Month: Jun 2020

An Etch A Sketch of a landscape
water then beach then water
a scratch in the mhachair
as we watch and watch
the croaking corn
chittering
and then
gone

Keats @JKprowling_nightingale

Jug Jug indeed. I’d like to get wasted but the ideas just keep coming. Out of the body and into the light and back again, a pretty bad trip.

Shelley @smackmybyssheup_skylark

Hi guy I really hear you wherever you are. Got the message: it’s hard to be blue in the blue. You’re living the dream, but sadly we’re awake!

Hopkins @manleyguy_windhover

It’s good to be fit, to play the ace, to hit the hole-in-one. We improve with use; as golfers say: the more I practice, the luckier I get.

Hughes @tedhead_crow

Folk & flock & fuck & feathers & filth. All things considered, we’re a lot like you: better to be black than hungry, better clever than good.

One for the lying warm in bed
bathed in blue mid-morning snowlight

One for the summoning of birds
with offerings of grain and fat

One for the whitening of skies
to silence footprints overnight

And one for the blackening
of enemies’ fingers, just like that

Turned blood-orange by the sun
this earth is a cursive text
a wall bearing many tongues:

Nazinger è maiale
Black is no terror   Beauty
is the only true revolt

II

The city as walled garden:
a flux of secret waters
and the force of argument

Dreams and grieving populate
these hazardous birth-canals:
expulsion as fiat lux

III

Grown from a single pixel
the lovers blossom for us:
his gipsy bling   her tattoos

Creatures of light and delight
they ignore meanings are loose
in their punkabestia

Here we go again
beneath each cross a footnote
of wailing women

history as one
long cry of pain that shudders
on to the next time

as if it mattered
this taking of dictation
write it down, write now

Previously published in The Warwick Review (2012)

Edvard

Mons Pubis bloodset and sunshot as he
makes lightfall, shuttering out the day

Lamplit, the worm and spirochaete are drawn
to these sheets, an expressive slithering

That eschews varnish. Alone in the dark
he summons vampires, would deny their gifts

Too long a life, an ill-becoming
sobriety, the Goebbels imprimatur

August

Cliffs of black diorite coagulate
in turbid seas, an infarct of the soul

A risen grave, the whispering voices
that hold nothing sacred, favour the obscene

Reflections, on and of, our nearest and
dearest: family histories of disease

Here at Blå Tornet, on the balcony
he dies at least a man of the people

Jean

A flatness resonates across the lake
the colour of nothing, of a bad mood

The birds are flown and now the nights grow long
his forests build a cleansing autumn fire

For the mind’s ear, and for a hearth replete
with tributes and visitations. Look hard

And listen closely: you can almost hear
the long silence out of Järvenpää.

Henrik

ACT IV: This is the house of the Master
windows downstage open onto the void

A huge caldera, dormant for now
beyond the trappings of an old religion

Drained of all meaning, scrawling in the earth
his demons turn their faces to the door

He enters, stands as he must before us
the Hero, homeless in this strange landscape

The blades are sharp   the blades are short
the edges trim and yards apart
nothing and nobody shall hurt
this manicured paved-over heart

Form as a purpose: the heron
as a gun-metal grey machine
stock-still over these wetland planes:
a weld of eye and beak and claw
drawn to a focus: a next meal
called into being by a spear.

So quick you probably missed it,
that lick, that flash of a C-word
before us: clip, claw, crescent moon,
the poise and bound of a great cat;
this is perfection of the wound,
scimitar, beauty beyond bone.

Cutlery tinkers in the skull
as etiquette becomes our meal
we are defiled   our heads are full
of numbers and of ritual
of tics and the pulling of hair
nothing and nobody can clear
this bar   this blood-brain barrier

​​

Once we were spooled, unreeling,
replayable endlessly;
even now we re-run it,
pause & rewind, overwrite
& splice in our search for it;
that line: our selves as they were
in the cassette memory.

Keep looking: the picture blurs
& shakes & all the colours
are wrong & the tape catches
& tangles in the machine;
the remote, the book of words,
the guarantee, they’re all gone:
all we have is this blank screen.

I

Look, who could be mistaken
in love for the coming man?
What else is there but falling,
what else enchantment surely
but a word to the wise? Look,
that could almost be my face
in the unspotted mirror.

Who, if I cried, would hear me
For lack of an answer here
this is how I see angels:
our drawn-out, hallowed bodies
as artful in their absence
as the miraculous voids
of a limewood vanitas.

II

One is astride, the other
panting now for some release,
arrival at the pin-prick
transaction of their business;
what a ride, what a favour
to the dark, and what hurry
to reach this vanishing-point!

Uccello cello cello
birdsong as dreaming aloud
against a heaven; painting
as a diagram of death;
and music as our vision
of time’s ending in the black
and knotted heart of the wood.

III

Thanks for nothing, thanks again
for the various despairs
of a modern appetite;
nothing to be afraid of,
nothing quite so of its time
as this cupidity writ
large in trillions and prayer:

Verklärte Nacht: betrayal
at a nicely judged remove:
as if our broken world could
turn away from reckoning,
all debts forgiven somehow
in the debauched coinage
of promises and regret.

