^{Deb. C. sent this rose. Thanks, Deb!}

get out of your own way

*
So the wise people say:
I throw this burning stub
into the waste bin from over here
three times without trying, without thinking

the world will explode
I will wake in tall grass
with my old friends
(we will swim together in spheres of light etc.)

and the first time
I just got it straight off
just flew without a thought
bing (steel bin)

since then a war has started
the air is violated and distorted
and words fly weird as sick birds

and an ugly stranger follows me about
everywhere I go, grabbing at my sleeve

deep resonance

Basho sees frogs jumping in ponds
and fancies worlds collide

someone should tell him the dungheap
is starting to slide

hairs in streetlight

in my lamb kebab I saw hairs she says
and I baulk
no
this is just way too much this hairs thing
too much

I can't do hairs are you sure
yes she says I saw hairs in there
creeping in

but it should all be interior-of-sheep
I know
but I see hairs
growing there monstrous

and I have to stop under a streetlight
and pull a face
at the very idea

how can a person even approach such hairs
such strange wayward hairs so late like this?

kakapo

why do men have deep voices and women not?
eventually I hit on the answer
it's so that when a man climbs up
to the mountaintop at the head of the valley
and stands there looking out
with his feet planted firmly
and he begins to boom out his clear manly call
and it echoes down
across the pine trees
and bounces off the crags
and drives chamois and squirrels
into their holes
the women who have been busy
in the valley
with their hanging of red rags around the stone houses
will hear him
will abandon their tasks
and come rushing up the mountainside like falling leaves
suddenly caught in the updraught and the sunlight
of his voice
and so that when they arrive perspiring and flushed
they will cluster about him in a flock
issuing cooing sounds
they will fluff their feathers and primp
and he will know from their voices
that there is not a man among them
to trespass upon his ardour

code flowers

^{And more... We like flowers here!}

head-rolling-wax-flarf

*
head rolling in locusts
hahaha no you fool
this was an applicator head
for receiving said wax
hold steady now
(the perfect medley!)

the words was born zigzagged
said wax, spoken wax:
words of honeycomb petroleum
lit like locust light

under the face there
pat-baby-doll-ooh-like-that rolling
optomotor optomotor optomotor head

which secrete bees scratching and numerous
all the curlers under
.
.
.
.

If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there,
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant – What then?'

— Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines

John Taverner's 'The Protecting veil'

The build is a Lancaster bomber coming slow
up the mountainside
lost in the mist maybe, who knows

something similar happened near here in January 1944
(a large pond and yearly flowers)
it was a training mission with a Canadian air crew
hit a hillside in the mist in the trees slid down
burning I guess carving a crater that filled
with green water and green life
I wonder if it's haunted
it has an eery green feel

but this bomber doesn't hit
although it comes to an abrupt cessation
or not quite
it continues in the background
and I suppose Taverner is saying
it's..............still................there
but the foreground is now quiet melody and playful stuff
that at first feels to do with growth
as though children were acting plantlife
but then it is clear that it's more, it's the veil
itself being woven and maintained by an intelligence
yes it's like plantlife, but it's as though a vast canopy
was forming from the mathematics of cellulose and sunlight
with the quiet roaring of that bomber shut outside
and I guess we feel safe
in this space
created by the music of a god
though I can't help feel
that the entire edifice depends on concentration
and attention
and our listening
and that if our attention should lapse
the whole thing will collapse
and leave only the roaring
suddenly filling everything
and that seems a desperate and fragile and conditional and doomed way
of protecting anything.

gunshot

This is thought to be the skull of the first ever gunshot victim in the Americas.
I thought that was pretty much a haunting poem in itself.

Read more here

work

part of the work
is just giving

giving indiscriminately
whatever is asked

just giving
just being ready to give

when another little face
appears open-mouthed

no part of you
must be able to refuse

when it is asked

there will be times
when the giving

is like tearing

be ready
know that you'll never get back

what you gave
that's the deal

from here
to there

giving: that's what the work is.

John Foxx - Oceanic from the Winter

bilberry fever

Yorkshire rears mild gorillas
in beige cardigans
pulled-up beamers in laybys
tupperware and purple fingers
happy primates in the bilberries
two hours at least
for a reet good pie
there they are on the hillsides
lowing, enraptured
browsing away like the last million years
didn't quite happen.

the railway love (decrypting Auden)

The pavement were fields
of harvest

Wheat and down
by the brimming

River I heard a lover
sing under:

'An arch of the railway love has no ending'

Bristolstreet the crowds were fields
harvest brimming the pavement

Lover sing under Riverarch Down
arch as the railway love

Love has no sending under love
by the brimming River I

Under anarch of the railway love
all ending
.
.
.
Read the original fragment - here

Or read Auden's original poem complete - here

Auden's poem was full of Eros and Thanatos anyway, but I felt it was a little poetic and cerebral, and wondered if there might be a less heady version lurking somewhere in there, a version that was more yeasty somehow. The more I explored it, the more depth I found in the original, until it became clear it was like a holograph with the message embedded in each fragment. That was probably what drew my attention to the possibility of using it in this way in the first place. I don't know if the Reaper is clearer in my version, but it feels closer to the surface to me, as does the speeding of time. I'm not in any way suggesting it as an improvement, just an exercise in responsive critique. And a bit of fun. And an homage.

wetting arc (à demi-flarf)

bead control, did you mean? maybe
she let her tongue travel
(deduced from heats)
in a Kirchhoff integral (WTF?) of stroking
repeated this a few times
a liquid-solid-interface
and soil cluster,
spreading wettability
and brazing the type of head
repeated stroking
any point
along the length, thickness
capillary, thickness:
'stroking equations'

Repeat unto distraction: and what if she just shoved him the love
she craved?


.
.
.

H.P. Lovecraft

They always out there sending out spiders and monkeys and a certain kind of iterating crab to read for signs of internet wildness, which shows itself through the unconscious overuse of certain key expressions. Next thing you know a grey wave envelops your blog and blogs like it, like a room slowly filling with sickness, and you know they triangulated your signal and came running through the mist. Someone somewhere is being held down in a bath, giving them names, dictating codes. You don't know it until it's too late, and then you find html where your pictures once interspersed text, like bones, like framework ripping through tissue, through wet frocks and the music is all corrupt files that eat at each other in analogues of hateful children in ditches on the way home suddenly waking to find their mouths untongued. In these circumstances it is always best to stay out of the rain and not try to be too clever. My prescription is always the same: a long fearful day in bed with biscuits and a book by H.P. Lovecraft.

Villanelle Zebub

horse-rid flak over a issue
SHE (long cahoot among mothers)
OF FLIES: a feminist tissue

he wouldn't know; or, knowing, dis' you
you among songbird smothers
horse-rid-flak-over (the issue).

...might be said not to miss you
all along..., here wreathed in wuthers
of wanting (lies a feminist) issue?

