water

all night the sound
of water tapping
—lost love

.

still life

anxiously checking 

his breath in the little bunk

—still life

.

dead food

this dead food
at 6am
—memories

.

tide

hands like a tide
under the covers
—her swells

.

.

frogs

all the young frogs
croaking
—surprise frost

.

.

Beeku

that wild buzz
of controlled fear
—a bee in a glass

.

browsing-room only

take this but not that? no, take this and then that too
what am I or you a series only an assemblage
in potential to be constructed chimera-like
by a passing consumer have you or I laid out
our limbs and traits along the aisles to be passed
or stopped at to be picked up and mused upon

down your throat consumer down my throat
like unwanted anchovies grafted onto delights
this is not conditional

.

limerick

two ladies whose talk was quite risqué 
once sat in a bar near to Biscay 
one said 'though I'd quite like 
to make love on a bike 
perhaps that's too much of a risk, eh?'


.

splash of the eager beaver

Thatte mediaeval Bestiary says of the Beaver

that when pursued for his Orchids
he will tear off them (off) with his owne Teeth

then raising a hind-leg to reveal to the Hunter

that nothing is now there (now) to be taken

So, in like wise, it says, good Christians should tear out

alle Sinne in such order that the Devil, when he cometh upon them,

should espy nothing there upon which to affixe his Talons & Claws

In these latter and later Dayes and/or/and indeed alle Dayes

it ith likewise recommended [and as indeed is the common practisse)

thatte these same Goode Christians

should tear away all Semblance of Reason or Independence

against the Possibility that some Scyentyst or other Oaf

might then yet assail them with impious query

whereupon, finding there nothing but only Nonsense
on which to alight,

So confounded, he will, perforce, Turn awaye

to other Prey

The Beaver that Beaver and all his Ilke
so languish in long-lulling Lakes of Sylk

.

losing everyone forever (for Laurie Byro)

on the moors the wind
is a kind of silence
I remember nothing at all
was not there
knew nothing
there is ash all down the coverlets
but Spring blossoms wildly
imagine now such a mouth
all down and not up
we paused at the ancient bridge
how we said how
but by our feet the germander speedwell
the river no more than a beck
overspun by a vast and heaved tongue
of rock
an owl as if to say
alighted on the nearby
look into my yellow eyes
really, so nearly, so it goes
on the moors the wind
is another kind of silence

.

no, it's not

in these wild days I go out in a basque 
what do you mean it's too late? 
imagine that—a gun against your/my head 
I'd say shoot first and ask as the cone forms 
what do you mean tonight? 
oh but between your legs some semblance of 

oh nothing, responsibility, owls that hark there 
some drunken conclave of owls flat-headed 
low-driven, the veins in your arms and breasts 
green as waterfalls 
deep as Derbyshire they struggle 

ungoitred, iodined, not far now from oceans 
but still a rejection, many-breasted 
oh the grand vibration one day I walked into 
Anne Summers, asked for a butt plug 
but imagine it was like riding 
a wild bull the faces of the masks of 
the same day the masks of the faces 

just 
cool rain 
still smoking off the gunmetal roads 

the Rapture people still say 
they are waiting so hard 
but what they want after the Tribulation 
is so materiel 
what difference do they suppose? 
cool are the draughts
slow are the sunlit rides 

look instead at this wind-worn grit 
fashion your hands to it 

out on the moor in the wet lows 
the geese shout nothing nothing nothing 

we suck up the frogweed and turn south
.


.

out of all the orange-copper reservoirs

Lily Cove 1906 falling from that balloon over Haworth Moor
the puff and heave such a day of all summers for the heather

elocution and pneumatica.captain general oh always Lily and her
encarted Billy what do you think when falling a shopping list flashes

by a future TV a space-craft there is a tearing sensation you
want to close your eyes every muscle Reiched up for the zero

down at Kildwick they spat and coughed the witches out out
on the running-moor the Hitching Stone drilled down such

unknowing all along the empty canal that night in wisps they
spoke of it.who there would grow beards?who would any more

punt as though mortal?up came he in new motor cars 1000
years on and still falling still nothing the curl and wave of one's

hair now extreme the falling jut of breasts over the endless moor
how indeed he looked couldn't help himself over the table-land

how high how wide and high how in all this white tumbling space
look now look mama the reservoirs below the quiet below

up from the old East End I have unearthed to here like a owl
a owl with yellow eyes made up on a fence my love down I go

Lily, he cried, deep in his hearth, as she hit deep-broken, living
only for a few minutes her beats and mystery.so hove the Lily Cove

.

pale blue Persephone

why are so many film directors obese? must be the diet
of worms and lost love but you are on this windy clifftop

your wild hair always shrieking your words ripped away
like men on fire at ground level by some magic of cinematic

psychism the camera view ripped away to the far shores
of a solar system not a raptor's eye that homes on garbage

and dead creatures but for a cosmic instant the machine
the robot turns think of rust and cranking and creaking

pieces of ceramic debris fragments of apparatus breaking
away as it turns with a last effort its huge head out there

the pain of it is unimaginable the loss and effort of leaving
it sends back one final transmission of a dying lover rising

out of the underworld caught for an instant in sunlight
that turn that strophe the last act before the endless drift

there is nothing just nothing more to be done

.

