sump

I went to see my neighbour
used to be a cartoonist
little funny things
better drawings than jokes
but okay
told me a cat got squashed
mentioned eyeballs
told the owner
who got it back out of the bin
his wife said I had a rival
another guy she now looked at
yeah, I said
we drank coffee
both of them chewing nicotine gum
the house smelling of lard
and last night's alcohol
sat there talked about the other neighbours
with the cars busting their sumps
on the level crossing
then he says
least you ain't a Paki-shagger
and she laughs
watching me to see
then we talked about the fridge
leaking water into the fresh-drawer
what they call it
how the people with the big field
had got some pheasants
all that
cars breaking underneath
she's sixty
and does something to do with coal
on a computer
deliveries and stuff, orders
and looks, and smiles
a bit yellow now with the years
of smoke and living there
but, you know
and he's sixty five
and keen on gardening and beer
and young women
the cat got picked up
put in a bag
at the roadside
then a roadsweeper came by
and took half its skin off
fortunately the kids were at school
they like me, these people,
I'm one of them
watching the road
the things that get swept down
looking out
into the leaves
with the cars banging
and that little guy from the station
who we all know
is a transvestite
on his knees
filling the scrapes in the tarmac
with some gunk
that never lasts
running out to the gate
when the bell sounds
and we all watch
when a special train comes by
we like these little moments
with the smoke blowing
and the steambox blasting out
shockwaves
it's a river, this road
from the moors
to anywhere
and we'll talk about any damn thing
that crawls down it
not that any of us
actually like each other
like, don't like
like this, not that
you know how
just that we're all here
at the side of the same road
at the same moment
watching the same cat run out
at the same wrong moment
that's what we've got
that makes us
dead cats and racism
and a load of people
going somewhere else
in broken cars
crashing by
cracking all our sumps
into the distance

Valediction for a departing prime minister

the rictus is a manifesto
sealed from within,
a gateway into
refusal to engage

HIGHER PURPOSE,
fixity, worlds of rarefied trust

(look what we found, witness
the shared miracle, reach out and touch
the portal
now)

REALPOLITIK beyond understanding:

a Level Above Human
see gods wrestle, see fingers of radiance
at work, at the helm,
tapping the rhythms of being, of real being here
now always like this, as it ever...DIVINE PLAN
FREEDOM, PARITY, look, freedom...
where gods wrestle with texts

from the sky, from dreams
serving purpose that derives
by strange mathematics
inexorably
from the imperatives
of the hovel and the palace

the urgent tickertapes
from Damascus and Gaza,
WASHINGTON
and Archangel
and Vatican City
and all I want, soon, soon, but

fish with no eyes, mouths sealed over,
claiming the gift of prophecy,
but forgetting now, forgetting...

the eyes of the unfaithful can't resolve
these dances in the sky
can't place them
can't read the texts
tune in the receiver
can't find them
on the shelves
or fix a clear gaze
on shifting things of light

with such sexless fixation
such urgent banality

the radio fails with a crackle
as the water reaches the throat

the lights come down,
fingers break the glass

(Now swallow the damn medicine,
you need more fixing.)

The weary woman
sweeps up hilarity
and teeth.

Night Night Night.


.
.
.

inmost

back of the front
the pieces blow
a reverse
fierce
a trunk's shadow
out of sun
not stilled

not sleeping this
regression
back of backer still
behind the town
behind inmost
bends
the tap
of leafy
fingers there
behind bed/wall/thought
scratching night
mare in a little head
liquid-runs-voice-tape

beat
cool fingers rest
revolve bring back
the front to the front
so the eyes
align eyeholes
and all comes back
awake
into sleep

never remember
you were ill here -- there
more there at here times
-- what held you
while you slept
and struggled

to come back.
Back now.
Here back.
.
.
.
.

dead moon

all down the east coast
the ghosts blow
like dazzle
over the waves
the surf's arc
the pattering cliffs
I go looking
in rock pools
for eyes
looking back
full of jumping
full of sinking coins

dead men and
shimmer

another
big-eyed idiot frog

another midnight philosopher
face down in a pond

grasps a dead moon
.
.

Zanshin

Whatever your arrow is
let it fly
as though aimed at the heart
of your enemy,
as though all your life

was balanced there
in that moment of flight,
in the intention
the desire
the act.
Hold nothing back,

give all that you are
to the preparation.
Breathe it in
until it fills you,
then let it loose
and move on.
When you release the arrow

the certainty
must be so complete
that you can close your eyes
forget about it
sing a song
or jump in a river -
it doesn't matter

because the universe
will take over
and guide it home
in acknowledgement
that you did everything
that was necessary
and all that you are
was in tune with this act
at this moment:

the arrow thudding
into the heart
is just the finish,
the gasp, the full stop
that says it is ended.

Don't wish for it,
don't be controlled by it,
just make it happen
and be emptied of it.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

river man (quick shuffle)

I am not the river man,
I am not the green shadow
that moves on the banks
that baffles your eyes
at dusk, nor the hush
that stills the watchers
in the dark shallows.
I am only a distant gunshot
sounding at nightfall,
and the burst of one star
over the treetops.

I am not the slippery river man.
I am only the undercut clay
of the river's bend,
raked by hands that tried to rise
but slipped back, tried to rise
but drew back, succumbed
to the currents and the flood,
to the bend of night,
to the voice in the rushes,
to the voice
that called from downstream.

I am not the leaping river man.
I am only a mudstone
with a round hole
where the grass once grew,
a hole where something alive
once passed through.

I am the sifting of pebbles
and the song of night,
I am the eye in the riverbed
the spring and the sprite.

I am not that frog-eyed river man
who weaves the dawn in your heart,
who wraps you in blankets of fog
and tugs your tresses apart.

I am not the choking river man,
and I will sing you no river songs
of far horizons as I pass you by.
I will dry here instead
in the cracked mud
by your feet,
as the singing
dies away
as the shimmer
fades
as the hammer blows
stop.

Breathe

1

You have to be dangerous, you
have to fix yourself, breathe in
intentionality, fixity of purpose
like a man sucking flame

through the nostrils, staunching
soft tissues. You will know
that it's you I'm talking to here,
not everyone, only jailbreakers,

criminals of the senses.
Yes, the static in your head,
the pain has to stop,
but don't think of freedom

here, pinned to this tree:
there is no freedom to hope for.
But there is the breathing in
of purpose, and the breathing out only

the extrusion of a silken span
dragline and capture
singing with little death

2

Breathe down, scoop cool
energy up from the earth
let it flood and draw down
heat from the stars

this is what we get,
this fervent shuffle

starlights fall from my fingers
batshit hits the floor

sometimes
a reasonable substitute for a life
is what it sometimes
is

chimes

breathe deep,
wayward choker on moths,
here are new airways
for the nightflying
new paths new
flames to follow

more chimes here, a clocktower

urgently

This is a poem with no end
this is a thing pinned to a ledge
consuming itself, watching the night
flood by, snatching at the wind,

waiting forever
to catch its death,
waiting forever

to catch its breath.


.
.
.
.
.
.

dead tree/live tree

Foster's Leap

You trace the black bones up the hillsides
and you wonder why and how many men
it took to circle the wyke
and you wonder further back
at nearby Barnold and the alders
and you feel it rushing by
across the fields forever
wind -- wet -- winter breaking
its teeth on the stone trolls
of the Leap, green and loathsome
up there when it should be clean,
and the small figure hangs between
the two pillars, mid-shriek
overhead, all silhouette
with no face, coat tails whipping
in history. And urgent with entering
you lift your feet in turn
from the black mud
and place them on moss
then stone, and your fingers
grasp easily onto features
that comfort with abrasion,
and you start up
towards Foster's flapping ghost

and towards the rushing sky.

