people who know nothing

that dirty little lake-river
where under we sat
when the bubbling
and anyway

even in our twists
whoever
oh I felt and almost did you
so urgent was it then

down by the windfall
where the dreams blow by so slow

that even the daylight
through the smoke/steam
is now unended

for this is a dark,
great love of waters

.

marry me this day, sweet love

all the trees become monkeys at nightfall
their silhouettes falling/failing in black buffaloes of exuberant life-mud

—in wine and strokes we pick the black parasites
from our hides, all of us native as treetops, roots, bark, nothing
beyond what we can see—deserter... we call you that. we dare and dare not.
the mudwine has taken us for harvest. you who deserted us, carry us then
in your strokes, carry us forth and do not. submerged as the naked one lying beneath, your story, your stroked mud, deserter. you who know nothing
and all things in the foul mouth of the harvest-rainbow. you who carry us on

my love our love, all that you are become the treetops now of monkeyed night. deserter. foul mud. breakers of wine. strokes of the carry-harvest,
unleavened, black carry.

fuul steps i mean

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.) 

.

Where has the embedding code gone to?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGZJg4uo3-k

girl from the frontier
girl woman with sixteen new teeth
I have no script
there you are
up in  arms, aloft as balloons

the bad man in the woods

monster with no teeth
even my boys now know Herb Robert
at the waysides
oh look such illegal pickings but how foolish
we have seen tormentil and have picked
by the Iron Age bridge
in the woods
by the river out of Hell
that rushes sometimes black always heavy
germander speedwell and its demons
tiny fleurs have we harvested
for beauty alone, no
also for summer's novelty
and the crushing sense of cloud
down in the valley

we are not allowed here
not on this embankment
this land
where the germander speedwell
lifts the stones in geological time
and the tiny beetles
crawl in our moss-mouths I don't wish
to be violent
but say that again we are not allowed
with such peaceful intent
and such little boys

.

Catholicon riff

so this meteor crashes into the house
of a priest and everything is broken and ablaze
and his concubine's bed is flying towards
well maybe the sea or maybe just the nearest village
it won't be possible to tell until the next morning
and he himself has landed upon a neighbour's roof
with three dogs and an ocelot
that was weirdly uplifted from a nearby menagerie
owned by a rich guy who is now all mush from the blast
what a selective blast but miracles like that can happen
so the flying concubine cries out oh can you help before I land
in the sea or on the land surely God can help
but the priest who now has three dogs and an ocelot
which feels like more than he has had for some seasons
shouts back no my love for I have to light somehow
the vesper candles so you must trust unto God
whereupon he alights into the still-smouldering locale
and partakes
of some wine and then earthly as it seems
and for the first time in history
the Catholicon holds no mystery
oh he says
this critter's got me all blistery
this wine seems fulla whine
and not entire divine
I must of kinda lost a lot
with that there rooftop ocelot


.



.

if like this, like this

hands in your hair

your hair your hair of olive wind
if a language flowing outward

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

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

your contours your hachures your rising and falling
your planes your whirling your little Sufi gasp

if like this, like this

heartbeat and breath and hollow ground
and midnight morning and all day and dusk that arcs between
blue spirit flames, radio crackles

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

in the fading red shadow of this our body

then this, this is the spray of night

[duende, red-black, in murmurs]

.

that's one dead uncle

the uncle has died the top hat

the high hat the cartwheeling

avuncular aunt in her/his sleeps

the last lap before Runcorn and Rainhill

he has gotten/taken off at Edge Hill his

hat that flies afar afield I swear

he was alive when last his face

his bomber sheep convertible

slowmotion dunes crowd out

his face a sort of function a sort

of etcetera a sorting and clipped

masonic scouse that elides the top

hat the vat the fatcurled cat the scat

and scant the cant the pant eek the rant

of garage sexpower the whole

damn shower nothing but a chair

lies he there the brother wyght

eek know his fernal troth and plight

a sort of half-love of which were made

this shade in Lancs half-glade and clade

the chair still warm impres't the rest

to rest to rest enough the high hat

on which he sat long and did rat

all things earthly 'neath his beastly bat

.

brown water at the weir

if only you had seen this
with its light that sprays the water
like a childhood machine-gun
and where we sit
when we are done with the races
and just wait in the mud
with our oh-he's-doing-it-again  faces
by that pool
and how he still wants to jump
up that wall, all lichened
and mossy are they the same no
all over his knees
for ten minutes we on the bridge
lost him in the shade downstream
as he tried so hard to win
there in the race

this ancient and aching shade

so much love in this: a new animal leaps
from of all of it

.

hitting one's head in the schoolyard

a tropopause to all things a place
where emotion stops
temperature is regulated
the wind suddenly ceases
in a long blue band of nothing
and forever we fall
into softness

oh I am such a zebra with this

.

