philosophy
is remembering your girlfriend
when the lights blow out

.

commas
are the breaths
within kisses

.

Quick poem for Duncan's sculptures

swollen their hard-soft bellies
that are not bellies beyond mathematics
their beaks that are not beaks
this sculptor of the infinite
will confound us with his Grecian tricks
as a sky will fool us with its love

.

riverghosts aside

the grass in the glint
the hand of your hand
the river's brush
the sun's cackles as the low
small things
away they won't

go the infested the path
what
now always never

.

Worlde's Blis: The Jaye Consort.

her drums pound
all the night
soft pigeons at dawn

.

ONESUPPOSESTHEAPOLOGIA (eek means also)

there is not one moment in/for which
the clockface of dandelions blown
out as basements will not tell
its facial tells at the table in the tension

of rigging ropes in the niceness tarred
as ancient kings of Natron salt
of all kinds and hues they all taste

with deep ceramic spoons they call it
that now that lying together in sleep or else
now world and children ere the moon the spoon
clock that has no face that has no rise

upon it at dawn and withafter dawn
and at nightsfall in the holy sex
of six and six and nine and hereafter

where the deadfolks the deadfux
as we now lay/lie with our feet updown
on the slow-rafted yet again to flux
what we have love what we have

death in all of it like fossil vampires
what sucks up fires eek phires
eek oupyres eek

so let loose
the fucking goose
eek lend-lease
the freaking geese



.

view blog

it means like the shifting the wheeling
of Patton's army to Bastogne in an instant
this miracle that cannot happen
like that it will not be trusted
for we have no priests with weather prayers
such forces as will have to be arrayed

Oh look, a delight of confluence
of water of flowers of light
and all down the road to the shakes
our hearts delighted

until we reck we rode with skeletons
such liches and fetches
all of it gone now
like unto little lights
underwater snuffing our futures
past and unpast we will not learn or unlearn

our stories of our lost children

.

pale early morning
drums
all quiet

.

Orange into black in the Yorkshire sinks.

always though they follow

all our secrets it is as though
we had convened perhaps
at the riverside
had been alerted to the coming
of the river monster and had fled
dispersed
never to be seen again

our lives are safer now
though so much lessened
by this dearth of monsters

.

Eithe Genoimen (reversal)

I would that I were littered stars
cast up upon the tide
that all my eyes might gaze aloft
to where you hence reside

.

fuck you he would say
with his dripping schticks—
I am Nature

.

ghosts by the river

the glint in the grass
the brush of your hand
the river
the sun low as the cackles
the small things
they won't go away

the path is always infested now

.

full of monkeys
the car slips softly
into the river

Peter Ackroyd, whom I generally regard as exhaustive in his research, and thereby reliable, reports in his biography of Blake that the average aperture of an 18th century English chimney, climbed by sweeper boys, was seven inches square. Can this possibly be true?

.

"The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad"—Salvador Dali

"The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, while insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence"—William Harwood.

Ooh so got to learn to catch a ukulele now ...

hair-clips

there's nothing left of this but hairclips
perhaps some DNA
which even post-apocalypse
takes time to wash away

.

look harder

look at each other
across the vast gulf
and try to read
what is in your hearts and heads
most of all try
to read yourself
in the eyes of the other

life is so short
so capable of beauty and disaster

it's too late now to look
for anything but truth

as we fly out of the room
on wings of cold silk

love is all we have
that keeps us airborne

gazing down as vibrant birds aloft
into what we know is coming soon
borne upwards in that sudden great heat
and cold that last swoon
to meet us and catch us forever
in its last known slap sideways
into nothing

take your chances and love real hard
little bird

.

rag-rug rag

if you can make it here
there's still no guarantee
that you could make it in the Gaza Strip
or the frozen methane
of somewhere else entirely so these fond statements
are very probably false
I recommend you do not trust them

all existence is suffering, sayeth
he sort of as dukkha
O the unsatisfactoriness
of what changes and cannot be relied upon
others of course make of this a virtue: Forever Changes;
Change is Stability and so on
but this too is falsehood, for all those people
died and liked it not much

it's not said to be a great thing
this withering and dying
best not to start it too early

one has nothing to report.
the changes are the same
as they ever were

the same rug from under the same stupid feet

life goes on so thick and fast
so in a whirl of things
stop it, freeze it and examine
the psychical genome
write it here
figure the real options
then and only then
proceed to alight upon the Earth
all the while conscious
that it is spinning and will spin you

one has nothing to report.
the changes are the same
as they ever were

I intend to be married to a stranger
by the end of the day

.

