murder glass

I'm on the glacier early enough to see a body drift by
two feet down
splayed and twisted
in old red nylon
and a rictus of frozen shout
drifting down
to the snout
like that
a piece of death from 1980
or whatever
just going down quietly
the grief long over
and his karabiners all froze up silent
so I reach down
grasp his head
hold it against the current
for a few seconds
his cold head
with its frozen brain
just hold it
then let it go
and I rise up
into the sunbeams
over Montenvers
on wings of pure glass
thinking this
is a fine moment to be a corpse
in a red nylon cagoul
swimming into the blue deep day
so damn cold and lost

porn addiction

went to see the new Nick Berg beheading movie and Christ
I had to sleep all night
with the light on laughing
like Linda Blair's head spinning
like a east europe

whore with a habit
and a clock running
fucktime
some level of ooze
you know
is okay close up but

I watched the first two minutes only
of the apostates stoning fuckvid
before I knew there was no love

out there
between planets
the wrap was like this:
like snails stripped out of shells
and waving writhing
little slimy asses in the fearful
then Linda Lovelace says
she now a nun

chugging on God
and I agree
some things you don't wanna swallow
all the way
for this
I declare the CIA
the motherlode
of pornography
with the ghost-McCarthy halfway down

the Bushthroat gaggin shotgun
and I sit up all ill
listening to the scratching
dunking dead cookies in the milk
Linda your bright clitoral rose soars
like satellite coma fire dunk

Poem about nothing

never like this, Andy Warhol
avoided your eyes, looked away
for the summer the kids came to
as though all along
there had been a problem

of unconsciousness, a passing out
parade in which
they shuffled
and fell like aces Wild Bill
cocking the last moment

he would ever know in the ring

of fire and ancient of days
fell like flowers from the burst
balloonmen, wee cummings and
Montgolfiers like captured clouds

of breath on cold mornings still dark
the old house on the hill lit suddenly
they dropped
to their knees grazed
as bullets that took flight
over the lake at dawn
chorus of wolf voices
that cry in long dreams
falling all around
their faces
looking

look at them looking
for it as they fall
look at them the swallows
the swallows

wheeled back
in balloons
for the spring
.
.
.

robot draft

robot stretches out
runs through his circuits
feeling for sleep

lights play
across his shell
dance like tension tics--
a humming through subcutaneous
membranes--

he is cavern
carapace, plastron

flashing crystal
pool of black within
rigid, liquid
sol/gel
lights going off/on
everywhere voices

animal sounds (something is coming
through) as though his circuitry
is looping
he feeds

choral music
into his night
(grunts
bird calls that come
of their own volition)
music to heal and soften

Christ, he thinks
I'm stiff as a damn board

stiffasadamnboard!


.
.
.

homophora poem (an ayeaye langpo)

the queen in the mountains
could not see the clouds swirling
over the capitol
the fountain squares reeled with pigeons
the turrets and balustrades
sinking in leaves
whirling leaves
in autumn
under our clouded sky
our frame
of light
ours
here
us
.
.
.

Poems about nothing. Number 1

These are filaments of light
or perhaps plant tissue
or flesh--cellular rods that grow
in memory at least and defy all

definition all attention all description.
Even here, even in the cracks
and the darkness before
the waiting ends they grow

like this, even flourish after
a fashion. They grow
with vigour and urgency, even
performing under these conditions

the stark acts of mating
or propagation, whichever it is,
however it can be described.
These filaments will never

swell into redwoods, or giants
who stalk the earth into myth
or shock their way into dreams
but even here, even here

is a life attempted. Even here
is a sort of brazenness that we
can admire, begin to know,
and reach towards.

Baltic lover

the Baltic loved one who sleeps - Jeremy Prynne
might in fact be a submarine skulking
and "echoing" in territorial waters - John Kinsella

We Dive at Dawn
Orzel left the Gulf of Danzig
for open water
Just think - submarine night
Dive! Dive! Dive! Baltic Gal!

