Simon Perchik...

Currently reviewing 'The D Poems,' a book of 183 (!) sort-of-ekphrastic poems by Simon Perchik, for the Triggerfish Critical Review. Hoping to interview him too if he's available. Watch this (or rather that) space... Will post links here.

.

Samboo's grave at Sunderland Point (revisited)

I knew I was right to leave
my washing out all this time
in the rain and snow
like a miracle
the sun just came out
now a gentle breeze doth blow

.

you can reasonably meet two assholes a day
one in the morning and one in the afternoon
but if you meet them all day long
you need to check yourself out—Anon

.

"... and of those tenne, one doth signifie nothing, which is made like an O, and is privately called a Cypher.” (Robert Recorde, The Grounde of Arte, 1543)
"now thou art an O / without a figure. I am better than thou art now. I / am a Fool, thou art nothing" (Shakespeare, King Lear, 1605/6)
"Nothing can come of nothing" (Socrates)
"Nothing will come of nothing" (Shakespeare, King Lear)
.

"Fighting childhood abuse, and the resulting brain damage, one fucking idiot at a time"—Diana Cryder, 2016.

once you've seen it you
can't unsee it
your apeface

.

The Doherty Threshold

Damned American rhotacism: I just misheard "hit the Doherty Threshold" as "hit the Dorrity threshold," and assumed someone had tripped on a Dickensian doorstep into some tragic and sooty apotheosis.

.

Must-watch TV ...

This is about the most disturbing and addictive thing I've watched for some time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(2013_TV_series)

I wanted to be a spy before I saw this, but now I think it's probably incompatible with credible parenthood.

More seriously, it reminded me of how we are all running cover stories and living double lives all the time, mostly beyond our recognition. Other things than ourselves drive us, and we don't usually operate with our own voices, whatever they are, assuming they exist... Perhaps there is a way to discover them, but generally we are already given over to some monstrous, overriding agenda before we even become aware of ourselves and start gasping about it. It's not really me speaking, and it's not really you responding; the entities engaged in what Bakhtin calls a 'dialogue' here are others, positioned further back, instilled through pain and urgency. They are survival functions and responses to the imposed scripts of others, often to others whose scripts we would least wish to internalise.

Watch this weird series with some self-reflection to feel the deep dislocation of yourself, and perhaps to recognise that really, however clichéd, the best shot we may ever have at decoding our own hermeneutics might just be to accept some versions of our ancient, most primitive narratives of love. Already that concept backs itself up into philosophical emetics, of course, but keep following the wheel, and just perhaps us humans really don't have much else with which to calibrate our compasses. Or we just keep recycling the same self-deceptions forever. It feels like the drive to address Global Warming: even if the entire theory was wrong, it would still be the right thing to do...

the night's travel (2009)

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

across all this she travailed
with sepia sandbags
of County Clare

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

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

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

be certain now be sure

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

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



(Published in PoetrySZ 2009)
.

sex squalls

the TV people always have sex rapidly
without foreplay, sweeping the papers
off desks, breaking things, tearing
clothing, thrusting against walls. grunt
they say and uh uh, then gone. i guess
they want it over quick, the TV people
with everyone watching. i would too.

.

Alice Aforethought

a little tremor shook the house
and all she had ever written
meant something slightly new

but before she could even wonder
if the words might all change back
her eyes were adjusting too ...

.

fairies of light
along the beck
green morning

.

therapy

18 straight hours
of binge TV
as primal screen-out
therapy

.

she left her tail
flapping
in the outskirts

.

we all listened
suddenly
the river stopped

.

the motor of this
moment is a vote started
in the heart

.

leaping out in front
of a car like Canute
no, he says, no

.

"Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry"—Auden on Yeats

man with failed parachute
has this decision
looking down
5 seconds to impact
should I hate this
or enjoy the rush?

.

falling in the air
a drop
stopped and thought

not over
not quite

.

just a-walking in the rain

sorry about the timing
;this isn't my fucking clock—Madeleine Shine

this Papua New Guinean thing of wearing
the thighbone of one's grandfather
I embrace the concept even for more recent ancestors
though one might usefully hasten the moment
of availability
.

battue at easter riff

On this matter, the oracle of which your contributor
is the prophet has never yet been prevailed on to declare itself
—JS Mill

Also, ð and Ð (eth)

[can a plane on a conveyor belt take off?]