Stopping Time

Took him three years
visualising Time as a goose
beating down the Atlantic
the wind-ways, the ripped open
cloud-roads from Labrador
and the great crossing all
in a dead V in the squalls
pulling up honking in the parks
and stubble fields of the North West
and one here, nearly dead with it,
Time's greylag ticked out most
of its heart into the night
crashing in a flapping mess
at his mind's door, where he brings
it food -- bread and sardines,
anchovies and shrimp mixed
into a paste with a little gin.
Soon he carries it in, lays it out
like a near-dead bride in a cot,
and clips its big wings.
In the morning it lifts its head
over the bars and looks at him
confounded and flightless,
and the moment starts to stretch
and the clouds stop
and the heartbeats stop
and he smiles that long smile
of a broken clock:

forever sadness
and eternal Spring.

Major Arcanum No. 23: The Black Dragon

Cheer up worse
things it could be

worse things
happen in the green troughs tomorrow is

day one I will I will another day
behind clouds survive

will at sea every cloud every tunnel
a light darkest

before the green troughs
I will my heart sink with sea

horse tresses wrack clee
shh they are tending the light

with moths and fire
flies for the brightment

I will in it face to foetal face
eyes for the fine shine

at sea worse things happen
survive so I will

wave things wavelets
creeps upon you like fingers

of photon falling this my katabasis
like rainbow troughs seaward

like all points dropping pressure
I will not now emerge that other end

of the world that could be worse...
.
.
.

other/self/other

You know from your own disturbance
that something is happening
it doesn't take the birds
going silent
or plumes of smoke
on distant hillsides stopping
and hanging, stilled --
only the catch in your own voice
tells you that a thing is here
for which you have no script
and that you are at your own edge
looking down, seeing nothing.
Devoid of options in this
you run down wrong paths
find them blocked
like forest trails
choked with drifts of leaves
and fallen limbs, find yourself
always back in that moment
of looking down
into the hole in the middle
where nothing has yet grown
that can accommodate this moment.

And when we wake in the middle
of searching, we find it, what we seek,
where we first looked and looked again,
though it cannot have been there then.

And we carry on as though

nothing had even begun
and nothing ended.
.
.
.
.

Instructions for pyrotechnic poetry

The trick is not in sending the words in loops and spirals off the trampolines of the lexicon through the hoops of the iris unstopped down the fiery skeins of optic nerves into the brains of birds:

the trick is keeping them anchored
and bringing them back to land.
The trick is not in watching words
disappear upwards at your command,
cut loose, like feathers in a storm
of your own marvel, while spectators
lose sight of your little lost swarm.
If you want some Oohs and applause,
keep them tight and bring them back
to alight spectacularly on all fours.

Always allow some exciting slack,
but bring your barnstorming babies
safely back from the black.

Major Arcanum Below Zero: The About to Blow

Before morning’s creep down the wideways of woodland halt
the breathed haircurls aflame he came where she was wide in the wanting

and illustry, and filled with bursts and offered more mothering was --
not needed now he burst also almost upon the brinking bells his heralding

and horn, but not yet the moment not yet the foment of follis he inbreathes
for his preparation and preparates his blowout into width and dimensions other,

that like here where leaves shuffle down and steam all night there, there is it
the spiral of steam that rises there when we look away -- there he prepares his

parting like the slitting of curtains and the eye that peeps and pokes between and now
at the threshold with hands undealt but ready -- as he’ll ever -- with position and time it is

coming it awaits two damn seconds only out of reach, and already under way,
falling last and first and before first in the space where there the spiral like smoke

rises its mystery...

three little poems

all night clouds shaking
with anger
in the morning
three little poems
from the east
rain down

screech owl: strix

I am an open throat
with the night sliding down
beating at shadows
yowling in red fields,

spinning wave filaments into beats
of self-betrayal, prey (though I
am all engagement, all sensation
and know nothing of this)
in the leaves, blood burst
beneath snow - and here, look,
here a poem was snatched, still glowing

here are whirling feathers
and the signs of struggle
here are footprints
at the perimeter
where something came to look

and here a boy runs down staircases
a dripping thing fresh
in his hands
the cry of a world in his ears

and all of it, all that we look for,
is in this wild-eyed running
and the owl's screech of tears.

Strix/Lillith

The Prophet

Call me the prophet
I break through the wall
of my house
at midnight
and leave hastily
jangling like a thief.

I have come North
heavy with prophesy
to tell
of owls crying in daylight
and bats dropping
from the sky
children that wake at night
and call from their graves.

Strange things happen in the air,
and my fingernails ache
from scratching at the sky. I am not
a father now, I am only
a wind in the rushes

bringing news of the distant talk
of strangers. And I carry
fire in my baggage. Tomorrow
I will break through the wall
into your house

and stand over your bed,
bearded and angry, my words
wild things that beat their heads
on your hands. Then I will leave
at nightfall, and fly to the east
on wings made from your hair,
dropping tears like moons
upon the dark land below.

(This kind of leaving
has the urgent drama and romance
of the night).

Call me prophet of feathers
and falling moons.
Call me fool on wings of wax.

Call me the prophet.

Links

I'm gradually accumulating links to sites etc accepting poetry submissions, as well as other resources and information. These are among the links on the right hand side of this page.

Serge Gainsbourg: Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais

This is a smoky kind of song for a rainy Paris in late summer, and strange dreams circle it like a late afternoon bar with all the curtains drawn, with drunken men and women surrendering to their sadness and strangeness. There's something of deep denial and anger in here, expressed through a kind of soft savagery. Blood runs down these yellow windows, and we order more wine and sing our sad, angry, defiant songs of doomed love through the smoke, no longer hoping for anything beyond the moment. Outside in the rain, office workers hurry back from their lunch breaks carrying flowers or broken mouldings from antique furniture, and here time stretches in one of those long moments seen through green glass and the dull shine of old sorrow. From the dreaming chamber, we sense some kind of dawn approaching, always that hateful daylight that comes to tear the covers from our dreams. I could almost swoon forever in that long moment, but only death ultimately lives there in that place outside of time. This is the message of Gainsbourg: the moment will always end, and the grey light will reveal the faces of your new lovers as old, monstrous, desperate things, your poems as paper scraps that dissolve in the rain, all your songs nothing, less than echoes. Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais...I have come to tell you that I'm leaving...et tes larmes n'y pourrent rien changer...and your tears will change nothing... We still have time for one more drink, one more song, one last cigarette before the ship sinks. This is a deep, drunken moment for me, as I once spent three days with a French woman I met on a ferry - we stayed in a guest house on the south coast of England, and we listened to this song over and over, venturing out briefly to sit in quayside bars and eat bad food, knowing that time was running out, that some kind of light was approaching. I suggested we should get married right there and then before the dawn came, but she said no. Why break the spell? I wondered. But she sensed the light better than I did, and she knew Gainsbourg's message better. We never met again, but neither of us listen to this song without recalling that long moment before the ship foundered. I got the train back to the north, and she went back to Paris, but footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden...

Serge Gainsbourg - Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais...

po - hexagram 23

Jump - for Charles Bukowski - nearly ready to scramble into a poem, this one

Everyone gets a chance to jump. It comes
and it's gone, a crossroads, a way out,
a way in, a closing door in the wind.
When the moment comes, and you're up there
looking out into the cloud,
just do it. Just fall, surrender
to it. Something big

wants to take over. Let it happen.
Take the car keys and drive south
fifteen hours without stopping,
change your name, say yes to everything
for three holy days,
just make that jump
before the door slams shut.

