so sag the benches-O

the white fields of nothing
the swaying fields of empty plants, flowers
bucky pools and bellbloom as paradise and its pools
here here
bullet
someone someone
must change these sheets before morning
before the arrival
no you and I must wait here
upon the hillside
with our Accuracy International stolen
and I will shoot and you will spot
one termite below
the eye from a shrew
just before Dawn
upon the day
think now
when the parade proceeds
to walk upon the shimmer
where once
my father
lost his footing
only to find himself wifeless
in Cordoba
bang lifeless with a mouthful of figs
shrews out of his ears
love now

hats like we stook

dating symbols across the carpark
in the near-east.forget.forget.forget
some holy man hollow as backstreet straw
says this: we look upon him [alarums alarums]
for a few seconds before ignition
before reaching out with hammers
to break his rodent compulsion
one's advice must be to distrust
while trusting
to unlove 0)this buddherism see
until the story breaks
down the hillside as burning pigs
at the carthage for Tanith and not
to the awful, the convulsive, the sheer
the /Breton/ thing of the fixed

fixed without that no that knife that bird aloft
do not enter/enter/do/not
not now oh but see
this is how
Steppenwolf
oh stop it now stop/silly says the countess
all tickled asquirm
with a key in its fundament so unlovely giggle away then

for this, this
nothing yet

in the yawls of monty zoo


.

all cats rehomed.

these things shudder by as half-eaten dreams but who gives
their outcome unknown
once I was eating a cake the next minute in wild ships
and this was in India by the southern lights and cookies

on midlife half-human scooters in rainstorms there in Goa
oh come on with the waterfall then! you monkey-faced tumble

all day and night Vishnu fucking Vishnu
well I cared for nothing but vindaloo tortoise
it's a colour most pronounced. it is a colour most pronounced
(most prized and otherwise-hued)

for there by the river as dead women
rocked by our swollen footage and beyond snakes on all sides

on the tide a huge dead elephant
onshore a nothing
some Gay men from Birmingham

and all night at dead Coco Beach
near to the rainstorm in a hut
made from cardboard where once
the wicked witch of the west et up all of a tortoise

now see how you is

but next the jellyfish.think hard.think soft and slow

by the pools this boy over and over
no he says no this is not the poem you were born to write
then he jumps, runs, snips
turns into an old man with binoculars
he is unreachable now and will not speak

you've never seen the sky so low
if you sing this shit again you will surely die
Coco Beach near Namaste near the chickenfish gurning so beyond

Portugal all over like there are horses, territories
colonies of way-out spice fucked from behind

look: potatoes, cinammon, wine, vinegar, dead stuff and packed hair

I am all done with it anyway and halfway baked
when he comes back from the pool
waSted like that and little and offers up
an oyster yeah i grab it
next thing we are buddies
drowning together in blue vapour
our hearts streaming out as red strings
on the guitars [red/blue]
of people we will never know/knew
the man out at sea the man who stands there

we open each others' wardrobes look in  at our peril

I want to say more have you seen will you ever know

what about it anyway?

.

alum and white again some baths of lead

the patchwork the pidgin
the pooling and how there you stood
drooping more how you were lit
in such lobbies and counterfoils all night
on the bed bouncing in deliria
not with sex but with ardour and the many fascines
thrown on all sides like incense or gingerbread
how we bounced not once but thrice
barefooted and and
then such rides to the north
and i cannot exclaim it
freckles and dead meat
and a river running by
and on the tops the beginnings of snow
underneath it all ash and the ceaseless
sound of cars driving
along the high street the high road
into the highest and nearest river
and above it all on the tops
the soft leavening of snow
starting to happen
along the corridor route
above the gulfs so deep
all of us falling at the last
gasping up into the interior
but there on the tops, snow
into which as any would
we arms like rebar and over
the far we'er hills we overgo
nothing like this
nothing such

and there on the tops
you know again
this smallest snow
.

