After a decision to stay, there is the question: has there ever been such a place? Once the question is asked, the place is already changed from what it used to be. The desire is to overcome and be overcome; to stay but not to stay. There are immediate glimpses of paradise, but they do not offer safety or even temporary security. There are moments of consolation, but they are untranslatable. There are cultures -- through cultivation and the occult -- but they too are vulnerable to desperation and prejudice. More importantly, any control over the process of identity and taxonomy is lost. As discoverer and discovered become lost in each other, there is a first new word -- canoe -- for transport inland, where the vision is confused between seeing a new god and a new land. Yet the vision is to be eaten, gorged upon, as if it is the recognition of a saviour who wants to share power. Blasted with ecstasy, oblivion replaces the sacred and dominates desire because it realizes it is neither unique nor immortal. The domination becomes the possession of gold and slaves. A new first word -- master -- transforms the place again. The old world recognizes itself in the new.
Chirping in the room tonight, a cricket
You return to the outside it answers;
Never anything so beautiful, yet
Never tired -- words made out of the whir
To understand what you can't at the end
Of the east: the full value for water
And absolute abundance to comprehend
Where you stay tied with sisal to the pure
Gone crazy for your other heart in a friend,
The sun in your chest, a sky of overture,
Snake necklaces, the cracks of glow in rain,
I forgive and I forget stuck and secure
On one another, yet walking with the cane
Of permanent grandchildren to last letters
Draped in amber, lapis, bronze, and silver chain.
You got here by water, swimming better
And faster than before the day of deep longest light
That roots and branches crust with dew sucking oysters
Pearling reddish white until you land and bite
The faucet open to dance with your thirst;
And you sit drinking, admiring the height
And grey juts of a woodpile that the last storm nursed
Dry at the river's mouth, before a vision
Of your baby daughter God might have rehearsed:
She empties water back and forth, from one
Glass to another, and among the crowd
You're the oldest and youngest having fun
To the music of trains unzipping clouds
Like oranges on your ancestors' altar.
Buried in onions and cocoa pods, proud
Of your elbows and knees wearing the star
Of their faces, these voices from blossoms
Bleed any garden of grief, make fingers of war
Soften for love or shit, and let death come
Naturally by drowning, for love to drain
It back through drought and masterless perfume
To bonfires rolling mirrors of gain
From reproduction with no longing to snuff
History in retrospective broken panes
Of innocence where children aren't enough;
Burning with imitation of the surrounding place,
Aware and forgetting, a great deathless laugh
At worship and beauty on the Janus face
Of common drum speech blazing with wax
And its lost methods, a three way tied race
Of wood, its erosion and the carving facts
Of your hand, forest like ships, lead, sawdust,
Tool encyclopaedias, broken tiles, jacks
With missing parts, beaks, anonymous crust,
Temples of shells that give themselves away
For prayer, palm -- its oil, flesh, lighting, shade, must,
Wine, fans, baskets, and clothes -- baking red clay
Dripping black tears, no virgin but a serpent
In ashes fertilizing the birthday
Burial of a placenta for the present
To be long lived, happy, free, and rooted
In dirt not envious of the luscious tent
And its bones, bowls of wet sand and crabs with no heads
Who dream and divine, buffalo -- its clothes,
Shelter, blankets, musk, spoons, knives, arrows, beds,
Ropes, and nets -- and bush rats dug from their burrow,
Spun by their white hairless tails, brained and smeared
With vege le paste for this fire to glow
Wherever the Columba has appeared
To incarnate the discoverer and discovered
In the one love each other has wanted and feared.
They have no creed but the canoe whispered
Between them and I believe in one human
Giving and taking all and needing no word,
Even the writer's, where the absence can
Begin to create the meeting of their bodies
Like rain and soil with no more divine plan
Than inhabiting each other to be free:
Volcanic black, dust red, clay white, and gold
All pressed into one ooze of oil and honey
Licked deep and sucked strong where their bodies unfold
Fertility's self possession without war
Or any self defense except the bold
Fidelity of forever at the core
Of love in action and its flooding consequence
With reasons to stay, provide, and adore
With each other what each can only sense
As discovery with no beginning or end.
Hair shaved strange and the musk of difference,
Adoption before the language to comprehend,
Foot rattles and instinct of the microphone,
A tonguing love and many hawk bells blend
In your ear's ernacle with no groan
But the land's Take me. Eat. This is my body
And blood, for you engorging in low tones
The teeth of amaranth and two figures you barely
See yet become on the piles of mattresses
Printed by imagination's mother finally
Free of the flat land's sandkeeper to obsess
As she never has on the paradise
Pointing her nipple for your lips to press
Like lavender water, honey, and ice,
While hiding monkeys, parrots obscuring the sun,
Video taped milk snakes, straw toting mice,
Dragonflies of silver stomachs, coffee pythons
Like flooding ditches, inch-a-day bluebeetles,
Bluer butterflies, and ox size fish with feet look on
With the Columba through your original walls
Of corrugated steel, palm, pod, stone rainbow,
Fibreglass, commandments, fire, and coral,
Especially for protection when you grow
Eating rhubarb, the cross of bread from boiled roots
Tasting like chestnuts, rainbow potatoes,
Blood sliced plantain, unnameable fruit,
Chilied civet, soft burnt mud, greens limestone
Only sweetens mixed with garlic, peanut,
Ginger and tomato, corn only sown
As seed and not dead babies' teeth, black smoked fish
Of democracy, nutmegs, cloves, no bones
And war wounds cooked in tire rims for a dish,
Red pepper corns against bad dreams and strong beer
And the hell of being eaten against your wish
And with no baby to drive away the fear
With an oak leaf visited by hummingbirds
And with no happiness simple and clear
As doing laundry on bright days with a yard,
Your homeland, and plenty of time to dry
While you sit amidst the straw once a lizard,
Grass once like an elephant, and garden no-one can buy.