I love Europe I love its Jungle theme
I love it Mrs B......dive, dive, dive
(it stalks the drowned Brandenburg Gate
the Shoulder of deep Orion—
Hauer and Ford submariner captains

......across the Tannhauser Gate
......sea-beams glitter)

OOoooohhh I love the race! I'm a race fanatic
I love it Mrs B!
I love things you people wouldn't even believe
letters from the Kursk bubble
like tears in rain
clanging on the hull

love letters
and fire (a chemical reaction) 108 metres down
the Barents Sea
things you wouldn't even believe
I love it
I love it
I love it
..........oh

to death
........a sudden irruption

.......silence of the sea lover
.......who sleeps
.
.
.
.
Prynne's poem Rich in Vitamin C can be read here

Other sources include extracts from Rutger Hauer's famous pre-death soliloquy from Bladerunner.

poetry poem - draft

feels like the carving of a nation from new air
or dreams
or the long address to the world
on urgent matters
--the removal of doubt
the resolving of problems out there--
big stuff big as worlds
that we do in private
in our little glow
at the keyboard
in hope that someone somewhere will find our importance
cast up upon the sand
glittering, irresistible
the answer to it all within
is how it feels this thing that we do here in ourselves
and strive to put forth with the unquestioning urgency
of any young plant
like all that it feels
but is only a little thing done in secret
underneath all that
just a hidden shaking of the tree at the centre
(the tree adorned like a wishing tree with bright charms
and spells for the alluring of spirits
and Oh I know most of us
end up snared in our own spell
staring at our own colours
forgetting everything
but really it's a side thing; it is. And it's not that. It's just not.
Those fluttering rags, those drifting shapes
those rhymes and rushes (all petals to bring
the workers to do the work that cannot be done
to act the last part of it the missing piece
the moment when it catches
the final act of the theft of fire--
all chimes and hues and incense otherwise, that's all)
those musics and clevernesses
all asides
all adjoinings
and not the thing
itself (though anyone has a right to dress nicely
and smell good). No, not all that. This! The communiqué, the address
the message the long song in the night
just the singing not even the song
that or something like it. Maybe that then. Just that. A convulsion of some kind.)
the mast the spine the frame
that wants to stretch its bones
just for the sheer stretching of it all
thinking maybe its stretching is unique, exemplary and vital
and filled with the representative charge of all moments
as though this act could stand for all acts
if you would only look into it.

In this spirit, I ask you please to look into it
for at least a few moments
before you move on.
This asking is all I am asking
for I cannot requite myself in this way.
To everyone their little looking in by the other.
To everyone this act of attention this wish this question this prayer
(every poem a prayer).
To everyone all this little vast yearning.
To everyone this little ongoing truth
that the very small
is the whole damn world
and all the teeth-chattering shudder and collision of new nations.

oh a distant seasong that might go on forever

Spots on the crossjack and moonsail flots
make dead leeway toward five stars east
gaff the yards I have not creased
one hand for... one hand for knots
one for the ship
and one for the dip
ah yer lateen rips wet weather
when you see me warpin tether
up Whitby wharf with a bellyfull
of iron-blowed skerryscull.
I'm luffed and laden me screechin maiden
and deadeye wire-stropped
with the monkey fiddler storm-stopped.
I'll wait at the wind's gate
to the wind strait out
to the new wind haulin
and the straight weight yawlin me glistenin singin frigate bird
if you just unchest the holy seaword
till the leech give it up
an the beachin bring me cup
am agog with grog in the barefoot web
like me father swarmin
to the fierce warmin moment
sloopin slough me beat, me reach
no driftin distant doubt.
Oh me farflung frothin fortune to flout!

lerv

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa
like this? Is it?
hold you down?
insert a catheter?
Huh, what? Huh?
I only g
et up like
what 3 times a night
don't even know if it's big enough
to take this mother
catheter
is this where we are
this
this
this
I got nothing to give to this
fall apart
fall
fragment
rain falls all over
and every man gotta right
to hold his woman's breast
at the last moment
just in case
the air start to slow
and he wish to breathe
his last moments
in love's gasping poements.

wail far out in mist

who is this speaking
I'm lisnin up hard
who
you know who
I don't
you do
I went there for some reconciling that's all
yes but you knew knew all along
like no way these things don't work for you you're doomed haha
who says this who
I do You do
who
I said already you know
it was a Crime Scene
or a WELL full of blood
how about that
hahaha you idiot
you're going back to infancy
and you expect what
there were cheeses and chocolate
and a Buddhist Garden
in which we could prostrate ourselves
and we talked like old strangers
and she could hug all she wanted
until the breath flung out of me
and nothing there
would make a tiny difference
still we looked at the garden and the river
and talked about someone's baby got absconded ducted
straight out of safety live into a cloudworld
where we catch our breath like that
yes but that's not it is it
not it at all
no time at all did you move from the clutch
to the cry
who is this
who is this
who is this?