the difficult bell that wyndes across the mill yard at hometime in the shifts

wayward Buddha who drifts lonely in the illustrious mist
Buddha three foot off the floor
we are not envious
neither that otherbuddha who walks over rivers
it's nothing that gravity can't fix

and all our songs in disarray
even there in the flower tides
what is it, campion? the bellflower, the germander speedwell?
down at this Wycoller they care for aisles
do you feel such longing
Buddha of the far night?
with your missiles in tact
and who knows now the junction
of tactile and tact?

she will not answer
but that was always unexpected

it's nothing that a brisk walk down the ginnels

(to the mill by the river by the fields of sabotage
our clogs upon the cast iron are not smelted
and oh such oxygen)

not you again

(it is reported that 21.5 people were killed earlier today in a suicide attack
in Jerusalem. it is reported but unconfirmed that God was amongst the many injured.
my disbelief has left a hole in the sky
through which a stain tinges)

nothing. nothing. not any more.
only the wynde and the slow/fast creep
where the water used to be

you with your brightness
your unexpected tightness
I was once a wild hedgehog
what lived live there in ditches
such things we have now
whiteness of bristle and bone
lightness even, scarce, unknown
all now agog
clouda moona thickets of the far
bush
no one ever

haiku
why won't you rhyme?
it's high time!

extraordinary measures in the sloop

03:57
and such clothes
maybe you think
look now
it is almost midnight
and all your cutlery jumping
like wild bells
I am a thing with a hood
you are the rattle
at the end of the world
as the rivers spill
as the horses slowly topple
but look again
for we are all of kindness here, now
it's time to stroke and collide
time to breathe
this is not yet the future
where we will be asked
it is just that moment
when we need to know
that hey
sink soft
no one will kill you tonight

it's a rare thing
whatever you got

down deep again, where they don't ask
the wildfires
shh
sleep soft, all of you
there are fireworks over the hills
and we heed them not
not tonight
sleep all my wide babies of snowy places
we are only ill with love
soft as the touch of faraway
and your whole heart snuffed yes
oh just watch, listen
tonight
we are saying yes

(what could Minkowski meant?)
(Oh be are baby tonight)
(Oh)
(0h)
like a dream and snuffle it comes ever on
oh stop it she says stop it
this moment yes this moment
is all there will ever so

.

ever yet in the crepuscules

come on motherfucker
your head fell off three years ago
when we stood outside that window
looking at the jewels
all I'm saying is three guys
with sledgehammers
could get through this sex
in seconds
and walk away as nuns
never to be seen again
om
I mean on
the high sad streets of Wilmslow
where the cratered malevolence
of Gold ticks its heart attacks
all of us now
Buddhists filled up with frozen fish
at the thought
let's do it tonight
OM
yes/no
tick tick
boom alabama
and all points past
one half of a tiger
and all the world

.

haiku

think and think again
half-moon—
what star-lit fools

.

haiku

three days drinking wine
with the curtains closed—
storm clouds gathering

.

haiku

rowing my boys
around this sparkling lake—
all our ancestors

.

haiku

through the dark
the owl hears the mouse—
two shivers

.

pottery

Don't trust anyone. There are too many anyones and they will tear you in all directions with their opinions. Only trust yourself, and then only when you are utterly relaxed, almost dreaming, when you don't care about anything or what anyone thinks, and you are almost prepared to die in the next line. Keep your deepest feelings close, but don't EVER let them write your poem or paint your picture. When unsure what to write next, go climbing. There's no such thing as a writer's block. That's just you blocking out the light. It's not an obstacle. Write about the new intrusive shadow.

.

The Triggerfish Critical Review Issue 11 is now live online and can be viewed here:

http://triggerfishcriticalreview.com/

Can't get the  proper hyperlink function working properly for some reason, but this overloaded blog seems to get increasingly clunky as I get older. I fear its legs are failing, its heart disrhythmic, its appetites awry...

