing of homes

the three and the unthree

and the fleet and the dead

you too, in there

maybe the closest I got

.

the peasant's revolt

the English would kill and be killed everywhere—Simon Schama

let us go to the thing and remonstrate

so they arched a devilling lever of the back death

the free dead affronting grudgement

on the awning of the wealth of June

on the feels of a black heath

the bridges powdered with shots

awls evenly at her percy this was not a gabble no

gabble gathered here to shake a point

states elonging to taxed electors whose

minorial recounts were grown on the wire

they who knew they were brewing paradox sickly

of the risen were woken open

malices put to the scorch

decapitated on the same lock one after the smother

captured at his airs in the hacked spun it on a spike

through the retreats on the heaving of thirteen Junes

what he saw has woken him in error

a sky dead with aims rumbling in ruin

it was a toy the span of the terror

way front, the spoiled party leagues gold cloth on the east tiles

oiled and down fall iterate spines in the little horse

.

a contusion of unknown flowers

may your heart be free and wilful

violet bell-flowers, what little scruffs

vetch, what dead ground

the nurse-hogs clean my skin

forest does not mean trees

but rather a hunting lawn

over which is applied forest law

so unhinged, caught in its onslaught

waiting for its own infection

like smoke

the head of an onion

a grievous thing

of the welters

we did that once but now

camera of the canal bottom how

we trod the bellied light

to appear on the victims neck

so fucked and slow we trod

the light into the mud from which

a bloody coughing

as though gazelles or other harbingers

had lighted

such sex such coiled and reaching now vexed

every gasp a tarot card thrown into bloody fog

all of it new and dead

five rise chimneys, dogs everywhere, wild wild as

footfalls of smoke

please

, of people and animals

even when the buboes appeared

everyone else too

sloughed there as so many crying shakes

.

Alice, at last

there's no sense pretending it's better than it is

lie there and die

in your last lucid moments you look around

bewildered

a wild spirit horse stamps upon your chest

his huge face in slow motion coming down

your family bicker above you as you sink, rise, sink

you are a box kite made by your dancing husband

you float far above the streets

out over the valley

a mile or more

so much dead string now

reeling in radio messages

from back then, way back then

running up bombed sidestreets for milk

in 1941 Liverpool

and the ferries still running

I was a clippy

you announce

the tram-brakes shriek down the Liverpool hills

a clippy in green for the Jazz dancing

when he came back on leave from the convoys

burning the Alaskas out of his head

with wolfpack beer warm as dry blood

on the font at St John's

the string cut, the kite falling soft

a mile away, miles away

down into the valley bottom

all your stories landing, coming home

running up Whitby Street

carrying milk through the bricks

milk that passed on through the bombs

to that day

when the kite flew over it all

dropping only itself

upon your coffin

sliding into the curtain

to the convoy fires

of the last Liverpool Atlantic

.

raising sails in the east badger

the fearsome saint puts the gun barrel

in the mouth of the winged horse

[it takes two poets at least to make one whole human]

what is 'target practice'?

what is 'a culvert'?

can you play Golf at night with infra-red balls?

what is that makes the toilet water blue?

I encountered bottled toilet water in Austria

at the age of twelve

could not understand why it was so coveted

and highly priced

this is an untidy landscape.the gritstone sparkles with quartz.

rosebay willowherb and ragwort grow from the cracks.ferns

uncoil golden arcs of prehistory.but this is already tinted

already disastrous to unmeaning.better only to look and say nothing.

the blurb says that Ed Harris says that Lee Krasner

says that Jackson says

jackson i goin to jackson

where de elphunts

run clockwok on a cold day place your back

to the fret you find the calamity always comin

from the groin east of reason

trunkful of 8000 mussels crawling snout

like

come back to life come back

all night she talks of badgers their huge

bearlike behinds cold on the road

after the school-run

all i need to know to be sure

do you know, like

anything?

i got doubts

for even blind babies smile

.

une ombre de la rue

(to Lee Krasner and Dorothea Tanning)

(look again look how the world is all alive with beanflies)

(start playing)

(where you used to be/clings to me)

in his or her thermosetting resins the moment throttles as though

it purhaps some placeholder for an embarrassment
when she/he is ready to be swept by the nervous heath-fire

(il fait si froid dehors)
the brownian motion upon the veldt-integument
as dough as dammit them digitigrade hoofers came all
in a swoop through the meridians beaming in their

tarsals their taste-feels like (degree)-proof in several
as though a motive now even but are you sure
you are ready for where you will go next.the cur-
tains will unravel the lights enumbrate are
you ready to see in this new place such parsifals as you may observe

through your new atavism of eyeshut skin through the breakers
and booms of the kopje drums the lift and unlike-light rings aloud

[The Door to December ... No pedestrians were out, no traffic on the streets .... Monster

THE MOON HOAX THE FACE ON MARS]

what about toxicocariasis he asks might i not be infected

struck blind from exposure to such drear auto-imagery?

(the monster sparrows fall/vos peines sur mon coeur)

unsatisfied he sends himself twenty emails of the same poem

signs each one what the fuck/in the long room/behind his shade/

the drug addicts and alcoholics/always off work/gawping

in stifled delight at the 9/11 TV

like the fried Kapa Normandy negatives it's not just like some patsy

in the back room burned your manuscript

like you might reconstruct it from memory

(i can't stop right now says K can you record it for me i will

watch it later it sure looks spectacular)

it's like they erased that whole sector of you made unrecoverable

black buntings flutter on the gate

no you won't be coming back.don't ask.