The clock is a stooping cartoon dinosaur; the men are alarmed, but are unsure why. Each suspects the other plans to steal his work if he sleeps.

I was listening to John Tavener's 'The Protecting Veil': what does this music have to do with a protecting veil? How does this music express or suggest a veil? Tavener states his intent with the title, but take that away - what is left of veilhood? He urges us on towards veils of protection with those three words, but then what? What? If he had named the same piece of music 'The Birth of a Blue Whale', would we have dreamed along dutifully in this other channel, hearing/seeing the booming of the ocean, the hulk of a mother, the first flaps of her calf's tail? Not a veil in sight?

I realise here I have inadvertently chosen an example that mirrors the original. Is there an example that does not? Maybe all tropes are one substance suggested by different prompts. As though we each walk to the same pool and drink from it, and seeing our own reflection, claim it as our own unique well, over and over and over and over... when it is just the stuff that is there, undifferentiated, unselected, impersonal, not owned, just lived along with earnestly in the assumption that somehow the water that we assimilate is part of us uniquely.

This narrative, like all human narratives, is ultimately false (and not false), as it assumes eternal life; assumes that our vast impressions of ourselves are somehow acknowledged by the universe (they are), and that we are granted ownership and the power to create (we are): as opposed merely to finding pretty pebbles in the dirt and arranging them carefully to show to our parents, before they fall from our grey fingers back into the mud at the other end (this antithesis is of extinction, and is as redundant as that which it refutes).

Of course the music has nothing to do with veils and everything to do with veils. It is intrinsically and uniquely expressive of veils in ways that someone unaware of the title of the piece would instantly grasp. Of course it is nothing whatever to do with veils. It could equally be the soundtrack to a film of someone preparing food (there we go again). Big mirror, little mirror, cracked mirror, rippled surface, veil of night, pinpricks, light, dark, distance, void, the impossibility (and certainty) of knowledge within a cellular instrument. Yes and no. No and yes. Where are you watching this from? Yes, so am I.

diamonds (dedicated to Don Paterson)

(In the lame way the mindless find sparks fires ice love
bright coal silence feeling)

there on the hillside look
are men with nets and pins
marching to an alliance with the landscape

(I ask you: how hard can you squint?
If you dig your thumbs into your eyes
those images you see are called phosphenes
not phosphates (are they connected?)
but I don't know that they are real
not real-real
not like dreams and things are real.)

I feel this one deep inside me, he says
like tornadoes or a sudden urge

later they stack their devices at the bar
giggling a little
at the embossed pewter urinal
in which they bathe their eyes
(now brimming with unwept sparks-fires-ices-loves...)

This is what it means, I suppose? The unabashed stare
into the eye of the page
the focus on 'the drama of the inner'... Is that it?
Is that what it means? In a spotlight like that?

Oh no he isn't... etc.
This chanted enough times could drown China etc.
A butterfly flaps one wing
and 'a page turns
in the world next door'.
(I forget sometimes whether we ever remembered
whether there is a next door.
Oh I'm waffling needlessly -
this is no help at all.)

it feels so big, he says, squirming, feels like certainty
rightness, like nature rushing out glorious

Oh, time, gentlemen, please, hurry...
these diamonds when we tried them
floated like ducks

it flows, he says, from me to you in the channels unimpeded

weatherproof for anything
except gunpowder and alcohol
or a human gazing into the flash
to see the effable glory (one doesn't like to use cuss words needlessly)

oh but the love the fire in its depth
the way that it simply must be right!

All this eye-pressing, it seems to work somehow

Could this be why Silliman thinks the coffers are empty...

"The work of the Postmoderns delegates the production of meaning to the reader, their poetry being largely derelict in its responsibility to aid it. The reader is alone. For those of us quickly bored by our own company, the result is work that can be objectively described as extremely boring."

Don Paterson *justifying* his exclusion of the British avant garde on the occasion of publishing his Anthology of New British Poetry 2004.

I thought I'd juxtapose this quote from Tim Love's essay on the avant garde/mainstream schism here:

'The formalist's stock criticism of free verse applies even more strongly to avant-garde writing. Each year the "Cambridge School" of poets (a school that nobody belongs to) hold the CCCP (Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry). CCCP poems tend to have broken sentences, multiple styles and perhaps most strikingly, multiple voices. Dialogue with the reader isn't just implicit. Eliot's "that's one way of looking at it - not very satisfactory" becomes integrated into the poem (indeed, at the readings it isn't always clear when the poet's introduction ends and the poem begins). In contrast, mainstream poems have an air of dramatic irony - they, like an actor in a farce, seem unaware of what's going on behind them, things obvious to a well-read audience. [My italics]'

More to come.