Some people can't make it, they teeter
forever in the jeering
clamour of themselves, knowing
that their moment just passed them by
and they were afraid to take it.
When your moment comes, be ready.
It's the difference between life
and not life - be ready to jump

when the demon in the top hat
opens the door and tells you
your time is now. Not jumping
is slow dying, cancer, rotting
from inside, self hatred. Not
jumping is being stuck forever
in your own shadow.

Be ready to jump.
.
.
.
.

elephant poem-not-poem - still gestating

That's not an elephant in the room.
Whichever way you look at it
that's a burning man, and he seems calm
about it all, chewing a sandwich
and reading the newspaper. These burnings
are common enough now, and we all know them -

well enough for them not to disturb
our own eating or sex most of the time -
but behind the sound
of crackling and chewing
is a quiet something,

a whisper that is not really sound,
but is the anger of a million poems
that warned about this burning
and how it would happen

every time a door closed somewhere
in one of those rooms upstairs
where fathers walk barefoot
on bare floorboards
looking for something that got lost.
Or when the lies
got so thick in the air
they started to stick

to people's skin, and burn
like napalm, or raining
ash. And I just want to add
my ashen voice to that soft beat
of the wind in the night, that quiet elephant

in the heart shriek that sweeps down
the mountainside noise of humanity

trying again to stand. It's all been said,
but I want to add my voice and lift
the volume just a little. So this
poem-not-poem is my name of anger

on that long petition
of the heart's horror.

Tim Buckley - Song to the Siren

my other site is here:

http://steveparker.wordpress.com/

floodlit midnight

what can I tell you about this?
it's like windows breaking in
like a hand got your foot
and dragging you back like a dream
like you can't, you know, run
like that, like falling through solid air
a confessional would do, like, nothing here,
nothing, just pain, self pity, hopelessness
that trope where you keep on on on
walking through that same door
into that place behind the wall
waking forever in the same mirror
looking out at that thing that looks in,
that is going to walk out
of the frame and kill something
next time he shows he'll have blood
around his mouth for sure. Best we can do
is hope it's his.

Hell isn't somewhere else,
Hell is just a different way
of seeing things.

Nick Drake - River Man

Beaker People

'Perhaps it's me...but in all honesty, I could not penetrate that tangle of syntax, invented words, and structure, and derive any kind of meaningful image from it. Sorry.'

- Critique recently received on an online poetry forum. Not often you get a keeper like that. I might just have it engraved on my headstone.

ad ugly damn diction

this no damn chinaman got me
no hepkat whore pours yellow ozone
back up my veinhome, this a German-French
sailor gripes my throat-gag

we know it in our grain-fathers
and the seepage of our guts

it is known likewise that we put on undergarments
as a sacrificial layer against the clear fact that we leak,
to protect others and ourselves we meet from the contagion

only for the dying dying,
like those others, those Irish-Iberian boilers
who came for the richness, the black loam and foam,
the Black Forest rides to the White Hart of Celt-death
of all I want out I want O I want out now
(but best perhaps not to mention any outer layers
for we have none here)

Beaker People come home
and your beds disturbed
your seed blows ravaged
so make it right with your fire

Beaker People I don't mean you
I mean those others who cry on the wind, those others

Beaker People, it's not really you
I'm calling to, but those others like you
who sing through the channels -
I don't know their names those others

fire magic make it right
with your fire magic make it right
with your fire magic make it right

whip the wind of its lies
and put back the lost things recovered

at what expense we here
I want out of.

killing saddam

A market in Mesopotamia
a bad boy favoured today
by Allah drives a camel
with a stick that he inserts in a wound
created for the purpose

wind scours his eyes,
winds here have the names of demons:
Simoom - the poisoner
Bad-i-sad-o-bist-roz - wind of nails
everyone’s fucking corpse-wind crawls across here
blowing sand off graves
whipping up silk rags
into the sky
they will all die of wind

leaves fall, his eyes
fall into ditches

he thinks of afreets
coming for him
dragging him again into fire
and darkness, a big-eyed djinn
leaping from the grave
tearing his shut eyes mudbrick

fragments that clatter
in the wind, a blown sunhat
amongst the ceramics, his hands
ziggurats that strangle
the babble

he drowns
in silence and clamour,
feels for that space between

brick fingers bore sockets,
the wells of Ur Nammu,
Nebuchadnezzar, rectangular
weep-holes in masonry
terraces denuded of time,
growth, space

after applause, vacuum
after climax - silence,

there will be none. Taken by afreets,
by time’s stoop, the clamour,
lost to comprehension
a straight drop brings him

a dignity of shadow
and the world slinks home
ears and nostrils stuffed with garlic
for the fear
that their souls might rise against them

quiet, quiet now, the work is done
and we who found our voices thick
with bile and antiseptic
must now find a time for our choking.

.

dumbass buddha in the age of gold

(This is a riff on the theme for the purpose of gestation - it's not a piece of writing yet)
this corpse-faced Capa Coha buddha with the leather mummified skin was I believe ritually flayed of all circuitry extraneous to the Samadhi of profit by the AIs at T.K.Maxx his unlit eyes like razored slices of trusting dead cow eye painted black
gone out, inverted and gazing into a bland Satori of suburban lack, some zombie quiescence born of sofas and soft furnishings designer satori of labels and stack-em-high, shit he looks happy enough in that lobotomised way that Buddhas have
when they've forgotten what it was that they were looking at in the middle distance
and let their eyes droop into the commercial break. This buddha, this housing ladder halfwit starter home happy head sunday league sideline-racer avid fan of reality TV this weather swapper this cash injection cctv new labour neocon illiberal iron maiden buddha shocked by the war suspicious of muslims better bomb em anyway buddha buddha buddha sergeant rockery buddha waxing of car born christian and now not quite sure but who knows there might be something pelican head lost object buddha waking in the garden shed at midnight in his wildest rainstorm buddha TK.Maxx Wallmart Imperial Tobacco buddha spending his synapses watching the flickers projected by the stormlight on his stone faced new brick bulkhead this droopy Buddha has got a yap dog buddha early night with his tired wife once a week where he finds all the Satori he needs, then goes off retail middle management internal email viral advertising firewall bitching styrofoam needless blackberry buddha without vision buddha without question without courage content to be his own enemy looking benignly at his own reflection in the wall of his tank wondering what it could be looking back with dead eyes.Dumbass Buddha.

WORD (in progress)

...is a long corridor
stretching
shadows
to snapping
just a tendril
shimmer with dewdrops
spark-gap
the node flashes between these
mirrors each
a cobweb jerking
a lung flooding, a wave collapsing
all words codified
first the p words b words plosified
when you look when you stop

time and fix
the moment like this, you see
it's like this that all possible routes
were travelled to this point
the poem of this point
a frozen frame
one circuit sparking
encoding a whole,
a fishdrop is this word
this face-down-study word this
library Larkin cup of tea word
this shuffle of an overcoat word
heading
home in the half light

a symphonic dusk of starlings
to a lonely house word
each to each
smoke flows back down

the chimney, coughs
are sucked back in
lungs filled with expectoration
where grow inflections of undifferentiated
word tissue, stem-words
that may become all issue, lexica-stock
of the probable, no men
clat ure of collapsed
wordwave
the pandorad hoard scattered
the hope-spasm of a diaphragm
the formula-shuck
of a buccal chasm
bilabial plosive
orgasm unvoiced
merely fricative thrust, close rounded and schwa
vowel freak-vowel schwa ugh lateral

ugh approximant of consonantal drift
gondwanaword of a pacific
rimshot acoustic
of blowface composition spit it out spirant
spit it out dearie, better
out than in

schwa (I know you not) bleak Blairword
thrusting bronchia-beyond-body-branch and broken
and web and filament and stem
and monofilament and unchained
polymer of word
enter your ear-anvil
still hooked umbilical in my
mindlung my voice chamber, still

tugging and coming, coming hammered
loose
placental
bloodroot to become
now yours this word delivered
of the systemic etymology
shivered into echoism
of silence,
sigh lens,
silens
word ecology fish-flapping now
a last flap the pin fixing the wingfin

to the specimen board we bends
creaking to look what it became
in the fixing, that fix
when all roads just stop
mouths go silent, clouds crystallise
as usual the miracle
a brown, dull thing
a word no one would use
in a brown dull poem even

not even
in our wildest sparks
cinders.

self loathing at dusk

He shows them magic
sparks cascade around his head
his fingers, tendrils that channel
starlight, he tells stories and poems,
his confidence backlit
with the mild hysteria of someone

watching a clock run down
he watches their eyes gleam,
wonders what he will do
how long he will survive
when these little lights
go out
when the moment
has ebbed away
in the near-dark of five o clock
the applause
leached out of his blood
the insistent hour
come upon him.