patachresis draught

The raw, which contain bark shavings and bugs during scraping, is placed in canvas tubes (much like long socks) and heated over a feu. This cause the raw to liquify, and it seeps out of the canvas, leaving the bark and bugs behinds. The thick, sticky pasture is then dried into a flat sheete and broken into flakes, or dried into "bouttons" (pucks/cakes), then debagged and sold. The end-user then crushes it into a fine powder and mixes it with ethyl alcohol prior to use. If all is performed aright the bug god will quickly appear.

.

Crikey, what a new (ancient) box of toys one have unearthed here:

Mediaeval punctuation.

(& every other punctuation & character event of which one could wish)

.

in the ruins of lost civilisations

imagine you wake
to find yourself at the wheel
of a miraculous vehicle
smoking down the highway
to some destination you suddenly forgot

well wouldn't you even ask anything about it?

.

de quidditas et bedknobs

It's not a smile, it's the lid on a scream

—Julie Goodyear

I'm going to be a star

—Withnail

(Oh the shock has pretty teeth, dear)

who anyway, not Lotte, the male, sang that opera?

//Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in mini-series

the magician in armani the guru

stands there looking like that

i'm going to be a star he says

with deep sheepish ignored

or (try got better( therapy from my future

think of him there that day all flowery

and embarrassing with his trying

(as they don't say in whales, Keep your Aberaeron

keep your bloody Abertmesisaeron!)

imagine what they will think of us

in 200 years, how cruel they will think

how cloddish and stupid, how unborn

how dead to technology and sophistication

/where is this line of the god flew up

what Hebroo scrip what desert codec

rcds this friv?/

¿but is anyway unborn dead

or only that sunlit moment each morning

before you remember she is gone¿ 

[singular they for instants 

when i tell some a joke they laughs haha]

hoho you see like unto a god that flies up 

it is as a heron what lifts water at dawn 

rises into silhouettes

of maddened saccade beatwingxz

over perhaps Dresden or othermother

flaccid with potatoes

O those mericans and their exorcised lingua

shorn of antecedent at all opportunity

down to mere function

for why should one waste time 

with the waxing god when one can just ask straight 

out robot I fuck you now—if denied

move quickly on it is best for all

¿why flourish and perform why¿

get it out of your mouth quick

so it is over efficiently, without superfluity

without Greek or French

and with as little Latin 

as may be contrived

for language cleansed of excess

to clinic sex-negative utility is all atavism

of the expressive, sharp, decisive

nostratic and primal grunt such a height

such an idyll from which we fell and fall

thankful at last to the elbow in the teeth

of a pre-PIE Webster—little wonder they elasticize

& plasticize each into triphthongs

of unknowing, delighted, savoured necromancy

the reanimation of the banished the instinct empathy

for/with the slain or bootstamped facial zones.maybe 

then nothing is dead but still

from crevices

where the lost invisible god jumps up

(do you hear me when you sleep i have died?)

wordy, well word up

fuck you, he says with his dripping schticks, I am Nature

watch this car.keep watching

80 miles per hour face first into a tree he attempts

to become one again with Nature

but only succeeds in dying drunk

on a bright day dripping his most ambitious inevitable

no you ain't phoney no more, J

hey

youse all murder in sunlight new york fuck

love 

as they don't say in whales, there is a taid

in the affairs of men

and a god flies up

.

Socrates just annoys me with warnings of anachronism.

Oh a bath full of blood or a cup
of hemlock either should suffice
to stop the travel of self-reflexive idiocy
I am not surprised really I am not surprised
O but just the other day my friend a butcher
as it happens and a worthy man questioned
the firmness of meat and how it is to be
evaluated for surely it might be like rock
or iron or even clay so how then are we to know
the true firmness. There in the marketplace
O out they knocked his teeth with stones
and clay and bars of iron and all was known.

What now can we say of the firmness
the iron-hard resilience
of marriage
in such dazzling sunlight
when all the world leaks in
and says it not?

.

Some strange claims have been made for the Greeks.

What nonsense that the Ancient Greeks created our ideas of physical beauty. We got that from when we were pre-human, and a strong, healthy body aided survival, just like we got 90% of our awareness of poisons and foodstuffs and danger from when we were pre-human.