Bhutanese Fire Puja, Harewood House 2006 - draft

Buddhist abbots show up in dirty track suits
with spark holes
and coke cans
and no matches
and it rains a little
as they borrow a lighter for the flares

(look this thing is all fire
words are fires and faces gather around them
flush from flaming lippy fricatives -
fire is to be seen bursting all over this scene)

and Lord and Lady Harewood
sit slow with silk scarves

and faces that don't move
as the monks change into cassocks
and perform
throwing sparks and pebbles
that we scrabble for
and the firelight glistens
on the beard
of Lord Harewood Lord Lascelles in whose grounds this scene
unfolds, with his mansion black behind him and the moon
behind that his snowy beard snowy the word combed snowy
like a fantasy wizard
sparks everywhere no movement of his face not even
at the end
when they rise and walk
into the vast shadow
all those slaves in Barbados
carved from their black bones
and cast with their big eyes into the future.

They leave without pebbles
not having scrabbled for them.

giant cowslip

stone path to the cascade
through scent of jasmine and high grass
stupa in silhouette with tourists
out there even
on the path to the boathouse
images forming urgently
above the rushing water
a red flower like an alien asshole
or a claw, or a crab
all of these
I try to take in macro
but shake too much
time runs past
along the river
rattling the trees
flattening the water
on the stones
whipping up petals
into my face
lowing on up the slopes
down which strangers come running
to catch the sunset
against the Buddha's profile
but I don't think Buddhism is a peaceful thing
a sunset a flower a breeze a calm lake
I think it is the war of all things
at all times
and carving a hole in it
with the most vicious weapons available.

a quick ramble about shambo

So today they came and took Shambo the Welsh Hindu bull with bovine tuberculosis despite the monks holding a continuous act of worship around him dragged them out of the way led a garlanded bull out to be taken away to receive a lethal injection and head out of all sorrow
...into whatever but that all happened 300 miles away and I only knew of it because of the TV that had imported the moment or some part or some properties of the moment, carefully selected, over here to where I happened to be looking in open like a fool to whatever they decided to upload into my head and I couldn't help but feel sad for Shambo and ignore the 2,000,000 other cattle killed today and I have to wonder if this transfer this shift this import and this selective teleportation of only the poetic, the magical, the evocative, the demonic elements present at Shambo's stall is some kind of actual metaphor or metonym. I can't quite get at this one, but the process occurs in reality, rather than just in text or language. Representative forms from the story of Shambo are implanted in me, I assimilate them and respond as the semiotics direct. The signs are not Shambo, but I believe Shambo is real. (This may be delusional on my part, but if so then the world is far stranger and more sinister than I think.)

Although I know I am being manipulated by story-tellers (tricksters) I still respond. If I think of 6 million Holocaust victims I feel little; if I am told the story of just one, or shown a face, or some personal effects recovered, I feel more. What is this process? Is it only knowable as story-telling? Is it more fundamental, or am I ignoring the depth of meaning inherent in the term 'story-telling'?

I am some kind of robot, and people can send signals to me from afar, instructing me to dance or throw up my hands or weep, and I will obey. Poor Shambo, says the robot, befuddled with words and images and the manipulation of signs. Do I object to my response, or do I attempt to claim it as somehow my own, and not something prompted and controlled by others? What is my free will regarding Shambo? Do I have any free will once I am exposed to his story? Even if I fight it I am reacting to the dictates of others.

Maybe I will strive robotically for total indifference to all such stories of bulls. Why will I do that? Why did the idea of doing so occur to me? Is this story influencing my urge to strive in such a way? The only sensible and proactive approach is to remove myself from all exposure to symbols and influence for a long time, and then ask what I will do next. After this hypothetical cleansing of interference, assuming it to have been totally successful, would I have any will to do anything other than satisfy the requirements of the body and shamble around with a vague interest in bright things? Forget it, let's go with Shambo and embrace garlanded slavery, and believe for a few stupid moments that we are free.

Save our Shambo!

Why does that remind me of this?

Postscript: Shambo executed last night. Monks in mourning. Durga festoons Shambo with flowers upon his arrival. Now looky here!

soup recipe (the dreaded Babel of langpo)

(note: all ingredients below
may mean different things
to different readers
assuming readers are eaters
I can't cater for local differences
at this level of nuance
and some variation in the outcome
regarding flavour, zest and nutrition
must be expected.)