now the slow domestication of wolfdogs

Kofee Annan (sp?) says well all this killing in Syria it is unacceptable
I couldn't have put it better but more importantly the role of the horse
has changed profoundly in the last hundred years
from draught to personal leisure
by which one implies no deviancy
but merely indicates the Sunday Riding
or the 'pettification' in American neologism
—anyway yeah yeah with all of that
it seems that horses are getting fat

one knew of course of the deepfried marsbars
and the intravenous dripping
but had not suspected it had crept so far
as the noble charger I myself
in my most equestrian moments feel a little fat
about the haunches but
it would be foolish to distinguish at this tick
of history between dogs and horses
both being fervently and undeniably now

of the same breed and elevation
the largest indeed-dog yet encountered
measuring 19 sure hands from the scuff
to the sahasrara chakra where dogness
fully resides so from this and the further
fifteen fathoms below it can be seen
that a dog is fully compliant to register
as a horse or ambassador if he/she should
so wish meanwhile the artillery but enough of that

Rosebud, no I don't mean that
I mean does Claudia Cardinale ever get that dog-opera bath
back there in Paris 1968?

.

even turnips have no place here

the funny man climbs up to the window at night
crawls in
kills everyone with a shotgun
their heads all over the walls
this is momentarily intense
but then settles back
he finds the jewels in the safe behind the wardrobe
the waves wash in
he lies there in the four-poster bed
in the spattered blood and oil
adorned with gems
laughing off his bejewelled ass
at the huge TV
showing the wrestling
big guys in underwear
the waves coming up the beach
he sits/lies there slugging the brandy
feeling the sure thing of enlightenment
coming over him
watching the flick of the lights outside
the loudhailers shouting
keep it going until dawn, he thinks
yeah
all of it an earthquake
coming hard on the heels

.

if we speak a sliding of several tissues

cunnilingual mother of us all tongue-sea ling and grey-ling
the ing of fambly your lost glottis frots the wet frottage
bright then the thane-thought of Thetis
the blood-blade the blind
of all suss astrike the sibilant
][your language though strident is awry][ should we
adopt with teenage glee your romantice? Marvel comic you macackle
what science do we have, sentient heart? oh god yes/no
slave-religion regurgitate, confess, out now the swirl
octo-pus that's it all like that

no fuss or muss, face that staunched
with fire the fection a or in or con
the flick keeps up the flick the schnorkel
the men with busted ear-drums the whole shack
shimmies five fathoms down five fathoms more
two minutes past the glass
I fall on my ass
O Saxifrass
river delta
light behind light
veins in the hand of the father
all of you vascular as unwanted erection
my language my language swells in these wells

there's nothing that eyesore

.

everything dead in the next two seconds

walking to unsigned unassigned unassignated musics
though different generations we are as brothers
I was so out of it it was all power games think of pine trees

spreading like vermin down the hillsides
our faces flecked with blood and mucus
but this this ... don't be so scared, trust something
a little anarchy is cool every day
oats and sugar and the representations of all parties
imagine not being scared any more
the scarcity of dialogue this process has no feet or follicles
it all came out of the sky one night nothing nothing
this is religion your self-analysis is equivalent
to an imaginary being who creates frogs who eat foxes
by some miracle of the roadside you came running
to have small wounds tended your hat too tight
your head too big your soul whatever somehow
just bursting from your little Hawaiian shirt

not even slightly scared, not really

.

days out at the reach

overnight the drifts suddenly something
(I had never seen madmen)
I gave her the part right away
Michael got a slot in the paper this year

but he may be too kind
we could have excavated igloos or igloox
as dogs remembering the last Spring
the levers I was born with from a mother's splitting head

armoured and aching drink this chill white/yellow weed
from the dry stones up Station Road but only
if bitterness is no signifier it is a roux a mulch
of pigment in the blood dropper and this

a gutter a thing that guts all dried and glut and thick and stiff
the red and purple the wine-dark the dream and drear
of that returning season/saison/sastrugi carved near dawn
by the corn people from Space

suddenly confronted by the Space Ace
shining from the time machine they leave holes
where he fells them each the birth canal
of a snow tree a post a nested bird of clay and light

did I tell you how I stepped
on a grouse that squirmed briefly beneath my boot
then took flight dripping with rainbows
shining and the wind stiffening the clamour

how how baby, they yammer
through the intakes and royds
lodge as featherflesh
in the walls and voids

"telekinesis involves movement, you dummy"—Unquote

.

ratchet-choking the homoousios (sea-coal)

in a way a way you are the dead
helicopter sweeping light
over the rooftops back there the year 2000
even before everything had happened
now today our six eyes flat out down
the shaft dropping stones through the grill
counting seconds this is you falling this is me

I confuse both of you with who she was
but is no longer
there is nothing down there for us
the seam is worked out and rotten
once a year the sunlight fills the shaft
whose final scrapes shine beneath the moss
as heavy sea that floods the engine room
the drowned men with their fingers wrapped
into the grill where we lay counting heartbeats and years
footfalls into the future a glitter in an old man's eye
but do not dare to think it, the consubstantial
the one flesh, spirit-flesh four now three now one
falling together falling upward at a heart's solstice
our peri-apogee backlit and uplit
our fingers tethered together

to gather in the very last of us

.