(wuthers: noun pl; erosions, breakingdowns, windsweepings, tormentings, halves of moorland fugues.)

grubby virgins - a teenage tenting from memory

80. But though I have wept

(san izal the bastard razorwipe
here a confluence of word-detritus
outflow from the engine
google (echoic resonant of plumbing)

and what it does cough up
a echoed cyclops
sit himself sheepish
like Rab the goosewiper
all the massaged up foie gras

all here shushed for secrets

whitewashed
for the people and stink)

of the san izal encampment
and teenage raining glory

language acquisition device - ongoing poem

the hewn trunk lies in the forest/instinctual dance/approximation/accuracy/failure/Chomsky falls in six rivers before nightfall/the singing child waits for the tiger to pass by

birdshapes here
exploding in shotgunned air
words drifting down

4 years old
a little less, here
LIKIDO/LYKYDOO
for a start
need phonemes here:
ARNTI
or
ARNTEYE
like a tree trunk
and a chainsaw
pagans in the woods
getting somewhere
but not getting it
but working it
but eliciting it
from undifferentiated tissue

how does it start
thing like this
a whatever
a song maybe
it's all song

joining in
an urge an urge
to get with it
applause

for it
no speciality
just special need
to join, partake
to frolic
roll around

just a feel, a reel, a rock,
a sing
a whole anastrophe
cutting wood in the distance
and getting closer, warmer,
getting there, homing in
sparks and shavings flying
around the head

lyre bird with a processor
treetop algorithms
iterating inta
the adultshould

all through songing along
for a kiss
hug
big smile over breakfast
where we all friends now
we? Miracles
coming real cheap.

idyll something maybe hexagram 23

all in a freakin whirl
out the window
corn/wheat
Po
what ugh23
it split on me
in the night
music in your little one singin
all the way down singin
songz of love

heart
LOL
white hart zoomin
like a fat quarry
my burden
ugh
down all down

this burn this steam of rooftop gold

just a quick blur of already dead

she's smoking more now she's pregnant
like a tacit protest
every bite on it like a grimace
in a baby's face
you, you, you, why

you got any cravings at all she asks
answers herself:
just cigs, me, that's all
they stick their hand right up
case of a cord prolapse
hurts like fuck and last time
it was a great big nigger

word hangs like that
the air all weaving
a knot around it
the word a huge bloody hand up
the back of a human puppet
squeezing its face up
whup whup whup
baby with no oxygen
and a cord round its neck

midnight
under poplars
all in a quick blur
of already dead

slept with him and him
and this and that
he's not up to much
don't ask -- just the fags, the cigs, me
a baby's head
breathe like that breathe
someone ought to say something here
like a baby's head in a plastic bag
someone ought to
full of smoke an' that,
breathe like you wasn't born
you was only shat
someone

knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel

augoeides
augment adon
shining one my
firefox extension
add on converse
converse alignment
adjunct
adject
augoeides
break the words down into
self becoming self
other above brother
extra flowing let it
understanding standing under
like a rabbit in a ray
in a lit wood humming
with temporal lobe elision
in a fit would bumming
me out radar station
watchtower of the top beyond it
all a bit good at becoming
above chakra station 1
trepanation without tools
language trepanation
and the very essence flop
I googled augoeides and this:
and I already had trepanation above
so I sensed the Houseman test
at work the synchronous turn
yes the essence flop
like jelly cartoon stuff
like a belly a spoon
an arriving soon
into and all down you
I'm here all the time the way
here your update
run software now?
Remind me in 0 days
Remind me in 10 minus 10 days
run now run
the Christo-Krishna-Adon
extension
run baby run baby run
I'm gaggin for it

Yahweh

So Yahweh can do anything
but He hasn't yet done everything
and one day He gets this idea
that starts eating at Him
what if
what if
after all He can do anything, so
He can do this thing
He can prove that He doesn't exist
and like an obsession it eats Him up

and after a while He just thinks fuck it
let's see

and He gets Himself some graph paper
and a slide rule
and starts calculating probability
as honestly as He can
all the while with that feeling
that you get on a cliff edge
almost wanting to jump
and the air kind of crackling
with suicide
and He sees the outcome
before He even writes in the last number
sees it coming
and can't stop Himself
because it's just what is
and you can't get out of the way
of yourself when you're hurtling
towards what you just are
or are not

and then He's just not there
like a book falling from a sleeping hand
hitting the bedroom floor, closing

no pain, no smoke, no earthquakes - nothing
just a dead story.
The End.

Broken-hearted Buddha - first draft

So the Buddha gets the flash
that is something like the onset of labour
and he thinks this is it, the real thing
but it moves on and he is suddenly aware
of the air shaking with birds
and the earth moving to the distant drumming
of elephants feet in the forest
and then he is aware that there are more orgasms
than he can count happening in that second
and the world swoons with bliss
and it's something he's never quite considered before
all that feeling, that experience lighting up
across the world. It's quite heady.
But then something else phases in,
and he becomes aware of all the pain
of a billion creatures dying in torment
the world filled with their cries,
and this almost sweeps him away, almost
pushes him into madness, and he remembers
some old movie about a man who has X-ray eyes
and can see through everything, and it's too much.
He feels like that, sitting there with this future
memory shaking him, and he feels something go,
something snap in his chest like a bowstring
and he knows his heart just broke, and at that instant
he feels something like lightning shoot up his spine
and burst out the top of his head, and then he gets it
the pain the joy the heartbreak, and then he knows
that without the pain he's just a smartass, without
the pain he's no Buddha.
And then he knows
he's got to stay
then he starts to get it
the Buddha thing.

Photo Opportunity at the G8 Summit

George Bush Junior
has a bottle of alcohol-free beer
poured into a glass
and it's poured badly
and it all fizzes up
and the froth runs down
the outside of the glass
onto the table
and he sits there
with the world-leaders
in front of the cameras
and he puts the glass
to his mouth
and takes a little sip
only it's not a sip
because it's all froth
so he takes whatever it is
that you take
when you suck in froth
and I'm wondering what he's doing
sucking froth like that
not waiting for it to settle
and become beer again
like maybe he thinks
we wouldn't notice the froth
and think he's just taken a slug
of lager in the sunshine
grinning and chatting
in between changing the world
for the better
but that's not what's happening
he's sucking froth
all lather and head
and he thinks we don't know.

Anthropic Rimbaud

Rimbaud is 10 to the power of 500 potential word clusters massing in Parisian night

it's not possible that this rain could fall here at this time

not even one of these words brought here by no mistral will never not fall nowhere near

and no one out late on a drunked up bender of black glass streetfalls could ever hit this combination by chance not by mere drumming of dead fingers on the tables at the rue des chiens

bodies of the impossible
drift

deep in dark river
trailing digits
mud
all of nothing

mouthless

ugly fact:
nature
a dead cat
wake all night

songs of itself
no longer
roaring

over pebbles
.
.
.
.
.
.