1. Many, many cloves of garlic, fired, seared, enraged
but unbowed (purple Spanish is best, but there we go already).

2. Onion always oniononiononion
desquamated and stripped and peeled
delayered with art

3. Then a hillside tumble
of leekcarrotsugarsnapspinachcabbagelentils
into the bruisèd alembic
to caramelise fervently
many minutes of dissolution

(I spotted a tricky reference to Krishna
and honey and cancer
and sunshine
in caramelise
again the readereater is advised
to exercise discretion
concerning which ingredients
are most likely and only ingest
elements already roughly familiar
from his/her own diet-narrative
--no one really eats sunshine or cancer,
for instance. Really.)

4. Stock, much stock beef blood stock
for of injecting testosterone-syntagmeme chokes

5. Fish sauce and fermented bean ooze

still slow heat at the vessel
agitation must feel natural
and unforced
if ingestion is not to be troubled
with peristalsis of lies
and echo of jackboots
in a soupy night.

6. Pepper of all kinds ground and befuddled
now raises the prima materia (one clear word,
one indisputable sharing of essence, one most simple consommé
in which everyone agrees is transparency and good intent)
dripping into daylight
all that remains
deep
down
soup
shine
green
steam
and all I am doing is sharing a recipe
and war between us already
there is.

new executive orders

*
Reichstag thermite blah
white hot in the ruins of recount
of a democratic party late in the day
and the barbecue just cold ash
(many inconvenient truths)

(the false-flag (Iwo Jima? Ground Zero?)—
of the fathers—Toratoratora!—Atta! Atta!—
Our Allfather Hiroshima
^{(the well where words wither)}—)

"total wipeout in 2008 of Republican..." you believe this
Pearl Harbour Blah Pearl Necklace
a spurt of new executive orders
that they'll let this happen
already in place about all our necks
(Martial Law/Scooter Libby/The Bohemian Grove)
like they won't do something?

(Get this burning issue off me!)

"you could sense something was gonna blow
question was what and who"
(a rigged explosion in democracy
- the falling man)
"Something's in the works," he stated,
"in the works...Chertoff has predicted them."
Habeas Corpus, Port Authority
the thing that penetrated the Pentagon
clearly had no wings
(and get this: the world watched in horror already in place)

like everyone their own twin tower now, rigged to blow
.
.
.

quickening (in parataxis)

—two years old—folded up still—like wings, wings in a chrysalis—furled, maybe that's the word—looking out, yes—laughing, of course (ha ha ha)—crying too, of course—still folded, coiled up—animal-unknowing,all that—three and a half/four better—more like it, better—first time flies out—little bird, scared, of course scared—high branches etc—dizzy,sudden swoop there!—recovery, catching—catching self, see—just above dead leaves—litter & hum—forest floor breeze, all that—flies into (own chest)—cave, maybe, myth, all that—dreams in there, you know—story writing itself—ghostly hand at table, likely—like that—woods, wild animal faces, maybe—primates, mostly, wild of dreams—fascinated—size + power + movement, after all—what he is after all, who—now clear memories, floodgates—first moment of love, after all, yes—wind now, wind—up hurtling himself—all starts here like this here—love, memory, who and what—quickening—wind—unfurling—

heading

heading home

observe closely what heading we are on

dead-heading

heading for disaster

subject: heading

This heading will take us to our home on the World Wide Web.

quickening

at two years
still folded up into himself
looking out, laughing, leaning out
but still coiled
in his animal-unknowing

at three and a half or four
for the first time
he flies out of his body
like a little bird falling scared
from a high branch
dizzy with the sudden swoop
catching itself in the air
just above dead leaves

litter and hum
of a forest floor

in a dream he flies into his own chest
sees his story writing itself
sees woods, wild animal faces
and he is fascinated
by his size
his power
his movement
who he is

now will come his first clear memory

and here
is his first moment of love
before the wind catches him up
and sends him hurtling

*
*
I began writing seriously a decade ago and was slow to learn. For years I was
awkward, sloppy, given to overstatement, the sentimental image, the theatrical resolution. From The Chinese Notebook by Ron Silliman
*
*

a short walk poolside (first attempt at something)

