Month: Jun 2020

After Albrecht Dürer

Here we are: look at it, a mess
of leaf and stalk and root,
of plantain and smooth meadow grass
of daisy and cock’s foot

yarrow and hound’s tongue, speedwell
and the dandelion
just in flower, and creeping bent; all
tangled and mingling

in this nondescript scrap of earth.
Just think of it: a piece
of paper and a muddy path;
a way, a world, a choice.

Another pause for breath.

Flame from the maple: a violin
a long dolcissimo lament
upsetting the saloon; a veil and
its violation, sentiment

and a raw distress. Tall as a spruce
and black as ebony, their shadows
move across the lawn. More bad news
from the front, more hymns for the dead.

One among so many, caught
on camera; no gurning
or performances, no grief
or shocking injury; just
a turn of the head and a
backward stare into the lens,
to me, to say look: before
being swallowed, I was here.
I know, because you saw me.
At history’s mad banquet
I happened by your table
and our eyes met. This moment
is ours alone and will live.

11.11.18

one man has gone insane with thirst and drinks
from a filthy shell-hole   the stink rank as

the pits of mud and piss in which we fight
even our bread and water smell of it

we have tried chlorinated lime to combat
the blocked latrines   our gas masks help a bit

a little cacao to stop the diarrhoea
but the sweat-reek of death is everywhere

in everything   the taste of scorching bone
at the back of the throat   the constant rain

of putrid flesh   we are carrying the dead
on our hands and feet and clothing   indeed

this is worse than any hell   the foetid
clay devours us as the world goes mad

Witnesses of Verdun: wereldoorlog1418.nl

A very Low Countries hell:
kingdom of the pipistrelle
and nightjar, and above all
the harrying watchful owl.
A city burns at her call:
buckets rattle in the well
as people panic, dogs howl
and midnight in a nutshell
rides the storm. And as tanks roll
over the plain, and bombs fall
out of a black sky, we swirl
the bowl of mayhem, fettle
our demons, and drink our fill
of the filth. As our hearts fail.

Weißt du, was du sahst?

The West Front

A spectral and pastel man
à la Puvis de Chavannes;
a nosferatu; sucker
fuckwit, raven-haired, tattooed
and pierced Sebastian;
beset by needles and by
notions of the infinite;

Or maybe a huge Deco
nude, pneumatic and roughcast
concrete pecs, cup-winner, eyes
on the prize; Führerprinzip,
Triumph of the Will, if you
will, a thick and relentless
chryselephantine phallus;

Or this war child, homeless king
of the streets; lord protector
of bomb sites; hoarder of all
their improbable treasure:
shrapnel, snapshots, dragons’ teeth;
a planespotter, gone to earth;
our troublesome feral dream.

The Lantern

Transparencies and slides of
our venereal disease:
Montsalvat steeped in, gorging
on our blood: On Purity
our text for today as eyes
are purged by chlorine, our hands
worrying at bandages.

Such clashing colours: khaki,
scarlet, browns, the bully-black
of boots and bad news, the whites
of marble and bone; rust-red
this rut of iron and mire
bathed fitfully in Klieg-light,
phosphorus, the follow-spot.

We have a knack for relics,
for coffin-gas transmuted
into the clearest ether;
high in their chapels of ease
the stained glass warrior-saints
are trenchant, carry their wounds
dearly, stand for our belief.

The Crypt

And here wé are, immured in
the meatiness of clays and
ochres, roasted haematites,
the earth-tones of Lascaux and
country house dining room walls:
the war paint of our presence
and persistence in the world.

A touch of burnt sienna
on the brush; the shadows of
sfumato virgins roiling
in the dark; here we revive
the gothic arts of torment
and delight, all flesh reduced
to the stickiest of jus.

A promise of tongues; the kiss
of incandescent charcoal;
solar flares; asphyxia;
the body seared and backlit
by a falling flame: here be
certain styles of ecstasy
beyond the Dresden Amen.

The Lady Chapel

This bread is tasteless, the wine
won’t clot, and has no bouquet;
above us a great white worm
is writhing on its cross; please,
somebody, laugh at this joke
of a hammered-up Jesus
flashing his pits, for God’s sake!