slow-motion by a canalside at midnight

beyond normality or Rock and Roll
this music of night and ejection
these ghosts that hover and splash
hover and splash
almost we can reach out and touch them
their green marsh-gas, their haunting
but no they are gone and will not come again
down there their drowned faces
vapid as the unborn
no, they whisper
we will not come

.

the omen-bird
bounces the canal at noon—
strange koans ripple
.

the petrichor of what is lost

sun and rain that hiss equally as they stoop
their equivalent rainbows on the grit, washing
into the heather scoops, and thereafter

through the smoke of this he walks away
—rain and sunlight that carve new
ruts to the past in his face

breathe in, and think
of how the mind-camera will pan and pan back

then be still as a moonlight hare
in the scent of yourself
.

infinite commas discovered near Stratford etc

is this a long lake, he asks
no I say, it is called a canal
and so we proceed

into a similar level of unknowing
almost Martian and from early space-science
as though a man with purple scissors
ruled the world

and all that dwelleth etc. look now
how such precision is required
to enable one plant to operate
along the canal bank, faced with
so much contusion—what
does contusion mean in this world
of meagre plant-life, clinging
as the boats laugh along

yes, what does plant life
what does canal
what does head wound
we did all that already

now just this: only an ape
would ever use a comma in poetry,

,

.

these collisions by the river by the wood

it's like getting mirrors involved in sex
suddenly
the Sun bursts over your new shiny oh for
the love of
nothing you know or will ever know
beyond that
moment when two tiny things suddenly
occupy
the rest of your lives and your children

your now dancing far fairy children
alone in the wooded wiles by the fires

looking aloft into twigs and smoke

all bets are off with mushrooms now
around here
.

This may be my favourite by the almighty Ramones

Sirius

are you too serious?
am I too serious?
has the world just fallen out of a tree
and landed
in a brown paper bag
attached at the mouth
to a panic attack?

.

there's no reason
for that cow that fell from the sky
it was just cow time

.

a while in the mist

all your fear is gone
your once-broken heart is nestled
there in the warm grass
near the waterfall
that cascades in your memory/body

your children of the past
and those to come they
are here too for this is the warm place

wait a while in the mist
that spreads cool as tall trees
over the mosses
wait here, lie

as a shade in shade
for all the world is fearful
but not here
where there is no time

where all is secret
in the walled garden
with its pulse
its butterflies that alight upon
your fingers
which are roots

back to the cascade
of beginning
stretch here, breathe in
the sacred the broken
air beyond air
light fills everything

there is nothing to think

it is time: at last
and at first
it is time

.

quite why we bother

down the heat and the path along

[by the railway]

by the railway-fennel ]grows it is difficult to find[
though its scent

..................................is everywhere after.

(You have crossed the old, collapsing bridge.)

the big mill chimney is still there—unstill
it shakes down a plume of shade that cycles
like a sun dial gnomon

......records nothing but its own presence
on the water

where sometimes-geese in their own concerns

and chase away the smaller ducks
halfheartedly

"halfway to here and there is that bridge
and after that I don't know"

it seems futile sometimes
but humans are good at/getting/up/again
...............walking
after having been laid waste

like everywhere flies after a volcano

.

Give thanks to the universal Lala!

when lies damned lies and atavistics (for Pam O'Shaughnessy)

under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me—Orwell

not alone not in isolation
bouncing back and forth
the origo of us of both
borne and birthed and transmitted

from one to one to one
warrior-hunter-mother in fire and fret
of the singularity that was both in one
no splitting no breaking of this

our covenant not in violence or love
no gods but us reached out to fashion

evil in clay or flesh but desire
only down the crying years we lay
together

drying on the mudbanks growing
wingfins of the halfheart assembled
together made the monster that wakes
each and every—who now can unweave
the whole world and time and point
stark as an angel and cry he alone
it is he who must not be

when I chose you
and you chose me
under the spreading
chestnut tree?

.

.

send your love to our pale blue dot

for all its unmeaning

Will you live to eighty-three?
Will you ever welcome me?—REM

Virgil and Wyatt are shooting at invisible dragons
that shimmer and dance over the rooftops of the stables
they aim low and wide for the mirage effect

just after High Three-noon occurs mythic collateral
further down the meridian

[these fire-hoofers have secret names, unspeakable
outside of conflagration]

like some sequential pruritus [tell me you know this
effect] lights are firing up
into constellations do you know this effect

of history this working at one that lights another
like the beacons of the body for there in the sand-
<paintings the itch-bird to a low hum weaves>

and it is prūrītus for it is prurient as nerve gas
that worms subcutaneously that ramifies the systemics
that pauses and looks out when it reaches the eye
prurience and prurites and the itch
the deep ache that is such prefix snapping as it swings

low over Tombstone plucking the wounded into dark
legends that dance upon the blinding wavetops

no says Virgil
no, forever

.

all night hooting
like a mad owl
that mad owl

.