IV

We are of course too canny
and too old now to be moved
or saved by such sob stories;
no, our preferred music is
the shrill, harrowing parley
of blue-notes calling the lost
each by their forgotten name.

Listen, as from a rostrum
we play this muttering trump
across meadows enfolded
and damp before hay harvest:
risen and recollected
poppies, blood-blisters, figures
upon a disturbing ground.

V

So, having seen off the dead
we turn about and face north;
hunters become the haunted
in their place, inheritors
beginning at last our own
departure from this room as
from another’s memory.

Unasked, our days become years
and years; we grow accustomed
to new styles of emptiness,
our flesh if not its focus
now assured of the long haul
from A to Z, from Garden
to Armagagageddon.

VI

It’s a bad house this evening:
hoots from the memory box,
my own appearances trashed
in the life-review. Should I
busk it nonetheless, applaud
these dramatis personae?
Should I run on, take a bow?

Best to keep the tape playing
just for laughs, until white noise
and video snow consume
the credits to my picture;
no edit or re-record
for this animated man:
this was as good as it got.

VII

Look, it needn’t happen here,
for I will negotiate
safe passage, binding clauses,
full and favourable terms;
for I will count the fretful
syncopations of my pulse;
for I will lift up mine eyes

Above the tree-line, up to
the ascendant zones of this
glittering, excessive white;
a body, chafing at its
last exposure to the air,
a mountain’s avalanches
pale before the brazen sun

Bongo-men slick in back-alley leathers
at the first night of Die Zauberflöte

Bongo-men poppered up down on the floor
in faux-leopardskin Versace dirndls

Bongo-men bareback in botox-python
on the altar of Sisi-Madonna

Bongo-men naked before these ordeals
Keep your hands up   step away from the light

Bongo-men: Salzburg fashionwear for men (alas no more)

No remedy for sleep, this
knitting and parting of hands
across the keys, this wrestling
with trills and mordents, fingers
caught in the flickering webs
of counterpoint, the endless
landscapes of G as we gigue
and joke our way through the joy,
the gyrations, and the grand
monotony. To what end
are we moving in this world
but our own reprise, better
and sweeter for the tempering
of labour and our love?

Such enlightening
geographic thunder as the earth peals
or the rage of this ebony and polished bell
piano / forte
as if marble wept
as if ivory glaciers nudged forward to be
dashed suddenly in shivers at our feet
following the laws of change
what is it that turns
ice to water and what follows noise
or the end of such heavenly doomed hammering?

is that really the time
please forgive me I’d love to
I’m sorry but as
you can see I’m not ready
my face and my hair
there is so much to do

Politely her guest yawns.
He has come, after all, too soon.

and here we go   how will this audience
play it? for laughs? po-faced? or will they get
behind the whole Zen-Quaker thing and tune
into the ambience?   so far so good
no silliness in the hall though God knows
what the listeners at home are getting
up to   standing to attention by the radio
set I don’t think   I don’t do silences
myself much   not the public ones at least
it is amazing how far one’s thoughts can
wander in a minute from the fallen
to the price of milk   it’s not that you don’t
care it’s just so hard after all this time
and you haven’t lost anyone you know

get a grip   focus   eyes open or closed?
not a lot to look at so try closing
and listening hard   air conditioning
of course   the sound of the girl beside me
scratching her leg and something like birdsong
it could be a bird even at this hour
under a streetlamp shouting to be heard
above the traffic   more like a whistle
really   in the head   is it tinnitus?
try fingers in the ears discreetly   shit
there’s definitely a hum there over
the heartbeat   they say it can drive you mad
something else to get checked   are ear tests like
eye tests or is it a medical thing

like father had before they found the growth
on his acoustic nerve? benign but it’s
left him half stone-deaf and now the other half
is going too the poor sod shouted at
needing subtitles and really really
missing his music it’s bravely borne but
I doubt the quiet gifts him anything
much in the way of helpful insights sadly
I think we’re nearly done the clock-watchers
are getting restless and we must address
the etiquette of ending we all know
the time and the sign of our return but
at the lifting of the piano lid
do we applaud and if we do then who?

Talk of the unspeakable
and here they come the angry
ones glad in the puke-sables
of damnation-mongery
a ministering veil thrown
up and flaunted in our sight
that we may be quite outshone
at the very thought of it

No longer beyond belief
our walls and windows begin
to crack before the dry heave
and oomph of a church organ
old spittle-caked JHVH off
on one of his rants again

Grey the sky and grey the day
leaden bleeding out along
its edges into this thick
and fevered cauldron   tonight

of all nights all the same
in this city playing with
itself   this is the very
cynosure the giddy pit

an omphalos of gaudy
musics and of bright shadow
one among many places
Blackpool   Kavos   Magaluf

all beating against the dark
with wings thin as a skin graft
covering our opened wounds
a ministry of sound

beats the tattoo   the winner
takes it all as a snare drum
catches at our heels and holds
us fast until the morning comes

A flowering of clays
its blue-green Oribe glaze
is a brackish pool
of comb-scrape and finger-swirl

One last pot out of Mashiko
before the earth and water shook