　　　_,,,

　　 _/::o・ｧ   .....................　　　_,,,

　　 _/::o・ｧ

　∈ミ;;;ﾉ,ﾉ

　∈ミ;;;ﾉ,ﾉ

the ochre mask of the heath fire a colonial subtext
shamanism in the word deceit a managed landscape
enough in this to occupy

(can a plane on the ground

lower its landing gear?)

(Left: House Sparrow hatchling (altricial-naked, blind and helpless on hatching).
Right: Ruffed Grouse hatchling (precocial 3-downy, open-eyed, mobile on hatching, 

follows parents and is shown food)).

each thing in its place presenting/obscuring the other thing
we are walking/passing along a corridor
leading to everywhere stop anywhere
"alight here for the rest of the world"—KWVR
the old man in the palace trying to find
the old man in the palace trying
each door in turn

forever

this could take

and like birds in the battue

you come sweeping low

across the moor

towards

(him there astonished six years-old
with his feet in the mud. .all around him are
red grouse erupting like springs)

poisoned vultures rising in gyres until falling back

into the story running towards you the funicular
rail of it stop look the funicular door of the running
in the mud the broken

spring whirring silent as disturbed birds

((falling lead))

.

Saint Fucking Teresa

SCHEMA

.

fond numbskulls of the Gregorian sashay

... not a word!—Madeleine Shine
... to the whys—Derrida (or another)

....................this text:txet siht

(boy) leans over 'is Jack Black?
that (old now) (how) (old) do you (exc')
as old as he looks-or-as-old-as /he is/
as old as he is meant [to look in this [Au]
as-old-as-he-seems- to-you\/ from a generation
((yawning back his/(my) sorrow))at this *gulfing* back—
back . time . lamp . black . this stretches pain yawns
(yaws) back and back-er (why, somnolent) (chasms) of-the-skull

—more of here the jug-jug bird—

a prophetess of course in sibilants sussurates as

'SO' a man awakes in there a man who sleeps

afraid he-will-wake-no-more awakes yawing
as a cockencroach top-eero-utsi-de (it the sci-fi genus venus)
through some s-i-d-e-h-o-l-e to see O mere "to see what ...

—thereof and of the flit and flitmost the skull (skirl here)
to see what (to-be-borne) so (.frit he is and all afear)—

... Blackjack be" (nothing—slouches ho!—
(is to -be- done about any of it)
in the thing he awakes (don't s(t)(r)(op)(h)(e) it ('me') [now]
exactly not that ...

(the movie
the (picture plane)(the) screen is of course all-screaming-woman
onto which a film of)

"and the irrecoverable (open mid-back rounded)
sickness of what he just said"
—everyonesaysthis.org

.

Holocaust Siren

so many people
gathered in a group of ten
Holocaust siren

.

tactics

a sacred dear
per sacred deer:
Iphigenia

.

off mass shell

alternate accommodation provided
for particular blinking residents

every other ...

.

the Beaker People

lumps of sandstone at dusk's
hunch
of ancestry at the littoral
of day/night the wash where the half
makes way to the deeper the deepen
the ground that *is/is/not* un/ground

askance to discern silhouettes
of what moves
as tides to deposit drift
from the pelagic the benthos (slick
and(
the creep and /erratic/
flowers, say, dead, in the dead—
hands of a mariner.hands.dead.off.of
again look (what is) the offshore ground
its lurks (and attack). reared
as eggs of  the deeper cast—off

in such tempest hove to hove

,

Yorvik

in Yorvik are some coprolites
rich in intestinal mites

set like stony stalactites
sit these historic Viking shites

.

LET ME FINISH... (the ancestral origo)

How 'turn-taking' in conversation 

may pre-date language: 

CLICK

Language Acquisition Limerick

our foremost most urgent volition
is the host language acquisition
there's no test for device
but young zest will suffice
to boast this proficient munition

.

the third person

Come on, baby, do the low commotion—Alice Aforethought

she doesn't say

take (James Brown, say)

"it is a channel a fuzing [glass] in which the newborn
swell (8) alchemic (such commotion in the materia
is by and large) (you don't say)" O take it O take it to ...

we are trying to speak but they won't hear
from afar we are trying to speak—

cable-stayed, clappered, cantilevered,
the pontoon and moon of a goose's neck o'erreached 
(1 Across: ancient archbishop comes as a wrench? 