They don’t make storage cells for this stuff
it comes and it goes like rainbows
you can’t freeze
these frames
they’re here and they’re gone
like POOF…magic
dust
in your hands

a lizard’s tail flicking, drying
he looks out into the evening
with that hollow light burning
all down the river
wonders if drowned people
are floating past
and he stands there in the twilight

in just his socks
for almost an hour
while the dark spreads down the hillside
and wraps itself around the streetlights

feeling something in his guts
that he never felt before,
not really, he wonders briefly
if it is illness, or just the tide
going out.

an attempt to speak clearly from the heart (rough draft)

I put my hands on the table

feel the pulse in my palms

the intake of breath

bringing sweeps of colour-history

gathering in flashes

of humans like apes watching

something - the smell, the taste of the sea

grief is here, darkness falling,

an urge to shake, to fall apart

cut through stretched hide

through my skin

smoke within miror

see in smoke

pulse still drumming

shapes forming

my hands, my fingers

smoke, watching

the whole thing shake loose

tear away

in my throat

far away head

breaks the surface, fugitive,

gasps, an icy rush

valley

birds above, shadows

fingers across my skin.

the beginning and the end of this

I know death

I am not refreshed

not welcome, here only

at last.

The 'Swastika Stone' - Ilkley Moor. Bronze Age.

Stone spiral carvings. Ilkley Moor. Bronze Age.

the pursuit of the white hart*

The kind of poetry (and writing generally) that currently most interests me is the attempt to speak from areas other than the intellect. Note that you can't do this directly, it has to be achieved through various kinds of suggestion, which require that you abandon any idea of overt, linear narrative, and replace it with a kind of mosaic or montage (both the wrong words) of narrative attempting to work at, and to contact, different levels simultaneously. This also requires some understanding from the reader that the direct narrative is being deliberately subverted to this end. A way to achieve it is by, having first located or established the subject, looking for it in different areas. If it is overt or physical, or extraneous, then look for it in yourself - see what is corresponding inside to what is outside, see what that looks like and what words and images are attached to it. See what it feels like, and what words come with those feelings. How deep can you follow it? The deeper you go (into what can become a quite shamanistic, meditative pursuit), the closer the images and words become to dream narratives, as they permutate through successive layers of language and imagery.

The vital thing is to keep the thread intact between the initial impetus and the deeper imagery - if the connection is lost, then the words cease to have any authentic link to outer reality, and the poetry becomes effectively meaningless outside of what is more or less a dream state. It is no good just summoning abstract or surrealist images from your imagination, they MUST be sequentially connected to the surface by the poetic equivalent of a chain of neurons, and able to fire in both directions.

If it's achieved - and some people have done it very well indeed - then the result is a startling interactive narrative of different realities speaking with different voices, and all ultimately decipherable through the presence of this Rosetta Stone of interconnectedness. It can seem very abstruse, and the best poetry of this kind often is, but it is never gratuitously or actually unintelligible, and it represents ultimately some of the greatest accomplishments in the pursuit of poetry and what it really is. Eliot and Joyce are probably the two best known poets to really use these sorts of dream narratives.

*The title 'pursuit of the white hart' refers to the frequent instances in myth of the appearance of a white stag, boar or other creature, announcing the proximity of the 'otherworld', or perhaps the 'unconscious'. Celtic mythology is particularly rich in these references, and I take them to be imagery of exactly the process I'm trying to describe in this piece, though they might have been more literally intelligible to their contemporary composers and listeners.

To be continued/revised.

Notes for a poem about Alan Turing

Turing is a candidate for the 'father of the computer' title. He was a prime mover in the decryption of the German 'Enigma' code during WW2. See Turing Test / Enigma / Ultra etc.

Kallisti - Inscribed by Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, on the apple presented by the shepherd-prince, Paris, to Aphrodite, was the word kallisti, meaning 'for the fairest'. Apple of Discord. Turing committed suicide by eating an apple injected with cyanide, having been convicted of homosexual acts in 1954, and presented with the choice of 2 years in prison (at extreme personal risk), or submitting to chemical castration by oestrogen injections that would have curbed his libido and caused him to grow breasts. His suicide came two years after his conviction, following a period of deep depression; which there is little doubt was brought on by the disgrace, the oestrogen injections - and, no doubt, what must have felt a humiliating rejection by a nation that he had done much to save from defeat by the Nazis.

Words to discard - love that dare not - apple - dials - fingers - secrecy - enigma - test - intelligence - betrayal.

I imagine his wheels spinning, iterating through algorithms of dead ends, all solutions barred, the certainty that the decryption was false, that no solution was currently available, the code now lost, the wolfpack arrayed in the mist across the North Atlantic, no way through, grinding of foghorns in the mist, a mile of darkness beneath, the final certainty that it would be better to run into a mine and vanish in some small, secret explosion than to either sink into the crushing darkness waiting, or surrender to a sickness prescribed by a grateful nation in an act of gross judicial indecency...

Enigma Machine



It was possible to dream for a long time, there amidst the bundles of cable that stretched out into the mist. Always cold, but even possible to dream sometimes that you knew who was out there, that it really was a human being sending back those signals from the North Altlantic, from the mist, from wherever, somewhere on the end of those cold wires was a human that you could fall in love with, or who at least might come in singing in the night Lily Marlene across the shipping lanes to pluck apples from the waves imagine apples falling from the night that hummed with electromagnetic Asdic amongst the Nordic clouds rolling in from the North. But of course it was never really possible to know what was out there until the answer came in unequivocally, when the machine turned finally and the screen cleared, and a face appeared, an iron face that no human could ever love, not in this test or any other.

the smoking mirror

Dead to the fairies

Smoking Mirror, what is that whisper,
what is that shadow
that walks at noon,
the silence
that grows like ancient trees
whispering through roots
that do not seek water,
but the access of language
through all temporal lobes
all channels?
Smoking Mirror,
what are the words

that the shadow speaks?
A signal beamed from stars:
it runs like a bright thing
between the trees,
a hole, still smoking,
where something was taken.
This is the message,
this at this moment
is the loudest
the shadow will speak
the closest it will come
Here are the coordinates,
move to these places, and watch closely, attend,
speak from,

of, your body.
These are the other ears
the other eyes,
and without these
you will hear no words,
but only
the wind
laughing
as it dances down
to where the weirs and cataracts
are flattened
into rivulets
and the roar and the trickle
of them, the whisper
and the flood of them
are sucked back
up onto the watershedding moors
feeling for peaks
to alight from,
from which to birth again
into the sky,
convinced of your inattention
and the futility
of pressing the point.