I could trust you if only you did not use high-rising terminals and look so orange when you think of the past

fierce frogs in mist

if only and then the rain
does everyone in the world wear glasses now
even in the rain such rains
have we expired even watching TV even that?

eyes are sore but not terminally so my eyes
are sore with thinking she says
laid there like Jesus spread your legs and think of home, ET

yes just do it and don't think even of that
it is the time in between again look now
the boundless frogs
bound without sound.what will we think.when we are woken?

.

register today and get exciting new features

what does she mean by 'strong, warm resinous'? [how to boil]
let them stand then you'll find quite small is and is mixed
to smooth elastic (you can make this just by placing)
when you are satisfied because I don't mind if one
is fractionally larger and has begun to shrink
slightly away—first of all, melt—
all down the hot aches the slick that comes for us all

.

The raft of the Medusa

Hwæt!

According to research by Dr. George Walkden, a University of Manchester lecturer,  the Old English word hwæt, which begins the English language’s oldest epic poem (“Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga,  þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas  ellen fremedon!”), should not be read as an interjection separate from the rest of the first line  (“Listen! we have heard of the might of the kings”),  but rather as part of a complete exclamatory sentence—something like “How we have heard of the might of the kings.”

Citing research that “there’s no record of the Anglo-Saxons using exclamation marks, or any other form of punctuation, besides the full stop (or ‘point’) and the occasional semicolon” Walkden declares all previous interpretations—”‘What ho!’ (Earle 1892), ‘Hear me!’ (Raffel 1963), ‘Attend!’ (Alexander 1973), ‘Indeed!’ (Jack 1994), and ‘So!’ (Heaney 2000)”—to be wrong.

Read the full article HERE.

.

menses and scarp

Hwæt!

Wyatt back
from the farflung
hauling home
home the sonnet
eek the heart that 'pon it
as if by dogs
from anchorage to nome
curseth the cadence and all what don it

(barrage-creeping firewall and their equi/v/alents

in the cerebellum but what of such War?):
—more of this later—the red barn
its proxies that tinge
through the psychotropes where one ought only
to hear of smoking idylls? for what a word's worth etc?
there are creatures, one cries, creatures

cries

smoking kills— so many smoking kills
—so many, but the e-mote seems at once

spurious spouting when with such windows or other
outfalls already
like this or...
this

[ore] the broadcast seams
worked out (work doubt!)
by forcèd men with baskets where the Sun:
Ceres/Bellona:
your many smoking kills where the Sun
at low angles in the woods; the Sun at Low

—Angles in the Woods Cry Havoc low
an gills
in the cerebella
only you could ever, only you

monster, your many smoking skill

.

in the dark way of aberration and sledges. oh

so this guy that jumps
well just before
it goes into that
he thinks oh
my wife has abandoned me
this train
my children have figured me for the disaster
even though I can make good trifle
what the idiotic Italians
call English Custard
Jesus
all that it is
all it will ever be
some kind of custard suicide
with rabbits
jumping
after the train blows by
in an awful blast of night
fuck
it's always more than that
three rabbits at least
and then a crow
crarks and everyone
says shut up hey nothing
not now
shh

.

all things here at once

this phone surrounded by flies
this phone that never rings
listen, your bed is filled with biscuit crumbs
and you are a frog anyway belly-up
the solar flares gleaming on your white skein

that somehow like a miracle

and its ruts are filled with your motorcycle-
roaring

and it really is Spring somewhere

and the night never did

.

there are no experts about you and me we are on our own

so drive me to Hell
you'll never find anything, Copper
I learned how to sit and wait forever
before you were born—Madeleine Shine

there are no experts about me and you
we are on our own
how tall you seem when you
are sitting down
quite the angry little animal

a numberplate says 333 and I can't
help thinking and then a broken window
at knee height
and the Sun bright and low
across the fire station roof
where once oh forget it
I am at a place called Eastwood Court
as though for epiphany or samosas
or some dead drop-off like someone
faraway died in a hole and a choir
gathered

and the way is filled with light
like the Hiera Hodos if, you know, if...

omens you just won't believe

what happens next
with that screeching car and the woman
full of ball bearings no one could ever solve

"the moment when energy flows YES"

in another window: "facials at half price,"
which I cannot help relating to pornography
and then: "the colour is called"
it was of course transitive, but the intransitive
is so farther so better so wider and its victims
it doth swallow and swift and so all against
the Law

and the white-angled Sun pulses
out the GPS

man, it's all over

.

when the levels uplit the levels

half of this and half of that
as though such draughts
and the house half full of ghosts
of the interior and interior
reckoning, for only then

as though some judgement or determination
from on high
as a kite flying low over the levels
it comes
knocking at three am
what you ask what
but it stands there pale
as harvests as half-eated bad moons with no faces

that anyone would recognise such things
at all is beyond
the pale/faced and tied
to the pole squirming before the denouement
where yes all that
as expected oh

it's love
and nothing at all
just a plane that fell from the sky
in pieces like ashen snow
just a boy
sick with it
off school
forever

.

