forever on ghost highways looking always to the left for the jumping shadow that follows behind hedgerows

let's get this straight

the dawn only half came up
and anyway i was intoxicated utterly
there in that doorway
while the water kept rising

O you cried you stupid

is there any way out of such things

I didn't know, didn't claim to know

but the night

from afar missives of pain
shook their way in

you know how that fucking squawks

new worlds folded here
while we didn't sleep

now at the end of it
grey tides roll in
and we sit apart
with little to say

death he said death, look
just like that
and I looked sideways
not wanting to look damn it

all up the wall there, death
crawling on little legs
like creeping cream
.
.
.

heron haiku

an old heron
lifts dripping from the canal—
winter sunrise

night wind senryu

I dreamed her voice
.............waking me softly—
only night wind now

frost pops haiku

now frost has daubed sad white
shadows of all our houses
along the back field
.
.
.

petrol lit the night far off

as though some strange unknown animal
had entered our bodies
collective.......soft...... marine
we felt quickly for our urgent purses
....................of disaster
knew suddenly
that only some cold wind from some north
..............wasteland veldt
of what feels like............ a soul
could make this apparition evaporate

down there
in leaden understanding
hardheaded men in caps
.......................beat all day

and at dusk we rutted our hats aloft

never was there a time for this
such spreading pink evil

now in wild flares
petrol lit the night far off
.
.
.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Lala rocks the kasbah.

Note to anon: Thanks for the comments. The reply feature is currently not working, so I'm replying here. Anyway, glad you grasped it, as I'd have hated to try to explain it! I guess I was trying to get to some sense of early childhood and how language and experience and personality sort of accrete almost like a geological process. So I was trying to keep it below the surface and steer away from overtly familiar structures... Anyway, many thanks for the comments, and I'm happy that you liked it. Steve.

Can't seem to get the links list to work right now. So I'm sticking a link to Deb Calverley's blog here...

buccal outflow (for Louie at 516 days)

.............O it is only a mere
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,sunshot
,,,,,,,,,,,,that sluts askance
such codex of angers
................as would confluence

..............such he humours
..............such he angles

..................................the little one
.........still unearthed
................................in all his bootings

.................too mainmasted yet
.................................his earliest gulfing

...........yet too unsupportable
.......................................O too topheavy

..............he (as) [rocks] —tumbles
..............in native headwater

—nyanza-rainbow-thunder—

(there of words
to be
all spray
clung asunder)

his graspèd vellus, lanugo
.......................spining here such
..................calcitics & miracules

...............................beneath all protologues

.............as leave all his lingule

.................in the wanting now
..........................only of burgeons

.....................here to upstutter
.
.

Le Dormeur du Val - an inflected translation of Rimbaud for Remembrance Sunday 2008

it is a hole of greenery where a river sings

hanging madly to grasses
................................tatters of money
......................where sun of the proud mountain shone
it is a small valley which foams of rays a young soldier
stops open, naked head, and the nape
bathes in cool blue cresses
....................sleep it is wide in grass, under the naked one
pale in its green bed where the light rains the feet
...................................in the gladeoli, it sleeps smiling
as would smile a sick child, it makes a nap Nature
.......................rocks it warmly: it is cold
the perfumes do not make any more shiver
..........................its nostril; It sleeps in the sun
.......................the hand on its tranquille chest

two red holes on the right
.
.

just got a thing about this song today

.

.

Retrospective war poem... Found Object.

"As long as we are alert and observant Saddam Hussein is not a threat to his neighbours. He's a nuisance, he's an annoyance but he's not a threat. That we achieved. It was never our objective to get Saddam Hussein. Indeed, had we tried we still might be occupying Baghdad. That would have turned a great success into a very messy, probable defeat."

—Brent Scowcroft. National Security Advisor to President George Bush Snr.
Interviewed in 1996.
.
.
.

just got a thing about this song today too (Jacques Brel - Port d'Amsterdam)

a love critique of economic collapse

now again a brutal man

some mess of crouches
sharp words
facial wire spread beneath

skin

in the arches
shovelling in stray dogs
shoving into leaves, groundswell

seeking out undifferentiated filth
sucking in cigarette ends
eyes in there somewhere alive, cruel

hammers in April

clanging

for prey to draw near

enough to contaminate
with whatever cold pestilence

speaks of love
.
.
.

wild dogs learning to fly (for Alfie and me and the moment)

dog came over two fences
sunny day and everyone laughing
came bounding
young Pit Bull full of fun
jumped up at my little boy
nutted him hard
all in zest all in exuberance
nearly broke his nose
figure it weighed about 8 stone
he weighed 4
and he just didn't have the attitude
for this nasal crushing
this attack
didn't want to be seen to cry
not in front of the neighbours
and the dog
so he burrowed into me
into my leg
and shook
while I held him
and held the dog
and the steam train
blew past
and the sky was pretty blue
and from someone's window
a paper aeroplane
headed down

and we followed it
into the dust
all of us wide-eyed
except the dog

just didn't get it
kept jumping
like a fool making faces
all this transcendent moment
.
.
.

the overall levity of sudden sex

somehow my concern was the American election.

but that fell apart quickly
when she took her knickers off
and topographic events flooded

it was difficult to get back
after the trees spilled
and the morning cast a scatter

as always some cold geese
clattered past
in the augmented detail

of wildfire
but this but this but this
i tried to ask

by fuck she shouts
i'm done with this
hits the black roads at dusk
things settling
all clocks fucked
whirring
like grasshoppers

one little thought
drifting home
alone
wearing tight pants
saying No

now all the heavy locks
of midnight
can't put this right
.
..