Giving names - first few words of another attempt to write about poetry

I'm giving names to the part of me that needs to speak. I'm calling it Sensorium, and I'm calling it Monster. Sensorium, because it is all that comes in, and Monster because it is monstrum, it reveals, it uncovers, it demonstrates. Monster, because I wake at night, in fear, with it arched across me. I follow it into the wardrobe and down the steps through the wall. I see now that all poems are brought back at night from these journeys into the Land of the Dead. But it is not a land of the dead, it is halfway between waking and sleep, halfway between words and what is beneath words. It is that place that you know from sitting in sunlight, unaware of anything other than the dust circulating in a shaft of light. It's very close to that place, and when you are near you are somehow aware and not aware of the voices from the sensorium writing furious poems in that language of light, webs forming all around in startled air, disintegrating, spreading, dying, all of it taking No Time, and then you are back, befuddled and halfway through speaking of what plants you will grow next Spring, to someone who regards you strangely, then stands and leaves. The only sign of their presence a flutter in the hedge. Shake your head quickly - none of this was real.

assemblage of components for poems about poetry - first draft

Some words it is necessary to sacrifice at the outset. Some words have every intention of subverting the entire deal, and can not be safely included in any delicate work. It is important to establish right away which are the dangerous words and deal with them. So which words are they? They are probably the words you would write if you were a keyboard without a human attached to it, or some mechanical fingers clicking away in space somewhere, lacking empathy with anything anywhere, just a wired heart beating like a metronome in the cold wash of an alien sun. Throw these words down the well and let them learn what it is to mean something. I'm trusting that you have a well, as it's unlikely you would have even read this far otherwise.

Then it is necessary to assemble the words to be used. This begins with establishing intent. In this case the intent is to speak about poetry, to unearth what is going on beneath the nomenclature, and the nomenclature here means not only words and names, but images, sensations, all the multi-media assemblage of our senses. At this level, the inner landscape of my knees is spoken of in terms of playing fields, rain, sadness of school days, retreat into long corridors and cloakrooms, insistent tapping of childhood threat, bone metastasis, osseous dream-fixes - the hidden language of the dreaming of the body. This requires particular words and materials, those which have been made active with both deep sympathy and fixity of poetic intent. Furthermore, it must be clear at the outset that some degree of failure is certain. The most one might hope for is to open the door at morning and find oneself naked and bereft on the doorstep with a mouthful of ash and a glimpse of something that ran around corners up ahead, never quite seen. I want to talk about mathematics and morphology, but I can't. Something is wrong, and it's possible that I'll never know what it is. Poetry is a little like that - like the awareness of brain damage. And now the moment has died anyway... I'm going to come back to this time and time again.

night don't stop -
black stars burn forever
at my door

the work of reassembly

The man rakes through knapped flakes
of flint, like leaves or blades, slices
of a body. He pictures unknown molluscs boring
into chalk, breaking down, leaving holes
that fill slowly with black, going bad, going hard;
thinks of an edge slitting hide, a heart flapping

in its own cavity. He finds the next piece,
sticks it carefully to the last, Superglue and blood
on his fingers. He's surrounded here by flint,
a thousand facets, more, spread out in shiny slices,
eyes staring up, frozen, each preserving an image
of a man swinging a stone blade, working flint,
moments captured in an immutable emulsion
of geology, fixed in leaching calcites and metamorphic
pressure - a record of clicking, grunting, industry

of rainfall or sunlight, smells of roasting
flesh, fur, cracking of fat and bone -
but he knows that these eyes look out only
from the impossible. These are not the flint roads
to a land of the dead, we shall not reach out
quivering hands to our mitochondria through this
avalanche of fossil. There are no sparks left
here, these fragments are cold as fish scales
to his fingers, this pool blind to both oceans

and the man refitting the scales, jigsawing through
codas of the Permian and Palaeolithic. He is precise,
determined; he assembles, he attempts, he rejects,
searches. He finds, growing in his hands, a nodule,
a flint - three dimensions, four, others perhaps
inert, coiled in a hole in the core in the shape
of an axe head. This is what he finds here

- holes - here in his hands, holes like words
transmitted from the Stone Age in its cataract
of sediment. He senses violence gestated, birthed
in these sockets, and his fingers sting
with the sensing. He knows the excitement,
the slight tremor as his fingers reach back,
adding more fragments, more of the hole, ignoring
the dreams that crowd upon him. He feels the void,

the discovery, absence, the discovery of absence.
The finding of holes. The shape of the absent -
he traces its periphery, its rim, feels the shape
of what has been taken. This is the beginning
of the work of reassembly: the finding of holes.
Later will come measuring and recording, cataloguing,
later still the taking of casts. Much later,
the tentative matching of specimens. For now,
he feels them in his hands, flints with no hearts,
light as pumice, warm as fists, dark as deep history.

haiku

The following poems are more or less traditional haiku inspired by reading Matsuo Basho. I tried to use some of the common nature images familiar from Basho and his disciples. The first one (kireji haiku, which also occurs later) breaks a rule by including an extra word in the title, but I wanted to use the image of kireji (referring to a traditional cutting word in Japanese, used to divide the two halves of haiku). In this case it becomes a pun as the two halves might be both two seasons divided by snowfall, and the two 'faces' of the poem.

(Click the title of this introduction or see the links below for articles about the elements of haiku, including kireji.)

kireji haiku

winter snows
in late autumn -
two-faced year

8 haiku



a jumping frog
breaks the pond mirror -
a spring day shivers





summer rose petals
cover the pond -
pink carpet roof





autumn moon
eclipsed by a snowy owl -
see her white crown





winter snows
in late autumn -
two-faced year





the wintry clatter
of machines on fields -
a flower factory





sound of engines
on the cool spring air -
frogs are courting





a single drop
from the spring blossom -
a beetle sips wine





the rich man
throws coins from his balloon-
summer fields glisten

Plutonium enrichment - Ahmadinejad and the Axis of Evil

This is intended as a poem about the US and Europe, not about Ahmadinejad or Iran. It just struck me that there was something deeply racist and disingenuous about the West declaring an 'Arab' (Persian, actually, but how many Westerners know the difference?) state seeking nuclear power to be irresponsible, war-mongering and evil, and potentially grounds for military intervention. Okay for us, but not for them? What's the difference between us and them? Oh, yeah, the balance of power, the benign hegemony, the Manifest Destiny, the right, the power, the imbalance... Oh, it's a Found Object, by the way.


Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what botherin' me
I wanna be a man, mancub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!

Oh, oobee doo
I wanna be like you
I wanna walk like you
Talk like you, too
You'll see it's true
An ape like me
Can learn to be human too

(Gee, cousin Louie
You're doin' real good


Now here's your part of the deal, cuz
Lay the secret on me of man's red fire

But I don't know how to make fire )

Now don't try to kid me, mancub
I made a deal with you
What I desire is man's red fire
To make my dream come true
Give me the secret, mancub
Clue me what to do
Give me the power of man's red flower
So I can be like you

You!
I wanna be like you
I wanna talk like you
Walk like you, too
You'll see it's true
Someone like me
Can learn to be
Like someone like me
Can learn to be
Like someone like you
Can learn to be
Like someone like me!

(Bagheera: 'Fire! So that's what that scoundrel's after!')