Misanther Panther

that got scientists thinking

MISANTHER PANTHER 

in making the concept of entropy precise
any of his comments had an open mind
which represents rank and enfilade do you
overstep the mark not much short
of blood loss involved in a member
of its own affairs—he gave them the slip
THE CLAW-SLIP THE HEAD 
by getting no idea is that true it can be EEK
shaken off simply by getting relocation
powers the difference everything they could
in the succession of firstborn girls to push
it through in one day—stay right where
you are in a single day in the opposite direction
unaltered even with incomplete reassurance-
an old question back into the consciousness
no other frontiers
whose lands had been,
I felt, deeply ashamed 
(finally after centuries it steps out, the PANTHer the ThInG)

...........................[it didn't work] ****

veering later, backing in the commons
at the forefront of arguing 
year on year he too has shaped
the voices of the living/their/appalling/histories

now, now they saw a chance to do the same 

the whole land has become
remarkable
forever

.

FOR SOME REASON TWENTY-SIX HAIKU FOLLOW THIS ANNOUNCEMENT

this black beam that can't support its own light

.

all around the lake below Cat Bells lemon drizzle

.

one of those days when all your teeth somehow don't quite fit

.

that's me and you Iris, far off on that bridge, look

.

it's that time again when the big hand points to nothing

.

arcades 
of nothing the big lake
.

full of monkeys the car slips quietly into the river

.

6 am not a bell ringing anywhere

.

one by one the frozen crows fall off the wire

.

if I had a pound for every time I'd have nothing

.

this and that most of all this

.

under the ice your early face beautiful frog

.

8 am who doesn't need a servant?

.

all up and down the eastern wall that maddening flute

.

it's not quite Winter not until you too start snowing

.

in all of my dreams that vast black bird stamps upon the ice

.

love's first shiver my third eye takes a second glance

.

Elvis came by
on his bike
pale as a duck

.

girlfriend in tree by the pale gate tooth problem

.

another bowl half full of dead friends

.

up from the aliment new snow all over the table

.

fragment and phrase oh shut your mouth how can you say

.

blue knives at midnight by the garage a frog hops by

.

melting frost down the wire you old crow half full of love

.

gumph like suddenly a head in an ashtray

.

night's hurricane
in the morning
we lie like lost leaves

.

wormy as the copper bottom

found three boys rotted onshore
or half so as squids, half-human and one still fancy
oh you mary sailors
child from salty shadow she crieth
what then of you, child of herringbones
you severy purpoose and freet?
and the while the wavebirds in their keg-leg-longings
of pups and rots and if you swaiver
face up to a seven side-on, breaching
the son-keel we'll give you then, listen there
on watch, for we abaft
the fortitudes, the runnings, the most of all
the berm and discount at 45 no 35
the goodwin the shocks and socks
the layingdown and the timber below
in the floors and strings that hold
and all beside out-cocks the blow

.

so sag the benches-O

the white fields of nothing
the swaying fields of empty plants, flowers
bucky pools and bellbloom as paradise and its pools
here here
bullet
someone someone
must change these sheets before morning
before the arrival
no you and I must wait here
upon the hillside
with our Accuracy International stolen
and I will shoot and you will spot
one termite below
the eye from a shrew
just before Dawn
upon the day
think now
when the parade proceeds
to walk upon the shimmer
where once
my father
lost his footing
only to find himself wifeless
in Cordoba
bang lifeless with a mouthful of figs
shrews out of his ears
love now

hats like we stook

dating symbols across the carpark
in the near-east.forget.forget.forget
some holy man hollow as backstreet straw
says this: we look upon him [alarums alarums]
for a few seconds before ignition
before reaching out with hammers
to break his rodent compulsion
one's advice must be to distrust
while trusting
to unlove 0)this buddherism see
until the story breaks
down the hillside as burning pigs
at the carthage for Tanith and not
to the awful, the convulsive, the sheer
the /Breton/ thing of the fixed

fixed without that no that knife that bird aloft
do not enter/enter/do/not
not now oh but see
this is how
Steppenwolf
oh stop it now stop/silly says the countess
all tickled asquirm
with a key in its fundament so unlovely giggle away then

for this, this
nothing yet

in the yawls of monty zoo


.

all cats rehomed.