It’s ewig the Weibliche:
Trümmerfrau, suiveuse de camp,
Jewess, impossible flirt
with her crack-houri nails and
rouge dragon weirdo-hairdo;
still a player, still making
an effort, skin in the game.

Blood, fish and bone: let us now
speak the language of cut flowers:
the unsexed lily is trim
and user-friendly, no stains
or inseminations here;
the crown of thornless hybrid
teas is a real tease – a scream.

The Graveyard

More and more we find ourselves
visiting the rose gardens
and pale ecumenical
woods of crematoria,
our endless rites of caring
and convenient despatch
etched in their condolence-books;

Rubric and writing that bleeds
a flattened sort of griefwork,
lost for words; as if the crawl
of bullet-points on vellum
were enough; as if these lines
enrolled in eternity
could summon the flesh, the ash.

Need for air becomes pressing;
absence weighs upon the heart
with its phantom limbs and its
acres and acres of stone;
still this earth blocks our release,
and still overhead the skies
are loud and heavy with wings.

The Baptistry

Our harps are tuned to mourning
for the grave’s oblivion.
We are badly soiled; our world
on deathwatch, wounded, winding
down and circling to what end-
this shower of glittering
fluids now shrunk to a smear,

The suck of mud, and the wear
of leather on skin. Smoke fills
the corridors; we recoil
from the barrages of heat:
out of this blackened city
comes a clamour for healing,
clangour of numerous bells.

Hell is what we say it is:
perhaps this firestorm, or this
frozen, arid wilderness;
our wish and our will. At last
we are truly clean, the fields
unharrowed, salted and sown
with the ordnance of our tears.

The High Altar

Burnt offerings. A man of
sorrows and a perfect fool.
Angels are come among us,
glory in our rout. This is
where we queue up for the Light,
and listen to the tuning-
out of neurones, one by one:

A life caught briefly; flickers
and clips as we go out of
the body, under the knife
and into the blue; we are
awash with the poppy; we
watch as the gilded petals
of this altarpiece unfurl:

Fungus and gangrene and pus
undone in the loveliest
of oils, a heavenly float
over broken soldiery.
Here, at the pedicured feet
of holy men, we are screened
and found worthy after all.

A journey began here, in this gilt
apricot-silky cabriolet
gondola to the Isle of the Dead,
to Valhalla, to the garden grave
they planned together.

A transport of the soul, its relics
and its marks of passage; a death mask
natürlich, as of the house rebuilt.
Behind glass, an empty vessel sings
of the lost presence.

…the whole sinister glittering faëry of gain…

DAS RHEINGOLD

WANT = HAVE
is not love

is the logic
of theft

is a forging
of charms

that know the heft
of money

DIE WALKÜRE

As warriors as daggers
to the heart they come

their children singing
disobedient   asleep

SIEGFRIED

How to be a man   first kill the Jew
then profit from a dragon’s tenderness

GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG

A thinning bloodline curdles into human history   this hope will self-destruct

An open window: sunlight
falling through the bars: music
to sweeten and corrupt us
utterly. Stiffening flesh,
skin still as warm to the touch
as the face of this coin:
rich, giving nothing away.

I: PHARAOH

Colossal hillsides, chisels in the womb
conceived you; igneous, eternal blocks
have husbanded your waiting form; the shock
of mallets gave you definition, room.

Black basalt panthers, porphyry baboons-
these are your kind; belonging more to rock
than to the men who sculpted you, your stock
is one with that of fossils, mountains, moons-

the mineral gods. You are, like them, alive
in every stone. In every stone a sea
of faces where the carver trawls his knife
to net your busy shape. Others go free;
they are still dancing underneath the dive
that beached your lifeless angularity.

II: MACBETH TO THE MANTIS

Alive in woodwork, breathing beneath stone,
you are a shuttered exercise in power-
beloved mistress, dear automaton,
how well I know that vegetable prayer
of helmets. Eyeless, as the skull’s edge
falls on your husband’s thrusting trunk unseen,
I am the rock face, split by the driven wedge,
the angular, carnivorous machine.