(les pierres/les cloches/les silences)

wind giant blow poem with a virtually unreadable and painful abdominal mid-section for Francois Rabelais - only a riff at present.

the wind giant was pretty much invisible to humans as they couldn't really resolve him other than as a sort of disturbance of the air a thing that shook the night and stilled birds in the day -- he came on with whirlwinds and zephyrs playing about his shaggy head came onward and was gone

when they caught him and got him down he lay stretched on the sand suddenly still and calmed but watchful silent visible from the flurries of grit that delineated him while they tried to force him to speak

what he finally said was forced coaxed nursed cajoled
expectorated with haunting liquors

stroked tortured summoned forth like a djinn falling for an old trick
humoured joked with fishwives
beaten persuaded reasoned

argued tricked snicked snecked
bullied patronised matronised

god-bothered belly-laughed
grated greeted groated

mocked caught up in webs of wheedle words browbeaten weaseled

fleeted tempted pre-empted
gutshot left to all but rot

batted unhatted desquamated

peeled like pigeons in pie
elicited
charged down like an elk weak with laughter berated blethered

bleated unravelled torn worn
worshipped shamed flamed unreeled bezeeled wittered

withered bored blah-blahed clawed
pontificated unto until desperation set in unfolded unfurled
desiccated like a mummy with a natron hangover

extracted
impacted
distracted

headed off at the pass

rambled on bambled distressed
pressed into lipservice wearied with all night besettings by small animals

blearied tugged fugged bugged
blugged like a ballan wrasse prising away limpets

unwound browned ripped unzipped as though with a rusty blade
flipped cripped and lipped

with great linguistic derangements of his person
with mighty bloody assaults upon his towers of air
with appeals to citizens to hurl upon him symbolic fruits
with witty ensnarings of his logical faculties
with entrapments and clever paintings into corners
with befriendings and amorous words followed by precipitous violent assaults
with many encirclings and sudden rushes forth
with pleasing and righteous finality

fleeced and flayed and fucked like a dugout canoe and fretted and fondled and frigged like sixteen sheets to a bad wind and fingered like injuns and forced like there was nothing for it and fleshed all out of him boned with bear traps only one reluctant squeak only one enfeebled fart of a faff of a word:

'Blow'.

He said nothing else and quickly dissipated into his own shimmering and was gone leaving no one who could understand his one little word that sat there between them all in the hot air like a petulant firefly -- and then on the horizon miles away they watched his silhouette forming up towering black and storming over the dunes heading north where a big blow was gathering busy with his own thoughts his own heading his own long deep important and most urgently requested windblowing of his anabatic storming and isobaric weathercock.

all you aren't love poem

all you aren't love poem
all you aren't got me bad
all the gap a mouth eats
my looking in
for it swallow my

approach let me

-- awakened then to
the-then-looked-away and --

then like this, like:

all day in everything she moves

away half away all away
this: away that: away

(alls them above ^ is vectors of mouth
is strophic notations of fingers)

nothing now I look all over you

and nowhere now none of it
till my shout runs back out
and my share now gone of it

dust of unwanting uninterest
underscored all you aren't

Here:

nothing now, all over you
.
.
.
.

otherself-medication

goblin who is not my enemy
goblin who looms at my edges
waiting for sunlight
to tug at the curtains
to run out
clasp at my heel
not enemy not saboteur

nor the unkind words
of loved ones
but mist that hangs
in the air
after spasm
stillness
that leaves footprints
in wet grass

who is neither loved

nor unloved
waiting

for your succession of moments
that come to nothing
your lightning sorties
the swirl of your dust
your sadness, your trying-again
you who are not entirely my enemy
even now

withdraw my medication
while I watch
from some distance
feeling that truth
that all things of the body
are sort of holy
sort of terrible

faintly irresistible,
and compulsion itself
just the shadow
into which words fall
when voice stops
in this world
moves elsewhere

please don't burn so hard so fast man
for the smoke offends my fucking eyes also of my friends here
at the next table

and I must have words

with you

in your dart of sunlight
goblin of my heart
leaving me here
to my own wordless
night

time too late
here we are beyond recall rolling

rolling

she pounds the table (who pounds the table?):

1. Remember, this time, damn it, the waves,
the count, the clock, the all of it, fucking remember, she says, remember

2, this croupier ain't no one you ever knew, mind
just a door banging in the fucking wind
all of that, no favours, just a hand reaching for you
so much as start to breathe ugly how you do

beyond
recall

goblin of my spinning
of my flame in the day
goblin hands that reach to catch
hands that pull away

goblin of the heart's engulfing

roll the damn yellow dice
.
.
.
.

La Fée Verte.

sump

I went to see my neighbour
used to be a cartoonist
little funny things
better drawings than jokes
but okay
told me a cat got squashed
mentioned its eyeballs
told the owner
who got it back out of the bin
wrapped up in black plastic
stiff, still warm.

His wife said I had a rival
another guy she now looked at
yeah, I said
we drank coffee
both of them chewing nicotine gum
the house smelling of lard
and last night's alcohol
sat there talked about the other neighbours
with the cars busting their sumps outside
on the level crossing.

Then he says
least you ain't a Paki-shagger
and she laughs
watching me to see.

Then we talked about the fridge
leaking water into the fresh-drawer
(what they call it)
how the people with the big field
had got some pheasants
all that
cars breaking underneath.

She's sixty
and does something to do with coal
on a computer
deliveries and stuff, orders
and she looks and smiles
a bit yellow now with the years
of smoke and living there
but, you know.

And he's sixty five
and keen on gardening and beer
and young women
the cat got picked up
put in a bag
at the roadside
then a roadsweeper came by
and took half its skin off
fortunately the kids were at school.

They like me, these people,
sort of
like I'm one of them
watching the road
the things that get swept down
looking out
into the leaves
with the cars banging
and that little guy from the station
who we all know
is a transvestite
on his knees
filling the scrapes in the tarmac
with some gunk
that never lasts
running out to the gate
when the bell sounds
and we all watch
when a special train comes by.

We like these little moments
with the smoke blowing
and the steambox blasting out
shockwaves.

It's a river, this road
from the moors
to anywhere
and we'll talk about any damn thing
that crawls down it.

Not that any of us
actually really like each other
like, don't like
like this, not that
you know how.

Just that we're all here
at the side of the same road
at the same moment
watching the same cat run out
at the same wrong moment.

That's what we've got
that makes us
dead cats and racism
and a load of people
going somewhere else
in broken cars
crashing by

cracking all our sumps
into the distance

Valediction for a departing prime minister

the rictus is a manifesto
sealed from within,
a gateway into
refusal to engage

HIGHER PURPOSE,
fixity, worlds of rarefied trust

(look what we found, witness
the shared miracle, reach out and touch
the portal
now)

REALPOLITIK beyond understanding:

a Level Above Human
see gods wrestle, see fingers of radiance
at work, at the helm,
tapping the rhythms of being, of real being here
now always like this, as it ever...DIVINE PLAN
FREEDOM, PARITY, look, freedom...
where gods wrestle with texts

from the sky, from dreams
serving purpose that derives
by strange mathematics
inexorably
from the imperatives
of the hovel and the palace

the urgent tickertapes
from Damascus and Gaza,
WASHINGTON
and Archangel
and Vatican City
and all I want, soon, soon, but

fish with no eyes, mouths sealed over,
claiming the gift of prophecy,
but forgetting now, forgetting...

the eyes of the unfaithful can't resolve
these dances in the sky
can't place them
can't read the texts
tune in the receiver
can't find them
on the shelves
or fix a clear gaze
on shifting things of light

with such sexless fixation
such urgent banality

the radio fails with a crackle
as the water reaches the throat

the lights come down,
fingers break the glass

(Now swallow the damn medicine,
you need more fixing.)