Anyway, a kind of in-house edition featuring most of the scaffolding crew who produce Triggerfish. That seems like an unusual idea, but unusual isn't bad.

Apart from that, there's truly fantastic, Taoist artwork by artist ZZ Wei, as well as an interview I did with him via his wife Hsuan Lin, as translator.

If you've been following Triggerfish, if you're an afishonado (sorry, just couldn't help it - Hail Mary!), then you know who to expect in an 'in-house' edition. Enjoy or avoid. But don't miss ZZ Wei!

.

there was a new ape called Cuadrilla
who acted like he was Godzilla
he hacked and he fracked
till our plates were all cracked
but he promised to use Polyfilla

some other exercise thing wah

all the trees become monkeys at nightfall
their silhouettes falling/failing in black buffaloes of exuberant life-mud

—in wine and strokes we pick the black parasites
from our hides, all of us native as treetops, roots, bark, nothing
beyond what we can see—deserter... we call you that. we dare and dare not.
the mudwine has taken us for harvest. you who deserted us, carry us then
in your strokes, carry us forth and do not. submerged as the naked one lying beneath, your story, your stroked mud, deserter. you who know nothing
and all things in the foul mouth of the harvest-rainbow. you who carry us on

my love our love, all that you are become the treetops now of monkeyed night. deserter. foul mud. breakers of wine. strokes of the carry-harvest,
unleavened, black carry.

.

same river thrice with narrative for those in need

a man walked sideways for fifteen days it was a discipline
taught to him by a guru as an act intended to bring about
awakening of a sideways sort but after these fifteen days
the man felt neglectful of the other direction and side
and felt that he must now attend to that
but in these opposing fifteen days he felt
that he was somehow revisiting earlier work
and indeed did he arrive after much thought and travail
at that place where the guru still stood urging him on towards
one side or the other it was somehow difficult now
to identify sides and the man decided not sidewalks
but rivers might be his thing and therefore left for a place
where there were known to be such rivers even in their sidedness
and downward determining and there eventually he arrived
although his motion had been still a little sideward
as of a river or wind although either might be disputed
and there there he sat and did not think any longer
of aught but rivers and their directionlessness
and each night there by the river was as though
a hurricane and a vast mouth and a red light that gleamed
and in all he was happy with it and felt it to be
a kind of love of which he had not known
and one night he slipped softly into the river
with pockets filled with stones and was borne away
in some direction that seemed at once this way and that
so now the direction seemed not to matter
and he slept softly there being carried down or up
to the new and farther place of ending and beginning
like some message in a bottle that could not be salvaged
until the very end and the sediment itself would be raised
now compacted and formed into rock that towered like time


.

every time is the first time

all night the wood runners back and forth under the lights the birds the fell-faced giants. nothing can stop this now and it rolls in again again. have you seen this calamity across the fields when the linseed turns blue and stops for a second with its hiss? something about this that turns everything. then we know at last. that wind giant was too busy so did not stop. even though there you lay broken he would not stop. out there in the wind urgency has collapsed. they lay upon their sides laughing tornadoes of death. fulmars of nothing. vespers and kindnesses that lie flaccid. some winds are too much for our little windows you damn fool, he cries, throwing the antique beaker from Iberia. all our clothes leak. sadness stalks the land like a wind of murder

.

post-pneumatic religion and inedible dates huff

as though the wainscot widened and an eye
or organ or otherwise enquiry
as though you there in reverie sat upright
as though a child's toy suddenly moved
in one flash six feet across the floor
and you devoted an entire life
to seeing that again
but never outside of sleep
oh see how the tip flares
backlit as shared ancestry
oh my abdomen/thorax/head
my chitin and wing-casing
my measly leggage that will not suffice

Bucky says no not up or down just out there
for how now such direction after Galileo
[if they ever get it working and trust Europe
for a name like that and anyway not to work]

might just as well ask
does the wind blow
or is it sucked?