oh those awful integrals speak in cockles of cold doom

enough white phosphorus to burn up a roomful of people

came out of her mouth
while she splayed
down there in mud
I have always tried, don't you see
as if oh out there like that they played
on the Whitby sands
some whale had flotted up and cold bespake
like washed up brothers and kamerades
trotting off to stalingrad's cold fucking

oh look here fuck they said and continued
where integers of apparence
oh no oh no
start restart bonnie and every little day

that you don't come
will be a season
cranking the same wire

even the very idea

but by winter this gate no longer

for now, you know

just this

love of wet cathedrals
of the mouth
.
.

a shallow love song

in and now out the same door
like all knives whirling
our utter politics in collisions
of limestone pavements

across all this she travailed
with sepia sandbags
of County Clare

all sailroads to traverse
and only 8 o clock
by the whale's chime

this big hand by the night's wild travel
points to 12
the little hand
flickers and stops

iris of heart attack hope
and love of small things
and wild places

be certain now be sure

it's that time
in between
where the hands don't count

it's okay to be scared here
to lie down and breathe
to lie a little
before waking
.
.
.

if like this like this

hands in your hair
your hair your hair of olive wind
if language flowing outward

if filaments of memory if
everything here warm slow
wild and slow-wild if how you come to life

in my hands your hair flowing out
if all morning flowing out descending bright birds
our inside us calling long ago this moment keening

your contours your hachures your ascent
your planes your whirling Sufi gasp
if like this, like this

heartbeat and breath and hollow ground
and midnight morning and all day and dusk arcing between
blue spirit flames, radio crackling

and if along our hillsides
like this, like this, we start to collapse

fading red shadow of this our body

spray of night reeling out

[duende, red-black, in murmurs]
.
.
.

ALL U KNOW ABSOLUTLeY FUCK

ALL U KNOW ABSOLUTLeY FUCK

WHY i HATE FUCKS:

Ok see ya hi boy
I sure love when you ignorant bastards
come through my line
acting like you know everything

why i hate ignoramus freaks:

u know absolutley fuck all
i dont know how old u r (but i do)
and you know grow up, wake up,
and quit fucking whining to me you ignorant

I NOMINATE DAVE SMITH
AS THE IGNORANT BASTARD OF THIS PAGE
(FUCK ALL OF YOU) HOW CAN YOU IGNORANT BASTARDS SAY?

why I hate houses of freakin apollo:

fucking ignorant bastards hit me
with something I haven’t seen before
fuck all these conservative boneheads
if you're sick of stereotypes by all

why I hate blacks:

fuck all the surs the norts the cripps and bloods,
matter of fact fuck all
when are this ignorant bastards going?

why i hate Bush in Brasil go home nazi bastard:

aren't you paying attention you ignorant bastard?
there's three days on the Senate floor
and I can't fuck all them old men fast enough

why epileptics I hate:

fuck all of you who hate something
and fuck sum1 in your family had epilepsy
would you want them ignorant bastards?

Nigeria’s Next Top Model:

fuck nigeria fuck africa and fuck all
the blacks that continue to blame the world
haw u fink africa is fulll of low lives..
ure jus an ignorant bastard

why I hate you fucking Yankee bastards:

why I hate preaching:

all you fucking aetheist God hating
motherfuckers need to suck
GO THE FUCK BACK where you came from
ignorant bastard scum

Mythos (Buddhism)

stillness
connection with night
the mother collapses
down the stairs
lies there
breathing hard
wondering what next
the father roams
in the garden
uprooting shrubs
roaring
finally she makes it
to the phone
he's throwing branches
at the windows now
screaming out there
she gets through
hears a voice
name
details
she can't speak
he's here
in the door like a black wind
grabs her by the legs
drags her out
yelling for her kids
down to the river
throws her in twisting
sits meditating
breath slowing
looking at the water
night, trees
he's a Buddhist
sitting there
peaceful
bald, bearded, beaming
the moon shining
upon him
.
.
.
(Published in Underground Voices Feb 2008)
.
.
.

night samphire (of violet denial)

five bells crash soft as the night's loft weeps
fog in the sea-troughs' lilt―tossed in the lorn byres

a tender opening haze of the hillocks creeps
quiet on flanks in the misted faery samphires

―bellowed as all grey bells fingers feast slow reaps
and all points paling—ghost as green lune-spires

mount the dead thrift headland's loom, nor sleeps
in gloom below—Hist! the flesh slow fires—

rears the riven ghost moon—her cool sprite peeps
whites of night under covers thrust in slow gyres

she comes with seaweed skims in skirted deeps
of rills and seeps before tides glist the mires'

brims in dawn frets and furrowed neaps
full for follow and all fusted elvet pyres

there at wind's flood we last leaps
once more the gust—till night expires
.
.
.