The weary woman
sweeps up hilarity
and teeth.

Night Night Night.


.
.
.

merlin: Kent 1940 ( to Yeats)

spinning in the opening sky
the merlin cannot hear
the gunfire
see the trails
the puffs of breath
as frames fall apart
and centrifuges fold --
sheer descent is stooped
upon the earth
the mere rustle
in the gorse
the streak
in the campion and thrift
and the beast slouches
bloodied up towards Gravesend
and Sittingbourne, a pulse
failing in its claws

and the singing of Merlin engines
over the fields
of new Jerusalem

inmost

back of the front
the pieces blow
a reverse
fierce
a trunk's shadow
out of sun
not stilled

not sleeping this
regression
back of backer still
behind the town
behind inmost
bends
the tap
of leafy
fingers there
behind bed/wall/thought
scratching night
mare in a little head
liquid-runs-voice-tape

beat
cool fingers rest
revolve bring back
the front to the front
so the eyes
align eyeholes
and all comes back
awake
into sleep

never remember
you were ill here -- there
more there at here times
-- what held you
while you slept
and struggled

to come back.
Back now.
Here back.
.
.
.
.

dead moon

all down the east coast
the ghosts blow
like dazzle
over the waves
the surf's arc
the pattering cliffs
I go looking
in rock pools
for eyes
looking back
full of jumping
full of sinking coins

dead men and
shimmer

another
big-eyed idiot frog

another midnight philosopher
face down in a pond

grasps a dead moon
.
.

Zanshin

Whatever your arrow is
let it fly
as though aimed at the heart
of your enemy,
as though all your life

was balanced there
in that moment of flight
in the intention
the desire
the act.
Hold nothing back,

give all that you are
to the preparation.
Breathe it in
until it fills you,
then let it loose
and move on.
When you release the arrow

the certainty
must be so complete
that you can close your eyes
forget about it
sing a song
or jump in a river -
it doesn't matter

don't wish for it,
don't be controlled by it

the universe
will take over
will guide it home
in acknowledgement
that you did all
that was necessary
and all that you are
was in tune with this act
at this moment:

the arrow singing
into the heart
the self
the quick
the moment
is just the finish,
the gasp, the full stop
that says it is ended.

heartbeat, breath

Zanshin.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

river man (quick shuffle)

I am not the river man,
I am not the green shadow
that moves on the banks
that baffles your eyes
at dusk, nor the hush
that stills the watchers
in the dark shallows.
I am only a distant gunshot
sounding at nightfall,
and the burst of one star
over the treetops.

I am not the slippery river man.
I am only the undercut clay
of the river's bend,
raked by hands that tried to rise
but slipped back, tried to rise
but drew back, succumbed
to the currents and the flood,
to the bend of night,
to the voice in the rushes,
to the voice
that called from downstream.

I am not the leaping river man.
I am only a mudstone
with a round hole
where the grass once grew,
a hole where something alive
once passed through.

I am the sifting of pebbles
and the song of night,
I am the eye in the riverbed
the spring and the sprite.

I am not that frog-eyed river man
who weaves the dawn in your heart,
who wraps you in blankets of fog
and tugs your tresses apart.

I am not the choking river man,
and I will sing no river songs
of far horizons as I pass you by.

I am not the river man
with his swirl of thunder.

I am no more the river man
with his ache that drags you under.

fragment of Auden

As I walked out one evening,

Walking down Bristol Street,

The crowds upon the pavement

Were fields of harvest wheat.



And down by the brimming river

I heard a lover sing

Under an arch of the railway:

Love has no ending.
.
.
.

Breathe

1

You have to be dangerous, you
have to fix yourself, breathe in
intentionality, fixity of purpose
like a man sucking flame

through the nostrils, staunching
soft tissues. You will know
that it's you I'm talking to here,
not everyone, only jailbreakers,

criminals of the senses.
Yes, the static in your head,
the pain has to stop,
but don't think of freedom

here, pinned to this tree:
there is no freedom to hope for.
But there is the breathing in
of purpose, and the breathing out only

the extrusion of a silken span
dragline and capture
singing with little death

2

Breathe down, scoop cool
energy up from the earth
let it flood and draw down
heat from the stars

this is what we get,
this fervent shuffle

starlights fall from my fingers
batshit hits the floor

sometimes
a reasonable substitute for a life
is what it sometimes
is

chimes

breathe deep,
wayward choker on moths,
here are new airways
for the nightflying
new paths new
flames to follow

more chimes here, a clocktower

urgently

This is a poem with no end
this is a thing pinned to a ledge
consuming itself, watching the night
flood by, snatching at the wind,

waiting forever
to catch its death,
waiting forever

to catch its breath.


.
.
.
.
.
.

dead tree/live tree

Foster's Leap

You trace the black bones up the hillsides
and you wonder why and how many men
it took to circle the wyke
and you wonder further back
at nearby Barnold and the alders
and you feel it rushing by
across the fields forever
wind -- wet -- winter breaking
its teeth on the stone trolls
of the Leap, green and loathsome
up there when it should be clean,
and the small figure hangs between
the two pillars, mid-shriek
overhead, all silhouette
with no face, coat tails whipping
in history. And urgent with entering
you lift your feet in turn
from the black mud
and place them on moss
then stone, and your fingers
grasp easily onto features
that comfort with abrasion,
and you start up
towards Foster's flapping ghost

and towards the rushing sky.

Stopping Time

Took him three years
visualising Time as a goose
beating down the Atlantic
the wind-ways, the ripped open
cloud-roads from Labrador
an arrowhead
of white and grey storm

pulling up honking in the parks
and stubble fields of the North West
and one here, nearly dead with it,
Time's greylag ticked out most
of its heart into the night
crashing in a flapping mess

at his mind's door, where he brings
it food -- bread and sardines,
anchovies and shrimp mixed
into a paste with a little gin.
Soon he carries it in, lays it out
like a near-dead bride in a cot,
and clips its big wings.

In the morning it lifts its head
over the bars and looks at him
confounded and flightless,
and the moment starts to stretch
and the clouds stop
and the heartbeats stop

and he smiles that long half smile
of a broken clock:

forever sadness
and eternal Spring.