1979 at the swimming gala
with the whole school lined up
around the pool
and she swam her length or two or three
(much I don't remember)
and all the school can't have been there
as I recall the pool area was too small for all those kids
so it's really like a dream where everything fits
into a place too small
and there is that steamy shouting of swimming pools
and she swims through all of it
all those faces
boys and girls laughing and steaming
and maybe she swims a good time in her heat
I don't know
but I know that she gets out of the pool
age fourteen in her swimwear
and walks the length of the pool
past the spectators
with her costume skewed by the swim
and one young breast exposed
just a budding and small thing
not even a breast back then
but something that everyone sees and laughs about
and she isn't alerted to this
because of the noise
and she doesn't know
until someone shouts something out loud
some boy who just doesn't know
and this is the phenomenological equivalent
of a mouse on a battlefield somehow triggering a cannon
with a ball that falls far off
in the future.

And I don't see her again
for several years,
but later she gets a cyst
in that same breast
and she needs an operation to take it out
they stitch it up, but it embarrasses her often
with boyfriends
as they don't do it well
and it leaves a scar
then she gets an abortion at some point
and struggles for a long time
with what it's all about.
Then she goes for a biopsy
and right in there, that exact same place
where it all hit.

(And he looks at her
and he tries to imagine roses
pink roses growing and swelling
singing in there where the cancer is.
And every day he imagines roses
even makes it a ritual
every day at dusk.

Even when she goes in
he thinks of roses
but most of all wonders
why he couldn't stand that day by the pool
couldn't rise in the heat
and the shouting
and cover her up.

And he has to wonder
who these imaginary roses
are really for now
now that it's all too late
for any stupid roses
to change anything.)

Pope, get your ass to Mombasa

^{http://www.kwanzaakeepers.com/africa-aids-death-count/africa-aids-death-count.htm}

Pope, get your ass to Mombasa
hit the hot shanty streets
in the Popemobile
a sack of condoms to throw to the kids
a T-shirt saying condoms are cool with Jesus
(make that in Kiswahili too)
order in a lot more Popes
more Popemobiles
more archbishops, deacons, cardinals
(all of them funkier than old John-Paul
all of them mobile, angry, armed with many condoms
and the message)
go out spreading the word
from the North Coast to the Cape
condoms are cool with Jesus
in Mombasa and Nairobi
Addis Ababa and Gaborone
Cape Town and Natal
Kinshasa and Kigali
don't stop driving, waving, talking, giving, saying
sorry for the previous reticence people
telling how the New Funky Pope got the message in a holy vision
Get thee to Africa, Pope, to help with the new Holocaust
and issue me no Papal bull
tell them how condoms are beloved of God
how they ensure redemption amongst all users
that the very act of putting on
of a condom
is a holy act in itself
is a prayer
and a hymn
to a God who cares more for life
than scriptures and stuffy old men

you can lie a little if you have to
Pope, you're a missionary
getting the message across is your mission
whatever it takes
so get your ass to Mombasa
Maputu and Mogadishu
Khartoum and Harare
Pope, your road to heaven leads due South
out of Vatican City
winding down ice cold, logical
from Alex to Cape Town
better get new tyres on the Popemobile
a non-stop driver, some caffeine pills
and a truckload of you know what.
Bon voyage, Funky Pope,
now you're on a mission from God.
.
.
.
.
The Vatican lies about condoms: here

^{More flowers from Deb. Click the pic to see a big version.}

Golem: a prolapsed sonnet

If I had a time machine,
there's one place I would certainly go:
to that room, to that murky and flickering scene
(back thirty or forty years or so)
where they reared me out of mud
and slapped me into waking;
carved a word into my head, drew my first ever blood
-- one word only, and the air all shaking, shaking;
one word for all of my future time --
(a word I have never yet read).
............................
That's probably where I would go, just to know;
just to see what it said,
and if I rhyme.
.
.
(links to golems here and here )

killing poem

killing someone must be something else
you do it slowly
stand in front of the chosen-at-random victim
and tell him what's happening
maybe you have a gun
maybe you have him wired up to a bomb
either way you tell him
you're deciding whether to kill him
tell him that he is a whole world,
that he knows nothing beyond his own nervous system
that the sky the stars the earth
are all contained within himself
tell him this: The vast circular night of the cosmos
is all contained within your skull motherfucker
and that you might just snuff it all out
for no reason other than the mighty caprice
of a killer
then you can do what you want
do it, watch him die confused
or walk away in an act of godlike compassion
either way you are all-powerful
a destroyer of worlds
limping home through the rain
in a funny hat

^{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
.
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.

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.