the enragé on the guillotine 1798

Strapped to a board
his body jerked and spasmed
for some moments
as the last volts of rage,
the final syllables of paroxysm,
earthed through the extremities.
His face that had fallen pale

into a basket
worked through varieties of wildness
and cruelty
witnessed by all who looked in,
as though he was not yet done with us
and our milky constitution,

as though the febrile soul would slide out,
would manifest before the assembly
as a demon that grasped and crushed

and devoured, and those
who perceived this straining
fell back,
left the square briskly,
pushing out through the drunkards
like swimmers frightened by a shark.
In this way, oscillating
with great wildness and fury
and explosion,
the Enragé passed,

his body finally growing limp.
Even his face, pale, romantic and bloody,
ceased contorting and at the last
adopted a sad aspect
as of one who has looked
into a savage crowd

through dead eyes,
and has seen such things there
as have made him glad
to be gone quickly from that place.
.
.
.
(Published in Underground Voices Feb 2008)

something going off somewhere

"Gonna see the River Man, gonna tell him all I can" - Nick Drake

if there had been any sign of it
more tender
weeping amidst grocery

it was by god gone now
there in all her pieces she crouch not singing
squat somehow the way we thought
afterwards to describe it squat-dark
of itself gargoylular all sad
at the parting of such winds there
........................................................aloft
in her pieces and location like that
come off it, we, come off it, you
off it, off. and this ululated, this on high
..........................................this to no avail
................this a mapping rolled

apace grating sensations she forgot
by a end of some earlier dissociation
that got her thinned beneath, attenuated, envelopt
in dermal flag and sheath let us now look
...................let us now turn

(no your poetry is nothing but chaff
only the stuff of directories, invoices
stolen histories, unvoices, this, this, this
many times I got to tell you this
the real your unembodied
falls dead within you no without you
without it will not do will not do not)

it after is not all not to say not at least uninteresting

look at the mother they say look
you want to know look
here in the crevices of her dustbowl

a seasonal disaster spinning
...................................................chinooks
though she clutches, clutches, cries stop O stop
look so funny, so wide and flat so funny
.....................................O after all that of course we were entitled
.....................................
.............................................exhale/exhale(exhale)

..............[worlds soon to come will know
..............no tooth decay]

(Himmler was (exactly) this age when
...................................he crunched his
............................................................bubble
..........................but I am not pessimistic)
........................................my geology sings:

phreatic slits the padding planes slewed
.....times leached calcites, lactated rock-stuffs
..........—all glint and shear, glimmer of renewed
..................lime integrals in deep and dash, roughs/
......................smooths as though—as steep chymical-stewed
.........................—resolvèd ruin's dry-rearing cloughs

....................[feet in ancient time—her thigh-heart enter
...................,—the Sotadic (undead sephira Daath)—we wight
....................her topographic shift—quite the Red Preventer
....................—in its ancient time—sped tricoteuse light]

because we're here because we're here because we're here

vadose, she is, escutcheon, keyhole, wet
.....................lights below ground
....................................voices in her hollows

............................far-off in the streamways
...............................all that no sign of it now
.
.
.
.
.
.



..................^[joints still crarking—crows not shaping
....................up wind/rain across playing fields of daylight]
.
.

Basho's mind of Christ

it was that rainy morning
the trains oozed past like snails
clouds of shit stuck to their long heads
she said I think you should
go

talk
to this other woman
I said
you're on a martyrdom trip
sound like my mother
sound like chaffinches over
Dresden

should I light the fire
what other woman do

you mean
anyway
you know the one, she said
as the train blew a faceful
in the rain
the one that's always there
in your
mind of

Christ
the frogs around the green ponds outside the stations
thought Christ
fuck this

jumped

six days into the trip
we found them white-side up
legs wide apart
in our thick soup
like jokes

fat dead jokes

about Basho
n

.
.(Published in Ditch, 2007)

gas and gold

oh whether to go with gas or solid fuel

the foraging aspect of all this
delights her deeply and she spends a minute
parcel of thermal energy weighing
it in her so inherent hands
before she crosses
herself like a nun in a sad Autumn

through the thoroughgoing trees along
which she now her him not hasty travails
[......................]

so passeth the winds of cold gold
.
.
.

The Orzel Project in Admit 2

5 Orzel Project poems published in Admit 2. Start at page 19 (collaborations between Steve Parker, JR Pearson, Pam O'Shaughnessy)

radio radio

and all the windows in all the world
through all the cornfields
will not be enough
to crack open
this last remaining corncrake egg
that will never now rear a little head
gulping at golden air
.
.
.

Of Some Far Off Autumn Morning (a fractured prayer)

your ghost came to me in dreams

still young and confused
and asked me why I was gone

I said I looked into the future
and didn't find you there

I looked and looked
in the rocking and the creaking
of our mother's armchair
where your hair once shone

like a mat of gold stuff
and I couldn't find you there

and now all my days all my days
don't contain you

and I can't answer
and I can't not

and this is me forever
clutching at the last wisps of you
filled with this failure
of not standing firm
against that awful tide
that I saw coming
and that I too became

and it's Autumn now
and you won't be there
in caravans and campfires
and the orchard's low glides

you are a hole in the air
that no nature abhors
that nature elides

and I wish you would sleep
and I wish you would not sleep

little lost friend
not even a peep
.
.
.

Drapetomania (to Buddy Kwow)

"Expect a little turbulence, ladies and gentlemen,
for there are monsters in our midst" - Madeleine Shine


they have poisoned the water them
.......................their sickness you can't even
..................................sweet
the sensation like shade comes
.............................above waves
................she walks................... but slowly
....................................as traffic (swings low)
...................downtown at noon on Penny Lane
^{(homage to slave-ship captain James Penny)}
...........Penny Lane in your ears and in your eyes and in

the catch of the throat is the crying

.........................of the edges, the edges
...................dropping away into.gulfs

......................where you have not grown
..........(there are no clear pathways here)

—through unhealed frontal cortices still the Middle Passage
..........................................................urges to run
...........................feel the myth-gene
comin' for to carry you home

[a stroke he says (a)(dark) imagine stroke a (angel) [blue]down reaching
swinging stroking out [suburban] low [skies] imagine (wiping) so circuits he says
such an erasure (touching) in the unheard (such a thing) imagine]

..................(?)somewhere here, somewhere we forget(?)

................"there had to be some spirit at work"

.............................lilting sideways
......................................in early frets/mists
will sleep better than the gentlemen do on shore...
are built on purpose for this trade...
are accommodated with air ports and gratings
for the purpose of keeping...

................where doors found beneath growths
...............of ivy and unreason.
......................................unused for years
..................wayward and swollen
...............with fruit no one will now [look into]

............(O this the moment we feel it most
............................here behind the halftown draperies
......................where feral trees sing sweet
...............as rivulets of volcanic sand at dusk)

...................the moment we learn
................those pleiocene footprints—one adult
...............................one child—not strolling safe on a lost shore—
.........................holding hands at sunset—

..........................but one taking home live prey
.
.
.

in the way of things

pulls up outside the neighbour & hax into the POV stream
rips out the soundline like despining a living cat
overrides it with Gimme Pink Apocalypse Now
whupwhup she says sudden her eyes half closed whup
whup all ahead distant hedge cleaving as we steam up

the Queen

is 101st Hairborne Adagio average redhot black
East European junkie with a kid n-n-n-n-
nineteen babysteps to tha hart've stark Bell Huey in early
Snow fucking White Sleeping with extreme prejudice
Beauty waking the evil hedge Son of Sam Raiming her
apart who know he was even able to finish and listening

her such sudden templepig baby noises anyway
whup all down his wug-wires
.
.
.

Untitled 3rd place IBPC from 2007

Can be read here at about.com/poetry

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: and what if she just shoved him the love
she craved?
.
.
(Published in Ditch 2007)

the level above sport

I can't write this
can only assemble artefacts
polygraph readouts intermediate or greater
(Please respond ASAP)
(one level above me right now, we the undersigned)
remove all associated physical effects:
tools (balls, bats etc), accessories, location
side by side in the air
A simple, easily-operated device is provided
by which a 'dead' receptacle at a level above

(fragments of grass whirring in sunlight)

Oh for God's sake look it's happening here again right now
in the air it is happening now!
.
.
.
(Published in Ditch 2007)

some heavy morning some sky will ring

momentarily that this event of eating breakfast
in a cafe alone (where no one else was
and where there was no sign

of their ever having been)
was almost a perfect experience of life in itself and now
briefly he allowed himself to smile down at the table
though it shook him to do it

and it was quiet now in his head
but then he changed and those things he conveyed
so easily into his mouth these
sick saccades appeared alien and vile
and he wondered really about

really about

it was only ten minutes to walk
from here to a station
where transports could be arranged
to carry his body home
but he didn't know if he could make it

with such gathering of sexual uncertainty
as swept over him now

he flung it from him
walked out of the room shouting

they would hold this against him, no doubting

such conventions as he were flouting

he clutched at his genitals as he went
and slavered into the street where

with great clouting and shouting

the car hit
and he sprayed for thirty metres
until he hit a tree
which took his head off
removing all ambiguity about the matter

shit
he said
for the final time
I've lost my fucking head

I'm now all spatter
and I wonder
does it all matter

most important meal of the day
they say
with cloudmouths of grey
don't they, hey?


.
.
.
(Winner of Poem of the Month Sept 08 at www.criticalpoet.com)

train

how the words are pressed down flat
as trains under snowclouds with a same

thin urgency none of the breaking forth how
we want to hear them lift out of this tunnel

of a barometric stifle how into some flood
downhill to how complex little life-stations

smog and history for the rushing

all along the valley dragging at live prey
sucking it in

a live burial

a sheer shriek tells you
if you know of such things

soon it will snow

a valley and a train and a words
flat out with the waiting
.
.
.

eyeless in...

Пусть он вспомнит девушку простую,
Пусть услышит, как она поёт,
Пусть он землю бережёт родную,
А любовь Катюша сбережёт - Mikhail Isakovsky

I see nobody—the Stalin Organs
shrill at night—on the road
—they fill the players
—said [.....]—with delight
—to be able to see nobody
(the river bank steep in the mist)
—clear black sky eyeless from al-Attara
to the Ashkelon dream-Kessel....Shhhh
............................=====>>>>...O

O—the road at night—I wish I
had such eyes— let him hear
Katyusha’s clear song—they fill
the players—to see nobody
^{(Russian manufacture 122mm BM-21 GRAD)}
—and at that (hush now)
distance—to see nobody
said the [.......]

("We will continue
to respond, to initiate and to harm...")
—the one whose letters
she has kept ............(Stalin Organs..................shrill

..............................................[of rivers]
..............................................................................at night

....................................................to fill .........[like a bird]

........................................................................we players
...........[homeland and their love]

.......................................................with ........................delight)

........................such eyes

.
.
.^{(This is a transtextual poem composed of reordered text fragments by Lewis Carroll, Mikhail Isakovsky, and Ehud Olmert, interspersed with original material.)}

some hushed fug of later days

where it dies already as though before his intent
he laughed at what would later crimp inward as evenly
and accurately coming like afternoon shadows
that weaving women under firelight
would yet though many of them had left
at such earliest bells those who remained
appearing awkward their movements set
to gain mechanism upon some galvanic episode
quite unimaginable to most
spectators all of them anyway suddenly
devastatingly such words anyway bereft

of shattering artillery all who survived
stunned and deaf some now all
but incapable of the most simple
decisions or activity clearly imperative
to get them all out quickly before they breathed again
though this process was resisted on all sides and here
now even the best amongst us
struggled to carry them to the dedicated transports
in such clothes as we had then

always, in such early days of acceptance,
some deep hushed fug after the moment
.
.
.

30 second poem of suicide

so stuff your foot in my mouth
let me watch you undress

your names are those of wild fields in the wind

yesterday this man this weird man I thought then with a large bag
I am an ex-offender he says buy some kitchen items from me

I well really I thought he says sex offender
couldn't get past the image of him pushing someone down
in wet grass

the house is tumbledown hillsides
little men cling to its sides

half-Japanese he looks to me
with bags full of torpedoes
I don't know what to say
I am a fool from the long moments of grass

I can't buy nothing I say I am filled with slime and wet gloves

what about that what about
he walks away watching me
lumbers back roaring

got to slam the door to keep him out

his big bag full of rain his implements
of afternoon prophecy
.
.

Epitaxy

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Burroughs eats bugs in the forest

when they took the boy's heart out
found it full
of ash and dead flies like a lantern in a cabin
by a sick bend in the river

flicking away
banging like that for ten minutes
asphyxiating itself soft

gradually like this his cock didn't stop
beating for three weeks
while space moments iterated
to nothing

while the flush asshole of night sky
dislocated itself slowly
from all these moments

while one leaf from a oak tree drifts down
a tunnel

of history later he comes to life under the sheets
grabs the orderly by the head says you now
take my place foreigner with no credentials
wanna fuck my wife my daughter my

I got a unmasked celebration coming on

know that as of now I am a Buddhist

mouthful of flies
you know how it is when the weather
comes in close, tender, hard

where do we start, he asks

you pay me first, she says

pay me like fucking a cold wind forever

.
.
.

shy shy shy

she always an aeroplane anyway

but when this happened she just took flight
as though some great wave come up behind her
full of geese and swans and old newspapers
dripping she rose from ugly water
into all silver idylls of sky
there to career

mad with beams
anvils falling like wet liquid rain in June

you should've seen him leap across
face like that
never saw it coming

always got it all wrong after
mixed up

walks into the grocers
what can I do for you the man says
want you to blow me he says
then fuck me in the ass he says just like that
laying his money down calm next to bananas

you think maybe you're asking the wrong person
at the wrong time the guy says old guy with glasses

later he asks his lover for apples

midnight the grocer turns up
tracked you down, he says

how you wanna do it?


.
.
.

6am rain

oh christ the wash from your passing
pulled my pegs out
now I'm sideways across at 6am

with a headful of wet
I want to run down the path
pull you in

just for being unconscious
come back apparition passing dream
I don't want to stop yet

the brown water and rain

I want your sway to keep coming
your crying claws
in my grass
your heft your shove

in all your long wet wake
.
.
.

silk

dragline that floats and whips sheer
across the cut
a pencil-thick polymer of this
would stop a 747 tear its wings right off
but it's dawn
their abdominal machines know nothing
but violet sensation

all scaffold of night
thick with insect life
waving its fronds

detail/nature/detail

this, this
the birth of shallow Buddhism

all over in the rain
.
.
.

heron

you bouncing ghost
along dawn's shining
absconding with my soul
.
.
.

Cops

there's a nursing feel to it what she does

with such familiar routine
but who will complain when nerve endings
are locking like that

disaster they reported somewhere down south
of the River of Life wash yellow flots ugly down
but this passes of course a moment assembles
around one tiny flame in a deserted house

three murders came in over the desk tonight
work for the girls you gotta
work it just like that earn your badge
tonight fireworks orange fire beers for the cops
made it to ten years in the service

watching streets
watching wind
watching up close your face so shy with passion turning

barren as dawn bleeding out
huddled in torn uniforms
no cars coming
.
.

Seiren Song

that made him yearn not for women not water's shades
some same cool and riversides
and rat-shatters and ice and low bursts

and green fingers stretching for his
only to drug as from strings words
out of him but to a night-sky whirled
in lofts within reach of that fishman

which spun from salt jism ancestors the while
alert to tugs the binary [fire] engine-putting
(slow as yawls) (moans of location) (mist)

over years over
humming shadow machinery
limbic waves of song

take me up he crieth take
in the Fall flowered as arrayed death dynamited

grey-flopping up murk-bearing O grim-aspected

fishman of fleeting littoral, falsehood of starry fishmen
casting of sparks, bearing of eggs, spuming of milt

some psentage've what hear've in dead channels
outflow've of a litl bang

your fucking tongue I know is our joint antenna twisting

but this, this, this...
.
.
.

(O untrousered apprishns of Phnicia
thy mermids ist none so faire—
what outspankered prismes, what
neutic flutic combes soonest they bare)

.
.
(Honourable mention in Inter-Board poetry competition, August 2008)

Commentary to Seiren Song by IBPC judge Tony Barnstone from IBPC August 2008

Yes, I know that this poem seems to descend into gibberish pretty regularly, and that it has absolutely wild shifts in register (from the contemporary diction of "your fucking tongue I know is our joint antenna twisting" to the overwrought alliterative diction of "fishman of fleeting littoral, falsehood of starry fishmen" to the archaism of "O untrousered apprishns of Phnicia / thy mermids ist none so faire--"). But, wow, it's fun. And I like those twists of diction, shifts and frictions of reference and rhetoric. Finally, I like the author's great sense of humor, as he blends nonce words in with the archaisms. I don't know what "outspankered prismes" are, nor what it means to bare one's "neutic flutic combes," but the newness and oldness and weirdness of the language are such that, frankly, I don't care. I can guess. The poem seems to be a Frankenstein monster stitched together from odd literary corpses and the bloody pieces of the author's imagination, written in the ideogrammatic method of that crazy old fascist Ezra Pound. But, unlike far too many of Pound's Cantos, this monster's got a jolt of life to make its limbs twitch. Watch it rise from its slab and wander the countryside until it's pulled in by the siren song of the old man's violin. --Tony Barnstone
..
.

Strix/Pop radio

flies found it
five days before humans
that smell
insect attack
fingers on keys

not even slumped but

purple-grey, mottled, the way they get
mouth slightly open/eyes still wide with

dry corneas
like something just came in
through the window
said no
wiped it all

no
[message half-finished
backlit/hot/whirring inside
screensaver
inactive]
off

didn't like their pictures
whirling any more

window still wide open
to that night

avid flies

owls' yaps outside

Pop radio
.
face just a bag
with a skull in it
.
.

dead love poem falling

all of me now given to this

moment of mirrored green
sighs O we now so so dark

can't hold you forever sometime will have to let you
your heat think of flight
of somehow light your weight your heft
you have heft you are real
though light we see clear through
your membranes into

the complex the conceit

that man so wild in trees
what did he mean by it
how fine we stared we started

to think that water so abominable stretched like that

I fall here fail fall
your abdomen like
no not tonight, don't leave now
with owls yapping no

want you all you all like the river the air
carries us up
where we fix

the weight of you the weight

a whole other human
loving now so hard
.
.

heavy blue grass

some coded rip of iteration
zilches over landing zones straafing
with zero-words a fleeting dance
we are then forced to adopt

as though a Tarantella now
claimed us by right of the poisons of rain
of Quackgrass and Rye corrupted
—there are no bystanders

in such a storm of nickel, no one laughing here
—no one imagines himself now a tiger
leaping from a window at night
tearing at the belts of Pont Saint d' Esprit

so recently, so possible to remember
in living minds still
the dance (not at all slow)
is Gatling arachnids of blue-soft-metal

Ranger Talons (...) claviceps purpurea (...) sound-language
phonemes whirring, falling, unfaltering
into a long blue grass
sunlight made southern
as moonshine glades

though all season rain lengthens
in rotting fields of dance

abandoned finally
to our own spiders
.
.
.

scheduled outrage at 3.pm

light above light, flowers?

this the fire us coughing, us, this?

hearted all driftings, smokes, rivers, small changes

come now this querray, come
O waiting emblem
pierced here

(this how walk we now this you?)

who are all of dead fascination, many-armed, begin
to assemble, assemble

our lights, look, spill out

windows only
into drunken sunbeams

boy no longer

caves in caves

vacant, unboned

(rats ever here in flood-

ways walk soft-loud
explosions)

silence now rain over fields clovered purple

in skirts, great skirts
forget
.
.
.

three gogs, one, more gogs, more

............................slick as vampire night

she turns her head shows her teeth

quite white ..........................but extended

the skin on her forearms bunched

folded freckled female-male

over the canal, over the river canal water slick

of shine reflect of towers of cloud

it focuses, draws in............................gathers

what now, what now

there are clocks exploding on walls

light refracts through yellow liquid

make up your mind make up make your

drunken air bounds this frontier

like animals are released do you

give yourself permission here, do you

teeter on night's parapet with dreams

.................(with snakes sloughing skins

) of dark lights she slumps soft

integument falls around her

fear of herself, absence

hoping only for anthemics

.............intoxication

as though

as though you could fly/crash
on a nearest hillside

loved/warm in moss

open your cavemouth
and say Aah

even out there
this might just sting a bit

the sky all red with bells

all red winter in its gathering
.
.

.

.

.

fucking your neighbour at midnight

it vanishes quickly but even in sheer darkness

the moment itself for crying deep is not lost

like tempora or gouache even frottage laid

deep as a Marianas turkeyshoot has a place

among the splaid mountains of the deeps, the crying of Europe

in 1947 when the Japanese fleet approaches

the coast of California--fuck all this he say aloud

I am a deep fool only in my indress, nothing else here

is the places so much where you belong. feel safe. Feel this

bigness belonging to such deep orders of the mad

and callous, I don't know even now

anything about history, only its pauses

to take breath. Tomorrow we will feel like all fuck you

different as deep cARPfish. Himmler walking home undressed

to a Bavaria poisoned stifled are you still here?

Yes, Europe laid bare of bachelors even. We have no

no we do not even enter. only these deep winds of ash

now shakes our nights. the vastness

the shaking, the medication of our deep violence

all these

surrender soft into minutes of arc

for the crying deep, deeper

but still

.

.

.

Transhumanglia

why don't we give them East Anglia? want they can build a wall around it keep the Phillistines out West Banksy can float around spray some ladders choppers cops trompe l'oeil tunnels balloon girls levitating in updraughts of Marilyn--but the Dutch canal those pumps all can be stopped can be again a watery world of channels Afalons they can paddle their aquatic idyll in peace so different from their Negev wastes eat many frogs fat carp nosing in the sluggish mud as they want build windmills look there's no Intifada in East Anglia the only suicide bombers are people who can't handle gas appliances Messiah will find them there he's any good findthem eating fat frogs squat in the holy wetlands at peace wrapped in a roadmap thinking of melons--Israel, I'm offering you East Anglia and all its shallow shining broads

.
.
.

plighted the fieldmask encrypt

They came on in the same old way,
and we stopped them in the same old way - Arthur Wellesley

on in the same old way we stopped this fall
of them and through the hearing [heart] wrink
of it now folded with very fear doesn't above all

shrink unto ever the wastes that so sing
ringèd brinks at the short slight doorways of frost—O
we confess shy of masonry shaven to shortcoming

of seasons of lack and ill-lustre how, ink, eek
we have state in the blank seas' moods where
time and tide shear upon our every waking sheek

will shove like all animals a heart yet all it
vergeth all confunded all in late grass love of
beneath all thinks where all lies stopt sunlit
.
.
.

sunlight green

white shadows of frost
paint rooftops on the field—
sunlight green above
.
.

lilac disonnet

midst of tilt her bright
fixes an azimuth of night
(will not now cry its last)
of arc—vectors of arousal
carouse here drunk as all
splashing in lunar shallows
:coil as spoons and hallows
—shadows rise as smoke together
on headlands breathing heather-

wind through clouds torn
deranged as lilac dawn
.
.
.

Zen arrow frogs

they got the Gambinos finally
that scrub and vinland olive heart attack
gave me shudders as if what
somewhere out there snipers

wait for Saint Augustine

roads from Marseilles
to the channel divides us like
feelings that you thinking don't think even
that unstated passive aggressive

has poisoned my boys
I see them slip away like dead

lovers unreachable in slight titanics of silence

who now among the serried ranks
of angels will cry shit your hair so dreadful

has grown
ugly and full of frogs so tiny
phyllobates as all hell froze eggs
of deep resonant night

dip your arrows here in my back
,
,
,

slick of black flags

evidently supertuesday and not one solid pancake
to enliven a notification of aquifers in

the corner a capsized toilet brush holder leaks
faecal toxins bespeaking slovenliness and weak
ness of domestic intention week in week out so

to applaud failure O why such
that we have ever and roused suddenly
by fluttering no it won't dare say that

over the many dark islands the flags like lizards
ragged tissue of two hundred year old tortoises
but why not
we gather here hot hopping hipping hoo hoo at margins jump idiotic
crazed yes but not
foolish only seeking cooling

together under we throng submerged as sea-rats
rubbing up wrong ways
of current

Darwin knows of

finched alive in fire and squeak

.
.
.

dead insects crawling rhumb lines great circles of love - drarft

.
one more way of not dying

(you look up into distance
look down again upon far blue worlds choking Buddhas

scratch back up—erect of spin and now
tilt)

at this moment of greatest pain you, you
you look upon wonders always

the mere shudder of your cheek
as you surrender to kisses
(jerking uneasy now from that mode to this like black electric
kettles switched)
excited suddenly with the force (all this etc how how lame)

flick of your dyed now hair leaking
down aisles of swinging I don't know
this running to where what it hurts again day-

light you have got bigger and your mouth
more strange to me than snowballs
is wide unwelcome windy and cold more challenge than the
easy crevice I knew once engulfed
in narcotics 8 minutes of care-

ful and specific stimulation won't do it now I find it
impossible now to tell
who is who what article we and
whose emptiness is this we lick my
beginning with

we are strangers at the mouth's meeting
stamping horses in dawn steaming unready
for the coming bit
surrender where the barrage breaks and lets and streams
all over the fields the walls the leaning batter and the closing

ritual of the mouth
unknown to us here now under this bulb of long life

yes like pyramids
here we gulf pale suns lone waking curtain

.
.
.

Operating safely on the planet's surface...

"I inhaled frequently—that was the point" - Barack Obama

806.4616.0110 (a cup of sugar) - draught

"Sending out an SOS
sending out an SOS..." The Police

YOU'RE walking past [light speed] the house at three
a.m all the lights on [electromagnetic yaps] shouting smashing
[there will be more]
someone crying in the garden
[no/white/wash/white/house]
music shaking [299,792,458 metres per second]
the night (wingbeats) kids hi(ding) under the beds
[................] everyone drunk everyone fucked all of it old

[wait... bells you hear her bells] --sugarsugar--embedded
grudges grievances hatred so you don't
(would you happen to have) [celeritas] even
(would you happen) consider knocking (tyres wail)

(trees sigh) (birds exhale) (legs flail) on the door
(freefall)(eggs fail) introducing yourself saying
Hi [exhale.................] (sail on silver bird sail on by
your time has come) mister we meant no harm

would youhappen tohave would you happen...

—mister we meant
..........no harm—

.
.

2 megaton snake (for Carl Sagan)

"Don't pray to that, it's not the sun" - Frank Redcar

fifty thousand sugarbabes
breathing out black fire

as sure as eggs
is lead balloons
one-a this 2 megaton bomb
gone down like redjunglefowl
with feathery ass alight

(a pope on a hope
shitting in the woods—))
(for the trees—)
(—can't make them damn drink)

two million tons of
high explosive dropped
on Dresden and London
on Leningrad and Cologne

fire demons, fairies, elves
shove your hand down the throat

fifty thousand sugarbabes
sweating out black fire

grab anything you find
twist, pull, rip it out
I love you, I love you
six years of burning
all wrapped up in one
hazy afternoon

(learned about nuclear winter
by studying dust storms
on Mars)

fifty thousand sugarbabes
guffawing

black fire
.
.
.

Rumi spirit-flarf

Can’t you see I’m stretching Rumi?
—I’m an emotional Rumi researcher
I run barefoot Rumi everything jade green
far-off lands, furniture...
Now I can see the Rumi far-off hills
and the dark far away...
With far rapture Rumi and abandon
I would hope for a child
a potent Rumi little vegetable god
(urchins won't Rumi relent
with the snowballs whirl
themselves raptured into a stream
from its Rumi source in the far off
mountains, passing Rumi far through
every repetitive task)
a Rumi sea urchin in antique dress
I found it a year ago when far Rumi

Back, this Rumi is as far
as you go, she says
this sight Rumi may harm you...
where a switch goes off in me
and suddenly when you Rumi have closed
your mouth kind of griot-Rumi-Rumi...

can't you see Rumi far, far I'm stretching Rumi?
.
.
.

Anomie (a beginning)

"I've got a bastard behind the eyes" - Withnail and I

let's look at this again

both ancient and modern
writers seem to oscillate

(thirty years of the same crisis)
(you'd think they'd get dead)
(bored banging the bedhead like cats)
(drowned in the same pond)
(nine times nine times nine times nine)

1. open the hatch look inside
never sure what you will see

(he can see "wonderful things")
(don't tell him anything yet)

2. sometimes you almost laugh
(relief)

3. then you see the little lights
—they're still there...

bions?Brownian motion?dead things?spirits?what then?

(he thinks he sees. don't tell him.)

faced. with this.
anomic space—the issue is to abolish. the restrictions

[["the words[_______]had the force of law"
(Eichmann)]]

see the little lights
—they're still there
(still) (a bastard)(behind)(there)
(the eyes)(there)(still)

see the little lights?
they're still there

they're still there?

thirty years—drowned—crisis—little lights
—thinks, only thinks—wonderful things, cursed things—
nine times—tell him nothing

let's look at this again
.
.
.
.

DCred(fi)shift

this train becomes worm
..............................become arm reaching white
skinny through warm
.............................skyline through

window
all feathers, glitter flying in its
............................................................(wake)

become sparks [reflection] —disturbance

it looks back sudden
angry/thrusting/prognathous/overbite

............wolf headed

west where wild winds whistle
whine, the moment of getting

(a sin to put on
animal skins and the heads of beasts)
it tears through the pages
the shimmer
......................we wake from
breath wet upon
fingers (we bite)
we flurry in time (mirrors) (pond)
(silver copper orange)
lead barium antimony
—forensics of dream (shift)
recoil

drop weapon (years ago) in.the rain

.........murder is a dazzling
.............................light

.
.
.
(Published in Dogzplot Jan 2008)

hypocaust

the colour is cold slow motion
seeping in chinks
with a dry hurtle of Spring

this way we flag
embrace
draw together ducted
press
bind and refract

we prism

[hypocaust]

heat from below
.
.
.

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
.
.
.
(Published in Cause & Effect Magazine Jan 2008)

feeding a child

making bread as ritual
—kneading, plying
itself a connection
with a thousand generations
of women
on their knees, pounding
fists in unclean bowls

fleshing out grey dough, oxygenating
latent life, swelling, rising
the sacrament
yeast/bread/yeast/ wine
skin-surface-bloom
sugar and spice
all things...
to all

always
cradled in the left arm
—not for the heartbeat,
for dexterity, ministration

his eyes as he drinks

the eyes
of vervet monkeys
his clutching fingers
feeling for lanugo still,
fur (to hang in)
a flickering, a place

beneath gender
waking slow
leavening, fervent

bright as sugared yeast

.
.
.

a siege of Khartoum, November 2007

Barbie was the original Red Whore, subverting...

the ghost of the Mahdi
stirs in his desert capsule
at Omdurman—such dreams

riding a wild camel
head swinging—excitement (alarm)
calls from the city, telegraph of heartbeat
breath, hollow ground

he is shimmer, spirit, silver mirage
contagion flooding outward

(the air hasn't quickened like this
since Gordon Pasha 1885)
such movement, such pace and fecundity
somewhere a tiny bear
(emblem of bears)

claws the Faithful
by wires of naming and intent
into the vast cleavage
of the West

he heads south, swinging
a rusty sword, feeling blood
beat again
in his dead camel's neck
rivers swelling
clouds massing

the beats stop, the drones
the wild pipes, the music...
silence

(process and plexus/
event and stasis—forces gather briefly along these lines
then quickly vanish)

flies whirl in the shimmer
—nothing, nothing
.
.
.

The Seven (Circa 2000 BC)

I was recently reminded of this wonderful Akkadian poem. Pretty sure the copyright has lapsed, so I thought I'd post it here. It's quite a staggering piece of magic.



The Seven


They are 7 in number, just 7
In the terrible depths they are 7
Bow down, in the sky they are 7

In the terrible depths, the dark houses
They swell, they grow tall
They are neither female or male
They are a silence heavy with seastorms
They bear off no women their loins are empty of children
They are strangers to pity, compassion is far from them
They are deaf to men’s prayers, entreaties can’t reach them
They are horses that grow to great size, that feed on mountains
They are the enemies of our friends
They feed on the gods
They tear up the highways they spread out over the roads
They are the faces of evil they are the faces of evil

They are 7 they are 7 they are 7 times 7
In the name of Heaven let them be torn from our sight
In the name of the Earth let them be torn from our sight


--tr. Jerome K. Rothenberg

The Enragé on the guillotine - 1798

Strapped to a board
his body jerked and spasmed
for some moments
as the last volts of rage,
the final syllables of paroxysm,
earthed through the extremities.
His face that had fallen pale

into a basket
worked through varieties of wildness
and cruelty
witnessed by all who looked in,
as though he was not yet done with us
and our milky constitution,

as though the febrile soul would slide out,
would manifest before the assembly
as a demon that grasped and crushed

and devoured, and those
who perceived this straining
fell back,
left the square briskly,
pushing out through the drunkards
like swimmers frightened by a shark.
In this way, oscillating
with great wildness and fury
and explosion,
the Enragé passed,

his body finally growing limp.
Even his face, pale, romantic and bloody,
ceased contorting and at the last
adopted a sad aspect
as of one who has looked
into a savage crowd

through dead eyes,
and has seen such things there
as have made him glad
to be gone quickly from that place.
.
.
.
(Published in Underground Voices Feb 2008)