America: it's like watching
a brain-damaged child
punching its own face
again and again

.

Romanticism is all about death
about an unsustainable level of feeling
this stuff has got me heartbroken and beaten up
and banned and in prison
all of them plosives
Romanticism then--
it's probably only good if you're looking at it
in a fucking zoo

"Humankind cannot bear
very much reality"--Eliot.

.

The Duodeniad (2017 remake)

La Rage—sing, goddess, of the Rabies of Achilles

the Pope now has an HIV-infected Gay lover
—this has led to a considerable softening of his position
regarding the use of condoms

words that won't wash out: tubetrain/rucsack/Krak des Chevaliers

the Chinese eat cats like crackers
but that's nothing to the French
who drown young beaked boys in Armagnac
bury them in woodland in Spring let it all mulch down to thick soup
they swear by the fortifying properties

his vegetal body his machine massif
his midriff his central nervous plexus a clock
a barometer to be tapped and adjusted
it tracks responsively the snaking isobars set it in train
like a Victorian clockwork golem
trained to follow a bannister commit strangulation upon
a sleeper on the highest floor he intends instead
the meridians of psychic commerce every time that she
walks in the room rage sing of rage golem sing of
Aung San Suu Kyi at one end of a telescope
a little uniformed general with his mouth grinding the other
like a cat with nothing else

rage sing of rage he says all silly with a new bike and hat

North Utsire/South Utsire: a sea giant moderate to good
occasionally poor at first

who could love your face so full of interior disfigurement?
the Vatican explains that on a case by casis it has never opposed
the use of condoms if you have been kidnapped by Islamist baboons
force you to commit acts of disgusting coitus on a monkey
but regret that you will still attend the 7th Hell on the grounds
that to be able to commit said act at all you must have had something
going on

we took me and some friends took control of the world sometime yesterday
in ways too subtle yet to be understood
I have decided not to give up wanking
there is a pleasant place just outside Hell where you wait
until the Pope catches up
it's all just a formality now
papers and ID please how often did you do it
were you married no well in here please
try to cool it in the waiting room there will be opportunity later

the Vatican explains that it has never been opposed to the use of
trained monkeys for sex

The Papa has issued clarification-condoms

Hunkpapa winewall at the margo
in eery breathbasks

.

Samboo's Grave at Sunderland Point (revision 2017)

Samboo's Grave at Sunderland Point

Let us not arrive on our deathbeds knowing

that we should have done more, that we

should have listened more closely

to our hearts—Madeleine Shine

On our deathbeds we will cry to have it back,

this wasted time—Alice Aforethought

creeps of sunlight over the salt-marsh
there in the wind from over without
Barrow and Overton, from here to there
up the Irish Sea the overfalls sing
then all out southward freaks of wind

curving in eastward on the intent, the raptor
look of it (in 3D—look again, Samboo

(bells everywhere—what bells?
nothing left below only a tiny skeleta)
your mother dead on the beaches, the bone-beaches

of the endless western Afrique; far-off the sluff and slough
the gold and the kohl the markets of Cathay and Shendy
for this for this, you here, you here—why here?
all of it, ten thousand years in the marram the cow-heads narrow ring
and no homecoming—just this loneliness
just this violation of the co-opting into everyone's dream
everyone who came here to stamp (and steam)

like cattle about your little garden of squashes
pumpkin-head boy from the meridian lands
sleeping soft and lonely beneath below and black
of beyond—and how was it done, Samboo, was it just a wheelbarrow
some seaman's cart; no gymkhana plumage, no funeral cortège
only the function, the deposition, the sediment
the geology of the placement of a little black heart, deceased
there at the wind's wild edge where it mattered most and least

dislocked now from his beach-heart and heave-head
trampled a thousand over, Samboo universal Samboo
weeps soft over the haunted bay
whirls thrice through the cockles
lingers a moment like a ghostly Susan
then thinks again, then is gone
here, spirit, here … we have caught your soul and you

are forever our little semantic boy
all in pieces and scatters underground
squashed and overarching—how little and lost and longing, all of it
how tiny and lost and ferocious
down there Samboo, down there in the warm and endless cold
where your mother gulfs across all of time
some great universal choke

where is my mind?

across all of this, swooping bells, worlds of light

.