—eek the whiplash curve of dispatches, communiqué—

(in which a both ways flux it hangs between
as potency and potential forth and back both
ways they are talking as mist in the talking glass
shapes that arise one upon another)

now take matters into your own s/pan

between us a co-motion an interflow that is the place
where we must look)(the hole in the sky)
the airbridge across which [a secret] terror passes
(puntus and pontifex and the Etruscan blank

sacred waters, confluence [mytholm] rising
to emit you—of sighs and foaming size

(such a dazzle and swirl I thought upon me)
(such the topography of the converse 
streaks they were)
(such streaks that fell slow as wartime)

....................(cloud)(static)(cloud-)

chamber between us, speak (your desire)
...............................of fear
(life) stasis in this 
our most honest 
engine

.

low winter sun
through wet trees
smoking cobwebs

.

Dmitri's secret dissent in the parrot axis (impetrarc sonnet)

(to his loving wraith, Suliko ...)

whether (it) were (Shostakovich) in the mind

of the Leningrad metronome—the dead

resistant pulse of a city ... life-lined,

thin, hollow—(was) the subsistent onward /z/ed

of a living corpse propagandized into legend

.("... Baby, Zed's dead"—Pulp Fiction) end (war) to end

all (beat); the rat-walk; the invasion themed

(water or feet) or scurry—(for all) immanentizing of despair

a (-) semic shift—Stalin's Walk perhaps re-dreamed

by Pixar—[¿memed?] resistance en plein air

.....(not) .........his polysemics on display for all (to see)

—at home he pulses with the secrecy

they'll never even know (how hard)—their fall (or call)

he feels with music, pride and secret glee

.

primus inter pares as pathology

all that big stuff she says how showy how
now too big for poetry keep it undramatic no
big words no climactics or adornings resist meaning
interest and the urge to didacticism for it
as though some pidgin yes how lookee
we are pre-creole in our perhaps trinket-junkets
shattered and bereft along like foam the beaches of Marseilles
and Syracuse and new fabrics like lollipop martyrs
in ruinated Leptis what history a lens to examine the fall of light
between future reflection and here the passing
breaking wave a waking flood-node origo a pulse or what a period what of we
think how these junglee ferals of apertures
close and how there will have been
have been the age of smoking the age of cancers
the age of a primus inter pares affect when
the default script of even the most peaceful
.....................war
handed down with the carnivorism the hero-complex
that you are not striking
.......................in appearance she will say later
having left the other now little more than a bag
carried off and this the children so cruel learning
of her complaint made fun carrier bag his wrist
a smoothless clunk and click of the unlubricated
she all abdomen as all wilted balloon shrinking
back to a little puff in which all of future immanence
of origo-bang therein uncontained in joy at this aging so
granted immoderacy and eccentre by her position
in time will now frolic as never before
settling in her own sand
become like Billie
all finally
mouth

.


.

some mischief
the scarecrow's splash
from the well

.

articles of a pantomime ghazal at this odeon near you

the anxiety of breathing under conscious(....)
control-the-tiny-filament that0separates
the animal in the brush from sunlight
—neither-no-hiatus-nor-no-diphthong—
[will do it for us now][death also autonomic]

scattering the focus the you the I the in
between penumbra of persistence only
the will and the wight who is that who
)echoic) O

will/s not and yet waits

sand is to glass, un-echo

.

broken trees
stuck on a weir—
the end of things

.

white turnip heads
in the floodwater—
the dead of winter

.

slanting fields
pour through wet drystone—
new waterfalls

.

the river rises—
nearly to our doors
we breathe

.

three and a half seconds of pure light (a poem for the Time Being)

unlike the whip-pan, which is used to rip the viewer

into a tangential reality, the dead-pan uses a melting rack-focus

to engage the death-posture of the character onscreen

—Madeleine Shine

1. (he sees himself laying onward

in the rain stone 

after stone

into the mist towards a horizon

which will not be known

this the Zen-pan or stone-pan)