Allow us the bigger time, you idiot specialists in the Greeks, who think all things are Greek things. To human consciousness human evolution is almost on the scale of geological time. You don't think of this, you people who look for beginnings rather than continuums and evolutionary arcs.

I promise you that ten thousand years before Mycenae the same forms attracted the same attention and evaluation in all cultures. When we see this today and like it today, we are not referencing the Kore or Kouros, but the far more ancient issues of health and survival. This is our wiring, and we did not acquire it as recently as three thousand years ago.

Almost all of human existence was spent as hunter-gatherers. Would anyone care to tell me what body-shapes were preferred, or even compatible with survival, for all of that time, if they were not the same as those which the Greeks (admittedly) venerated, but did not invent?

This is, after all, as always, the Sacred Way, the Hierá Hodós, whatever we think of it as we hike and bike through its blinding, now banal, chaos, now outlined with its adipose moped-mephitic kouroi. This is not at the end of the day; it is the onset of night. It ends as always at the tiny temple of Demeter, She who dwells in the seed. And don't forget she is and always has been a bee.

.

discus etc Myron

one leg weight-bearing and the other not ...
this is an untruth
one is weighted and the other braced
also weight-bearing, carrying all the potential
the other merely a fulcrum for the explosion

which will propel this UFO down the centuries
through our smoking eyes from the Severity
to the Abandonment

of all beauty. O it is a moment of shattering, it is an act
of terror, it is not to be contemplated

in its window-breaking vagabound and vagary

leave it to fly and its shards to fix
its immanence

too damn late now

.

we love icy noctiluca

some girls are bigger than other girls' smothers
you mustn't dream your eyes your violet cruelty
oh what nonsense as we jump
shut that up yes.there she lay like an oaf
with nothing to offer
Buddhism, she said, meaning hatred and cloud
all things are gravity, everything falling
into itself.
therefore this is nothing
obviously
we get the dreams we deserve
some girls are smalling than the imaginary eye of a camel-needle
done by a Dali
falling falling
downstairs like his sister off a bridge

now, really really
what you sighing?

.
/
,

If you don't do what you believe in, 
you end up believing in what you do
—Xavier Rubert de Ventos

For balance and measure, here is Wikipedia's etymology about the word 'hallow:'

Etymology[edit]

Further information: Weoh

The noun is from the Old English adjective hālig, nominalised as se hālga "the holy man". The Gothic word for "holy" is either hailags or weihaba, weihs. "To hold as holy" or "to become holy" is weihnan, "to make holy, to sanctify" is weihan. Holiness or sanctification is weihiþa. Old English, like Gothic, had a second term of similar meaning, wēoh "holy", with a substantive wīh or wīg, Old High Germanwīh or wīhi (Middle High German wîhe, Modern German Weihe). The Nordendorf fibula has wigiþonar, interpreted as wīgi-þonar "holy Donar" or "sacred to Donar". Old Norse vé is a type of shrine. Theweihs group is cognate to Latin victima, an animal dedicated to the gods and destined to be sacrificed.

In current usage[edit]

Hallow, as a noun, is a synonym of the word saint.^[3][4] In modern English usage, the noun "hallow" appears mostly in the compound Hallowtide, a liturgical season which includes the days of Halloweenand Hallowmas.^[5] Halloween (or Hallowe'en) is a shortened form of "All Hallow Even," meaning "All Hallows' Eve" or "All Saints' Eve."^[6] Hallowmas, the day after Halloween, is shortened from "Hallows'Mass," and is also known as "All Hallows' Day" or "All Saints' Day."^[7]

In legend[edit]

Some important and powerful objects in legends could be referred to as "hallows" because of their function and symbolism.^[8] The Tuatha de Danaan in Ireland possessed the Four Treasures of Ireland which could be interpreted as "hallows": the Spear of Lugh, Stone of Fal, the Sword of Light of Nuada, and The Dagda's Cauldron.

In the modern period, some neo-pagans believe that the four suits in the Rider-Waite Tarot cards deck (swords, wands, pentacles and cups), which are also a representation of the four classical elementsof air, fire, earth and water, are also hallows.