either way never to be seen again

.

salvage operations at Dream's door

after the dust after the night the stamps and long looks
it must be that he revisits the area
in search of fragments, moments

that should not be left behind.spirits
that can still be salvaged and drawn forth
from what seemed present but was really aside

alongside and if one had looked with the edges
of one's eyes it could already have been seen
that those were dead channels whose signals

could not arrive in the present and would have no life
in any future beyond eccentric/specialist histories
he comes back with handsful of broken artefacts:

tablets etched with mistakes.de facto promises
never now to be.long dream vistas sketched
in air quickly exhaled and forgotten

bones, wet clay, blood and fibre.this will take time
but time and reassembly are what are left
on this side of the magic door.he is thankful for that

.

meridians of what is not (Ah Pook, the Destroyer)

again the sprawl and slur of unreason

as the whole day leaves in a hurry
mopping itself back up on the way across
"who really gave that order?"
reanimated/reactivated/reassembled as a kind of death

that reaches out an unseen hand to trip those dancers
who did not look and would not look
again the bodies broken on the wet road

raising feeble heads and wondering what
the/de/light/me/not the quint/essence
the pipes the pipes are calling
from way down the fountain around which

we inreeled the Sci-Fi strain threatening to life
unaccepted/unfillable/inviolate
only half alive skims over surfaces

never once looking down
not even at maps or other forms of the below-
oh no he cries oh such schlock and schtick
as the whole day the week or several arrives

and leaves in one such flash and flush
quite of the order of hands.quiet.shying
hush now hush—the beginning

of the world is nigh

.

a 10 word challenge poem from a poetry group somewhere

zebras, stripy horses maybe...

some frivolity some alacrity but not that, no not airborne
not something public and known
lifted from the river, scooped, but whirled,
same but different
oh but a sort of flight and beauty and care and sweep
quite the opposite of how you consider it: fast. as if
strength had other cases.wafting onshore at low water
the wave-destination across all oceans
me and you forever.things like that. moon and tide

 .

not even one swallow makes a summer (a much-reducible complexity)

truly for you nothing is written, Lawrence, blah blah—can't remember who Omar Sharif

I will revive etc as though revivification was a wheeled animal
suited to presentation in a Dover Area School hearing of the flagellars

nothing left of her but hairclips

perhaps some DNA

which even post-apocalypse

takes time to wash away

all this people informed

all this telling

all this offering

you've got to stop

all this wanking

why, will it make me go blind etc

no but it means you are ...

all the effort and sharing and volunteering and introduction

all dedicated ex post facto to the urgent proof, the question

the trial and strappado and squassation of the proof

of the old untruth that not even one swallow does not indeed

make anything

.

counterflarf

love tomato

in high-end supermarkets
I've driven 100 miles
this is like Disneyland
at the wrong time of year
in every dazzling
a chance mutation
it tastes of absolutely nothing
from the south of Italy
and of course smells fantastic
it's certainly possible
it's not going to fly in the breeding
a raw cranberry
a household product?
down towards Dorset
for the most part

the weather now
working its way
and the far south-west
the middle part
the rest of the day
the best of the temperatures
sing, sing

hundreds of extra police dominate
the top slots
there are no signs
on the start line
at the halfway mark
it's still not clear

these dramatic details

flarf arf

unnecessary paperwork

a man walking found yesterday
has taken the top spot
the richest person from iron ore
one of three
having grown
now look
the lost chances
taken down it says
the brothers are thought to be
the end
who died needlessly
was treated like luggage
immediate improvements have been made
following footsteps
Warren/Justin/Bill

it's time for Sunday
medical practice
should Islam play?
the natural platform
we simply don't know what
we are joined
this was Stalin
what happened to
Sufism was the perfect unable
ready to fight to the death
a jihad trail, that's the sauce
architects