these things shudder by as half-eaten dreams but who gives
their outcome unknown
once I was eating a cake the next minute in wild ships
and this was in India by the southern lights and cookies

on midlife half-human scooters in rainstorms there in Goa
oh come on with the waterfall then! you monkey-faced tumble

all day and night Vishnu fucking Vishnu
well I cared for nothing but vindaloo tortoise
it's a colour most pronounced. it is a colour most pronounced
(most prized and otherwise-hued)

for there by the river as dead women
rocked by our swollen footage and beyond snakes on all sides

on the tide a huge dead elephant
onshore a nothing
some Gay men from Birmingham

and all night at dead Coco Beach
near to the rainstorm in a hut
made from cardboard where once
the wicked witch of the west et up all of a tortoise

now see how you is

but next the jellyfish.think hard.think soft and slow

by the pools this boy over and over
no he says no this is not the poem you were born to write
then he jumps, runs, snips
turns into an old man with binoculars
he is unreachable now and will not speak

you've never seen the sky so low
if you sing this shit again you will surely die
Coco Beach near Namaste near the chickenfish gurning so beyond

Portugal all over like there are horses, territories
colonies of way-out spice fucked from behind

look: potatoes, cinammon, wine, vinegar, dead stuff and packed hair

I am all done with it anyway and halfway baked
when he comes back from the pool
waSted like that and little and offers up
an oyster yeah i grab it
next thing we are buddies
drowning together in blue vapour
our hearts streaming out as red strings
on the guitars [red/blue]
of people we will never know/knew
the man out at sea the man who stands there

we open each others' wardrobes look in  at our peril

I want to say more have you seen will you ever know

what about it anyway?

.

alum and white again some baths of lead

the patchwork the pidgin
the pooling and how there you stood
drooping more how you were lit
in such lobbies and counterfoils all night
on the bed bouncing in deliria
not with sex but with ardour and the many fascines
thrown on all sides like incense or gingerbread
how we bounced not once but thrice
barefooted and and
then such rides to the north
and i cannot exclaim it
freckles and dead meat
and a river running by
and on the tops the beginnings of snow
underneath it all ash and the ceaseless
sound of cars driving
along the high street the high road
into the highest and nearest river
and above it all on the tops
the soft leavening of snow
starting to happen
along the corridor route
above the gulfs so deep
all of us falling at the last
gasping up into the interior
but there on the tops, snow
into which as any would
we arms like rebar and over
the far we'er hills we overgo
nothing like this
nothing such

and there on the tops
you know again
this smallest snow
.

the difficult bell that wyndes across the mill yard at hometime in the shifts

wayward Buddha who drifts lonely in the illustrious mist
Buddha three foot off the floor
we are not envious
neither that otherbuddha who walks over rivers
it's nothing that gravity can't fix

and all our songs in disarray
even there in the flower tides
what is it, campion? the bellflower, the germander speedwell?
down at this Wycoller they care for aisles
do you feel such longing
Buddha of the far night?
with your missiles in tact
and who knows now the junction
of tactile and tact?

she will not answer
but that was always unexpected

it's nothing that a brisk walk down the ginnels

(to the mill by the river by the fields of sabotage
our clogs upon the cast iron are not smelted
and oh such oxygen)

not you again

(it is reported that 21.5 people were killed earlier today in a suicide attack
in Jerusalem. it is reported but unconfirmed that God was amongst the many injured.
my disbelief has left a hole in the sky
through which a stain tinges)

nothing. nothing. not any more.
only the wynde and the slow/fast creep
where the water used to be

you with your brightness
your unexpected tightness
I was once a wild hedgehog
what lived live there in ditches
such things we have now
whiteness of bristle and bone
lightness even, scarce, unknown
all now agog
clouda moona thickets of the far
bush
no one ever

haiku
why won't you rhyme?
it's high time!

extraordinary measures in the sloop

03:57
and such clothes
maybe you think
look now
it is almost midnight
and all your cutlery jumping
like wild bells
I am a thing with a hood
you are the rattle
at the end of the world
as the rivers spill
as the horses slowly topple
but look again
for we are all of kindness here, now
it's time to stroke and collide
time to breathe
this is not yet the future
where we will be asked
it is just that moment
when we need to know
that hey
sink soft
no one will kill you tonight

it's a rare thing
whatever you got

down deep again, where they don't ask
the wildfires
shh
sleep soft, all of you
there are fireworks over the hills
and we heed them not
not tonight
sleep all my wide babies of snowy places
we are only ill with love
soft as the touch of faraway
and your whole heart snuffed yes
oh just watch, listen
tonight
we are saying yes

(what could Minkowski meant?)
(Oh be are baby tonight)
(Oh)
(0h)
like a dream and snuffle it comes ever on
oh stop it she says stop it
this moment yes this moment
is all there will ever so

.