Cannibals worship you, and no wonder;
you are carving come to life, a charmed
voodoo Galatea. The head hunter
knows; his magic runs on masked alarm,
rituals to contain (as if they could)
the terrors of your crawling, hungry wood.

III: A VAN DYCK PORTRAIT

Proportion here is kept by fantasy
and artifice. From nests of plaster cloud
a masquing monarch looks, but will not see
the bones beneath their cultivated shroud.

This man has an oyster’s innocence;
his Maker covers him, a sheet of pearl
defending Virtue, making gorgeous sense
of irritation from the busy world.

Only on canvas could that head control
this intricate robotic armouring
of limbs and torso, only painters hold
together the exquisite patterning;
elsewhere, there are no heavens, earths or hells,
no magic- only steel and silver shells.

IV: PERSEUS

Emerging pinkly from the soap, unreal
and unapproachable, the face displayed
in shaving is not mine, is many-rayed
and fleshless, mirror-skinned, mercurial.

The silver fluid trembles; I can feel
vessels beating underneath my blade
behave like strangers, and I am afraid
of this reflection’s restless, smoothing steel.

I sense the blood’s thump in the skull’s great
basin; the veins across these temples snake
and bulge, ballooning nausea, fear, hate

o sever their expanding skins o break
these coils o hear the music of debating
voices rise from red enamel lakes

V: ANTINOÜS EMBALMED

More precious in rare minerals than in life
a face that once looked lovingly now stares
out of set diamonds and in high relief.
The brains are sealed in alabaster jars.

Heaven is lapidary, beyond grief;
salvation is the salvage of past years
lest ye forget. The truest words of love
are graven headstones, metamorphic tears.

At last the incorruptible are free;
their cults are emptiness, the shield-and-show
of bodies locked in rigid ecstasy.

For theirs is a kingdom only statues know,
where veins don’t knot, where skin, a spotlessly
marbling membrane, thrills in vacuo.

VI: SALOME

Always the same and everywhere unknown,
lust’s thirsty acres are as hopeless as
unreachable horizons curving alone
to no coast; no exploding waters crown
these vulturous, flesh-heavy distances-
only the dropped sweat, all of it my own.

I have heard rivers run in undertones
below, though none rise here; no spring, no cistern
in this hot arena. I have known
the gasping sands, all that exhausted stone,
endured illimitable surfaces-
from skin to silk to skin to bronze to bone;

I need an ocean’s plunging silences
to bless my undiscovered face- to drown.

VII: CORAL

Not brain perhaps, but what a brain might be;
alive and dead, persistent after death,
slow-gathering towards eternity
its tiny cells and skeletons that breathe;

a living rock. Safe-keeper of the sea
behind its huge and continental hearth
its shadows cast are limestone sanctuary,
blue pools where we may innocently bathe.

Beyond its keep, mark how the sea rages!
The quiet place is patiently defined
amidst uproar and the unappealing bells.

Its bastions are soundless; images
of a lost kingdom surface in the mind
as goddesses are born aloft on shells.

Watch as an ice-princess thaws
amidst gongs and glockenspiels

A water-torture calling
for a name, for our applause

What is it that so appeals
in what is so appalling?

The because because because
of our nature: that it spoils

The sun as a slap in the face
to the upward adoring gaze

Burst lips and blackening of eyes
as the heavens brusquely amaze

She: unworldly, prone to melting
He: bewitched, and a roaring fire

So the seasons turn. Frozen
rivers relax, the waters break

Snowflakes and crystals turn to blood
in the ungloved heat of the hand

She is running now; her touch
a trickle of sweat in his ear

Her name a memory of cold
snegurochka snegurochka

Seen once and unforgotten
the terrible thing we each
hold and wield, the cold chisel
in our brain. Here we feel it
and feed it, make it our own
re-screen it, learn it by heart
then let it tear us apart.

Into our temperate and tideless lives
they come, shocking as child molesters, each
unasked; the angry forgotten god arrives.

We bury them, but everything survives:
from gardens, fields, the pagan sculptures reach
into our temperate and tideless lives

and the torsos of our strangled, sawn-up wives
disturb marine-life on the morning beach.
Unasked, the angry forgotten god arrives.