2. the boy the silhouette only of the boy

the long-dead seen from behind

hobbles along the alleyway

leaving his merest forensics barely

stroked into silver emulsion

3. another who reaches the vanishing point

who leaves nothing

—undiscoverable archaeology

of light

a creature of soft parts only

who dances but will not keep

who leaves no fossil for the reliquary

4. where at the table the hands work in shards

—of flint, itself fossil, compression,

the metamorphic dead—

knappings, rebuild in three dimensions

the stone jigsaws—each when finished

yet incomplete—brooding an inner hollow

where something was once eased forth

now only a void, a lost core felt

as disturbance

of the night air but nothing

when we stir

only nothing

lost there

in all our rolling fingers of dream

(2009)

.

le dormeur du val: an inflected cyborg translation of Rimbaud for Remembrance Sunday 2008

it is a hole of greenery where a river sings

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

two red holes on the right

(Translated by Steve Parker 2008)

.

'The' Tao that loves is or is not ...

慈 loving 故 causes 能 ability 勇 brave

.

found language poem with

creaky-voiced
glottal
approximant

(th ey tht lks
out frm yr ope

glottis)

.

diminishing returns

Prize:
a lifetime's supply
of cigarettes

.

payment protocol (lacuna)

make a hole in the self-text
into which (which?) fluid
a lake to fill the lack

which yourself luna-like
from below-above one
(second of the all-poem)—you

,you

.

if so how (Cézanne of Green Fables) ]now you're for it/

Don't throw the dog—Tibetan Buddhist monk
from Drepung monastery (speaking to Tashi Tsering,
alleged four year-old reincarnation
of the deceased high lama, Khensur Rinpoche. 1991)
... rich oil and wine into the earth slap—Aeschylus
For the love of God, have pity on yourself—Bob Dylan

(in sacrifice: S-A-C-C-A-D-E—3: Callas the elf,
2: Cézanne the woodcutter ... 1:
)
(add fool to the fire) fairies parallel in the offing the day
the music died 23/10 the day on which

there are fairies/fairies in the offing look how
if ever so how then not so how the distance
closes in light in light's rush (inlight he names the third
brush with the law names he the second in outlight
fury of love, his father-(died harmony)-in the off and only—what
I want to use by you says (he) died of harmony only for it

—for it is a spirit smell not given—

eighty-four days in the outwrites all over
its assay on Cézanne, paracelebrant
and vocative I, O, think that—may have been the south pole
or dipole but this
............................in your face it is now at moments after
it (what) is spring either that May not floruits its rill-
-its koanica not its the first he names
(the conscience of the town ... the ditch of truth
—Victor Hugo)

and then he knew ...
......................that was [not] where he was going—
(Hemingway/Burroughs)

.

canniku

the sky, look
for an instant
they hold

.

canniku

put to
the question
snakes the way and long

.

older by an idiot (Immaterial Culture) (unfinished otherwise overfinished)(high, heeled posture and bearing)

In September 2006, the U.S. government announced 
it had moved Mohammed—Wikipedia 

[seemingly its entire being in lordus though its vocal response so monomoraic as to appear pulse or spike of the silence which surrounded it than any genuine phonology merely a swell or gathering in of the tacit a rousing almost but not quite a wakening into true utterance]

—the second sunday in june 1144 the first dedication of the arch gothic—

(2015, 9/11: 111 people killed when a crawler crane collapses in Mecca during preparations for the Hajj
an inquiry is ordered, presumably into the mysteries of predestiny and the mind of Allah.urgent also numerology)

{In 1912 a group of women calling itself the Heterodoxy begins to convene a Feminist luncheon symposium (one supposes) this association for unorthodox women includes prominent lesbians and will meet regularly in Greenwich Village until the 1940s]

—oh this antipodean retroussé of the language oh it I will not have?¿albeits pointing up of the question innate to every word—'for'

(Every animal is sad after coitus except the human female and the rooster—Galen)

instance the Nazi side-co-opting of astika and nastika

(oh god I want to hide—my side issues—in the useful penumbra of yours ...)
(my side issues forth(in and of itself)In and Of

there are messages come through at long the needle
flickering (ectogasm)

forms around the mouth of the silent --------- between us now declared

older by an idiot
gentlemen, a mystery has been committed—The Goons
in bowls of unspoiled human juice

is that you whose presence so frightful
vague in the evenings in the autumn is that you (who does he mean-
spirited are they both and full of sire

who does he?

who does he imagine how that turns
her vocalization her rhotacism her R-marinaded vowels
revealing a febrile eek tenuous wheel upon the air as one
mid-splutter after a breathing (a wreathing) of smokewater
boarded 183 times (gave up not the goods)

put to T h e Q u e s t i o n

(snakes
,,,,,,,,,,,,,the
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,way
..........................and long)

.