I wanna be like you!



http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran

the apes storm the tower - solo climbing poem

...some dynamic of wind
that blows through
when you look down
some mathematical thrust
of stark distance
galvanising musculature
without attention or intent
(and there is movement
in the boulder field
something bright flaps
in the corner of your eye)

and the moment yawns
and expands
says No, says Yes,
says nothing
says Describe
the next clear movement
in increments of unconsciousness,
break it into fragments,
so tiny, so infinitesimal
that it is no longer possible to focus

and then the whole thing just happens
without you even noticing
in one dynamic sweep
that you won't really remember
like you will never know
what birds flew over
what mindless tune you hummed
where your tongue was in your mouth
in the long instant that it took
to make one clear movement
that fades suddenly
into heartbeat, breath
distance,
and the world
rushing in.

Does George Bush see Ahmadinejad like this...




















or like this...
















or like this?


















I sometimes see him like this...



















and sometimes like this.

Ahmadinejad King Louie Ghazal Bop

I wrote this as an attempt at a ghazal, as it's a pretty ancient Persian poetry form to do with longing, but also to do with fire and righteousness. One of the most famous ghazal conjurers was the pretty incomparable Rumi, and anyone who hasn't read Rumi should start now. It seemed an appropriate form for the subject, despite the superficial levity. 'Ghazal', by the way, is apparently pronouced something like 'guzzle', which makes me a guzzler, I guess. Anyway, I regard this issue about Ahmadinejad as more or less on a par with US civil rights, the Ku Klux Klan and any other Naziism you can think of. Not to mention the deep spiritual dream-disparity. Let's get real, huh? I remember Gore Vidal saying back in the 80s, when Dubya was still guzzling, that the advent of Perestroika had left a vacuum, and that America would now have to turn on the Arabs, and revisit the process of demonization. That process, of course, is what the ancient Zoroastrian Persians (with their lightbulb god, Ahura Mazda) might have characterised as Ahriman, the principle of the Lie. How prescient that seems now. Anyway...

He says give me the power
give me the West’s grey flower.

He says Oh I wanna be like you
and affect that hegemon glower.

Man Cub come lemme join your club
lemme share your fragrant bower.

Am I not a man and a brother?
I'm claiming now as my hour.

You got it there so let's all share
that there nucular power!

Da zapbangronee, oopdeeweep,
oopdeeoobiedoop power flower!

He says give me the power
that doobydooby nucular flower!

waves

it goes on
the chatter
the end of the world
crackle of failing stars
of radio on hillsides
forest, wounded brothers
like you didn't know
this river leads only
to the land of the dead
no one swims upstream
against this

current. Yes, it's here, here
this moment
I'm dropping in real time
like I'm stepping out
of a helicopter, laughing
and the leaves fall slowly
around me
like dead snowflakes
like words raining down
like it made any difference
like anything
just this:
attention
attention
look here
the flames go on anyway
the madness, the fluids
the smoke
the intimacy of men
sweating, with their eyes
darting
what about it?
These 3am rooms
are dead places
I awoke with men
on my chest
pumping my heart
I remember passing out
looking at the ceiling
the moment stretching
and you were still there
when I came back
laughing in the corner
with a tube full of black blood
hanging out of your arm
like some evil dick
like a disaster.
I couldn't see it in the same terms
as you, couldn't see the joke
the bravado,
just the black blood.
All things became possible
way back, did they?
You all looked askance at the river
then dived
anyway.
All things jumped together
I imagine you
were even holding hands.
You entered deep and silent
descended, and failed to rise
just bubbles swirling
and a bright hole full of nothing
where you fought briefly
then succumbed
to the flood.

hands haiku

tiny hands
clutch at the sky -
a child chasing birds

danger

this site - click

cold crow haiku

fog in white fields -
cold crow on a wire
hears me stamping

shewstone haiku

a backlit screen -
ghostly hands paint words
on my window

chatroom haiku

busy screen at night -
hands making shapes
across oceans

Ambrose Bierce - to be expanded

This is just a short improvisation, but I'll probably
write it up into a longer poem about Bierce, who is
something of a surreal literary icon - surreal for the
details of his life and his disappearance, as well as
(in a sense) the subject matter of his short stories.
It'll be a bit random for a while.

Ambrose Bierce saw a ghost in his room,
telling him of the ice and the many ways of dying.
He saw himself hanged at Owl Creek Bridge, waking
under water, his head full of sunbeams, fingers
raking new life in mud. He dreamed his own history
from the future, plotted the murder of his dead
father, disappeared into Mexico, just walked
down the dry roads and the dream
of the Aztec sun where the dazzle
of hummingbirds danced in his skull.
It is not known if he drowned in Morning Glory
(ololiuqui) or just shimmered into invisibility
amongst the fireflies, chasing his last
story with a Corona typewriter
in a canvas knapsack.

Blood arcing into rainbows
in low light.

danger

Cloud Chamber

He puts his head in the jar
they seal it
remove the air
then they let in the smoke
and blood
mixed with ash
and the intentional hatred
of several observers
after a few days
his eyes are sealed over
and his face
is more or less black
with the tissue coming away
and a low whine
issuing from his mouth
he submits without protest
to this experiment
compelled by loving voices
from the deep past.

sun in the south - haiga/haiku

midday sun -
beetles make sand rivers
down white banks

dry years

I dried out I was bone and gravel desiccated cartilage teeth joints that did not fit the wind blew through me whistled through my mandibles tunes of longing of emptiness of the desert high pitched vanishing aloft whipping dust into a shimmer of heat silver haze of distance my inner ear its tiny bones the dry clink of my phalanges my nails my baked core cracked my iron rusted my linen my leather my natron salt my alliance with the darkness fell in flakes in powder of stale herbs and dry poultice for the heart wounds I was discolouration on the earth stain of ochre lime rictus dream of waiting centuries to be borne into the future on the backs of white ants and scorpions gathered at the riverbed at half-moon sensing water in their chitin shine beginning the slow work of reassembly

Nuit

The Egyptian goddess Nuit represents the night sky. The myth involves the stars, and especially the sun, being taken into her mouth every nightfall, passing through her body, and being reborn every morning at sunrise. This was seen as a cosmic sexual process, and I used some of this ancient imagery, jazzed up a little, in the Nuit poem below.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/sex/ipi/ipi09.htm

Nuit and Kephra: night train jazz Beat

...no stops downwind of dawn
a soul-shiver through the fields
blows the platforms
into overcoat starlight
dust of forgotten days,
...............ghost-cries of memory
.........thrust
through the cell-momentum
of those
........who would ride the night.
Blow-train-blow-your-smokestack
eater of miles, moon-train melting
......................snow
all down the Eastern pull
of the Milky Way,
blow all night from your black kettle
..............steamfusing
.........................sky with track
hit the last Great Bear tunnel
..........................with a shriek
from a mouth clasped
by the kiss
.............of night
blow like a whale
spray your ash on the backwash
of the backends of cities,
black hammers
..................of pistons
............dead mathematics
wailing beauty of steel
blowing the erections of landscape
clatter over the neck of Orion
rolling the dawn down the track
...............beetling and blowing
its beat pistons
up the last flat iron mile

blow, firebox, blow...

god of the waxing year

This is just a context pic
for the following poem.
It's a carved foliate mask
representing the Green Man
or the God of the Waxing Year,
who supersedes his brother,
the God of the Waning Year,
at Yuletide.

Jól's axle: seasonal terza rima

A yellow light through mist amongst the trees:
below the frosted branches, freezing snow,
a flame is fanned by winter's quick'ning breeze.

It flickers first, then bright begins to glow,
and creatures creep from holes to see the sight;
then feel the shift as ice does turn to flow.

At yellow dawn, the bested year takes flight:
the wheel that creaked all night to broken rest
awaits the horny wrest of summer's wright.

That infant nestled in the mossy breast,
where earth and sky do suckle: doubly blest.

Alternative version - still working on this:

A yellow light through mist amongst the trees:
below the frosted branches, freezing snow,
a flame is fanned by winter's quick'ning breeze.