ever yet in the crepuscules

come on motherfucker
your head fell off three years ago
when we stood outside that window
looking at the jewels
all I'm saying is three guys
with sledgehammers
could get through this sex
in seconds
and walk away as nuns
never to be seen again
om
I mean on
the high sad streets of Wilmslow
where the cratered malevolence
of Gold ticks its heart attacks
all of us now
Buddhists filled up with frozen fish
at the thought
let's do it tonight
OM
yes/no
tick tick
boom alabama
and all points past
one half of a tiger
and all the world

.

haiku

think and think again
half-moon—
what star-lit fools

.

haiku

three days drinking wine
with the curtains closed—
storm clouds gathering

.

haiku

rowing my boys
around this sparkling lake—
all our ancestors

.

haiku

through the dark
the owl hears the mouse—
two shivers

.

pottery

Don't trust anyone. There are too many anyones and they will tear you in all directions with their opinions. Only trust yourself, and then only when you are utterly relaxed, almost dreaming, when you don't care about anything or what anyone thinks, and you are almost prepared to die in the next line. Keep your deepest feelings close, but don't EVER let them write your poem or paint your picture. When unsure what to write next, go climbing. There's no such thing as a writer's block. That's just you blocking out the light. It's not an obstacle. Write about the new intrusive shadow.

.

The Triggerfish Critical Review Issue 11 is now live online and can be viewed here:

http://triggerfishcriticalreview.com/

Can't get the  proper hyperlink function working properly for some reason, but this overloaded blog seems to get increasingly clunky as I get older. I fear its legs are failing, its heart disrhythmic, its appetites awry...

Anyway, a kind of in-house edition featuring most of the scaffolding crew who produce Triggerfish. That seems like an unusual idea, but unusual isn't bad.

Apart from that, there's truly fantastic, Taoist artwork by artist ZZ Wei, as well as an interview I did with him via his wife Hsuan Lin, as translator.

If you've been following Triggerfish, if you're an afishonado (sorry, just couldn't help it - Hail Mary!), then you know who to expect in an 'in-house' edition. Enjoy or avoid. But don't miss ZZ Wei!

.

there was a new ape called Cuadrilla
who acted like he was Godzilla
he hacked and he fracked
till our plates were all cracked
but he promised to use Polyfilla

some other exercise thing wah

all the trees become monkeys at nightfall
their silhouettes falling/failing in black buffaloes of exuberant life-mud

—in wine and strokes we pick the black parasites
from our hides, all of us native as treetops, roots, bark, nothing
beyond what we can see—deserter... we call you that. we dare and dare not.
the mudwine has taken us for harvest. you who deserted us, carry us then
in your strokes, carry us forth and do not. submerged as the naked one lying beneath, your story, your stroked mud, deserter. you who know nothing
and all things in the foul mouth of the harvest-rainbow. you who carry us on

my love our love, all that you are become the treetops now of monkeyed night. deserter. foul mud. breakers of wine. strokes of the carry-harvest,
unleavened, black carry.

.

same river thrice with narrative for those in need

a man walked sideways for fifteen days it was a discipline
taught to him by a guru as an act intended to bring about
awakening of a sideways sort but after these fifteen days
the man felt neglectful of the other direction and side
and felt that he must now attend to that
but in these opposing fifteen days he felt
that he was somehow revisiting earlier work
and indeed did he arrive after much thought and travail
at that place where the guru still stood urging him on towards
one side or the other it was somehow difficult now
to identify sides and the man decided not sidewalks
but rivers might be his thing and therefore left for a place
where there were known to be such rivers even in their sidedness
and downward determining and there eventually he arrived
although his motion had been still a little sideward
as of a river or wind although either might be disputed
and there there he sat and did not think any longer
of aught but rivers and their directionlessness
and each night there by the river was as though
a hurricane and a vast mouth and a red light that gleamed
and in all he was happy with it and felt it to be
a kind of love of which he had not known
and one night he slipped softly into the river
with pockets filled with stones and was borne away
in some direction that seemed at once this way and that
so now the direction seemed not to matter
and he slept softly there being carried down or up
to the new and farther place of ending and beginning
like some message in a bottle that could not be salvaged
until the very end and the sediment itself would be raised
now compacted and formed into rock that towered like time


.

every time is the first time

all night the wood runners back and forth under the lights the birds the fell-faced giants. nothing can stop this now and it rolls in again again. have you seen this calamity across the fields when the linseed turns blue and stops for a second with its hiss? something about this that turns everything. then we know at last. that wind giant was too busy so did not stop. even though there you lay broken he would not stop. out there in the wind urgency has collapsed. they lay upon their sides laughing tornadoes of death. fulmars of nothing. vespers and kindnesses that lie flaccid. some winds are too much for our little windows you damn fool, he cries, throwing the antique beaker from Iberia. all our clothes leak. sadness stalks the land like a wind of murder