Incredibly, the splendid liner dives,
killing hundreds; iceberg sirens inch
into our temperate and tideless lives,

dodging the surgeon’s healing feast of knives
with fatal quickness. Emboli detach;
unasked, the angry forgotten god arrives.

What have you done? What pain, what murder thrives
between an ocean and an empty niche?
Into our temperate and tideless lives
unasked, the angry forgotten god arrives.

In some versions he is believed
and let go, a voice unbroken
by the telling and unrelieved
questions of his disaffection.

Not this time. This time resonates
with cries and fracture. He will beg
a mercy from the power that waits
upon all new schools of music.

The song may or may not survive
this torture, but hell, wait to be
transported by such a lively
rendition. Extraordinary.

Just as the righteous dream of
kampf-sexy eros-jihad
the staunch of blood and poison
run together in the streets

Just as the answering play
of might along a drawn sword
a wounded polis turning
on its own philosophers

Ein Märschenoper

I

This is my gingerbread cottage   is my
leather-bar-cum-jailhouse Konditorei

horrid treacle-black as you could wish for
the liquorice heart of this gobstopper

beats for you   would eat you up if only
you would visit   why not suck it and see

II

skippity-skip
in puddles of sick
we cackle and spit
throw it all up

keep it all down
in a world of shit
we make it our own
skippity-skip

III

Finger the puckering rosebud
and relax   put a spell on you
as the saying goes   as I would
before these purple gates   yoo-hoo

Knuckle to the membrane   I could
deflower and disembowel through
a gesture   hand on heart   a crude
and pointless emblem and untrue



IV

Mr Sandman
send me a dream
da-da-da-da
not what they seem
the tickle and creep
of lips that are searching over and over
the shape and the taste of you   your lover

the jewels of our wanting gleam
in the dust and feathers of sleep

V

Look if you can   look if you must
this ogrish cavalcade
of head-blossoms   colour of rust
so graphically unmade

Google it goya / yo lo vi
florescent body-parts
clung so forever on the tree
a carnival of sorts

Eternal Father strong to save
where on earth do you start
with bones on the floor of a cave
spare us the bleeding heart

VI

Capriccio of butchered self-regard
The raft of the Medusa   smörgåsbord
or members-only snuff-shoot   you decide

VII

judecide believe me there’s no such word
yet here it is about to be defined:
an act of rendering (see lost below)

VIII

Keep it simple keep it slow
approach and beg us on your knees
first the rush and then the glow
there is no cure for this disease
in a ring the tumours grow
beneath rock-candy-crystal trees

IX

Who puts the desert in dessert
or the die in diabetes
the abandoned plenty-pervert
that gobbles up your sweeties

Where shall you find me   may be seen
the triumphs of my hunger   maybe
in this orgasm-canteen
in the playpens of Abu Ghraib

X

fee fie foe
Guantánamo

fie foe fum
Jerusalem

foe fum fee
The Holy See

fum fee fie
Necropoli

XI

The dead have evolved Vale to the Vale
et Ave to a healed head vol de Tod
to a toad-hole all the addled ova
that the devoted leave love-death LOVE DEATH



XII

This is the world’s wood   enter deep
along the tracks concealed
now by dodder and saplings   keep
your ears and your eyes peeled

Deeper   follow the black engine
the pine needles spearing
leaf-litter to where we begin
with shacks in a clearing

You look as though you’ve seen a ghost
bloodying these maples
in a horned thicket all is lost
great legions   great peoples

XIII

Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook   sharks and Nazis
and all the rubbish downloading
as we sit and take it   TVs
tuned to some Scat Channel horror
while on the other side   fading
are the voices   much as before

to ashes   untold histories
have vanished   magic   self-cleaning
and reinvention overseas
as the kindly old Herr Doktor
so good with the children who now bring
him   aghast   to the oven door

favoured chosen quick
to give offence
its florid memory

children are moving
among us can
see what we cannot see

so quietly they
turn to marble
faces of injury

(and such injury)
again again
endear and endanger

the accusation’s
dance on the point
of a pointed finger

that is the purpose
of being It
to brandish without fear

the black fairytale
Kalashnikov
no pax for this child nor

peace for the shaven
man now bleeding
into his cloud of nails