It feints and flicks, then bright begins to glow,
and creatures drawn from holes to see the wight
do sense the shift as light does start to flow.

At waxing dawn, the bested year takes flight:
that wheel that waned all night to broken rest
awaits the healing wrest of summer's wright.

Bright infant nestled in the mossy breast,
where earth and air do suckle: doubly blest.

Some stuff about terza rima

This form was invented by Dante Alighieri, probably for the Divine Comedy.
It uses a chain rhyme of a/b/a b/c/b c/d/c etc; and, in English, it's usually
written in iambic pentametre, as I've done above. I'm very much a beginner
at this kind of form, but it's a challenge, and quite enjoyable to have a go at.
The easy pitfall is the overuse of modifiers as an easy means to fill the metre.
I used rather a lot here, although they are fairly appropriate in this sort of
context. I also used a lot of internal rhymes, alliteration and assonance to
try and create some mood and symmetry, which seemed appropriate to the
context. It's rather more about the pagan associations of Yule than it is about
Christmas, though there are overlaps, of course - the latter having borrowed
much from the former. The symbolic associations with Yule that I've used
here are to do with fire, yellow, wheel etc. The title is also a link to a
Wikipedia article about Yule, if you're interested. For more on terza rima,
click the title of this note.

gnostic telescope

don't let them fool you
the sun is no flaming ball of gas
it is, as any eye can tell,
a hole in the sky
through which can be glimpsed
the unimaginable brilliance
of the world beyond

this site

is a place where I can work on writing, and present what I most like for others to read. A few of these are finished pieces, in the sense that I'm probably leaving them as they are. Most of them are work in progress, even when I haven't labelled them as 'unfinished'. Some of them always will be, probably. Some stuff is just like that. Mainly poetry at the moment, as most of my prose is unfeasibly large for this format, but I might get some extracts together, if and when... The pictures are just images that I either stole or found interesting enough to point a camera at. I don't put very much effort into photography, and none of the pics here have been photoshopped in any way.

words, don't fail

It was all dangerous
it settled over the river like smoke
and I had to look
there were bells ringing
and I lay there
looking up
looking out
clouds rolling in. Thunder.
You couldn't get away from this
for much longer. I knew that much.
I was trying to write the unwritable,
trying to find the courage
trying to summon up
what I was
before it started:
the chatter, the flowers
roots breaking my temples
but I just don't remember
past tomorrow
there is just the lying
in the dark riverbed;
the tar, the slurry;
the choking;
the way down;
the road to extinction.
Lies, all of it was about lies.

Nothing else.
I resist, for a moment,
then my words fail.
I have got to make a deal here
about tomorrow
and what it means.

ghosts on Stairs Lane

Soon the orange shoulders
of Cock Hill and Stairs Lane
will sleep under snow
and grouse will huddle
in ditches
below the wind farm.
The children by the paper mill
at Goose Eye
will make ice slides
past the Turkey Inn

while the bus steams,
spinning its wheels
at Slippery Ford
watched by men
from the high intakes
remembering the thrill
of being snowed in.

lime mortar

The lime powder whips up
out of the bag
in a cloud
and sticks to his eyes
he falls back
into the rotating drum
of the mixer
and the flanges
catch his jacket
he rotates there
for fifteen minutes
half in, half out
head in the mortar
he wonders vaguely
if he'll die
a kind of peace
comes over him
and he learns to go with it
he surrenders to the spin
augments it
with quick skips
each time his feet
touch down.
After a while, his eyes
stop burning
and he looks into
that whirling world of mud
perfect now,
sticky and fluid
he prods it, smells it
it smells like a grave
he wants to taste it
to feel it in his mouth
to know its cold, its grit,
its heaviness.

He can't quite stand
when they turn the mixer off
he sort of slumps
between two of the guys
a dead weight
his mouth hanging open
full of mortar
and a crazy light
in his eyes
like an animal
or a dead person.

But the mortar flops out
of the mixer
just right, grey-brown
and firm,
ready to use.

cage

crows 2 by Deb. C

This was Deb's take on the 'crows' haiku. I thought I'd put them together:


wave upon wave
crows spiral
black stars

crows

wave upon wave
crows falling
like black stars.

Beckett poem

I had this meet, see,
with Sam Beckett's ghost,
I was trying very hard
to survive,
to make something work,
trying to be well.

The river sent telegraphs,
black things that fizzed at nightfall,
that sat outside
sparking.

(They were going to kill me:
that was all pretty obvious.)

That turkey with no head
rode out across the clifftops
towards Dun Laoghaire,
but we paid him no attention.
All day we shuffled
on the Liffy bridges
looking keen,
grunting through our cans.
Nightfall we drifted
down the antique hoardings,
feeling the gut
welling in our barrels,
doing the tour -
the poets, the Provos,
Easter 1916, a gun cache
in a wardrobe...

me invisible to myself,
Sam a gaunt hawk
like some other
Max Ernst-birdhead-Loplop,
as though
to remind all people
of the violation of childhood,
make them look,
make them look away.

That tower out there
past the bay (a Joyce-dish
filled with foam)
collapsed into the sea,
and we both went running
after John stuck on the train
his face full of alarm
waving under the bridges.

I was trying to ask the right questions
very carefully and slowly,
see past it all, what it was really.
Trying to stand alone
in the dark
with my omens,
with my stuff.

No one got a light?
No one?
Fucking disaster
of a place.

radio rain

the chair, the skeleton
I'll be here
when the dawn blows nails
through the heads
of the pumpkins
I'll be here
when the radio rain
turns to grey sweeps
across the fields
I'll always be here
in this chair
no matter how
no matter

iron eye

This thing on a long iron stalk appeared from the surface of a reservoir in West Yorkshire during a recent drought. The water was around six metres lower than average, and the 'thing' is a little under a metre in diametre. I assume it's some obsolete part of the filtration system, left 'tethered' to the lake bed like a dead mine. It has since disappeared back into the black, peaty water, which no light penetrates. I like to think of it down there, preserved in a peat solution like a huge iron eye in the darkness, until the next long drought.

You can click on most of the pictures for the larger versions.

reservoir dog

This was washed up on a beach exposed by the drought. It was some matted, compacted pile of reeds and vegetation, but it had me thinking of garrotted bog men, macabre corn dollies, and some grisly pagan artefacts from Medieval Britain. I thought it looked a little like some ghastly head of a dog or a horse left on a beach as some sort of sacrifice. Perhaps a kelpie?

The light was quite unbelievable, and the whole place felt dreamlike.

sluice

outflow

WWM

(A panel saw with a wooden handle, the old type
that you might even resharpen.
A tenon saw with a brass back, a crosscut saw
and a rip saw - all years old, with the blades oiled
to stop the rust.)

WWM
punched into the handles.

And an old spirit level
made of wood and brass
with glass vessels
for the spirit
and some bubbles
of old air
unbreathed
for fifty years.
I don't know
who he was
but he liked these tools
and he oiled them
cared for them
so I'm fitting a wire head
in my drill
and grinding off
the specks of rust
that have appeared
as a result
of my neglect
then I'm oiling them
using them
grasping the sweat
the grime
the blood
the skin
absorbed
in the handle
the spirit
almost
grasping the ghost
hand of the man
himself
that liked these tools
and how they felt
the patina
that was left
by his grip
this is as close
as it gets
to shaking his hand -
using his tools,
most of all
using them,
bringing something
back to life.

goose alcohol sutra

There's a goose outside
at the edge of the field
honking, squawking
every year a goose
doing that goose thing
that sway, jerk, dance
by a big old bath
where the sheep drink.