Walter Sickert on late Monet:

‘I feel no need to pass out before a pond.’

.

Act boldly, and unseen forces will come to your aid—Dorothea Brande

.

225,386 people 

were killed 

with firearms 

in the US 

between 2007 and 2013

(keep it quiet
and act
like it didn't happen)

.

babyku

a mother makes up
songs for her baby—
cradling her thoughts

.

/ˈmæs.ə.kə(ɹ)/ of the lullababy (work in digress)

this dyad is found deep—Wikipedia
so I says says I—Ireland
that even those who assert that everything
is predestined ... look both ways
before they cross the street—Stephen Hawking

from the pictures it looks

—animals in other language [a look of]
animate of dysnumber
dogs in/of the farflung
frequentative of barbarossa .......................babararian
such ack specialist ack Greek Heterodox ach diet so axo saxo
Fama romance-god of rumour thereby war and the war-floor
and of and unto and the saline

—with the SER and HIS residues required to form—

of the hedgegrows and hedgegogs then
are we—rossa.rosa.eschscholzia
rooted deep through viral floors
of Tom All Alone's 
in its very rooking of us we stand parled (parled)

linebroken as dyads.]states the interstitiate]

also “the head of a newly killed stag”
the promiscuous slaughter of many who can
/ˈmæs.ə.kə(ɹ)/ O schwaaaaa
(obsolete) Murder—Gothic-vocative 𐌼𐌰𐌹𐍄𐌰𐌽

(the unidentified in all space exerted
by the unreadable cumulative
of the unbigenough for measure 
-for)—mezhaphor-

-O lullababa no

what now do we not know

.....................................................................¿chiarascal?
.

Virginia Woolf speaking of words ...

... feeling herself carried along in the swirl of many things
—Virginia Woolf: Night and Day, 1919.

A recording of Adeline Virginia sounding rather High Victorian unmodified by Modernism, and her word-thinking evidently in like stasis. One would like to have asked what of structures then? What of houses or churches? Why are they not all caves or at most fashioned of sticks and turves? How unprogressive these Blooms! But one may hear the deep discarnadining sadness in the sea-caverns of her voice, may sense the urge already to retreat therein: her soul pockets filled with ponderous words, with the multitudinous Cs to which her voice ever sinks ... Her love grown heavy now: only four more years of life to be endured...

The only known extant recording of Virginia Woolf, 1937.

.

full text of Pliny the Elder's natural history

~ 
et in arcadia ego


-;*> ; 

>;.-^>^ 

le berger traces his own shadow in the script not that of his companion
not that of his componionette
frZSK** 
-#> 

o 
s*> :. 
this is not the birth of death or art 

clambering hegemony

!>"^ 

c'est l'occupante Poussin et il dit que l'autre vie est aussi l'Arcadie

see XXXV 5, 15 "mais qui est elle?" La Justesse, pluk!

"I have attempted the penny whistle, 
and have discovered it to be damnably devoid of strings."

—Madeleine Shine. 1969.

"I have attempted the strings,
and have discovered them to be damnably devoid of whistle!"
—Aliceaforethought 2015

.

our savage gentle forthright astronomy (work in regress)

and the item is life whirling
and the auctioneer leans back
says this says this

will not be our future
no this will
expresses most clearly
as extended
that such a thing
metaphor

pataphor in unfact-

o look

an eye-blue tarquin takes off
all its sails set

still set upon this I cannot

[whats, though, whats?]

destination Mars,
a whole genre novel
with alacrity to be hedgehogged
of all its drear love

what he said
what the thunder said
the dunder [the caboche?]

don't play retroracist games for now
is the winter
rip't from the belly of christ's American
hegeMony Mony here she comes

then suddenly she doesn't come
at all
—and without a gasp

oh phrike and great snakes
the way and long


.