average Russians, ask
we actually sought out what to make people happy
so they lose
let me ask
it's so implausible
there's a huge amount to deal with
we didn't think we had a perfect way
one way
let's deal with that
the primacy of religion
at the very least
I'm not sure
an intrinsic calling
you couldn't have

it means more
for instance
let me just put a final question
put it crudely
ten years ago
suddenly
in my opinion
I certainly agree
an internationally acclaimed pianist
has been convicted of blasphemy
hanging over him
in which

switched off indefinitely [some out-Abilene Paradox]

he sees the lights mutters oh the lights look he says
lights ahead lights I know them what they mean
there is time he thinks and forgets them right there

in the blue zones are symbols that represent wrecks
not so much in the physical but in the connections
that went before.everyone.at some level.sees this coming

ignorance which can only be by choice.either of display
or of discovery.harken to these deeper haptics
of the infrasonics.of the sub-semantics

How To Make Things Dead:

stop but there is no stopping for there are no responses
and the cavern does not echo.the quiet.too quiet.
lets it happen
will not intervene will not reach out will not say stop you/I/we
are entering the irredeemable world from which
no one returns.he says there is no such world but that
is only his view ahead into the lights and he will fly there
alone.all others having abandoned the craft before impact

I or you didn't want this.therefore it was inevitable
let's not let's do it yes/no
too late it's undone
in the oncoming retreating light

"the exorcism typically requires the summoning of demons in both
 parties, first allowing their terror of each other
then the utter dispelling of the myth
that they were demons at all. in all cases
these conditions are early fears, and can go on
to become anything, given sufficient wind and gust
from the thighbone trumpets"— Bon Po Exorcism,
Madeleine Shine, 1989

.

.

blue

black branches on blue
first bird already singing
from the silhouettes

.

rearing cornices of the upshut

so we're zooming in
already your teeth an issue of disarray

the snow has cornices, architraves, mouldings
ogee/torus/egg and dart/astraglomancy
these terse things undistinct and while I looked-O

down South/Sith in the vapid fronts a blackbird
there have been already many disasters
555333if you know not
I met her at the railway station such gaslights we reached
she was wide, Gothic, adorned, gaslit
the line offered such virtue and escape
out there in the gasnight a blackbird beneath
and all now lost
.....boys forever jumping on hammers
a thing leaps now from on high wails
battering the shell into extinction but we care not
for this
all day shimmying
up and down through the public doors
watch this we cry forth
watch again with no hands
watch
how...we...climb
through the moss/through the moss
bang and bang again
if ever there was a reason
for time to have such a reason
then surely this is the reason
shut up, she cries, out there with her hammer
don't fall, no, don't
it's worse down there
at nightfall carrying home broken-legged
bearing away
fractured sons of adventure
all Easter lofted in the snows
lambkins dead below
stop

.

Yes to this

machine sea (2011)

ugh a dread from over
            the far morbay that blackback fells stark
                         into spluts of early birdscold

a monster inching inthing .              that ingrew
[airturtles in lifts of silent drubdead] a waiting grew in-again
and ingrew
until over all.the cock and cocklefield was a mainshout pulked

all-ending the lowscrats
in their long-hauled ruggers lugged hard.
the gutwives widing the redroll to belift
                                        in now the men the drymen in, in

acres now to the barrel-beaches with the uncut catch inwarped.
fishimps and ghosts sidelaying low as lie-low for Jamaico

on the eastlandic scottles .............of west herringbane
and chinee soup schlocked in-out in octofathoms
of hemp drabingers, haulers, menwomen
from the near-sea teeters.a washup iglooed him up in rubs
on a southbeach known by no one.his/her face disglued

the songs of how they wore their sea-sucks unscrewed
now from his beachheart and heave-head for the far Cathay tubs


(published in The Triggerfish Critical Review,  2011)

 .

snow

we drive home
in other directions—snow
like dead confetti

.

even everything is almost nothing

so close so almost close so far so
the night smothers us all in snow-soft
the strings stray minutely and wholly into utter dissonance
making decisions, making decisions, busy busy busy
my word, my word
the unfamiliarity
the compression into almost nothing
that contains the universe in embryo
the screensaver green in the back room
flickers
you, you think it is a ghost
but it is everything else
falling like leaves backlit
in some cellar faraway
flushed with wild solvents
all these ambients thrashing their last
(all my plans/all my plans

out like little lights
...