.

post-pneumatic religion and inedible dates huff

as though the wainscot widened and an eye
or organ or otherwise enquiry
as though you there in reverie sat upright
as though a child's toy suddenly moved
in one flash six feet across the floor
and you devoted an entire life
to seeing that again
but never outside of sleep
oh see how the tip flares
backlit as shared ancestry
oh my abdomen/thorax/head
my chitin and wing-casing
my measly leggage that will not suffice

Bucky says no not up or down just out there
for how now such direction after Galileo
[if they ever get it working and trust Europe
for a name like that and anyway not to work]

might just as well ask
does the wind blow
or is it sucked?

either way never to be seen again

.

salvage operations at Dream's door

after the dust after the night the stamps and long looks
it must be that he revisits the area
in search of fragments, moments

that should not be left behind.spirits
that can still be salvaged and drawn forth
from what seemed present but was really aside

alongside and if one had looked with the edges
of one's eyes it could already have been seen
that those were dead channels whose signals

could not arrive in the present and would have no life
in any future beyond eccentric/specialist histories
he comes back with handsful of broken artefacts:

tablets etched with mistakes.de facto promises
never now to be.long dream vistas sketched
in air quickly exhaled and forgotten

bones, wet clay, blood and fibre.this will take time
but time and reassembly are what are left
on this side of the magic door.he is thankful for that

.

meridians of what is not (Ah Pook, the Destroyer)

again the sprawl and slur of unreason

as the whole day leaves in a hurry
mopping itself back up on the way across
"who really gave that order?"
reanimated/reactivated/reassembled as a kind of death

that reaches out an unseen hand to trip those dancers
who did not look and would not look
again the bodies broken on the wet road

raising feeble heads and wondering what
the/de/light/me/not the quint/essence
the pipes the pipes are calling
from way down the fountain around which

we inreeled the Sci-Fi strain threatening to life
unaccepted/unfillable/inviolate
only half alive skims over surfaces

never once looking down
not even at maps or other forms of the below-
oh no he cries oh such schlock and schtick
as the whole day the week or several arrives

and leaves in one such flash and flush
quite of the order of hands.quiet.shying
hush now hush—the beginning

of the world is nigh

.

a 10 word challenge poem from a poetry group somewhere

zebras, stripy horses maybe...

some frivolity some alacrity but not that, no not airborne
not something public and known
lifted from the river, scooped, but whirled,
same but different
oh but a sort of flight and beauty and care and sweep
quite the opposite of how you consider it: fast. as if
strength had other cases.wafting onshore at low water
the wave-destination across all oceans
me and you forever.things like that. moon and tide

 .

not even one swallow makes a summer (a much-reducible complexity)

truly for you nothing is written, Lawrence, blah blah—can't remember who Omar Sharif

I will revive etc as though revivification was a wheeled animal
suited to presentation in a Dover Area School hearing of the flagellars

nothing left of her but hairclips

perhaps some DNA

which even post-apocalypse

takes time to wash away

all this people informed

all this telling

all this offering

you've got to stop

all this wanking

why, will it make me go blind etc

no but it means you are ...

all the effort and sharing and volunteering and introduction

all dedicated ex post facto to the urgent proof, the question

the trial and strappado and squassation of the proof

of the old untruth that not even one swallow does not indeed

make anything

.

counterflarf

love tomato

in high-end supermarkets
I've driven 100 miles
this is like Disneyland
at the wrong time of year
in every dazzling
a chance mutation
it tastes of absolutely nothing
from the south of Italy
and of course smells fantastic
it's certainly possible
it's not going to fly in the breeding
a raw cranberry
a household product?
down towards Dorset
for the most part

the weather now
working its way
and the far south-west
the middle part
the rest of the day
the best of the temperatures
sing, sing

hundreds of extra police dominate
the top slots
there are no signs
on the start line
at the halfway mark
it's still not clear

these dramatic details

flarf arf

unnecessary paperwork

a man walking found yesterday
has taken the top spot
the richest person from iron ore
one of three
having grown
now look
the lost chances
taken down it says
the brothers are thought to be
the end
who died needlessly
was treated like luggage
immediate improvements have been made
following footsteps
Warren/Justin/Bill

it's time for Sunday
medical practice
should Islam play?
the natural platform
we simply don't know what
we are joined
this was Stalin
what happened to
Sufism was the perfect unable
ready to fight to the death
a jihad trail, that's the sauce
architects

average Russians, ask
we actually sought out what to make people happy
so they lose
let me ask
it's so implausible
there's a huge amount to deal with
we didn't think we had a perfect way
one way
let's deal with that
the primacy of religion
at the very least
I'm not sure
an intrinsic calling
you couldn't have

it means more
for instance
let me just put a final question
put it crudely
ten years ago
suddenly
in my opinion
I certainly agree
an internationally acclaimed pianist
has been convicted of blasphemy
hanging over him
in which

switched off indefinitely [some out-Abilene Paradox]

he sees the lights mutters oh the lights look he says
lights ahead lights I know them what they mean
there is time he thinks and forgets them right there

in the blue zones are symbols that represent wrecks
not so much in the physical but in the connections
that went before.everyone.at some level.sees this coming

ignorance which can only be by choice.either of display
or of discovery.harken to these deeper haptics
of the infrasonics.of the sub-semantics