End of Career

the cruellest thing
Tony Blair did
was not the Iraq War

it was buying Gordon Brown
an ice cream
in public

then watching
it kill him

.

if you had it in your hands

if you had it in your hands
it would be all purple light
too many voices has the world
and rather too much fight

O I have been rejected
rejecting have I done
those silly distant struggles
have all been lost and won

but love's the real hearted thing
so always keep it near
and be as brave as possible
for all is fucked by fear

and if you had it in your hands
what difference there would be
we'd slide down flumes and ski down flanks
then crash into a tree

.

of love and dark ways in fragment and phrase

this the cold air of a summer
in which of anyway there was no certainty
even afterwards long after
when he held his head in death
cradling those thoughts
as if they had happened then
as if that had been some point

of gnosis but no it cannot he will think back there
into the garden whose bench was now
or then a gap or space or absence

no he would think in those last times no

it could not be for imagine the unimaginable faery
transport of such a thing and who anyway
could sit upon it there in the air such
an air of hiatus or hubris or harking

anyway to the meek in rows for the showers
of midsummer with a dug-up of poppies
that were anyway fell anyway of light
and anyway of war and rivers undug and
now yes and yes and yes

to what motor or engine or brain
does one prostrate is all after and no
before so yes and come hither
for one has words painted there upon

the sky, look
for an instant
they hold

and all the world shudders
pricked as an anxious pet
but perceiving nothing yet
like so many whirled Buddhas

lapses or relapses or collapses

in all such ways: your absence
.

upon the killing. turnips etc

silence in the lounge
where once as if

some explosion

everyone bated

look at their idiotic

think now, think hard
what comes next


.

all the grooming politesse of night

O men dreary rolling their armpits
through the steam
oh look he says to the mirror oh look
that's all
this is what it is to live
to have to cater for secretions and stench
to work with to manage
he lights a cigarette and blows a faceful
of smirking smoke
stuffs it in the plug with hisses
there now, block up, he whispers
you are nothing but a trap

full of hair and death
of most unfortunate breath

suddenly startled at himself
he goes straight back to bed
to perform last vile acts before work

in th bathrm a elephant as if
forms itself
but does not shave

three women of ages without hair appear dead
in the bath

without grace or meaning
the beat and industry

trumpet and jazz
jazz and strumpet

gone to work far-off
in mists of southern slick

signed

Dot

.

.

miracules

the enclosing lushness of the path
to the Pooh Sticks bridge

Herb Robert is everywhere
reaching, with its tiny pink starlight

offset by the blue walls
with their mossed-up faces
hanging over the beck

where one cannot help but stop (along)
and ask for reassurance

with such miracles
we sleep at riversides


.

schlock and schlock again

all that it ever was A major bouncing like
me and uh you in a bouncy castle by a uh river
no minors no sevenths no augmented
nothing but front out gutloose oh fuck

all of it swirled in smerk

dried up now in petrie dishes
like dead squirrels
in rude postcards from the Front

both dead in the mud
not even not even
squirreling

don't fool yourself

time is what we don't have

sit back anyway
you may as well die comfortable

.

delight ain't just 
the giver 
of sight—Madeleine Shine

machine sea

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)

Cronos eat (jelly) babies (to the Gala)

what we call watch they call un show
we look it from different sides
somewhere between this thumb or toe
time and tongue for no—elides

[—this to 'veal the camembert drool
pinched with pincers from anabapt
munsters calumnous to some fool
hung to dry on Omaha—rapt—]

gagging for Kiplings who states his cakes
that eau est le fuel of the kill
is that which jelly babies makes
in Time if it's coiffured its fill

.