Major Arcanum No. 23: The Black Dragon

Cheer up worse
things it could be

worse things
happen in the green troughs tomorrow is

day one I will I will another day
behind clouds survive

will at sea every cloud every tunnel
a light darkest

before the green troughs
I will my heart sink with sea

horse tresses wrack clee
shh they are tending the light

with moths and fire
flies for the brightment

I will in it face to foetal face
eyes for the fine shine

at sea worse things happen
survive so I will

wave things wavelets
creeps upon you like fingers

of photon falling this my katabasis
like rainbow troughs seaward

like all points dropping pressure
I will not now emerge that other end

of the world that could be worse...
.
.
.

other/self/other

You know from your own disturbance
that something is happening
it doesn't take the birds
going silent
or plumes of smoke
on distant hillsides stopping
and hanging, stilled --
only the catch in your own voice
tells you that a thing is here
for which you have no script
and that you are at your own edge
looking down, seeing nothing.
Devoid of options in this
you run down wrong paths
find them blocked
like forest trails
choked with drifts of leaves
and fallen limbs, find yourself
always back in that moment
of looking down
into the hole in the middle
where nothing has yet grown
that can accommodate this moment.

And when we wake in the middle
of searching, we find it, what we seek,
where we first looked and looked again,
though it cannot have been there then.

as though nothing had ever begun
and nothing ever yet ended

we see omens
with the edges of our eyes
other
self
other.
.
.
.
.

Instructions for pyrotechnic poetry

The trick is not in sending the words in loops and spirals off the trampolines of the lexicon through the hoops of the iris unstopped down the fiery skeins of optic nerves into the brains of birds:

the trick is keeping them anchored
and bringing them back to land.
The trick is not in watching words
disappear upwards at your command,
cut loose, like feathers in a storm
of your own marvel, while spectators
lose sight of your little lost swarm.
If you want some Oohs and applause,
keep them tight and bring them back
to alight spectacularly on all fours.

Always allow some exciting slack,
but bring your barnstorming babies
safely back from the black.

Major Arcanum Below Zero: The About to Blow

Before morning’s creep down the wideways of woodland halt
the breathed haircurls aflame he came where she was wide in the wanting

and illustry, and filled with bursts and offered more mothering was --
not needed now he burst also almost upon the brinking bells his heralding

and horn, but not yet the moment not yet the foment of follis he inbreathes
for his preparation and preparates his blowout into width and dimensions other,

that like here where leaves shuffle down and steam all night there, there is it
the spiral of steam that rises there when we look away -- there he prepares his

parting like the slitting of curtains and the eye that peeps and pokes between and now
at the threshold with hands undealt but ready -- as he’ll ever -- with position and time it is

coming it awaits two damn seconds only out of reach, and already under way,
falling last and first and before first in the space where there the spiral like smoke

rises its mystery...

three little poems

all night clouds shaking
with anger
in the morning
three little poems
from the east
rain down

screech owl: strix

I am an open throat
with the night sliding down
beating at shadows
yowling in red fields,

spinning wave filaments into beats
of self-betrayal, prey (though I
am all engagement, all sensation
and know nothing of this)
in the leaves, blood burst
beneath snow - and here, look,
here a poem was snatched, still glowing

here are whirling feathers
and the signs of struggle
here are footprints
at the perimeter
where something came to look

and here a boy runs down staircases
a dripping thing fresh
in his hands
the cry of a world in his ears

and all of it, all that we look for,
is in this wild-eyed running
and the owl's screech of tears.

Strix/Lillith

The Prophet

Call me the prophet
I break through the wall
of my house
at midnight
and leave hastily
jangling like a thief.

I have come North
heavy with prophesy
to tell
of owls crying in daylight
and bats dropping
from the sky
children that wake at night
and call from their graves.

Strange things happen in the air,
and my fingernails ache
from scratching at the sky. I am not
a father now, I am only
a wind in the rushes

bringing news of the distant talk
of strangers. And I carry
fire in my baggage. Tomorrow
I will break through the wall
into your house

and stand over your bed,
bearded and angry, my words
wild things that beat their heads
on your hands. Then I will leave
at nightfall, and fly to the east
on wings made from your hair,
dropping tears like moons
upon the dark land below.

(This kind of leaving
has the urgent drama and romance
of the night).

Call me prophet of feathers
and falling moons.
Call me fool on wings of wax.

Call me the prophet.

Links

I'm gradually accumulating links to sites etc accepting poetry submissions, as well as other resources and information. These are among the links on the right hand side of this page.

Serge Gainsbourg: Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais

This is a smoky kind of song for a rainy Paris in late summer, and strange dreams circle it like a late afternoon bar with all the curtains drawn, with drunken men and women surrendering to their sadness and strangeness. There's something of deep denial and anger in here, expressed through a kind of soft savagery. Blood runs down these yellow windows, and we order more wine and sing our sad, angry, defiant songs of doomed love through the smoke, no longer hoping for anything beyond the moment. Outside in the rain, office workers hurry back from their lunch breaks carrying flowers or broken mouldings from antique furniture, and here time stretches in one of those long moments seen through green glass and the dull shine of old sorrow. From the dreaming chamber, we sense some kind of dawn approaching, always that hateful daylight that comes to tear the covers from our dreams. I could almost swoon forever in that long moment, but only death ultimately lives there in that place outside of time. This is the message of Gainsbourg: the moment will always end, and the grey light will reveal the faces of your new lovers as old, monstrous, desperate things, your poems as paper scraps that dissolve in the rain, all your songs nothing, less than echoes. Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais...I have come to tell you that I'm leaving...et tes larmes n'y pourrent rien changer...and your tears will change nothing... We still have time for one more drink, one more song, one last cigarette before the ship sinks. This is a deep, drunken moment for me, as I once spent three days with a French woman I met on a ferry - we stayed in a guest house on the south coast of England, and we listened to this song over and over, venturing out briefly to sit in quayside bars and eat bad food, knowing that time was running out, that some kind of light was approaching. I suggested we should get married right there and then before the dawn came, but she said no. Why break the spell? I wondered. But she sensed the light better than I did, and she knew Gainsbourg's message better. We never met again, but neither of us listen to this song without recalling that long moment before the ship foundered. I got the train back to the north, and she went back to Paris, but footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden...

Serge Gainsbourg - Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais...

po - hexagram 23

Jump - for Charles Bukowski - nearly ready to scramble into a poem, this one

Everyone gets a chance to jump. It comes
and it's gone, a crossroads, a way out,
a way in, a closing door in the wind.
When the moment comes, and you're up there
looking out into the cloud,
just do it. Just fall, surrender
to it. Something big

wants to take over. Let it happen.
Take the car keys and drive south
fifteen hours without stopping,
change your name, say yes to everything
for three holy days,
just make that jump
before the door slams shut.

Some people can't make it, they teeter
forever in the jeering
clamour of themselves, knowing
that their moment just passed them by
and they were afraid to take it.
When your moment comes, be ready.
It's the difference between life
and not life - be ready to jump

when the demon in the top hat
opens the door and tells you
your time is now. Not jumping
is slow dying, cancer, rotting
from inside, self hatred. Not
jumping is being stuck forever
in your own shadow.