Coronation ceremonies for monarchs still invokes four ritual objects, now represented as the sceptre, sword, ampulla of oil, and crown. Similar objects also appear in Arthurian legends, where the Fisher King is the guardian of four "hallows" representing the four elements: a dish (earth), Arthur's sword Excalibur (air), the Holy Lance or spear, baton, or a magic wand (fire), and the Holy Grail (water).^[9]

Earlier Welsh tradition, as recorded in Trioedd Ynys Prydain, also refers to Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain. Symbolically, these could also be interpreted as "hallows", although they are not actually described as such in the medieval Welsh texts.

The Irish may or may not be impervious to psychoanalysis, but fuck all that I'm from Liverpool and as cooked down concentrated mythological psychoanalysed and wild as it gets.You just can't handle wild. Go find your own clover you small thing that is incapable of joy and expression. We are of the Hollow Hills and we will kill you with our love—Madeleine Shine. 2005.

The ideal mystery [story] was one you would read if the end was missing.
—Raymond Chandler.

Hello

Personally, I am inclined to believe that the derivation of the word 'hello' is linked to the word 'hallow,' and that the word is in fact a blessing. Here is Wikipedia's etymology, though some of it is transparently functional, superficial, and late:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hello is an alteration of hallo, hollo,^[5] which came from Old High German "halâ, holâ, emphatic imperative of halôn, holôn to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman."^[6] It also connects the development of hello to the influence of an earlier form, holla, whose origin is in the French holà (roughly, 'whoa there!', from French là 'there').^[7] As in addition to hello,halloo,^[8] hallo, hollo, hullo and (rarely) hillo also exist as variants or related words, the word can be spelt using any of all five vowels.^{[citation needed]}

Telephone

The use of hello as a telephone greeting has been credited to Thomas Edison; according to one source, he expressed his surprise with a misheard Hullo.^[9] Alexander Graham Bell initially used Ahoy (as used on ships) as a telephone greeting.^[10][11] However, in 1877, Edison wrote to T.B.A. David, the president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh:

Friend David, I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away.

What you think? Edison - P.S. first cost of sender & receiver to manufacture is only $7.00.^[12]

By 1889, central telephone exchange operators were known as 'hello-girls' due to the association between the greeting and the telephone.^[11]

Hullo

Hello may be derived from hullo, which the American Merriam-Webster dictionary describes as a "chiefly British variant of hello,"^[13] and which was originally used as an exclamation to call attention, an expression of surprise, or a greeting. Hullo is found in publications as early as 1803.^[14] The word hullo is still in use, with the meaning hello.^{[15][16][17][18][19]}

Hallo and hollo

Hello is alternatively thought to come from the word hallo (1840) via hollo (also holla, holloa, halloo, halloa).^[13] The definition of hollo is to shout or an exclamation originally shouted in a hunt when the quarry was spotted:^[13]

If I fly, Marcius,/Halloo me like a hare.

—Coriolanus (I.viii.7), William Shakespeare

Fowler's has it that "hallo" is first recorded "as a shout to call attention" in 1864.^[20] It is used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written in 1798:

And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners' hollo!

Hallo is also German, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and Afrikaans for Hello. It is used in the Dutch language as early as 1797 in a letter from Willem Bilderdijk to his sister in law as a remark of astonishment.^[21]

Webster's dictionary from 1913 traces the etymology of holloa to the Old English halow and suggests: "Perhaps from ah + lo; compare Anglo Saxon ealā."

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, hallo is a modification of the obsolete holla (stop!), perhaps from Old French hola (ho, ho! + la, there, from Latin illac, that way).^[22]

The Old English verb, hǽlan (1. wv/t1b 1 to heal, cure, save; greet, salute; gehǽl! Hosanna!), may be the ultimate origin of the word.^[23] Hǽlan is likely a cognate of German Heil (meaning complete for things and healthy for beings) and other similar words of Germanic origin. Bill Bryson asserts in his book Mother Tongue that "hello" comes from Old English hál béo þu ("Hale be thou", or "whole be thou", meaning a wish for good health) (see also "goodbye" which is a contraction of "God be with you".

fairies caught
in the headlights—
all engines stopped

exphrastix

All the men and women I have faced in that final moment ...
I have not prevented a single murder—Albert Pierrepoint
We were very much in love ... I wish I could have found it
in my heart to forgive him while he was alive—Ruth Ellis
A country road. A tree. Evening—Samuel Beckett

two hours from three am
i makes a picture of a fucked-up fairy
that no one will ever see
plays quiet sounds over

to settle its stages add sage
a smoke to quiet it
the silence in the stoppage
feeling more like it more important
scrunched it in plastic like a commodity

added money for the wishing well
smoked now smoked like a fish
banged it all into place

so Irish are we me and the fucked fairy
in the darkness so unbounded
by these and this our hollow hills
reel out at night in their blood

their thrashing
their white gasp

.