Crying for her kind
wondering how
same as the last one
the last sad goose
in early December...

...and the moment hits
somewhere in the night
when the needle counts zero
and the wind blows in
and you fall back
into the wreckage
crash into empty cans
and bottles
and dead cigarettes
and the storm finally
blows the roof off
and the waves
crash through
your head
and you lie there
in the mess
kind of laughing
kind of not
somehow at peace
unhurt, that's the thing,
peaceful, listening
to the rain blowing in
and the stars

and the moon
is a goose
honking
all night
for her lost friends
by the big grey bath
where the sheep drink.

eyes in the trees (very unfinished)

Autumn scooping gutroots fog setting mycelia twigs of duende tendrils of night plucking guitar strings of dawn ugly ugly neurons hammer Pan god frying cold fungi loam freeze dirt grinning night-brother dark-brother ugly forever... windows frosted forest breath with intent here nestle hatch nurture coil crash into mist taking birds from dead stumps brother in twilight lost frozen grey brother stiff with memory rising ghosted with snowfall I gather grey Amanitas in the forest and my dead brother is risen weeping by the stream and I'm laughing like a cloud bursting and snow shatters the mirror of dawn.

Wave upon wave, crows falling like black stars.

untitled

You have seen my secret place,
my foundation of ash where I coil.
Now there will be no silence between us
though our mouths may remain sealed.
Death will hold no fears for us
who have already died
and walked back into the light
through pine trees
engulfed by the mouth of winter
and shaking with the poems
that the Spring left here
like stars beneath the sea.

light

We found this copper funnel in a hole in the ground near the reservoir. We suspected fairies were afoot, and we played with it for a while, saturated in light. Then we hid it again. The light reminded me of something Henry Miller wrote about the Iera Ogos (the Sacred Way) in Athens. He said that beneath the veneer, just under our impressions of modern reality, as you walk the Iera Ogos through the ugly, noisy back streets of Athens, everything is still flooded with light. That's the impression I have of this moment: flooded with light, almost numinous. The pagan priest at the centre of this ritual of light is my son, who was actually looking hard for badgers.

haikewe

leaping at clouds
as though excitement
could wake skies

one dead by morning
a confused mother
crying over wet fields

Reservoir

The reservoir is black and orange,
and the wind blows the fires
across the Wolfstones.
The police close the road,
and we can't go and look
at the flames against the sky.
The lakes are deadly here,
their depths eat light.
Nothing lives down there.
And my son dances like a ghost
in orange shallows, wind barking
at his knees, whipping up sand into his eyes.
All of it dead, culverts and sluices
things in tunnels, all bereft,
even intent, enthusiasm,
parenthood, like a black stone from the sky,
making a dead-duck splash, then gone,
like a boy sinking
in orange light.

dawn vignette

The shoulder of Boulsworth Hill
thrust against the cloud
like a half awake lover,
and the dawn's sweep
down to wet Wycoller
where the bridges crash into the beck,
and ghosts crowd the ruins
in the night's flood.

History is close here:
the Iron Age, the Saxons
with their wykes,
vaccary walls
still stark on the brows
like tombstones in the mist
down the hillsides
to where the alders shuffle
about the beck,
waiting for dawn
to drive back the ghosts.

The message

The message
is paraffin
and ash,
iron filings
and spent oil.
The message
is a room
in the afternoon
with no light
with the curtains
half-drawn
and grey rain
on the panes.

The message
is the shapes
beneath the skin
moving,
looking out,
looming
blue-black
behind the face
that demands
you attend
to the words
the absence of light
the anger
the alchemy
the message
until it becomes
no longer
the message
from the father
to the son
but the long
message
from the son
to his own
worthless soul.

The workaday psychology of shamans

This is dark crimson
dyed with berries
and the blood of stags
filthy with age
and stinking of Christmas
drumming red spirals
across the snow
spindrift dancing
in the air like stars
I pull up in my sleigh
and tell the reindeer to wait
Yeah, I'll pay, I tell them,
I'll pay in kicks and Fly Agaric
and cold urine.
And I drop the package
into the chimney hole
of the yurt
hearing the babble
as the inhabitants
scramble
to grab it from the fire
hoping for money
and finding a salmon
a piece of antler carved like a face
some cured venison.
That makes me laugh.

I kick the reindeer into life,
and we are gone
streaming
like blood in snow:
singing to staunch
our winter wounds.
like blood streaming in the snow.

animal on the roof

the night outside
battering at the roof
I picture it as a thing
with a mouth
thrashing
an angry animal
licking at the tiles
I see it with intent
though it can't have intent
surely it's just the night
and the wind
and the dark
that surrounds me
that fills my head
with those thoughts
as though some giant
had walked across the sky
open-mouthed
to tear off my roof
and roar in my ear.

World, I am not passive

World, I accept these gifts -
the autumn rain,
the shimmer of distance,
the earth's long arc of silence -
I will snatch them from your hand
lest they grow faint with the waiting,
and turn, like secrets, to sand.

And these streams that curve through the body,
these freshets that carve roads
where no words will walk,
I am not passive in them,
I have bent myself
like a root boring through rock.

And I will bury them in me,
and wait at the foot
of my own altar
for these stars
to cough, to falter,
to start to catch,
to catch fire.

moorland beach

The Smoking Mirror

I was trying to get somewhere near the dazzling consciousness that seems to run through Aztec culture. There seems to be a seam of death and sex, with a quite startling vividness and magic. This poem was an attempt to see myself in that light. It's brutal, and it hasn't got everything I wanted it to get. It's therefore far from finished. Very much a process, this one, rather than a static thing. The death thing is pretty prominent for me, in a variety of ways. I've known a lot of bereavement, and my lifestyle involves much literal risk. That's the background here. This poem is not a game, it's a kind of dispatch from the front line, although that sounds more pretentious and self-involved than I like. Anyway, read between the lines.


The sun rises in a broken ribcage
even here, just below the surface
of the earth, the sun rises black
and dripping from the swamp
in my belly. Look close, lover, look into me,
see the animalcules dance
with their skulls aflame.
The sun cracking my spine,
exploding my chest, sunflowers
of semen and blood making rainbows...

a nearby branch
a little man
a straw hat
spits and blows smoke,
peeling the bark like skin, circuits
blowing as the air hits them, blood vessels
vapourising into little blue clouds
that float through us where we coil
here in the dust, sloughing off reason
and time, losing our bodies in limestone,
moving beyond our sex into crushing,
grinding, gasping... death flies here
like a humming bird, sucking the juice
from bones till they wilt into dry grass,
fly backwards into miracles of spread legs
and arms pinioned this finally is my moment
of requitement, this savage assault through
my chest is all that I am, take my heart,
lover, tear my flesh, make my blood count,
make me a vessel for the birth
of the future, burn my essence
into the fabric of the moment,
let me hang there, irrevocable,
undead, in your arms of hate-love,
invade my rictus,
carnage alchemize our flayed sex
and thrust us down into the very centre
of night. Smoke and angels,
giant spiders dragging birds into mouths of fire.
You will never leave me now, lover,
consubstantial with myself, lover,
requiter of my drying heart.

Love

It wasn't love
it was cocaine metabolised out of my skin
that made animals dance outside the car
as we drove through the night
I don't remember where we were going
or if we we got there
I was wired up to the battery
and my teeth were chattering
like I was imbibing electrolytic speed
from the battery cells and the road ahead
with words falling from me like electric confetti
not even looking at you
not even certain that you were there
just that something other than myself
drove between lines and lights
almost forever, it seemed,
like it could never stop.

It wasn't love
because in dawn's grey light
I sat on the beach
with iron filings and ash
where loss should have been.