Be ready to jump.
.
.
.
.

elephant poem-not-poem - still gestating

That's not an elephant in the room.
Whichever way you look at it
that's a burning man, and he seems calm
about it all, chewing a sandwich
and reading the newspaper. These burnings
are common enough now, and we all know them -

well enough for them not to disturb
our own eating or sex most of the time -
but behind the sound
of crackling and chewing
is a quiet something,

a whisper that is not really sound,
but is the anger of a million poems
that warned about this burning
and how it would happen

every time a door closed somewhere
in one of those rooms upstairs
where fathers walk barefoot
on bare floorboards
looking for something that got lost.
Or when the lies
got so thick in the air
they started to stick

to people's skin, and burn
like napalm, or raining
ash. And I just want to add
my ashen voice to that soft beat
of the wind in the night, that quiet elephant

in the heart shriek that sweeps down
the mountainside noise of humanity

trying again to stand. It's all been said,
but I want to add my voice and lift
the volume just a little. So this
poem-not-poem is my name of anger

on that long petition
of the heart's horror.

my other site is here:

http://steveparker.wordpress.com/

floodlit midnight

what can I tell you about this?
it's like windows breaking in
like a hand got your foot
and dragging you back like a dream
like you can't, you know, run
like that, like falling through solid air
a confessional would do, like, nothing here,
nothing, just pain, self pity, hopelessness
that trope where you keep on on on
walking through that same door
into that place behind the wall
waking forever in the same mirror
looking out at that thing that looks in,
that is going to walk out
of the frame and kill something
next time he shows he'll have blood
around his mouth for sure. Best we can do
is hope it's his.

Hell isn't somewhere else,
Hell is just a different way
of seeing things.

Nick Drake - River Man

Beaker People

'Perhaps it's me...but in all honesty, I could not penetrate that tangle of syntax, invented words, and structure, and derive any kind of meaningful image from it. Sorry.'

- Critique recently received on an online poetry forum. Not often you get a keeper like that. I might just have it engraved on my headstone.

ad ugly damn diction

this no damn chinaman got me
no hepkat whore pours yellow ozone
back up my veinhome, this a German-French
sailor gripes my throat-gag

we know it in our grain-fathers
and the seepage of our guts

it is known likewise that we put on undergarments
as a sacrificial layer against the clear fact that we leak,
to protect others and ourselves we meet from the contagion

only for the dying dying,
like those others, those Irish-Iberian boilers
who came for the richness, the black loam and foam,
the Black Forest rides to the White Hart of Celt-death
of all I want out I want O I want out now
(but best perhaps not to mention any outer layers
for we have none here)

Beaker People come home
and your beds disturbed
your seed blows ravaged
so make it right with your fire

Beaker People I don't mean you
I mean those others who cry on the wind, those others

Beaker People, it's not really you
I'm calling to, but those others like you
who sing through the channels -
I don't know their names those others

fire magic make it right
with your fire magic make it right
with your fire magic make it right

whip the wind of its lies
and put back the lost things recovered

at what expense we here
I want out of.

killing saddam

A market in Mesopotamia
a bad boy favoured today
by Allah drives a camel
with a stick that he inserts in a wound
created for the purpose

wind scours his eyes,
winds here have the names of demons:
Simoom - the poisoner
Bad-i-sad-o-bist-roz - wind of nails
everyone’s fucking corpse-wind crawls across here
blowing sand off graves
whipping up silk rags
into the sky
they will all die of wind

leaves fall, his eyes
fall into ditches

he thinks of afreets
coming for him
dragging him again into fire
and darkness, a big-eyed djinn
leaping from the grave
tearing his shut eyes mudbrick

fragments that clatter
in the wind, a blown sunhat
amongst the ceramics, his hands
ziggurats that strangle
the babble

he drowns
in silence and clamour,
feels for that space between

brick fingers bore sockets,
the wells of Ur Nammu,
Nebuchadnezzar, rectangular
weep-holes in masonry
terraces denuded of time,
growth, space

after applause, vacuum
after climax - silence,

there will be none. Taken by afreets,
by time’s stoop, the clamour,
lost to comprehension
a straight drop brings him

a dignity of shadow
and the world slinks home
ears and nostrils stuffed with garlic
for the fear
that their souls might rise against them

quiet, quiet now, the work is done
and we who found our voices thick
with bile and antiseptic
must now find a time for our choking.

.

dumbass buddha in the age of gold

(This is a riff on the theme for the purpose of gestation - it's not a piece of writing yet)
this corpse-faced Capa Coha buddha with the leather mummified skin was I believe ritually flayed of all circuitry extraneous to the Samadhi of profit by the AIs at T.K.Maxx his unlit eyes like razored slices of trusting dead cow eye painted black
gone out, inverted and gazing into a bland Satori of suburban lack, some zombie quiescence born of sofas and soft furnishings designer satori of labels and stack-em-high, shit he looks happy enough in that lobotomised way that Buddhas have
when they've forgotten what it was that they were looking at in the middle distance
and let their eyes droop into the commercial break. This buddha, this housing ladder halfwit starter home happy head sunday league sideline-racer avid fan of reality TV this weather swapper this cash injection cctv new labour neocon illiberal iron maiden buddha shocked by the war suspicious of muslims better bomb em anyway buddha buddha buddha sergeant rockery buddha waxing of car born christian and now not quite sure but who knows there might be something pelican head lost object buddha waking in the garden shed at midnight in his wildest rainstorm buddha TK.Maxx Wallmart Imperial Tobacco buddha spending his synapses watching the flickers projected by the stormlight on his stone faced new brick bulkhead this droopy Buddha has got a yap dog buddha early night with his tired wife once a week where he finds all the Satori he needs, then goes off retail middle management internal email viral advertising firewall bitching styrofoam needless blackberry buddha without vision buddha without question without courage content to be his own enemy looking benignly at his own reflection in the wall of his tank wondering what it could be looking back with dead eyes.Dumbass Buddha.

WORD (in progress)

...is a long corridor
stretching
shadows
to snapping
just a tendril
shimmer with dewdrops
spark-gap
the node flashes between these
mirrors each
a cobweb jerking
a lung flooding, a wave collapsing
all words codified
first the p words b words plosified
when you look when you stop

time and fix
the moment like this, you see
it's like this that all possible routes
were travelled to this point
the poem of this point
a frozen frame
one circuit sparking
encoding a whole,
a fishdrop is this word
this face-down-study word this
library Larkin cup of tea word
this shuffle of an overcoat word
heading
home in the half light

a symphonic dusk of starlings
to a lonely house word
each to each
smoke flows back down

the chimney, coughs
are sucked back in
lungs filled with expectoration
where grow inflections of undifferentiated
word tissue, stem-words
that may become all issue, lexica-stock
of the probable, no men
clat ure of collapsed
wordwave
the pandorad hoard scattered
the hope-spasm of a diaphragm
the formula-shuck
of a buccal chasm
bilabial plosive
orgasm unvoiced
merely fricative thrust, close rounded and schwa
vowel freak-vowel schwa ugh lateral

ugh approximant of consonantal drift
gondwanaword of a pacific
rimshot acoustic
of blowface composition spit it out spirant
spit it out dearie, better
out than in

schwa (I know you not) bleak Blairword
thrusting bronchia-beyond-body-branch and broken
and web and filament and stem
and monofilament and unchained
polymer of word
enter your ear-anvil
still hooked umbilical in my
mindlung my voice chamber, still

tugging and coming, coming hammered
loose
placental
bloodroot to become
now yours this word delivered
of the systemic etymology
shivered into echoism
of silence,
sigh lens,
silens
word ecology fish-flapping now
a last flap the pin fixing the wingfin

to the specimen board we bends
creaking to look what it became
in the fixing, that fix
when all roads just stop
mouths go silent, clouds crystallise
as usual the miracle
a brown, dull thing
a word no one would use
in a brown dull poem even

not even
in our wildest sparks
cinders.

self loathing at dusk

He shows them magic
sparks cascade around his head
his fingers, tendrils that channel
starlight, he tells stories and poems,
his confidence backlit
with the mild hysteria of someone

watching a clock run down
he watches their eyes gleam,
wonders what he will do
how long he will survive
when these little lights
go out
when the moment
has ebbed away
in the near-dark of five o clock
the applause
leached out of his blood
the insistent hour
come upon him.