How To Make Things Dead:

stop but there is no stopping for there are no responses
and the cavern does not echo.the quiet.too quiet.
lets it happen
will not intervene will not reach out will not say stop you/I/we
are entering the irredeemable world from which
no one returns.he says there is no such world but that
is only his view ahead into the lights and he will fly there
alone.all others having abandoned the craft before impact

I or you didn't want this.therefore it was inevitable
let's not let's do it yes/no
too late it's undone
in the oncoming retreating light

"the exorcism typically requires the summoning of demons in both
 parties, first allowing their terror of each other
then the utter dispelling of the myth
that they were demons at all. in all cases
these conditions are early fears, and can go on
to become anything, given sufficient wind and gust
from the thighbone trumpets"— Bon Po Exorcism,
Madeleine Shine, 1989

.

.

blue

black branches on blue
first bird already singing
from the silhouettes

.

rearing cornices of the upshut

so we're zooming in
already your teeth an issue of disarray

the snow has cornices, architraves, mouldings
ogee/torus/egg and dart/astraglomancy
these terse things undistinct and while I looked-O

down South/Sith in the vapid fronts a blackbird
there have been already many disasters
555333if you know not
I met her at the railway station such gaslights we reached
she was wide, Gothic, adorned, gaslit
the line offered such virtue and escape
out there in the gasnight a blackbird beneath
and all now lost
.....boys forever jumping on hammers
a thing leaps now from on high wails
battering the shell into extinction but we care not
for this
all day shimmying
up and down through the public doors
watch this we cry forth
watch again with no hands
watch
how...we...climb
through the moss/through the moss
bang and bang again
if ever there was a reason
for time to have such a reason
then surely this is the reason
shut up, she cries, out there with her hammer
don't fall, no, don't
it's worse down there
at nightfall carrying home broken-legged
bearing away
fractured sons of adventure
all Easter lofted in the snows
lambkins dead below
stop

.

Yes to this

machine sea (2011)

ugh a dread from over
            the far morbay that blackback fells stark
                         into spluts of early birdscold

a monster inching inthing .              that ingrew
[airturtles in lifts of silent drubdead] a waiting grew in-again
and ingrew
until over all.the cock and cocklefield was a mainshout pulked

all-ending the lowscrats
in their long-hauled ruggers lugged hard.
the gutwives widing the redroll to belift
                                        in now the men the drymen in, in

acres now to the barrel-beaches with the uncut catch inwarped.
fishimps and ghosts sidelaying low as lie-low for Jamaico

on the eastlandic scottles .............of west herringbane
and chinee soup schlocked in-out in octofathoms
of hemp drabingers, haulers, menwomen
from the near-sea teeters.a washup iglooed him up in rubs
on a southbeach known by no one.his/her face disglued

the songs of how they wore their sea-sucks unscrewed
now from his beachheart and heave-head for the far Cathay tubs


(published in The Triggerfish Critical Review,  2011)

 .

snow

we drive home
in other directions—snow
like dead confetti

.

even everything is almost nothing

so close so almost close so far so
the night smothers us all in snow-soft
the strings stray minutely and wholly into utter dissonance
making decisions, making decisions, busy busy busy
my word, my word
the unfamiliarity
the compression into almost nothing
that contains the universe in embryo
the screensaver green in the back room
flickers
you, you think it is a ghost
but it is everything else
falling like leaves backlit
in some cellar faraway
flushed with wild solvents
all these ambients thrashing their last
(all my plans/all my plans

out like little lights
...

.

cinquain

I flush
the fish away
she beats a kettle drum
the kids watch the funeral rites
struck dumb

.

all quiet on the Preston Front

most vexatiously ill-clad under a car in the snow—Madeleine Shine

the waves onshore make no sound

their energy displacement stifled—

the seabirds do not cry

the fish the wind the sunlight

have no way to know

the proton gradient builds

the periphery cannot hold

nothing is uttered, everything is lost

all energy sucked back in the counter-tsunami

draining far off out there

through holes in the seabed

raining down far below

into caverns that echo only with silence

for even there

no words, no cries, no sounds of waterfalls

nothing now to guide the way

only the collapse of a wave function that could not hold

could not speak

would not

wave

.