cinquain

Granddad
caught in the anti-air-raid lights
his ghost in the cellar
the dull guffaw
of nights

.

cinquain

the dawn
lit up her hair
as I watched her leaving
now every damn sunrise leaves me
grieving

.

nervous systems of aquatic animals

any way you dress it up
this recreational fishing
is a form of psychosis
to be marvelled at
in years beyond

.

when I was all a elephant says you

It's you, it's you. It's always been you
and it's always been in you—The Funloving Criminals

everything will break all systems
will corrupt and fly
pie it was known for its innards
in Liverpool of all, naked one
corrupt and vagabond
for yes it's you it's you
Jesus, you might say
my fly pie will die

the lonely. then he stuck
the french prussik below
the descender and nearly became
fly pie himself down there on the rusty rails
at Hodge Close imagine the sense
of nearly dying like that for

tomorrow for the cutting
and removal how wayward
of these secretions to fill holes
left by musculature detaching
one's elephantine belief in fishgods
or other for how is such imperfection

the work of the omnipotent
and benign?even toothache
says no or else malign.or eek
what a sick burden of humour

[but there are iambs and counterbids
the world holds
it holds for a while]

it's quite a thing looking back
but whatever we say of hardship
of the primitive
will be said of us soon

the fry writhe with life

and in such spaces we love

.

Wikipedia's etymology of jackdaws, just because I love crows.

The western jackdaw was one of the many species originally described by Carl Linnaeus in his 18th century work Systema Naturae.^[2] Owing to its supposed fondness for picking up coins, Linnaeus gave it the binomial name Corvus monedula, choosing the specific name mǒnēdŭla, which is derived from moneta, the Latin stem of the word "money".^[3][4] The genus Coloeus, from the Ancient Greek κολοιός (koloios) for jackdaw,^[5] was created byPeter Pallas in 1766, though most subsequent works have retained the two jackdaw species in Corvus.^[6]

The original Old English word cēo (pronounced with initial ch) gave modern English "chough"; Chaucer sometimes used this word to refer to the western jackdaw,^[7] as did Shakespeare in Hamlet although there has been debate about which species he was referring to.^[8] This onomatopoeicname, based on the western jackdaw's call, now refers to corvids of the genus Pyrrhocorax; the red-billed chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax), formerly particularly common in Cornwall, became known initially as the "Cornish chough" and then just the "chough", the name transferring from one species to the other.^[9]

The common name jackdaw first appeared in the 16th century, and is thought to be a compound of the forename Jack, used in animal names to signify a small form (e.g. jack snipe), and the archaic native English word daw. Formerly, western jackdaws were simply called "daws".^[7] The metallic chyak call may be the origin of the jack part of the common name,^[10] but this is not supported by theOxford English Dictionary.^[11] Daw, first used for the bird in the 15th century, is held by the Oxford English Dictionary to be derived from the postulated Old English dawe, citing the cognates in Old High German tāha, Middle High German tāhe or tāchele, and modern German Dahle or Dohle, and dialectal Tach, Dähi, Däche and Dacha.

Names in English dialects are numerous. Scottish and north English dialects have included ka or kae since the 14th century. The Midlands form of this word was co or coo. Caddow is potentially a compound of ka and dow, a variant of daw. Other dialectal or obsolete names include caddesse, cawdaw, caddy, chauk, college-bird, jackerdaw, jacko, ka-wattie, chimney-sweep bird (from their nesting propensities), and sea-crow (from the frequency with which they are found on coasts). It was also frequently known quasi-nominally as Jack.^{[12][13][14][15]}

An archaic collective noun for a group of jackdaws is a "clattering".^[16] Another name for a flock is a "train".^[17]

I do believe
Wordsworth was only there
for the gingerbread

.

Click the following text:

Petition to pardon the estimated 49,000 men, who, like Alan Turing, were convicted of 'gross indecency' for same-sex relations in the UK under an inhuman and absurd law which was only finally repealed in 2003.