They don’t make storage cells for this stuff
it comes and it goes like rainbows
you can’t freeze
these frames
they’re here and they’re gone
like POOF…magic
dust
in your hands

a lizard’s tail flicking, drying
he looks out into the evening
with that hollow light burning
all down the river
wonders if drowned people
are floating past
and he stands there in the twilight

in just his socks
for almost an hour
while the dark spreads down the hillside
and wraps itself around the streetlights

feeling something in his guts
that he never felt before,
not really, he wonders briefly
if it is illness, or just the tide
going out.

The 'Swastika Stone' - Ilkley Moor. Bronze Age.

Stone spiral carvings. Ilkley Moor. Bronze Age.

the pursuit of the white hart*

The kind of poetry (and writing generally) that currently most interests me is the attempt to speak from areas other than the intellect. Note that you can't do this directly, it has to be achieved through various kinds of suggestion, which require that you abandon any idea of overt, linear narrative, and replace it with a kind of mosaic or montage (both the wrong words) of narrative attempting to work at, and to contact, different levels simultaneously. This also requires some understanding from the reader that the direct narrative is being deliberately subverted to this end. A way to achieve it is by, having first located or established the subject, looking for it in different areas. If it is overt or physical, or extraneous, then look for it in yourself - see what is corresponding inside to what is outside, see what that looks like and what words and images are attached to it. See what it feels like, and what words come with those feelings. How deep can you follow it? The deeper you go (into what can become a quite shamanistic, meditative pursuit), the closer the images and words become to dream narratives, as they permutate through successive layers of language and imagery.

The vital thing is to keep the thread intact between the initial impetus and the deeper imagery - if the connection is lost, then the words cease to have any authentic link to outer reality, and the poetry becomes effectively meaningless outside of what is more or less a dream state. It is no good just summoning abstract or surrealist images from your imagination, they MUST be sequentially connected to the surface by the poetic equivalent of a chain of neurons, and able to fire in both directions.

If it's achieved - and some people have done it very well indeed - then the result is a startling interactive narrative of different realities speaking with different voices, and all ultimately decipherable through the presence of this Rosetta Stone of interconnectedness. It can seem very abstruse, and the best poetry of this kind often is, but it is never gratuitously or actually unintelligible, and it represents ultimately some of the greatest accomplishments in the pursuit of poetry and what it really is. Eliot and Joyce are probably the two best known poets to really use these sorts of dream narratives.

*The title 'pursuit of the white hart' refers to the frequent instances in myth of the appearance of a white stag, boar or other creature, announcing the proximity of the 'otherworld', or perhaps the 'unconscious'. Celtic mythology is particularly rich in these references, and I take them to be imagery of exactly the process I'm trying to describe in this piece, though they might have been more literally intelligible to their contemporary composers and listeners.

To be continued/revised.

Notes for a poem about Alan Turing

Turing is a candidate for the 'father of the computer' title. He was a prime mover in the decryption of the German 'Enigma' code during WW2. See Turing Test / Enigma / Ultra etc.

Kallisti - Inscribed by Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, on the apple presented by the shepherd-prince, Paris, to Aphrodite, was the word kallisti, meaning 'for the fairest'. Apple of Discord. Turing committed suicide by eating an apple injected with cyanide, having been convicted of homosexual acts in 1954, and presented with the choice of 2 years in prison (at extreme personal risk), or submitting to chemical castration by oestrogen injections that would have curbed his libido and caused him to grow breasts. His suicide came two years after his conviction, following a period of deep depression; which there is little doubt was brought on by the disgrace, the oestrogen injections - and, no doubt, what must have felt a humiliating rejection by a nation that he had done much to save from defeat by the Nazis.

Words to discard - love that dare not - apple - dials - fingers - secrecy - enigma - test - intelligence - betrayal.

I imagine his wheels spinning, iterating through algorithms of dead ends, all solutions barred, the certainty that the decryption was false, that no solution was currently available, the code now lost, the wolfpack arrayed in the mist across the North Atlantic, no way through, grinding of foghorns in the mist, a mile of darkness beneath, the final certainty that it would be better to run into a mine and vanish in some small, secret explosion than to either sink into the crushing darkness waiting, or surrender to a sickness prescribed by a grateful nation in an act of gross judicial indecency...

Enigma Machine



It was possible to dream for a long time, there amidst the bundles of cable that stretched out into the mist. Always cold, but even possible to dream sometimes that you knew who was out there, that it really was a human being sending back those signals from the North Altlantic, from the mist, from wherever, somewhere on the end of those cold wires was a human that you could fall in love with, or who at least might come in singing in the night Lily Marlene across the shipping lanes to pluck apples from the waves imagine apples falling from the night that hummed with electromagnetic Asdic amongst the Nordic clouds rolling in from the North. But of course it was never really possible to know what was out there until the answer came in unequivocally, when the machine turned finally and the screen cleared, and a face appeared, an iron face that no human could ever love, not in this test or any other.

the smoking mirror

Dead to the fairies

Smoking Mirror, what is that whisper,
what is that shadow
that walks at noon,
the silence
that grows like ancient trees
whispering through roots
that do not seek water,
but the access of language
through all temporal lobes
all channels?
Smoking Mirror,
what are the words

that the shadow speaks?
A signal beamed from stars:
it runs like a bright thing
between the trees,
a hole, still smoking,
where something was taken.
This is the message,
this at this moment
is the loudest
the shadow will speak
the closest it will come
Here are the coordinates,
move to these places, and watch closely, attend,
speak from,

of, your body.
These are the other ears
the other eyes,
and without these
you will hear no words,
but only
the wind
laughing
as it dances down
to where the weirs and cataracts
are flattened
into rivulets
and the roar and the trickle
of them, the whisper
and the flood of them
are sucked back
up onto the watershedding moors
feeling for peaks
to alight from,
from which to birth again
into the sky,
convinced of your inattention
and the futility
of pressing the point.