.

seriously, pigs on fire

the first sensation is of invasion
by powerful toxins
that feels like an earthquake
the organism shuts down a little
and then a shuddering takes hold
and here is the separation

the divergence as the oscillation
defies the local disaster

these words are vague words
unless you have bestial experience

there is a possibility
that these abstract fires
might say nothing
that the readers might just
roll down the hillsides
might lie there by ponds
thinking nothing much of this

beyond the croak of shallow water

.

I had smashed the windscreen and was crawling in

imagine if they did that
how disapproving you would be
figure yourself leaping down rivers

a man enters your door
and steals your keys
a man is in your house
you hear noises.a friend had this
and was too scared to act
he stayed upstairs.

I keep a pickaxe handle near to the bed.
I am sufficiently insane if required.
the merest tinkle and I am active
beating reflections and windows
you bastards I cry I will have you
once I hit myself around the head
convinced that I was a burglar
Bastard, I shouted

I don't get this focus on these old words

he started the car and reversed out
with me on the roof
by the time he got to Burley Terrace
I had smashed the windscreen
and was crawling in
it was a Zombie film
I didn't remember it was me until later

I know where you live, I shouted
beating on the bonnet like that with no head

I got as far as the end of the street
before the dawn came up

before the dawn of the dead

.

little satchel

one could imagine it anyway
the settling in the invasion
the colonization of melody
the meme life the not actual
of virus half-strife

blackened now, balded and blasted, the grouse-rid heath

I have no kenning me not now
kenning I have not my wild sow

imagine emmer wheat and rivers
mudstone and sand-stations of the wild cattle
imprints in cuneiform

one huge rock hard-hewn, struck with crystals

the wounded are dying from lack of sanitation
and the town is about to fall
their exhausted faces bewildered, lost

oysters
agape

their faces lay undiscovered for five years
his unearthed body still wore those same clothes
as on that day

a little satchel on his back

shove your hand deep in the rivers
and grasp up the mudfish

now light fires by the delta
and forget
what it is to hurt so much

.

the zooming green play

in the border by the school railing the wild plants
suddenly look like machine parts
such is their depth of field
so vivid are they in this moment
for a second the world rotates about this green axis
I am instantaneously drawn in,
risen, raised, as though
a lens had been tightened
an axial symmetry was now fixed

it doesn't feel sane or safe
to see with such clarity

such starkness in the green-grey
it almost crawls there and wakes
quickens and reaches

I sat all day with green saki
feeling that beat-down satori

creatures of a later age shuffle
into our disasters

.

.

ravenous vermin

the teeth that started all this are now gone
those teeth were not real teeth
the man who leaned in with all of his heft
applied to the luxator who did to the teeth
what a bus does to a tortoise
is now gone oh now gone

it has rained for this six weeks
inveterate book clubs of Tai Chi and smoke

use this to make your title stink

Kali got Jeffrey
under the table
by the time we found them he had died of fright
or some other small rodent issue
Kali looked smug
we buried Jeffrey in the garden in tissue

no one knows who let him out
and my youngest son won't admit it

got to imagine it, though
a caveman confronted by a huge tiger
it's a bad end
Bruce Chatwin sees the Prince of Darkness
in that lurking spotted fear at the fire's edge

predators were big back then
before we got projectile upon them

now hey what
we pray together
to our gods of sewage

love, too, is a parasite

your clothes ain't done up
jesus don't you care?

buy the next ice cream or we will
fall upon you like ravenous vermin

.

didaktosaurus captured in yellow smoke

(the thing is they watch you do it

they know nothing of deep play

if you do it so casually then what
exactly what?

how would you tell them sensibly
that adults do things that for a tiny reward
risk everything?

you live in their dreams
you saunter beside the dusty high-roads
to the Gnostic frontier

it will be years before these bombs go off)

what a disaster that we can't live in the future
when everything has been cursed

oh shit whatever
we get long enough to pick the frogs out of our teeth
grow beards
lose everything

isn't it enough?

but that boat across Grasmere
little red arms and legs churning in its wake
and the crew eating cake

meantime all is hedgehogs, hedgehogs
all the way down

the amplification here is not in hand gestures
or facial tics
but in the kitchens of Dorian Gray
the outer the unreason of behaviour as foliage

he screams wildly then reads a book

my dear fellow, he erupts

all is fucking lost

.

a dog that flew upwards in ice cream air

at this point he feels
that he should have a word with himself
he feels like a vampire an oupire
a thing that wakes up and wonders what

warfare is always the main business of Humanity
this is why women are not valued so highly

this is changing now that vegetables and fruit
can be cultivated at any time. night or day
anyone can order a mango to be delivered
to his/her door in a basket strewn with exotics

those seasonal cycles are now just particle splash

a man walks along the clifftop with a small dog
that won't stop tugging
suddenly he has had enough he reaches down
picks up the dog and hurls it over the edge
he watches it hit far below
then heads back to his rented caravan and eats ice cream
from a shoe

the dream reference is of escape and disaster
he wakes early and walks the same path
along the cliffs
dragging a spirit dog that yaps maddeningly

somehow right in his ear as though it hovered
beside him

it is understood that dogs can digest fecal matter
and take out the last vestiges of nutrient:
they are adapted to extreme scarcity

sometimes the caribou just walk away in ways
that predators cannot

if you or I ate shit we might at least
want to keep quiet about it

this is the thing with dogs

(people think dogs love them

think about this in terms of protein complexes)

in the karst clints and grykes are edelweiss
on the clifftop
a man backs up to the edge
his arms outstretched
lets himself fall
it is Saturday
the unlikely flowers of North Yorkshire
flying about him
the ground zooming in
the riverbed
the limestone
the shattered small dog
yaps out a river from the deep phreatics below
into the sunlight

this is the thing with dogs

.