.

cinquain

I flush
the fish away
she beats a kettle drum
the kids watch the funeral rites
struck dumb

.

all quiet on the Preston Front

most vexatiously ill-clad under a car in the snow—Madeleine Shine

the waves onshore make no sound

their energy displacement stifled—

the seabirds do not cry

the fish the wind the sunlight

have no way to know

the proton gradient builds

the periphery cannot hold

nothing is uttered, everything is lost

all energy sucked back in the counter-tsunami

draining far off out there

through holes in the seabed

raining down far below

into caverns that echo only with silence

for even there

no words, no cries, no sounds of waterfalls

nothing now to guide the way

only the collapse of a wave function that could not hold

could not speak

would not

wave

.

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

 

.

hands like giant falling sheep

[the conditions it fakes/faces
I am your mother
we share the uh mouthhgun the mouthgerm
we/my/I are a chronic anaesthetist
such ungodly aesthete

we may say
we were brought up that
they/we had no end of rats' asses
to choose from

where did you get love from_
it's all very difficult to recall=from (tail.snout)

¿have.you.seen these hands and lands¿
yesterday/only/
now watch this

over here like a rat
going-down
on the head of a captain///capped Anne

sluck sluck sss
evil eye evol
wah and
the brat-floating

off course 2X3 inchmetres

the strange sad thumb trick at the
how it was

[cockled) one is to learn to bagtype to touchdance ¿
on all such keys-oh
when all this outbelled, combing with many incomes of the many marcels and millimarcels

hectopascals of the mouthwater

risebird, uh rise¿¿¿

.

pretty hues ask after all if drugs are the thing

few have knelled and known oh the yellow stir
what and even more
when after all after all
and still after
and sometimes the belief
faraway the furthest the farthest of us
slits itself blooded oh bloodward
how sad and dynamo; how like
a tree once rid
of
well
half-ached all over
yr lost/found mind wasn't mine
all it found to find
in it
at dusk-bells to say lakes

.

the yellow way to Nirvana

Kurt Cobain's lank hair filled
with screams/pixies/trajects
all the air
all the air around
one little girl/boy
disputed
hello hello hello hello
don't wish for it
may you live in etc
how many girls in Seattle
would have wished scrawny
wishes for any of so much life
just before?
fingerprints?
what is the sound of one hand
thrashing over
the bridge pickup?
think there

nothing now
never mind
hey

spirit umbilical frags all in
the next door noises of love
anyone left smoking?

.

no way in or out

there's nothing to it, watch

the iron plates of the skull in spasm
a core-sample from the inner ear, the sinus
a straight line curling into the forest pathways
choked again with drifts of leaves
at this point further penetration
is unlikely/the party retreats through
swamp and density in excited disarray
sucking in arrows from the shades
carrying out their last malarial god
on his shield
to deliver back unto his immovable parent state

all down the banks
hares dancing unseen
beneath the rocking bells
it's almost some kind of Christmas
if you're fucked enough
to love it

.

the wide sneer of motorcycles

black, lank, cool, the enticing cloud
talks across the parklands and wires
its shaven participles, its dogs and damage
requited briefly by some gust and thrust
[we continue our extracts] the reader is
as always in complete innocence
I want to change, it says or does not
say, a middle child, I met, to learn more
immaculately dressed, there on the floor
as a baby a baby

they were grateful
she had started having accidents
again

.