Sunday, June 28, 2015

miracules

the enclosing lushness of the path
to the Pooh Sticks bridge

Herb Robert is everywhere
reaching, with its tiny pink starlight

offset by the blue walls
with their mossed-up faces
hanging over the beck

where one cannot help but stop (along)
and ask for reassurance

with such miracles
we sleep at riversides


.


Wednesday, June 24, 2015

schlock and schlock again

all that it ever was A major bouncing like
me and uh you in a bouncy castle by a uh river
no minors no sevenths no augmented
nothing but front out gutloose oh fuck

all of it swirled in smerk

dried up now in petrie dishes
like dead squirrels
in rude postcards from the Front

both dead in the mud
not even not even
squirreling

don't fool yourself

time is what we don't have

sit back anyway
you may as well die comfortable

.


delight ain't just 
the giver 
of sight—Madeleine Shine

machine sea

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)

Cronos eat (jelly) babies (to the Gala)

what we call watch they call un show
we look it from different sides
somewhere between this thumb or toe
time and tongue for no—elides

[—this to 'veal the camembert drool
pinched with pincers from anabapt
munsters calumnous to some fool
hung to dry on Omaha—rapt—]

gagging for Kiplings who states his cakes
that eau est le fuel of the kill
is that which jelly babies makes
in Time if it's coiffured its fill

.


Thursday, June 18, 2015

(a hypnagogue for JM)


... that slepen al the nighte with open ye—Chaucer
... delight ain't just the giver of sight—Madeleine Shine
... because he is absolutely evil amounts—Camus
... the best method of accomplishing 
an accidental result—Ambrose Bierce
... whose evil consequences will extend—
Currer Bell

(it is a dawn it is a purple drift and yaw
in which the like and light and fore)

it is water underground
it is dapple on the dead
it is sunlight bent around
beneath the bed

The Deer

—it went by in a clatter, panic
you didn't see or hear
yet both of us gets franic 
abouts the outcomes here—

waking to all of the other: so far
(there to spread) the waning paling night

dawning-disaster, and delight
undead
alight

what asters, dear
what fright

.




radicalization is the resigned resort of the desperate and lonely
anyone can find friends and fervour
in that foolish firelight

.

Monday, June 08, 2015

jump or roll the dice

The people we write for
are always already gone
and will never read us again
we write only for ghosts
—Madeleine Shine

once it becomes clear
that you are falling asleep
at the wheel
and that some other driver
takes over
seemingly with every intent
to drive the bus off the road
it really becomes immaterial
how beautiful the destination
how well you describe it
how it is just around the next bend

at this point your passengers
are advised to cut their losses
and jump
before the next lapse

they can grieve later
for the garden they never reached
for the dreams they lost along the way
but they will live

as they watch
the mad bus
the driver
and his dark brother
disappear into the mountains

.

.

last night I walked with a zombie

inconceivable now as the pathway
its soft-looking venoms
where once

the bell the bell the clang
that rang for us zombies
at the river's edge

blood in cups we drank
so slow and soft
slicking each other's bloodlips
never really asking

it's not me
it's not my family
in your head

we the walking dead

eating at each other's brains
lack of brains
wasting unrepeatable miracles

muscle, fat, fibre
connective tissue
brain most of all, this head offal—

all these we devour and desire
our species
yes we desire most of all
our own species
and we are rare

what's in your head tonight
zombie? oh oh oh

bury me under a heavy stone
let it be inscribed
with warnings
not to unearth monsters
lest one has time to talk
and the fortitude to wait

for all of it to become true

.

.

Sunday, June 07, 2015

It's not a smile; it's the lid on a scream—Julie Goodyear

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose--Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr.The most revealing features here are the murmurations of the audience: when they *dare* to laugh.

or maybe stoats lofted, Biggles?

what are you like with heat?
there is a tide in the heat and beat
which if taken at the flood, would

what do you call a man with no head
no arms no legs no body?
it is a sort of rude joke and like seagulls
not to be trusted or rusted or thrusted
though no doubt the years have it
crusted. once I sat in a café in Cairo
watching a gang guy twist his moustache

the divvil, he said, they think I am afraid
from the divvil I am afraid from no divvil
which point he produce his flick knife
breathe hard. the divvil, he says

the divvil. by this point I study
indifference and his display falls flat
but is quickly redeemed by weasels
which jump over our tables

in a late-night kahwa. will, one thinks,
one, ever, find, ones, way, home

through these midnight weasels?
wreathed as they are in hashish smoke?

twenty five years on, the weasels?

wind in the arch?

we hoot and feel the resonance of masonry?
at least my parenting does this?

dick was the answer, didn't you know?

just like bob was the other answer

now there is the Theory of Everything

it's more complex than you thought
this weasel thing of love

first you have to answer your own joke
then twirl your own stupid moustache
then recognise your flick knife

most of all
see the weasels, the weasels

then find your way home
to find all the furniture gone

no one ever lived there anyway
what you thinking huh?

brevity is lost to me now
and you also, whoever

.

Just because it's that time on Saturday night, or should be...

Tuesday, June 02, 2015

Littlebigbang Theory

cold dark matter, some of it bright and hot
some of it not matter
on such a scale that it might appear
arrested, frozen, fixed
in crystal spheres
but in reality flying
outwards from a single point of origin

Play that film backwards—Brian Cox

tracing the reverse trajectory
of all that is or has ever been

brings us at last, second by second
gasping on the shores of cosmic time

to a garden shed near Banbury

there a mild goddess sits
the un-ancient of days
her finger on the button
what done it all

her name the horn of becoming
the park-keeper at the gates of dawn

the shot that was heard around the shed

gnab

.

we are the eggmen

as with Burroughs's ugly spirit what killed
his wife one awakes to find one's existence
compromised by forces that appear alien
beyond one's control astonishing how a moment
will unravel everything gasping at the sudden
intervention at how it can never be undone
can never be put back never made whole again
one can of course fret and complain can pine
or preferably one can awake to find one's mouth
and eyes sealed with ectoplasm half-buried
in a ditch in some urban woods waiting to be
kicked to pieces by feral children in the closing
pages of someone else's story in which ultimately
one was only a minor character forgotten
once the book slips from the fingers onto
the bedroom floor where once or twice only

.