How heartbreakingly cool that the Pale Blue Dot picture was taken on a Valentine's Day.

The Pale Blue Dot.

many worlds theory

at your elbow the downtrodden
at your cough the desist
oh look another spark oh look
how we shift
there is here/there another
this is the astro=stronomy of cool
relationships at every other (cough)
a new snake slide up
into the outser
what miracules then what freaks
it appears
watch youself pirouettes on skeins
of cold and hot
children... oh lawks childs above and below
well who'da and what little spiracles
what true eyes what hid hud in the hair
like unto Huck down tha river
and the cannons thereafter
floating up bread for the undead beginnings
of the next crash all lights on
the crazy gin what just jumped

it your time
jump not in but on

this your new riverbank religion
believe real and hard

.

Most of this is lies now. All the better. Click that.

Jah ajar (almost [all most])

They will stay there
to and fro they will
a cut lip—JH Prynne


Prynne is Romantic
almost antic with Romantic

i get cardiac shadow

think of easy in the garden
it is sure Eliot and Wordsworth
just in that. it enough iterate

then look at that par a thigh
almost a condition spread
for someone i knew or know

had such a spread had to had
its parathyroid took in a hospit
shoulda see the scar but then see

he breaks up breaketh his

signal absolve inner static
or cardiac listen and glisten
he never or maybe got
the hit or miss governor
anyway I think he would
like that naked as he shines
in that abandon of the sheer

frantic love of these black
confusing machine-drops-through
the page listen now
the sun is big shafts almost
pyramids burnt into
the very the fabric of trees
striding home somehow
and every last treehoisted lofting a way
to the Wordsworth Grimms
for they are barely different
3000 or more years old app

not now that we know

& hear his to and fro
for he has too much of pride
ever to use the word 'parse'
and hail cannot happen in Winter
oh look if you don't believe
it's almost true
.

I love flarf
but flarf
for all its authentic voice
is always devoid of love

.

not enough, ever

my lost children
in the tunnels
reach out

it is that time
and then the other time
when it all whirs
and goes backwards

towards the other place
the further place

look now look
soft as the dead hands
that stroke
cool and slow
it comes

over everything
little dark dead angel
watch it happen

the happening
beyond everything
that you know
and your mouth

in the morning
when the door
almost cries

think yourself
like oxen through the dawn forest
then never think again

yes, yes

.

poem for Lif

the first purple crocuses
hence will burn in the wind
with language unabate

sick it up a little tiny

it is not April or lipreading

this is in anyway tribute
to one day
where the bad slick
was all but no not nearly
all or if so then the entire

history of everything

maybe now none of us
can make it
all of us jumping always
singing as we fall

all we got then
us falling heroes
ripping at ourselves
watching it zoom up
doors bang bang bang
as we go

I want the best thing ever for you

all my love for what could
all we got left
is everything

it's written now
we is what surviveth
through the window

other worlds everywhere
burst

.lilacs bred up from the cold
evil

crocuses
looking up like babies
stroking
clouds into the future

yes, just say yes
and fall into the sunlit place

we'll all be there
all of us

we all promise

.

a glimmer only that unvoiced fricative fetch and shade

think of hate as a compound noun
two words in one portmanteaud into sex
in the Germanic/Japanese as though
a martial art spirit wafted as burning money
fragments aflame along the alleys and cataracts
why anyway would they call it a stroke
and why so gentle so tender

as though some dark angel had reached down
stroked away the circuits but gently
through the skull something in the byways

the lanes the backs of beyond the wainscot
something frozen and haunted mid-afternoon
watching the smoke-ghosts of Shatin
the temple of twenty thousand million golden ghost

buddhas horseback for the racecourse
but look again stop and feel

as the money blows smokestacks for the dead
listen now listen there is nothing to hear
only the tiny shove just beyond the sensory
horizon for even sense has an event

horizon where we freeze and all is stop't
listen there to the dead money end of yourself
great golden one so in factitude great
that it takes twenty thousand million

facets to express the one nothing of the dead
the unstuck crusaders the templars hospitallers
undone unseamed from the navel
at the horns of hateen think there in your smoky ardour
of Burckhardt digdug his own ungrave in gravel

to Shendy and Orens they the trains a-blowing
what then? now nothing? so quick to end and so long
to fashion. think of Gorlice Tarnow. think
of the passion. think of biscuits
one might just as well. all for nothing now. all.

.