Giving names - first few words of another attempt to write about poetry

I'm giving names to the part of me that needs to speak. I'm calling it Sensorium, and I'm calling it Monster. Sensorium, because it is all that comes in, and Monster because it is monstrum, it reveals, it uncovers, it demonstrates. Monster, because I wake at night, in fear, with it arched across me. I follow it into the wardrobe and down the steps through the wall. I see now that all poems are brought back at night from these journeys into the Land of the Dead. But it is not a land of the dead, it is halfway between waking and sleep, halfway between words and what is beneath words. It is that place that you know from sitting in sunlight, unaware of anything other than the dust circulating in a shaft of light. It's very close to that place, and when you are near you are somehow aware and not aware of the voices from the sensorium writing furious poems in that language of light, webs forming all around in startled air, disintegrating, spreading, dying, all of it taking No Time, and then you are back, befuddled and halfway through speaking of what plants you will grow next Spring, to someone who regards you strangely, then stands and leaves. The only sign of their presence a flutter in the hedge. Shake your head quickly - none of this was real.

assemblage of components for poems about poetry - first draft

Some words it is necessary to sacrifice at the outset. Some words have every intention of subverting the entire deal, and can not be safely included in any delicate work. It is important to establish right away which are the dangerous words and deal with them. So which words are they? They are probably the words you would write if you were a keyboard without a human attached to it, or some mechanical fingers clicking away in space somewhere, lacking empathy with anything anywhere, just a wired heart beating like a metronome in the cold wash of an alien sun. Throw these words down the well and let them learn what it is to mean something. I'm trusting that you have a well, as it's unlikely you would have even read this far otherwise.

Then it is necessary to assemble the words to be used. This begins with establishing intent. In this case the intent is to speak about poetry, to unearth what is going on beneath the nomenclature, and the nomenclature here means not only words and names, but images, sensations, all the multi-media assemblage of our senses. At this level, the inner landscape of my knees is spoken of in terms of playing fields, rain, sadness of school days, retreat into long corridors and cloakrooms, insistent tapping of childhood threat, bone metastasis, osseous dream-fixes - the hidden language of the dreaming of the body. This requires particular words and materials, those which have been made active with both deep sympathy and fixity of poetic intent. Furthermore, it must be clear at the outset that some degree of failure is certain. The most one might hope for is to open the door at morning and find oneself naked and bereft on the doorstep with a mouthful of ash and a glimpse of something that ran around corners up ahead, never quite seen. I want to talk about mathematics and morphology, but I can't. Something is wrong, and it's possible that I'll never know what it is. Poetry is a little like that - like the awareness of brain damage. And now the moment has died anyway... I'm going to come back to this time and time again.

night don't stop -
black stars burn forever
at my door

the work of reassembly

The man rakes through knapped flakes
of flint, like leaves or blades, slices
of a body. He pictures unknown molluscs boring
into chalk, breaking down, leaving holes
that fill slowly with black, going bad, going hard;
thinks of an edge slitting hide, a heart flapping

in its own cavity. He finds the next piece,
sticks it carefully to the last, Superglue and blood
on his fingers. He's surrounded here by flint,
a thousand facets, more, spread out in shiny slices,
eyes staring up, frozen, each preserving an image
of a man swinging a stone blade, working flint,
moments captured in an immutable emulsion
of geology, fixed in leaching calcites and metamorphic
pressure - a record of clicking, grunting, industry

of rainfall or sunlight, smells of roasting
flesh, fur, cracking of fat and bone -
but he knows that these eyes look out only
from the impossible. These are not the flint roads
to a land of the dead, we shall not reach out
quivering hands to our mitochondria through this
avalanche of fossil. There are no sparks left
here, these fragments are cold as fish scales
to his fingers, this pool blind to both oceans

and the man refitting the scales, jigsawing through
codas of the Permian and Palaeolithic. He is precise,
determined; he assembles, he attempts, he rejects,
searches. He finds, growing in his hands, a nodule,
a flint - three dimensions, four, others perhaps
inert, coiled in a hole in the core in the shape
of an axe head. This is what he finds here

- holes - here in his hands, holes like words
transmitted from the Stone Age in its cataract
of sediment. He senses violence gestated, birthed
in these sockets, and his fingers sting
with the sensing. He knows the excitement,
the slight tremor as his fingers reach back,
adding more fragments, more of the hole, ignoring
the dreams that crowd upon him. He feels the void,

the discovery, absence, the discovery of absence.
The finding of holes. The shape of the absent -
he traces its periphery, its rim, feels the shape
of what has been taken. This is the beginning
of the work of reassembly: the finding of holes.
Later will come measuring and recording, cataloguing,
later still the taking of casts. Much later,
the tentative matching of specimens. For now,
he feels them in his hands, flints with no hearts,
light as pumice, warm as fists, dark as deep history.

haiku

The following poems are more or less traditional haiku inspired by reading Matsuo Basho. I tried to use some of the common nature images familiar from Basho and his disciples. The first one (kireji haiku, which also occurs later) breaks a rule by including an extra word in the title, but I wanted to use the image of kireji (referring to a traditional cutting word in Japanese, used to divide the two halves of haiku). In this case it becomes a pun as the two halves might be both two seasons divided by snowfall, and the two 'faces' of the poem.

(Click the title of this introduction or see the links below for articles about the elements of haiku, including kireji.)

kireji haiku

winter snows
in late autumn -
two-faced year

8 haiku



a jumping frog
breaks the pond mirror -
a spring day shivers





summer rose petals
cover the pond -
pink carpet roof





autumn moon
eclipsed by a snowy owl -
see her white crown





winter snows
in late autumn -
two-faced year





the wintry clatter
of machines on fields -
a flower factory





sound of engines
on the cool spring air -
frogs are courting





a single drop
from the spring blossom -
a beetle sips wine





the rich man
throws coins from his balloon-
summer fields glisten

Plutonium enrichment - Ahmadinejad and the Axis of Evil

This is intended as a poem about the US and Europe, not about Ahmadinejad or Iran. It just struck me that there was something deeply racist and disingenuous about the West declaring an 'Arab' (Persian, actually, but how many Westerners know the difference?) state seeking nuclear power to be irresponsible, war-mongering and evil, and potentially grounds for military intervention. Okay for us, but not for them? What's the difference between us and them? Oh, yeah, the balance of power, the benign hegemony, the Manifest Destiny, the right, the power, the imbalance... Oh, it's a Found Object, by the way.


Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what botherin' me
I wanna be a man, mancub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!

Oh, oobee doo
I wanna be like you
I wanna walk like you
Talk like you, too
You'll see it's true
An ape like me
Can learn to be human too

(Gee, cousin Louie
You're doin' real good


Now here's your part of the deal, cuz
Lay the secret on me of man's red fire

But I don't know how to make fire )

Now don't try to kid me, mancub
I made a deal with you
What I desire is man's red fire
To make my dream come true
Give me the secret, mancub
Clue me what to do
Give me the power of man's red flower
So I can be like you

You!
I wanna be like you
I wanna talk like you
Walk like you, too
You'll see it's true
Someone like me
Can learn to be
Like someone like me
Can learn to be
Like someone like you
Can learn to be
Like someone like me!

(Bagheera: 'Fire! So that's what that scoundrel's after!')








I wanna be like you!



http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran