rifle association

.
sit down you ugly scrape no I haven't
all the windows blasted in like that imagine
just a parrot that was all that was left
to speak for them the very sort of air and DNA
left there like that the high seas oh christ
just what a handcart rotten scraps am I
supposed to believe in history? the Clovis
I apologise all day on the same bench
no one knows this shit like my mate Charlie
he's your man for signing and stuff only
he is diseased now a air rifle out the back window
Georgie and Paul now that was no way to live
cans everywhere and a lawyer too then the Jazz starting
you're fucked mate yeah well only by your mother 3 to 2 they sledge
oh god attack attack my car got nicked
all day alone in the waterfall look an orange floating
in a million years you couldn't grab it
a little baby crow right in the middle
of Ambleside we had to stop the Runes
pressed us so he stripped off and went in
I was more cautious, less elevated

let me caress you such needs as I have

.

testing the banal reflex

.
what about you over the fence
with the wind whipping white about you
what about you?

all down the dingle the dell the dingle
dangle yards I collapse like reeling dreams

my house is full of the breathing of ghosts
I can't abide their nightly hoof
on the floor above the floor above O the latch
and the lantern and then
how about I live with you instead? where
is your other place
.............where I ///brush the animals at night///

moan of recent nuclear clouds O (how this is a folk song)

there you were (I couldn't understand it)
i had tryd evething
there you were (I at least serious could not
stand under it without you)

unsure of yourself
sure that you were a disaster of some kind
I was fucked up
I couldn't even hold your hand or touch your keys
on which it was my habit to spread

there were no volcanoes or earthquakes
lame shit like there were ever volcanoes or earthquakes
all of it was politics my chest heaved
itself out my lungs glocked purple
on your carpet but you were kind
you pretended not to notice
as my rats ran into you
you wanna smoke I asked then sure
you said why not let's both smoke
from all our holes at once? this is a movie

An Odysseus myth explaining the invention
of cigarettes: an all-consuming polythene sack
that contains endless moments
it whips there in the wind over the rags of fence

none of this is enough he is coming for me

over the church rooftop something animate cries
ripped away by bags of stark air
only just saw it, me
didn't see it at all just a flag a flit of something
fly there and the the the bells start up an inverse amnesty
of the innocent

diagram of ear wine glass wall episode loud unclear
late as elves the winewall of which glass pantoums

.

Deb Calverley poetry reading.

My poetry mate and fellow conspirator from Winnipeg, Debbie Calverley, is giving a reading of her stuff at the Winnipeg Art Gallery on September 25th. It's a little far for me to attend (3300 miles!), but if you are in the area check it out and give her some support. The details are here:

http://www.culturedays.ca/en/celebration-schedule/view/4c62b2a5-f8c4-4bd4-ada4-0db44c4a89be

.

Philishave & Violette

Thou shalt upon another forest set—John Donne

raising the sunken fleet a man at every pinnacle

such attenuated animosity

the only thing wrong with this building
is that there are places
from which it can be seen

Ho!

a giant pair of buttocks and a bus station

glint upon the eagle the late bell the backlit spume
all the earthly welter yours now

in code (the life that i have is yours &)
=francogerman erupt her name=
of course
face down in the attic bath
dot matrix
=wait for me and I'll return=
all the volga creek hey hey
a-wimoweh a wimoweh
in the pixels the quiet pixels
the bions leap to night

such a difference I suppose

.

Glock 26

fixed together at the lips like oysters
all the world sealed in a congress
without words or sound or silence

keep drawing it in keep only this
consciousness of mouth and eyes
in the dark world below fire

but only this shared space of mouth
eyes hollow ground heartbeat
breath fixed together at the hips

speak from below speak in no language
to and fro the air the mouth air
air of the hair and face hands around

a face and in the hair clutch
the air from within without sound
fix on this this kiss from here afar

all night one flute and a falling star

.

white heads in spate

the man rams his head down the toilet violently
bang bang splash bang fucking bang
it's late at night he has a gun up his ass
the man now coneheaded from the ramming
wet and stupid and bloody and all a fury of sewage
he shouts to James Joyce
Jim you Jim come back up I hadn't finished Jim
Jim it's shit but not as we know it

briefly Jim's head drifts up
but retreats at the first headbutt

the man now has to catch a train he rushes out
to the station
what's with you all wet and covered in shit they ask

I was arguing with Jim he says fuck you
he is my muse

next time leave your muse at home the station
master says
or I personally kill you by nail your head
to the track how you like that?

he is a big guy
the man doesn't want to mess
but he can't help it
sorry he says now is that a rare ocelot in that tree
yonder?

when his back is turned the man
the toilet James Joyce man
rushes from behind and his head

enters the ass of the station master
who issues a suitable gumph

now the man parades upon the platform blind
as a shouting lollipop of nothing

drosophila of stem cells of words

Jim's head both eyes hanging poised
in urgent sewers

all up the line the winter whistle blows as mad
as white bowls of butterflies & blood

.

politics of the hipglass outcrowded

a young man a quite innocent man only really a bypasser

stops at the shop window to examine a display
horrorstruck he sees from the back of the shop
another man a naked man [maybe the naked shopkeeper
maybe a god in a low guise a satyr or pederast]
with an erection oh christ a look of delight run towards him
he crashes into the glass in slow motion the glass
the glass rises now in millibars of hectopascals of analects
of love and time's first forgotten disorient
crazes and maps itself cobwebs and meridians
of disaster spread now this is meaning slide into this
the whole street shimmy everything in birds of fracture
rupture around this flow this node of impact
perhaps made of steel first exits into the street
while from another world a different time register a crow
swoops in it pecks with fury at the shopkeeper's cock
he screams brings down the rest of the mosaic
in blinding jigsaw shatters the sky the entire sky
fatally injured spasms there in the street there & there
nods and collapses there the innocent young man the crow
the shopkeeper hover in CCTV glass falls around them
waterfalls & cataracts blind the moment the shopman
reaches for others a crow in his mouth blood runs
down his chest this now this he cries is politics at its best

.

the press

it is an iron plate applied as The Question the question it is a fear
and a iron miner's miracule
(why do flies sink in lakes he asks well because of their spiracule)
of light and fission a fission of faces that now look
the fire the inquisitory press beneath which most things
cease to struggle or digress it is a rusty iron level
a heavy flat of a fatherhand but the witch stuff in this fug
the chug chug burd aloft jug jug bird O gone soft
is entirely contraband outwards eyeballs squeeze
inwards air doth rush upon the flags that gutter there
some ichor now doth gush and geeze & wheeze & fleas
O fleas: Mark, butt these fleas...

it is a heaviness and heft dragged up from in a delf
it is a squeak of kick and cock collapsed upon itself
a leaden place of heat and beat and it is then a river
slowed almost now to death
there skinned unto a sliver

now nothing can be known as true
as this press yet obtains
now sideward slick the sluices-oh
now outward slide the brains

I look upon myself anews
as planar kangaroo
what I awready knew's
in hi-winds i has blew

xxx

the trombone loneliness of the hammer monkey

gradually he became nothing
his voice lost its harmonics and grew thin
his friends dropped away
this was Buddhism he thought
this was the ranking southgate weatherfront farce of escape I will kill you
he says I will kill you with my smother my idiot submerging overcoat
out in the garden I fire over and over
many have I killed

you fucking scrape, he said
why are you there always?

in a stinking den a man grew a beard

look at me now
look at me

in the night he cogitates highly
real love is not that love that lasts forever
that is circumspection, survival
real love is the thing that lasts
for three weeks and brings you close to suicide
you are an electric cable
connected at one end
but not at the other
you are a boy in the rain sick of choirs
throwing a trombone
off a clifftop
somehow the wind gushes through its tunnel
it screams out low magma

it is a slow day
three boys are beating a monkey to death
by the roadside
with small bronze hammers

why would kudos be considered a plural anyway
and who would think such a thing?

and who would think such a thing

there are markers, coordinates
you are no longer ordinary
your time has not arrived

the man with the beard smelt bad
all night we stared at each other
but nothing was resolved

it was a city full of holes back then
left by the Luftwaffe
even years later
the holes unfilled
imagine the entire place in love
with nothing
just desperate now
to connect that other end of itself
to a grid that is understandable
for which there is a name

in such ways we have died like monkeys
at the hands of boys
who were unconnected

every generation the same
every god failing to ignite

a brass shadow falling

a low screech as the hammers climax

my little love
come hither

.

Fitzroy's Moral Collapse (a reading)

Fitzroy's Moral Collapse

supermarket terrorist consciousness

it is a bad time in the season of your throat

this is not that gag about Linda

Linda don't inflect yourself
on the crabshelf of lingual attack

a brother points age 4 says look
there there is a lady a tiny lady at night

she is just there across the water
you could almost have reached her with your fibres
but then nothing this is not that nun thing
that done thing that fling that they sing about warm beer
not there but here you hear

in far rooms the hoovers come and go
humming of Michael I worked in a hotel
in Israel
we plundered their fridges oh hell
feasted on their remains
the MFO and UN boys from the North
their scrota emptied into the well of Eilat
flat-feeling uncertain they went back
leaving steak and beer and plastic gin

always better after they leave she told us
their money left behind with their semen
floating out towards Aqaba
and the animals all running dry not that
it mattered cigarettes are cheap and days are long
full of whiteness everyone speaks a white sibilant
language under the breath and no one here
ever quite gets to it—occasionally the outburst
but that is nothing just the soldiers come home
late at night with lost keys for headbutting the door
open competitions the Norwegians were best
at this for their running up while the Americans
didn't wish for the same bruises but would be cruel
to the feral kittens round the lobby one morning

the Golden Gate got sploded all to bits we almost
but then a bag by its alone in the bus station

bricked up the Dung Gate long aloof
only spiders now listen ahoof listen early one morning
the gate explode the sire got shraps and flaffs
all up hizarm

he don't blame no one for not comin back
it's late after all
was just hopin for a party
he an Linda an Mike

once on a beach my sister belinda she pissed out the winda

the wind erased it all

anyone wanna fuckin arm wrassle
see him with the arm
lookin out on the bay
with all that attitude

the pigeons come here to drink they would say
they go back there to shit

no way of knowing what's best
not ever

.

"There's an interesting piece just here about erectile dysfunction...look..."

A Youtube Channel for readings from the Burning Gorgeous anthology

We now have a Youtube channel for readings from the anthology. I am still feeling my way into this stuff at the moment, but I hope to improve. Anyway, it brings the characters to life a little and is worth a look:

CLICK HERE

Some readings from Burning Gorgeous

I Instruct My Two Leads by Greg Grummer

Ontological Considerations by Greg Grummer

Outwitting Your Angels by David Mehler

found object

the centaur I once owned, No 3245, had an access ply hatch, screwed down, easy to remove for repair, after, springing a leak, always drain down in the winter, and remember, the force, exerted by the mass of water displaced, when slamming into turbulent seaway, useful to have access

.

while we are drunk prime numbers eat our beloved pets

those idiot neighbours are rutting again
their grey drub like a monkey chained to a radiator
through the middle of it all a thick slick of clay
down which cattle
long ago
in the rain
puddled out a canal—in The Handbook of Wild Animals
of Britain and Europe it states that 'the situation is different
in the Baltic', of which one has little doubt
—it goes on to say that 'many large insects are eaten'
but this too is obvious in the circumstances

all day on the hilltops the grey slick mustered
and slid
he sat there on the road waiting for the lahar
which might release him from this intolerable banging
all night every night the same clanking of some ghost
locking doors his face in the pillow unshaven now
his breath all beer and barbecue and smoke
she lies awake for a long time afterwards wondering
about the headlights that spread magic lanterns
across her curtains and over the ceiling
Politics she thinks that's all it is
men just smell bad and snore
in the morning he wants more he is still drunk
but by now the barbecue has guttered and gone sour
on his breath
his advances are halfhearted and she buys him off with tea
and TV and the invigorating memories of who did what
there in the garden

the book says that 'they race through the treetops
and leap prodigiously'

she reads it in the shower watching the pages darken
clutching the cat tight against her stomach
in less than a minute it stops struggling
and the blood from the raking of her abdomen
swirls down into the plug
these are these are the moments she thinks
for which as children we yearned these are
the pregnant cat showers from which
there could be no return

almost without thinking she padlocks herself
to the radiator
starts to beat it with the cat a dead sort of clang
against the wall rings rang this she sighs yes
will give them things of which to think she thought she sang

he's still up there face down in his morning stink
she'll clean it all up later maybe his blink
if there's time
if the bells again
don't start to chime

.

nocturne

imagine a journey on a ship
and the ship is on fire
okay forget that you are floating
on clouds and you are a Hindu god
in the bushes off to the left something
is waiting for you and you are about to die

what does 'datejust' mean?

a man on a ship humiliates himself
he leaps on the table while drunk
and urinates in someone's soup
this is an old time steamer between
Liverpool and New York and your Mother
and he gets on stage and this is not
a Graham Greene novel—for some reason

Miles Davis is on this ship
and when the man starts urinating
in his soup he reaches up with fingers
almost each a foot long and takes him by the throat
pulls him down and says listen

but the man by now is too drunk and does not listen
he goes on to attack the captain who is looking
for ice and ought not to be assailed so

he shows his buttocks to the ladies in cabin 339
laughing as he does it oh life on a ship is such fun

but worst of all he sidles alongside the chaplain
who has by now spotted the ice and has no time to waste
hey you wanna do it he asks
not now not now says the chaplain

in the morning the man remembers little of this
but signals come in
by noon he knows enough
and something within him starts to die
his good intentions fail and he cannot
find it in him to venture on deck and apologise
to the other passengers

not that Miles wants an apology
Miles thinks he is a fuck and isn't interested today
in a fuck
while he rows through the bodies

the Purser's daughter's body was not violated
but the intentions had been clear enough
at 2am when he approached her bed
with suggestions of Jazz music

the man doesn't know how to return from this escapade
and he retires to his bunk
where he lies urinating in his own soup
buzzing like a kazoo

something has died in him from this confluence
of events
and he would rather now that he went down
with the ship
whose lights are even now going out

I have fucked up again he thinks
so profoundly this time
that though the ship sinks
I will lie here and mime
for you just can't keep doing
this pissing in soup
not if you want
to stay in the group

Miles sculls softly onward
imagine him there blowing and sculling
in the cold
nothing left
the Carpathia arriving hours later
asking
where's the president?
a great sea monster welling beneath
a m onkey a t the prow laughing its arse
off

oh just imagine the birth of Jazz on the frozen sea

little pixies in Elmo blue dancing everywhere
bears drowning on all sides coughing as they go
you ever see someone drown they cough then go quiet

but I love you you know I do

keep your hands off me

something went wrong

.


.

maybe Iran 1940 everything starting to die

dead und dgrdtion//i hf nu avid avid what do you look like
you fool
you ful some yu fool the collision was awready happen
over and above the consequences there were
to be considered the humans
my parrot what this parrot here?
I will kill it now with a stick by God I will
if you want to be friends then stroke better
and carefuller like look
a picture has now emerged from the oil shapes-----
this company is not fucked though buy shares now quick
divers divers down davit down
there remotely people how lonely
their legs caUght in clam clutches how they saw/away/ey
their limbs and everyone such a limb/mb
such moments as these
not ever in one's lifetime not ever
robots not relied on
I never expected that it wouldn't get erect
I mean it's never happened before
I can't imagine what she thinks of me now
all that big-titted oil and everything
It's out there like a reputation
everyone sitting round
.....................hating

everyone sitting round like it is an orgy
she even using her teeth and none of us sure
alla them are like fish with the mouth full up
with shit not one a them a good thing to say
here I am face down agasp why do you not
care

come back to bed honey
it's not our business

.

at owl bridge a hanging

she sits there in front of me
she has all the assumption of authority
& I am only here to be told what to do
guided you want to put it like that
adjudicated upon you want to put it
through the desk I can't help think
this is a porn movie set she is quite large
her bare arms ripple slightly like long tulips
I can do it anyway if required merely
a kiss can set me off like a kite
she looks to me forty eight alcoholic unhealthy
bitter she looks I imagine her lying back
over the desk like cheese somehow
my shades descending but these moments
of fantasy pass and love now comes upon me
I love you I tell her I love you
I wish we had met earlier when I was still young
I understand that she feels challenged by my love
but I don't know what is script and what is me
are you mad she says
I don't know I say I thought you would tell me
okay she says I will chance everything
come and show me how mad you are
her little dog yaps at our feet as we do it
there on the Rubella leaflets and free condoms
she takes on a neck flush as we separate
yes she says
you are mad
I will refer you
to the madness people
oh I say
I thought maybe I was
but wasn't sure
as my madness settles down
into my lower limbs
like flamingoes upon a lake
waves and wind flowing out
she a sheer octopus
feeling herself quick to see what's missing
our mouths somehow
stuck together fright
all over us like turtles heading
out into the deep blue
frightened by a song offshore
oh baby I say
fuck she says and the frets
already rolling

.

lights over the Lune

is it true that when Beefheart then a vacuum cleaner salesman
by chaQNCe met the Grea=t Aldous Huxley on a doorstep
and in a moment of fear and amoksha did point to a specimen
of his wares and cry aloud sir this sucks? <<>> aldous being blind
took this as a general utterance of discontent and admonished
gently the disaffected young man he saw hanging in his thoughts
above a blue pool wherein did disport various fishes and mokshamen
a gulf then there was with only an unseen vacuum to fill it
Mr Beefheart sensing this whipped up once more his dogs & swung north

.

Vliet

the desert lilt of it as though some ethereal caravan
was crashing nearby tinkerbells above the deep Omission
his finger his hat pointing cactus needle speculum and spike
you anther you anther at some point every man must consider
the transplanting of body parts must yearn for the hastening
of stem cell reality wire me up O that I may emerge fixed
but no he didn't think like that come on though oh come on
who would you be who given the chance but no he who didn't
in his caravan of souls what cliché pointing stabbing grabbing
heat and air what from the body is it possible he says is it active
is it a head on a stick that we might or might now not well is it?
or has this been tested how many years do you want taken away
captain my captain of wavetops & outcrops here he says hold
it for me & feel free to pump for it is loaded already but this
is not how our sink comes about startled as an ass at dawn
oh this discovery that every which and all anyway on the roof
all of us hold tight to our little things lest sucked away
we get and overcome sick as little dogs red red strawberry
douse it now before fire emerges from the forceps you you
he says again you it is you of whom I speak devil clutch for
I will at candle hour remember those lost watches
soft as out they outgas

.

Just felt like this again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CkHXxlzDcg

Yoshimi

half-assed poetry reading with Crowleyan headgear

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzvJUNVz7n0

Keep meaning to get around to doing more of these, and doing it better. This was the first Youtube one anyway.

Steve.

the move around

a man walking by sees the burning
of course he remarks upon it to his companion
who happens to be his wife who he met years ago
at a student party it was touch and go back then
because he was unimpressed by her physique
similarly she was less than impressed
and thought he was a drunkard who shouted
in kitchens further back she was anyway
not inclined to give him a break
because of his association with shouty boys and he was
wow disinclined to approach
in the later lamplight they lurked and lurked
now and though they are all of love and
love's secrets look at them there
in the firelight attack
which of them would you prefer to be?
the long haired hassassin or the woman
who has no boundaries cloud
me I got no preference any old shit
will do in this life at the edge of the waterfall
clutching my cock
running out greenfaced greatcoat fungal hark
scaring the kids
I am a bad man of paper paper
you should hang on your wall
beans all down my face
how about you you in love or what?

been a while

.

some elevations of the limpet in fierce cloud

a thing like limpets in the wash
as the whole ocean floods over
mouth to mouth can you imagine?
really mouth and the world
how important this can seem
no it is too vast to pass over
in the heather in the streams
the flutters that run down
opened out into sunlight as
they widen now here branches
stop it look again look at it
at night the rivers go quiet
still mouths [singing] as though
the waters that made them
were not yet finished like
survival was this last flick
of the body on the field
no no if this doesn't work
now cling with your mouth


.

lost loves dance in Time

the flower the steel and titanium flower
that opens inside the man who is looking
as hard as he can at his lover's breasts

pornography is known to wreck humans
there's no way out of this

.

song for Richard and Karen

seemed like Quantum Mechanics had entered a social scene
in the firelight each of us suspiciously attempting support
he sat there wretched in it all she was out there somewhere
looking for him he felt her like a searchlight over Cologne
with Song For Karen playing in the back he laughed even he
had to laugh when it said goodbye Richard it was like an omen
he must look back on this time and shiver for a door had opened
in the wind and he had only half stepped through it there he
wavered between these magnetic forces trivially swaying
like any of us attempting to lighten the unbearable she arrived
vigorously and took him home I don't know what happened next
but the other woman Jo I think went back to her dentistry alone
down the arches of our slender adulthood small forces rang out
some violation over the lake across the fields far back in the woods
this woman sitting in a bath covered in feathers it is hard to believe
but there amongst the terraces these really were such times

.

marvels from the East

so underwater as they are make me dream
of octopus—Madeleine Shine

oh god oh god he keeps saying and this
is half an hour after the fact no reason that he should still
be thrashing and moaning like that oh god oh god oh shut up
she lies there waiting for this to subside
eventually she says oh look I have to sleep now
yes he says but I can't stop something has happened
I can't stop coming and look and here he whips up
the sheets and says look how the head of my cock
now glows greeny blue and fluorescent it is because
now I understand all things all politics and all of nature
this is now my node and my zone and my antenna
what have you done to me I feel that I am now
almost a god oh god oh god
yes she says almost a god you are darlin
now tell me about it in the morning
now turn your dick off please for at all times I hate blue lights

into the night alone oh god
.

.

man of the flies

oh you get sick but you try to make it right
by thinking hard of kings and Viking ships
maybe History could make the difference
the assumption is that there is a Thing
out there somewhere in there somewhere
that everyone knows
to which they can be summoned
before which they will stand deflated
outside of which
all of us are flies

this is the thing with Justice
its gears
its voice

but there's nothing
but the clamour

as the flies home in

a week from now
your family will recoil
when they lift the sheet

I live by the river—Joe Strummer

.

hands like a rabbit

Chipul tau si dragostea tin dei (your face and the love from the linden trees)
—O-Zone

always the/a momentum of love the flywheel as though credit
were bestowed by belief alone the subjunctive barnacle penis
coiled in the head now unflipped in the tracks of back brain flick
a small dog by the back door of a vacated house waits
I saunter deep past in the pool room like everything is easy
still every nuance laden with water running in everywhere
by Friday we are up to our throats to sustain the conversation
we eat flies we discuss the solitary sex habits of Karl Marx
and Margaret Thatcher we know Death is near but Love
really dreamed up by Japanese students as a sensible alternative
to ripping out the aliment in shame(baba)no one now remembers
no don't stop keep running the tape I can't stop believing
not yet

.

history of the kite riff

little boys under the tree in ragged shorts legs stung to fuck at night the sheets
heavy almost wetted with damp the walls thick as dawn hillfog stifling the sheep
cries six layers of wool blanket and the mortar falling out white and limey porridge
every morning the range coughs up a stirring mother thin as a wooden spoon
cracked down the middle from want a boy in a hammock our only toy a net
laden spinning between trees stop it he cries at night mice on your chest so tame
you can pick them up but not the rats my brother gets his thumbnail bitten off
waking to a big one you smell them under the floorboards rotting with the Warfarin
can't drink it burns them deep but you can't dig them out fucking hippies dancing
up there on the hilltop drugged as rats in head-high nettles just think what they
are doing in the mist Granddad on the roof making his last kite just think she said
miles it went out across the valley far as aeroplanes we never knew such kite flight
as this RM Ballantyne rescued from a burnt house scorched but wild dogs the coral
the stitched sacking you know how many rats in a hay barn gather they cry now
with pitchforks the last bale lifted they start running a tine through the middle they
hiss and bite like overdone porridge bubbling its last bloody geology the woman
stands there impervious to hot spitting thin and surrendered martyred, spooned out mother.

huzzah silver surfer

the bearded guy so unlike the weather
with the fat ketch by the outer wall
only caught this in the corner of my eye
kept popping up hey I cried at last
are you the rat from that story
he popped down he said nothing
hey I shouted it's too late now
too late the waves already were coming in
he was riding on them silver surfer
his glistening back I saw
as it zinged past hurrah I did shout
I popped back down it seemed only right

.

prose monsters unforgiven

your head oh flit past that
baby you little darling you
have seen as I have the triumphant state
but really both of us heads down
know nothing of politics now
it is just not enough
to roll one's tongue in such
circumstances
really there must be more technique
more consideration given
to the basic frictions and their complexities
for either of us to surface from these tissues
holding together a head intact
these are the days of love
all of us shoved full of Love
one day we will walk clear
jesus does no one understand me yet
here in the ash rivers I bestride
sucking at the only things
the only things I know

.

of the care for the complexes of partners

so would rather see women
get fat on the seashore
pull the heads off crabs
stuff the wings into their cheeks
suck at the gills
little legs writhe out of their ears
talk passion about sand
glass and vitrification
under the barnacles the weedy timbers
at night some adolescent flow comes in
assume like slow murmillone fish
the adipose corners of this tissue
you you you he bubbles out at the last
were not as I thought
you thought nothing she scales left
perceiving new brightness
in the cave roofs along which bells
of the bottletop church advance

.

tomorrow everything changes

there's a bad man on the loose

first reports

the neighbours said something about deer
that yap like owls

no one can believe the neighbours

go further go fact-finding ugh

why doesn't every river have a water wheel?

Oh I dunno

guess they lapsed the waterwheelers
used to try so hard
when there was wool and canals

now there is a bad man on the loose
in the old house on the hilltop you see
his flicker cooking monsters quick call Black Bob

get him dancing on a treadmill why isn't every
exercise bike every pec-deck loaded to the grid?

this was never an honest nation
now we are just birthday cake waiting

the neighbours will deck their garden
suffocating one hundred years of nature
oh what the fuck
he is a fat guy who barbecues chicken
and rides motorcycles
she doesn't much care for him but at least
he is constant in his racist throes
and she ain't a Paki

a boy hid here in the apple tree
below him in the pond there were newts
sometimes he came down and watched them
with a torch while the sirens blew

nothing changed
the newts died when the decking went down

every world
sucking itself in
hollow
emptied out
flying
into the fog

thank fuck for newts that squat
wet as night on the sandstone
looking up
not even wondering

.

the inside of an elephant

Carl Jung and James Joyce are the same person
both of them fucking an elephant
up a ladder in German fetish latex
the elephant restrained but peeved
man if I was there I would shout get down and stop that
Jim would probably crap on my head
Carlos would keep going
sure that somewhere in there
there was a light

fuck, there ain't no lights
it's all just elephant ass

.

(improvising &) burned to the fingertips

(warning: contains strong languages)

sick sounds through the wall hubble

start easy: everyone includin you is stupid
baby you has that skeleton feel today
like the hilltop clock running down to war flutes
(imaGine war as a soft blessing that comes
and comes at night in the snow like Tracey)
oh god I most clapses hear again the voice
Zen in the art of Eostre keep it shut

that door-hacking god-egg harking oof like nothing
was ever wrong where is your mother then?
your mama she decrees disasts (spit advection spread) of the planes
injuns wholly
Joe I gots nowheres even to go but the caves now
me/can you save ha? the pine-poplars not jocules not at all string it out
man-moss all over electric
all over the 3 high winds no you ain't comin in sweet Loretta
but she was an Otherman in your face he waves it
in your face an you all sick an nowhere the thought the sheer thought

no trouble I swear
over and over I promise not
false as high cyclonic winds spreading out
there is always trouble with me

look even when he is not sick
he is still contagious as an elf lighting cars
down the whistling alley we walked away years waiting
(shine baby shine) now no more
the linnet's song of night is stop't
within the little throat

.

flexicon reef

word definitions if for instance a school
in the Soviet Union is was biswas known only by a number
a cumber of say nine school nine
and the football team scream
says we are nine if they make a myth out of nine
if formations accrue like sealife around nine
then nine becomes nine times nine or more
open to the seafloor on the Lynch roads
somewhere Karl Popper's head explodes

Kierkegaard flips like an obsolete god
at the eruption of Popper's headwad

but if nine is this world then what
is next it is not ten curled
this monkey has not gone the 100th monkey
nine get it nine
or ten

it's not zen or eight
all of it growing in the sensorium like teen sex-
argot ergot in the wet quackgrass
this is the big bang eight no wait not eight nor frass
yes eight not seven forever the secret seven
this mandrill's gone to heaven
a greet ya in the sky
what word is that then
honey pie?


.

a rearing of sea cocks

what is scooters what is vacation what is fall?

you are who again?

I didn't catch the reader I mean not that but heard it was
n't up to much not that I trust anyone
but you how are you in yourself parrot fiction
the friction of the slow heft always so

have you become like a parakeet down there in the hollow ooze?

so I have heard not that I and war was again a thing of the close
shave
at the very threshold I he she they is written this
in fervour
of this assembly hopes this
is okay with you darling
but would like to know who

has grasped the mud O in such fields we flew

[down to Gorky Park etc a climb a route
on Cyrn Las called Lubyanka
the Skull
The Grooves]

(O we will murder you given half the chance)

in the wind what was that name again
such cockrocking
it comes into focus this covered in kisses
you upside down pretty much
this TV screen closing in like a mythic bridge
with its beard falling into the river

given half the chance

even old people
like to fuck in rivers
and throw pineapples at each other
agonizing really how they cavort so

given the chance even people
like to climb the stairs and say yeah what
I won't be like this forever
so get me while you can

this radio burned long since

how are you in yourself
(without a question mark)

.

everyone you haven't slept with since

I can give a cat an orgasm—Germaine Greer

what that little tent was all about:

Mr Wolf allegedly to be summoned
by code-knocking on the fire surround
—in the tool store a World War Two
Commando assault craft—mephitis
of perished rubber she had crinkly hair
affected still—the derelict flapper look
what that little tent was all about
in front of the gas fire after the bath
—black and white TV memory 1969
the Eagle landing one small tent
for a man—cigarette smoke that stuck
to the cold bathwater—1930s perfume
the boy sat there—Craven A cigarettes
in some adult game wearing just underwear
which boy maybe both boys years apart
heard hollow of the little tent its connection
in wolves and Vikings maybe both
from opposite ends of the tunnel
looked down and became frightened
of George a heavy fancyman with iron grip
at the flappers the rubber wolf
that scratches in the night hole behind
—the wall where men in perished static
from St Nazaire at shoal depth we cringe
back from the night's defences away
...from the history behind the knocking

from the little tent both of us panicky
awkward across years fumbling to break the signal


.

my brother's drum

all night I had to beat my way in
with some old arcane stickhand-
rhythm of fireplaces and hash ash
that sent out the windows until

this drum jumped up grabbed my throat
grew a little mouth like a bullet exit
all bitty and crystalline stuff mingled cock attaché
with the darkle of tissue

you can't see inside this Sufi drum it is sealed
it is how I know my brother's head is still in it

.

tuning in to Radio Silence

at night you see the hands
rise from the heather

somewhere around here let's find out
follow the sounds of water underground there is a shape
that comes over us towards midnight

the radio starts up far off we want to run

keep digging here someone says

here is where they last saw themselves
here where the shape

put your ear to the damp ground you hear
chambers open out into worlds of wetness

under the gurgle of dream tiny voices
we are on a hillside when the dawn crawls in amongst us

we have found nothing we insist
nothing here in the night

in the night these are hands reaching from the moor
no one can hold all of these hands
each of us leaves with loss with the loss
of all hands

having at last excavated nothing

.

diary entry under wet

it is now and the wave is coming through
from the back of the head it enters the orbifrontal cortex
the outcome is inevitable and I refuse to express it

the flowers are not dead but neither are they enthusiastic
it is the future and Carry On films are now the basis
of the Global political system the voice of Kenneth Williams
issues from black and white TV screens throughout the precinct if you want
a vision
imagine a nasal bray camping
on a human face forever

it is no future and my position is that everyone knows everything
until it is taken from them by science

it future despite my anger my children
can unlock me like a big wet cake

who will you be when you die further?

in such waves we alert the future

a plumber has reduced the size of my bathroom
by boarding one wall
he tells me my new bath is the wrong size it won't fit
but it was fine it was the right size before I say no no
it won't fit you got the wrong size bath

why am i saying this. no reason. gaze how small the even epic.

at 11pm my boy wakes and gets out of his little bed
he calls me and tells me he is a little tired
I put him back to bed. he sleeps. he is a little tired.

I am a little tired.

you can't keep calling something a crisis
when it is twenty thirty years later. the opportunities
are all sucked out they are crowded with fossils.

look I say to him in his [radio] sleep. father this is now
what the world is. bone. dance. don't think you will wake somewhere else.

he doesn't understand his options yet. he is not going to wake
not even to tell me stood there in his pyjamas filled
with the world-concern of little boys lost at night
that he has woken to tell me as late as it is risen
from his bed his little bed that he has woken to tell me
that he my son my father I am a little tired

[rafted mad rafted like licks at tombs
(trumpet intro: if today was all we believed
we would not go looking on the moors
at night for ourselves
would not go barking outside
would not find emptiness
crawling on our skin
we would listen close by the old wireless
we would curl up
we would go to sleep)

I don't understand my options
I am a little tired
I can't go home]

sad as rafters in the circus haunt several
dark upon the chance happening late one above all
who feared most


.

dead chinook overfall so wide is love

holes in the city
where the Luftwaffe came over
how much we hated the Germans in our backyards
gasmasks everyone even in the 1960s had a gasmask
one day some boys

a firework a fireworld laid down by
rubble the verbs seep only
baby baby in the future you weren't there
I looked everywhere until my heart cold

as penguin poetry flew out they tied it to me
lit it and ran off I got it off just in time
oh Airey Neave never did so but what

legs blown off dead of the loss of blood
no vital organs blown up just the conduits
in that they were cheering that night
there was no mistaking what that was for
over the South Atlantic oilfields

whose water is this? who


.

nettles riff nettles the big tree

there at the confluence of radiators the boy sings

I knew you when you were small
you remember back in the old days
a father from outside swinging
a man with a glider who said now then

now then what? someone they said did homosex stuff
in a cinema after chopping nettles all day
this was a betrayal of his wife/mother
all day this was a betrayal

the boy was in bed with biscuits
a torch
the cold the deep cold

by the age of eight I was inured to cold
I can take cold like I can take rejection
warmth I see as too much frivolous politics

ancestral shame I can't help your Grandfather
who in a laudanum frenzy
maybe it is not right to speak of the favourite goat
whose spirit appeared over and over
in the guise of a maiden
always at dusk clutching a glass
of chartreuse asking in chitin

to be served in the hemispherical bread oven
where the bones were found behind the wall broken

later his girlfriends found these discoveries challenging
uh uh uh uh uh she would say from her book
he held so avid at night beneath the blankets
in the torchlight uh uh uh uh uh he
would say back in English Naval umaphore

tomorrow both of them scything nettles in the old garden
at each other scarcely looking



.
(Second place in the IBPC March 2010 hurray!)

a creek in the neckriff

the grinning fossilized foetus elephant (mammoth) flat-cycles across the skin
—the sea-skin seen from Space

the half human exults in the drowning vessel
watches the men go down

the infinite verse your mother has slept

the seagod counts to the number Graham then falters wonders can there be another
—there is: Graham plus one is called the elephant embryo cycle
it is a seagate
at which lonely verses wait lonely-(verses) two lonely verses

but wait cannot compare
with the little embryo elephant
smiling in its great circle
.

item this

item 250556951567 on ebay is the head of a panther
red mouthed panther gold eyed mounted item this item
is the powdered skull of a panther taken as a prize
by an Algonquin in 1840 in a near miss he found it hiding
out in a hollow log from the mist and magic of Yellow Rain Snakes
a coyote also a coyote he found at lurk amongst the population
poking in a burning he stick he found in the lightning to drive
out the lurkful watch of panthers from the hollows within
the panther and anther powder comes in a phial a secret phial
it can easily be added to a drink to prolong life all along to make strong
the vigour the virile force the vital esprit de corps or used as an ichor
to augment the eye's core the coyote also was taken though the extraction
of his thereaway member from the hollows with which he had tried
to flush the panther puma brought about disaster on the Algonquin
whose head powder is also of the listed items 250570583394
in sudden defaults of dizzy fits the Algonquin a man then found
himself though still proud quite weak and sick and died there
in the arms of panthers and coyotes alone from all his humans
it is why the power has massed up here alongside in the skull powder
in tides of light dust it may have become radioactive and then bad
to the touch

.

tiny fish

all day I felt like a waterfall was breaking through my chest

that birds flew in and out of the rainbow spray

nothing assailed this vision
nothing became stagnant or blackened

the water that fell there ran white down to the sea
with tiny fish borne along speaking in bubbles

and there it dived beyond human comprehension
into deep trenches
where unknown creatures wafted and swayed

I alone of the pirates
had made it back

.

licorice for this small act

the man gets drunk stands on the table and pisses
all over the velvet jacket of his frizzy host
he is ostracised for this small act he tells himself I am a bad man

much later he grows a beard he takes to eating mice
sitting by the river all Autumn look the delightful
cavorting of young otters just before they reach his net

in which he and they swell
red and bloody tumulus

always certain from childhood
that one day he would be eaten alive upside down
in the shades by his own cock

.

politic heliocline

100 metres down everyone becomes Mickey Mouse

look a nudibranch poster

if there was ever life here it is bread now with giant hands
mulching it squeezing it into the mouth
it comes on like that as though illness was a fashion

you agree with me he says over and over you agree you do

the whole nation gets excited
whenever a politician is caught fucking a sheep
but really it is a young willing sheep
that pushes back

there is now nothing to answer

.

the aeroplane birth of some slight nations

even unladen a toilet in the West is roughly egg shaped from above
while from below it looks like a cabriole leg with elephantiasis

rendered in the wide white smooth coral of private parts
that skirmish in the mouth like the Roman porcelanosa pretty pig

O this in itself could explain some of the monstrous births
that have littered the playing fields of Europe since 1916 and

what would you do if while slicking it to glory across the mudflaps
suddenly a thick and non-local hybrid of birdlife eschscholtzia grabbed at your crotch?

this could make you re-examine the entire history
under which you had calabashed for so long

no maybe no but nothing ever even in the snow survives past infancy
while there is a flute at the Eastern Wall crying for sleep

.

BULLETS

Lingchi

I became irritated/imitated/discovered/recovered how to peck—approx' Jim Crace

sixteen degrees of self-medicated bipolar night
sixteen years—night—old now old he/she
leaves is (anabasis) not seen again
—a cell-archive found later full of forgeries

[opium was sometimes administered
either as an act of mercy or as a way of preventing fainting]

interpolations/bells—rises leaves
he is found to be impossible she sits nearby
look how cold it is only yesterday I could have sworn
he never spoke like that leaves rises
what did he mean Autumn (filled with wire?)
runs backward will I become him again then again?
(nested within the chart of accounts) it is only our sadness that alights like that we tell her
it happens then it can't be unfolded to crow againبنویسید تا در پایین‌ترین ویرایشگر به خط فارسی‌ تبدیل شود. متن نوشته شده را می‌توان به صورت مستقیم ایمیل کرد، به صورت فایل در کامپیوتر ذخیره
it breaks and gushes (a cup of sun and so I tried it too—Shunryu Suzuki)
out through the male amnion wall 凌遲 it shines it shears
it rears it folds back, you, back
—back into itself pecking child of the pelican plucks blood from its breast
sucks it in—sutra-stuff-baggage of wilt & caramel—& there it ashes at its own feet

all Autumn maybe more there is more.........(wanna hear)
........—rock n roll radio-tissue-voice
/////////////from the empty room ..................................(a joke?)

life is too short to splice wire rope—Bernard Moitessier

.

caving that could have been could have had had the monster not been sighted early

the bright ^^heart rings over the hit or miss governor
sad though it seems in the little-(((90()child spotted lost
a new thing rises like corru?-&*gated plastic its limit..../?ations
sure like fire sure like the absence of angelic force////////

so she in all memory of cloakrooms inert in her concern
of staid fatherhood the occasional violence so it took her

as mechanics this not this this not this
in the garden some eventual escape

eventually a place like that a place
from where to claim something
not O not merely a place
a place from where to look down

into those phreatics to claim as vital forces

those phreatics look those
vadose those dread passages

wherein one might

if oh""""%£££ haha the 5y5monster.../// hand not reached in
haha had not ript it all out ha is that all that is left
of you now? fathre56%mudre...$)?/0000000-----------------------------

round an round the race track the little tractors came anooooooooooooooooooooooo
one went off the edge
and three (((burst into flame)))

look there has been a thing
we can't talk of it###even no# no#

.

quick the pirates are coming

the pirates the opirates swarm up from deeps
of sudden throat

one has three rows of teeth another
levitates from the mast foot hangs there over the ploughing ship
swells in a vicious solar flare exploding rains down
realigns at the poop then seastates forth big and menace

these pirates all of them in a wrack language
advance with cutlasses to where we are hollowed
heads out in our fearful caboozes

what is it with you pirates we ask

they shimmer then as though a startle had come across
we go with that
flinging turtle shells we rock-oxen swinge
the pirates in lurks there at the tabernacle they oyster out threats

we gather in like fry we eat up good all phosphorus and wave top

again the pirates have come up the thwarts
squidflooding their mouths at us

all the Last Day to come again in pink neptune arrays
you could bask in

reading wet books
till forever cracks
another

.

black bird tongue

one of the kids is going feral
I saw him looking out the window
at a blackbird in the snow
his eyes stark yellow his tongue flicking
engaged and slow a week later he came in with a rabbit
in his mouth slicked it down blooming and bloody on the carpet

still jerking a little
look he says what I have brought to the table
I am concerned for his future as a politician
or town dignitary if the Press learn of this early deviance
this is how they start
then scales form behind the ears
next thing they sprout feathers
from the shoulders

and all is lost
I hope for some intervention from upon high
to save my son from the high winds
that have come so early upon him

there is still
(the air is still)

just....... time

.

parachutists of the pink disaster

so I have a new hat
that's just not good enough to stop the world

FDR himself in Morocco said that a hat is only an abstraction
of sex
of therefore the dream of war

Stalin of course leaned right over and requested
a retranslation

what the fuck he said he said
does he mean it?

all the while my new hat Tzara fishattack buried
treasure as if the goats had gone crazy now

down by the river the hatmen leaning in
a certain stench that cries over the hills

Paulus wringing his hands in apology
like oh I didn't really mean it

sorry I have gone back to Stalingrad
where my love waits
with machine chocolate

is this the end
is this
the end?

.

Stalingrad silent night

maybe it was at the tractor factory at Stalingrad
that humanity became enlightened
that the Buddha learned of the sniper art

my kids there in the rubble screamed along
with the Katyushas ran with the wild dogs
that came starving from the cellars

something broke there in the scream
some part of humanity looked out from the snow
and thought jigsaws might be an equally good way to go

into the night
sex was never an issue
it just flared like that like a dog had barked
or had failed to bark somewhere down by the stables

the presence of politicians is a corrupting taint within humanity
this is known

yesterday my heating went off
do you think I wept about it?
no I burnt what was available
starting with memory and working out

at the end of every forlorn meal in the underground
some new love begins

I mean you don't have to fuck your mother
just because she didn't like the chocolates
and you want to say you care

these are mistakes
like lying to children
telling them you are Batman
that you can fly more or less

you know sometime you will have to do it

better always to carry a few small sticks and find a bridge

this is what they were taught
in that old singsong tractor hymn
of Bing Crosby Stalingrad snowman walking
hey can you smell carrots?

nor women neither nor women
wolves from Ethiopia strangled in through tunnels
to a Palestine zoo

autosave failed
Christmas lifts over the rooftops like

.

moments in the spirit room

around about midnight
the ghosts start to bite

on the stair
there
a walking chair
now the electricity starts up

in this room alone
the time zone
collapses
logic lapses
I am thrown
into
spirit world I try hard
to keep my head up
but how do you explain
someone knocking on my door just now
so it thundered so it wept into the vast openings
of night yawing like bullets through flesh

yes of course I opened it
of course no one was there

all around that unseen clamour

.

upeyeku

thango ingdown
upcome re turnarrive staired
down by the upeye

.

Le Dormeur du Val -- a translation of Rimbaud

it is a hole of greenery where a river sings
hanging madly to grasses
tatters of money
where sun of the mountain shone
it is a small valley which foams of rays a young soldier stop
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

passing strange food mouth to mouth

being in love no—not that the wind
doesn't still when you step outside

(someone has their hands over your mouth
in your mouth around your head someone
holds you as you fade)

like you were broken into saccades
like they had sliced up your senses

the trees harbour dark things
the night is a wild white train driving
into its own abdomen
—digital craqelure shatters above

rains down glass and ice
see here is your face your thousand faces
in the rain memory wake here at nightfall
where the hares dance dusk dawn grasp
with tiny hands we come running again
to your arms hold me hold me unbreathing
in the shallow brown water

below us shapes flick
not so in love that you wouldn't know it
nor so we fade as the barking of dogs
over forest rides love is a mouthful
of pine needles the feel of a wet pelt
the stench of the other
—blood in the snow
hold me there beneath the snow

until the choirs have passed by
—again at dawn the thing on the bedhead watches
every day now it grows more vivid

soon it will speak
in the empty house
that no one will approach

.

Lilith - An Anthology of Women's Poetry

Is now available here: click this link

I'm plugging this book partly because some of my friends are involved in it, and partly because there's some excellent poetry in there. Highly recommended.

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

mist that hangs
in air
after spasm stillness
footprints
in wet grass

who is neither loved

nor unloved
who waits

for a succession of moments
that come to nothing

swirl of your dust
your sadness, your trying-again
you who are not entirely my enemy
even now

withdraw my medication
I watch from some distance

that all things of the body
are sort of holy
sort of terrible

faintly irresistible,
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
for the smoke offends my fucking eyes also of my friends here
at the next table

O I must have words
with you in your dart of sunlight
goblin of my heart
my own wordless night

here we are beyond recall rolling rolling

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

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

2. this croupier no one you ever knew just a door banging in a wind
a hand reaching for you so much as start to breathe ugly how you do

beyond recall:

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

goblin of the heart's engulfing
roll the old yellow dice

an arch planchette

of the genealogy of long argument written
from the inside with a planchette or something
(one must assume the most common shape)

try to avoid being swept into eddies
he took some blood from me—I hate that
(his staff are not very polite)
I was shy at that time of my life
with the very concept of pollution

influential people/the law...
he might try learning some manners
like almost every pollutant
I'm worried about public relations

to some extent large or small
always a natural background

he tested my urine
—that can show quite a lot of things
many wrecks were lost simply because
of a strong tidal stream

you're too young he said
maybe you'll get it later

the tests are very curious

.

life without the civilising intervention of regular oral sex

uh i don't want the earth to keep on
in its track no i don't want santa to come no more
nor no fairies to squat by the river
singing low plaints to the love of children
no i want it all to break and fail
all women to rush suddenly from their bloodbeds
intent upon burning something
all men to lift hammers and crush their own fingers
one by one in their workshops
then retire to nearby hostelries with straws
to contemplate with bloody women
the next act of clarity

(air in the bells. lake-voices at ring in the noonfish church.)

.

language acquisition device

she's never kissed me in any way that made sense
she turned her head slightly
looked out at the starlings in the rain
turned back like this
avidly read about starlets
from the newspaper
that was scattered on the floor like huge wet leaves flopped there
in a fucking flop crisis

in the night, though, starlings she looked
owls she looked also
many seafaring midnights of birds she looked
catafalques and stoops as though of doom yea she looked

me all so passionate but had to entwined look
so I too
yeah there they were, both of them dying
in front of the gas fire
hey hey what's going on he wakes now thinking like a hen on fire
don't be ridiculous

why you sit in trees with starling rain rain idiot
night of the stretches the trenches the facial
twigs tendrils cobwebs mycelia of the dream nothing
Buddha god moonlight of limbs what you want to take me
out
out
there where the moon bounces
no yet again I am not invited
to my own funeral

baltic sea 1955 wtf cold as angels mmm...

.

voice of violet war

put here your illegal ear
to the crystal set

his wartime voice of the hollows calls
Danzig—the Finland Station—Archangel
from tractors in rubble London calling
now war is enigma coding nickel from The Finns/oil from Ploesti
........morsing out Ultra .... .- -.. -. --- - - .... --- ..- --. .... -
- .... .- - -.. . .- - .... .... .- -.. ..- -. -.. --- -. . ... --- -- .- -. -.--

London crawling into its own rats unreal the voice of paper night
sirens of Goering's drub... violet descent all stations all stations
......................rat voices from the thin megaphone
flow down into an organ stench at Saint Pancras & the King's Cross
all-atlantic emergency from Hut 5 Hut 6 (unknown)
the fog signals fly in

Wetter setzt Messe. Das ist die glückliche Zeit.
Alaska nach Liverpool. Das ist die glückliche Zeit!
(into the cold alive moment frozen in the warm moment
all stopped held tight the thin voice
.................................the moment)
...................in den kalten lebendigen moment
...................eingefroren im warmen moment
- .. .-.. .-.. .... ..- -- .- -. ...- --- .. -.-. . ...
.-- .- -.- . ..- ... .- -. -.. .-- . -.. .-. --- .-- -.
let us go then you and I
Queen Mary ship of dreams
solve et coagula cathedral in the smoke
report fire here light and not light and light there look
every light in its own water

so many of us just quietly borne away
little lights at sea
............................our tiny Darwins all gone out
finched alive in fire and squeak
.

fissures of men

><((((º>`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·...¸><((((º>¸.
·´¯`·.¸. , . .·´¯`·.. ><((((º>`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·...¸><((((º>

skyeater

Sky TV is amazing just a couple of months
and you know almost everything there is to know
for instance did you know that everyone was a cannibal?
no, see, but it's true, those Neanderthals you thought
ate grass and sang river songs petting each other
with big stupid placid grins like bovines no
they were all munching each others haunches

every chance they got you couldn't go to sleep back then
and hope to wake up with limbs crikey no that's why
they died out from sheer tiredness of having always
to stay awake and watch one's extremities and the Anasazi
that you thought spent their days tending gardens
and inventing games with corncobs in fact they had
a special delight in internal organs and bone marrow

of their neighbours and relatives even it turns out
Jesus when they discovered his grave—dude got half a child
sticking out his dead mouth seems he died from biting
off more than he could chew all holy guys get it the same way
either chugging on cock so hard they forget to breathe
or like Mohammed choked on a burger made of the brains
of a Jew neighbour he caught frying up his wife............yeah I guess
without Sky you know nothing all of you don't even see
the slavering nightmare that creeps upon you

even as we squeak now me I got myself prepared and oiled ready
for to offer myself spatchcocked whole to the history channel

.

dark upon the faery flow

late afternoon and the sun
in September
a window
up a shadow ladder
you'd never guess
in an apple orchard
everything gleaming
almost in love
somewhere there in the leaves
in the trees the sunlight
a door a ladder what
fairies everywhere
in transposition
all of a sudden all of a hold
fireside no I mean yes
look at this then how
the light leans in low
almost they tread upon my boots
as leaves mythic really they seem gleaming
each a little waterfall of dark light
something like light
something like it

light
ready for the off

.

sunny down south

member A from
has sent
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that you be notified

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.

hurt chords by J

search the web, Bing

he wants to be John and June
Klondike 1932 they came running like like
rotten fruit drip from the mouth
was sex politics back then in the etherised
shamericas of youth I mean it though
that shameless familiarity with skirts
the certainty the utter clockwise
i hurt myself today to see
here nothing here nothing here whirling girls
she was on the streets at 7 years old wauling
les ombres de la rue
little slut you should have guillotined her mother way before
as if table upon said in more
now look again upon the clock
facial tictactoe facial cumshot
all of us dripping in our even bukkake

no one laughs in this custard pie event
even the clock/cock shuts
(wrong twice a day imagine there in the carking shrubbery a strange face peered out its yellow vibe through long, long leaves)

air in the bells. lake-voices at ring in the noonfish church

.

Popeye imagined by Dante & Dali...

THE WRESTLING POETRY FEATURE AT CLATTERY MACHINERY

in even avenues of love

(this takes only a moment
but gives you increased capabilities)

if the grain is kept straight
.............................and held so
with conviction and compass
then the mere will allow
that across to the felds a wife
....................or what or wifwhat
eek from afar as though even song
through water................was sprung
imagine more then than a water wife

who bounds o'er dark floods
her entire head now bubbled & hove to
the variance of a new North

upholded there in such sea hills
staymates and thwarts

(press this button once only)

the attack the attack
..............................least of all
in the smallest things O some new chaos

.......................rupt the night
in which we look
Oh therein his earnest helm and heck

as though there were no none of it
ugh yes no nonce of the word of it
....................................no eating of it
"no longer any mouth to put it in"

pshaw! now nothing is to be done

07762 888118
anyone with the answer
please call before morning

.

Lights fall from the Old Man of the Sea (a wrestling poem for Rus Bowden)

we hold until I am exhausted

he is a trickling thing of sand
a scintilla that drains back into the beach

a shock of trees
released by strong winds
he is a fish, a slither
an eel that flits away
then has me pinned

he is all around me
he clenches, shoves my face
towards his
buried down there
beneath our grinding feet
iron-eyed our faces

stare it out underground
through lock and tremor
we are two seismic prayers
to a god divided

he is a lion he is my mother he is the flicker of songbirds falling
as black snow in early evening my fingers are wings are poems
within his smoke we fold back to embrace
count five sudden things of magic
stamp and hold tight

lion mother phantom
my lost brother
whistles hard in the waves

old father in the fallen leaves offshore

we walk into the sea
each carrying the other
light as children who cannot return
rise only as the tide
sends up her drowned lanterns

each with his heart of red sand
catching, holding

our breath beyond reach

.

BIRTH PROSPECTUS.
THE END OF US.
A free E-book By Peter Riley.
Click here to download

for everyone's little brother who died too young:

ICHTHYOLATRY

now I feel like someone

shoved a huge fish into my throat
if you look into my gaping mouth

you can just make out
its pucker just see the glint

of its eyes back there
a monstrous glottal stop

I look out it looks out
those are my eyes too

in there my eyes its eyes
mouth in mouth it wriggles

it freaks I am in the stink of it
all down my oesophagal culverts

its tail flaps from my cloaca
visible even within new trousers

cut for concealment
I now waddle with its cold

between my outer legs
maybe I was always a bit fishy

but this, this, O my people
is something new

.

a moth in your mouth a moth oh good god

on the way home from the pub
a guy accosts me
in a alley
a dirty high hat
breathing it up like an alpaca
or some other stern beast
think you are a poet he says
I am going to kill you poet fuck
tell me how the night sky
add up to nothing how the wind
blow everyone apart
tell me biggest secret
you know
thinks you are so special you
stick a gun cold in my eye
tell me tell me or quickly die
I can't help think
this is the great moment
the whole dirty history of poetry
I have the answer ready
always same answer
ooze from everyone's belly
silence beyond everything
for its expression
I got nothing I say
I am just go home in a cold and stiff wind
please don't harm me
or I will herewith uncoil and eat at your whole fucking head
for I am already known as the gravedigger
even amongst the merest flowers

of evil at which he smiles and becomes now my friend
hand in hand we beguile the night
around us buildings collapse softly
we squat together eat butterflies
that druggle in the mouth
both of us glint
like Autumn storms coming in
leaked low & let loose
.

cows of a the causeway 2

she comes in from the rain
says hey what’s for dinner
says hey..........I'm thinking
of having sex with him next door
at weekends just a sort of arrangement
I haven't told him yet
thought I'd slip it past you first
..................sure he says

he likes you &
his wife would watch
if there was nothing on TV
while we're at it I should tell you

I have a similar deal
....................with your Dad
sometimes your Mother watches
not always sometimes she turns
away............... to gaze at the wall
that writhes with damp and cold
tides of old wallpaper windows
of seaglass ghosts and head-high nettles
..............................the drowning of children

sudden outside voices now stilled O
I dream about such walls as that
..................don't you?
yeah oh yeah she says she slides closer
he feels her moving around inside
but can think of nothing to say
................................—to sum it up neatly:
outside in the garden a gale
whips the washing line
into wild skipping rope cycles
that rip at the long unmown grass
ghost children spring up
beating time.............. into stars

everything is unkempt and ugly
for a few seconds
he bursts over himself
laughs a little awkwardly
shrugs it off
smooths himself
back into place

his face a blue skull
he steps he dances the slow starfish
he veers

aloud to her incoming

rock-and-roll-radio
.

tea coal (self mortrait at dawn after delayed flight)

I sat up all night smoking looking
into some distance as though awful faces
there in the night looked back I wonder
sometimes if I will smoke until
it dries me up like an old timber stood
derelict above the tideline desolate
until I am well enough of myself
desiccated in my own salt and voice
just a thing that looks out
from a pile of frass
feeling for myself in stutters of radio
—it is at these times

that I am at my most inhuman as though
I might rush out and engage
in some act
motivated entirely by silence
by something there in the mist
which I do not even feel
sometimes this is an elevating thing
that makes me climb rooftops in darkness
an animal wired to the night

in that arching pilot rictus
it is in pain that I appear most real
watch the needle
I look to find myself there
in the scattered leaves of late October
look here it is already in the coming repetition
of late hunt it down
for this is an interactive animal
barely brushed by late winds
folded in like a baby that sucks
its own shadow
knowing no other mother to clutch

the sensation is that of a cold moss that seeps
behind the face somewhere
in the olfactory wall the haunted cavities
of pre-language it runs down
through the thoracic circle the abdomen
with its distant cries and heave
it eddies and corrupts in the genitals
settles finally as a dying reptile
in the ossified knee joints

stifled and unspeaking
its tiny mouth stuffed with mothers
stretched in death's happy alarm
over and forgotten
snuff

but feel free to add
your little fucking soft
afterdark breath in your ear
handsliding alerts

& be aware that you dance with the dead people
you are in the presence
of the dead
the sexy dead people

for one night only O
the blinding lights are blowing below



.

Another awful politics cliche back on the rise, and another nice old word about to become unusable.

The Minton Report into the Trafigura Ivory Coast contamination incident

Darvaz: the Door to Hell

this vanishing act runs dry

around of midday I arrives at your house
I don't says much
but swans around there in your backyard

all the while fixes you with wild faces
like a goat
suddenly released into a cinema
couldn't find its way out
got angry sat up on stage glaring out at the crowd
like the devil its elf
bleching out fury
Casablanca running like the sea
white and black
across its hairy toggenberg face

O beard of the prophet now sweep down
this could be the beginning of a uh beautiful elation

"such people we saw the like of there
such glory and fineness walking"

yes oh yes we on Sunday visited him
we found him much diminished
in both cognition and physical ability

you have no idea what's happening now

you, I say, you

I stuff your letterbox with petroleum jelly
I will dance hoofing like a wild buffalo on your car

on your doormat you find
an offer of marriage
a broken balloon
but what care I for your goosefeather bed?

oh if only these words
had fallen suddenly like dead sparrows in China
into ponds all over town

.

teaching a boy /θ/ to enunciate

(the boy with the blue hat under the wailing-tree
finds himself in a wasp world maddeningly abuzz

swirls of dental fricatives hold him electrically crucified
shimmering above the plain
he has therefore no meaning and must withdraw quickly

for into such confusion we sashay like vampires
stopping camp upon the half stair half turned insistent
that this is the music such children made
of what the night
Bela Belial undone teaching the unboy to enunciate peripheral
phonemes of the edges of the mythos grosso I wanted
to hack my way through dream conquistadores
drift upon high the philosopher's tone
the alkahest)

all of it out of reach drowned in articles
in dense green capillary the delta swoon
silver guitar amazon pirarucu sucking in prey
it has teeth everywhere grinding teeth
it has no language
the trees now deep in black water it waits
in the roots always wakeful

the thing
black as water lapping
waiting always

any real poem should come up close
breathe hard in your face
threaten
to murder your family

after that it's as if a boat was cut loose
by drunken strangers at midnight

crashing in your dreams

tomorrow and


.

Edith

have you even any idea?

and what if a young boy just had enough
6 years old he saw a TV thing
that said this is the age of the self
your parents no longer feel a sense of duty
he quite reasonably buys the hour
of the hoot as the dawnwash
elevated he flows let me O god let me
garrotte this hollow
that in his hollow he dives
straight through into the schwa between
where the rats
such a thing such a thing
such a thin and awful thing

hi he says I'm new here
to a piratical fetch on a drippage
both of them squat where
watches below the slow

point he gets that he is the Buddha
he sees that work below him
flowers and new bread emanate
he p[onders] becomes intoxicated
he jumps
he enters the swim
years later
he wakes still there poised

what then he asks
what now
what

he curls back in
understanding the impossibility of everything
I will eat bananas then he says
I will eat biscuits
and gaze from on high
waving my uncut wand
playing with it gently
waxing it up

or I will slough gently into it all
either way
I think my cock just dropped off
anyway
maybe it's time to start
a riotous religion of reeling rats
all of whom now fall to their feet

Christ only knows
where they were before

this acrobatic stuff

aeroscape nude encounter
now you endless (I don't mean
just don't even bask
for again I'm fucked out with the full flood
squawks of
little miss skygod
hacking (to be honeytoed) all night
christ no

moresongs of love i hate love now just like you

me washing in on
the stupid blue beach
a big bird eye watching
over

repeat after me
such anthems of
stark /sorrow/ treelines
snow has gone bad

he wakes again with his gun
to the Buddha's head
everone in the building has a hardon
to see what come next

things slide now
into the cage

the Terror and not the Terror

"offer yourself to him" -- Withnail and I

.