(a hypnagogue for JM)

... that slepen al the nighte with open ye—Chaucer
... delight ain't just the giver of sight—Madeleine Shine
... because he is absolutely evil amounts—Camus
... the best method of accomplishing 
an accidental result—Ambrose Bierce
... whose evil consequences will extend—
Currer Bell

(it is a dawn it is a purple drift and yaw
in which the like and light and fore)

it is water underground
it is dapple on the dead
it is sunlight bent around
beneath the bed

The Deer

—it went by in a clatter, panic
you didn't see or hear
yet both of us gets franic 
abouts the outcomes here—

waking to all of the other: so far
(there to spread) the waning paling night

dawning-disaster, and delight
undead
alight

what asters, dear
what fright

.

radicalization is the resigned resort of the desperate and lonely
anyone can find friends and fervour
in that foolish firelight

.

jump or roll the dice

The people we write for
are always already gone
and will never read us again
we write only for ghosts
—Madeleine Shine

once it becomes clear
that you are falling asleep
at the wheel
and that some other driver
takes over
seemingly with every intent
to drive the bus off the road
it really becomes immaterial
how beautiful the destination
how well you describe it
how it is just around the next bend

at this point your passengers
are advised to cut their losses
and jump
before the next lapse

they can grieve later
for the garden they never reached
for the dreams they lost along the way
but they will live

as they watch
the mad bus
the driver
and his dark brother
disappear into the mountains

.

.

last night I walked with a zombie

inconceivable now as the pathway
its soft-looking venoms
where once

the bell the bell the clang
that rang for us zombies
at the river's edge

blood in cups we drank
so slow and soft
slicking each other's bloodlips
never really asking

it's not me
it's not my family
in your head

we the walking dead

eating at each other's brains
lack of brains
wasting unrepeatable miracles

muscle, fat, fibre
connective tissue
brain most of all, this head offal—

all these we devour and desire
our species
yes we desire most of all
our own species
and we are rare

what's in your head tonight
zombie? oh oh oh

bury me under a heavy stone
let it be inscribed
with warnings
not to unearth monsters
lest one has time to talk
and the fortitude to wait

for all of it to become true

.

.

It's not a smile; it's the lid on a scream—Julie Goodyear

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose--Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr.The most revealing features here are the murmurations of the audience: when they *dare* to laugh.

or maybe stoats lofted, Biggles?

what are you like with heat?
there is a tide in the heat and beat
which if taken at the flood, would

what do you call a man with no head
no arms no legs no body?
it is a sort of rude joke and like seagulls
not to be trusted or rusted or thrusted
though no doubt the years have it
crusted. once I sat in a café in Cairo
watching a gang guy twist his moustache

the divvil, he said, they think I am afraid
from the divvil I am afraid from no divvil
which point he produce his flick knife
breathe hard. the divvil, he says

the divvil. by this point I study
indifference and his display falls flat
but is quickly redeemed by weasels
which jump over our tables

in a late-night kahwa. will, one thinks,
one, ever, find, ones, way, home

through these midnight weasels?
wreathed as they are in hashish smoke?

twenty five years on, the weasels?

wind in the arch?

we hoot and feel the resonance of masonry?
at least my parenting does this?

dick was the answer, didn't you know?

just like bob was the other answer

now there is the Theory of Everything

it's more complex than you thought
this weasel thing of love

first you have to answer your own joke
then twirl your own stupid moustache
then recognise your flick knife

most of all
see the weasels, the weasels

then find your way home
to find all the furniture gone

no one ever lived there anyway
what you thinking huh?

brevity is lost to me now
and you also, whoever

.

Just because it's that time on Saturday night, or should be...

Littlebigbang Theory

cold dark matter, some of it bright and hot
some of it not matter
on such a scale that it might appear
arrested, frozen, fixed
in crystal spheres
but in reality flying
outwards from a single point of origin

Play that film backwards—Brian Cox

tracing the reverse trajectory
of all that is or has ever been

brings us at last, second by second
gasping on the shores of cosmic time

to a garden shed near Banbury

there a mild goddess sits
the un-ancient of days
her finger on the button
what done it all

her name the horn of becoming
the park-keeper at the gates of dawn

the shot that was heard around the shed

gnab

.

we are the eggmen

as with Burroughs's ugly spirit what killed
his wife one awakes to find one's existence
compromised by forces that appear alien
beyond one's control astonishing how a moment
will unravel everything gasping at the sudden
intervention at how it can never be undone
can never be put back never made whole again
one can of course fret and complain can pine
or preferably one can awake to find one's mouth
and eyes sealed with ectoplasm half-buried
in a ditch in some urban woods waiting to be
kicked to pieces by feral children in the closing
pages of someone else's story in which ultimately
one was only a minor character forgotten
once the book slips from the fingers onto
the bedroom floor where once or twice only

.

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

.