Month: Jun 2020

Afterlife of a vision:
sales and inheritances;
loans, and the slow accretion
of labels; a provenance,
a good story, with records
to account for the distance
travelled. And so many words.

On this darkest day, amongst other things
we consider our blindness: to the winds,
to the streams of boiling iron beneath
and all around us, to the turning world.

So much weather; so much of us that sings
in the face of it. As the night reminds
us of daybreak, so we can see our breath
in the enfolding clouds; we are unfurled.

We watch and we think and we think
we feel but have no sense of it
at all, this rupture, this fall and
recapture, this ecstasy of death

We wonder, will it come for us
who did so little, tried so hard
to refrain, to remain untouched
by its distant intractable hurt?

We shall see and shall understand
all in good time, this waste of life
this cold and hunger, fire and gas
elsewhere: that it is all about us

Yes, this is supposed to hurt
the rank punishment of thought
the rationale of the boot

This is where we learn the art
of losing; something torn out
of us: a tongue and its root

Always and only the pitch
the so so so beautiful
big bold incredible thing

The dare to dream it bigly
go mad for it so very
long so very very hard

Unbelievable so great
let me just say I love you
as I thank all over you

So special incredible
give me a break yes bleeding
in the locker-room so sad

Orange, evidently, is the new black.
Pumpkins fatten for the knife, to be carved
and then discarded; the spray-tan is back,
ditto the pompadour. Who’d have believed
it could come to this: thin skins and bitter
pith, seething in a fit of saccharine?
Bottle it up forever, the utter
strangeness of it, or let the demon in.

Just imagine: raised in honour
of his money, of his reach
a likeness; the noble donor
standing flawless in his niche

Gifts for the gifted, for the free
here we turn our gravest face
upon the filth of history
we know, we have won the race

Be careful, these will become your poems.
My voice will become your voice. Will it be
light or dark enough? Will there be problems
of tone as you wear my skin? We shall see.

No doubt your tongue will explore my meanings,
take a knife to my throat; your words instead
of mine. Give them new life; the singing is
mostly what matters, music in the head.

Between the wall of shall
and the looping broads of should
lie layers lawyers liars lairs

An A-road to a dark wood

This is how the dead speak
radio-carbon ticks
in the dark, in a box

Litanies of base-pairs
unclasped and spiralling
down bloodlines, down the years

Shrouds of 3D-printed
plastic and plasticine
likeness: face of our fears

a groovy track in the black
of shellac 78s

a lacquer of cochineal
candy-bar nibbles and treats

a sheen of violet / green
wing-cases woven in knots

a specimen   one in a
million   pinned in cabinets

A heart darkly become glass
as midnight out of the fire
fashions mirror snowflake blade

A black eye suddenly laid
on the face of all desire
shadow that no sun outlasts

A life as a running
away with from towards
the world and its wonders

Anything to keep up
and unafraid of this
our race to the bottom

His gnarly feedback was
a pilgrimage of grace
in the fast lane   at last

27.10.13

Tick toque an early start
this is where pastry
comes to be torte

creams to be beaten
and fruit perfected
and then eaten

Hell is a rich and varied habitat.
From its low-lying rivers, bogs, and leas
to the windswept hackles of the Great Orme,

its climate, landscape and geology
support a range of plant communities.
The human impact, while significant,

is managed well, although of late increasing
numbers of the damned have put some strain
upon the countryside. As a result,

on most estates the land is farmed for pain;
gorse anvils, shredders, and threshing-machines
crop thumbs and fingers in the bramble scrub,

and nettle beds are grown by the latrines
and slurry pits, where excrement collects
from deadstock grazing in the ragwort fields.

There are no trees. Deployments of insects
and cankers, die-backs, rusts, and needle drop
have cleared the woodland and removed the shade,

leaving new prairies of abandoned hope
– bracken and hemlock mostly – to flourish
in their place. They also burn well when dry.

Rape is quite common here; it nourishes
the ovens and furnaces that drive
much of the regional economy,

and quite a few signature species thrive
in its field margins: cleavers, horehound, docks
and agrimony, teasels, bittersweet.

In the following pages we shall look
at these and other plants that now depend
upon the nitrogen, organophosphates

and neglect that finally brought an end
to the needless diversity. Maps will show
their total domination and their spread

throughout the nine circles. Visitors to
these parts may find them useful as they walk
our extensive network of burning coals.

Your help in managing our rare outbreaks
of colour will be much appreciated,
as will the contributions of your waste.

I’m looking at a basket of dumbphones:
a tangle of handsets and base-units,
brackets and wires. Each was lighter, larger,
louder than the one before it, stations
on a road to silence as your senses
and strength all dwindled to their last nowhere.

Tunstall, Binatone, Friends & Family:
every evening you called, left messages
or spoke with nothing to say. That lifeline
is now dead air, lost amongst the rubbish
of a long illness: dressings and creams, pads
and spools of plaster. To the skip with them.

A second-class to nowhere
brings us here   quite out of love
with who we believed once   here
on a sleeper to the grave

Cinders   rat droppings   a botched war
know this for all we can leave

And so we stumble through the week
the sun forever on our back
forever doing the Lord’s work

As if the clarity we seek
were by the wayside as we take
the road to Paradise (or such like)

Previously published in The Warwick Review (2012)

​

This map on the wall
with Africa so small
and Asia so vast
and its infinite poles:
which truer, the fist
or the flat of the hand
in this lie of the land
this abstract of souls?

How to be a man
when there is no longer
work to be done
or scars to be won
down a pit in the field
no pain or gain
anymore no throne
or theatre for our
testosterone

We forge the armour
of a built body we grow
muscle and hair
to catch and keep our
last shrivels of respect
the point and power
of a caged honour
we wear a skin where blood
and bruises flower