To say yes like a tree, flower, and stand
Together all angles of a bamboo sky
Undresses the water with snakes, hearts, and hands,
And overcomes you entering a vegetal circle
Of green dusk speed, rubs of mica, and black sand
Germinating heat to knife a thick spill
Of watermelons, pumpkins, beans, and wine
Out of soil that knows no refusal,
Cultivation, and owning except its vines'
Dominion made brief and full of permission
By gods who stay unknown through words and signs
But who root their beloved in the cinnamon,
Silk, aloe, black pepper, frankincense, plants
Of fireproof wool, and more species that no-one
Can name, that even the Columba can't
Whisper through the nameless sadness buried
In this place's lava of what you want,
Yet in a red rock chalking over the greed
Of white numbers written without your consent
On the walls of your house and without heed
Of its glass windows and their rippling content
Of the arts within and the greater art outside;
In pine groves among palms and fern lineaments
Of peace, where horns thrown in the river guide
It and the conch shell highway past the diamonds
Hanging from banana trees where you confide
A valuable smell of metal, beyond
And before the tribal and dreadlocking moss
Into your happiness: a tree to bond
You and the dove with roots tumbling across
And around the ocean in no one direction
Mixing sound and echo identically from loss
And invention; a tree that could be one
With its picture and many different trees
In its branches off one root into the sun;
A cross of earth and downpour, good for burning, bees,
Snakes, birds, bearing nutmegs, and fuchsia clear wine;
Dead trunk with life at its antipodes,
Full of ascension and burial, turpentine
And cloves, laurel leaves, flowers, fruit, open pods
And closed, cane and mastic, your names and mine,
Baobab, banyan, audience and stage, gods
Human, gingko, peach, pollution, the forgotten,
Olive, oak, mother tree of fig you sawed
And took like desire to be sprouted again
In better weather and soil, though new shoots
Came out of the old stump, too, strongest when
Your love, children, baby, and you in bathing suits
Rest together under a singing tree
On a turquoise bay and shore of sand and roots,
No memory but this tree of diversity.
To see it is to want to possess it
Like a god with your dead, immediately
Making it your own, a paradise to fit
Your poor autobiography with beatitudes
Of comfort for the meek to inherit
More from a generous ground than not enough food,
Thirst, vulnerability and no vision
But burial without children of the good
And valueless, with no value held in common.
It cannot be possessed, either in passing
Or with towers of defense built by the one
Redeemer and your retrospective song
Of self enshrinement and the power to utter
Every line about possessing this beginning
Except to cover it up lasted two brief chapters
Before your myth took over to fall apart
Into faithless history waiting to recur.
The tree full of different trees, Columba's art,
Cannot be possessed unless it's reproduced
In your flesh, the branches staked deep in your hearts
Possessed only in each other, your bodies sluiced
Together, flooding with Take. Take. Give. Give.
And refusing nothing, never to be reduced
To mere images of the desire to survive,
Owned in gold or even in a body not yours,
The ribs dug deep to begin this narrative's
Fixity without dissolving the future
Back into slavery, gold, and superstition,
The actual discoveries made pure
With God and country pointing the direction
To flow perpetually though far from the fire
Yet never far from fear of such reasons
For your language and trading what you perspire --
Broken straps, dishes and whatever more
Your toxic landfill won't drink laced with barbed wire --
For the gold protected by good harbours
Of people like open mines themselves, nearby
Deep rivers of more gold, with gold on the shore
At night to gather with candles, gold eyes
And gold fingernails tracing a gold spine
Into fertile mountains and cemeteries
Of gold burying the silver in dust shrines
Gold earringed and braceleted to a garden
Of solid gold trees and gold bunched flowers on vines
With lapis men and raw sapphire women,
Gold ducks and dogs, pearl birds, horses invisibly
Pounding gold shields with helmets of dust so golden
That rocks burst gold at your touch to free
Prisoners in gold chains like water from a gourd
Or gold from rhubarb to dream of their babies
In gold cradles on islands never explored
By one-eyed, dog-nosed men in the shade of their feet
And women wanting to be manless yet adored
Consumers of themselves as gold and meat
Which no-one knows you secretly have fed
With more than gold: mint, pepper, cowries, sheets
Of paper, brass, salt, and the life ahead
With foreknowledge of eleven children
(Their dried navels in a chest under the bed
Of their mother), gold dust like halogen
Light coating their naked bodies bulls eyed
At the lake's dead centre, a gold amen
Inviting all that is gold to undress inside
And also plunge in never to emerge
Except as gold of human flesh, hands tied,
And ready to be sold; the demiurge
To reproduce the tree of trees shattered
In confidence to sing the tidal surge
Of eleven voices eight times squared, murdered
With sweet Jesus' name in the last paradise,
Converted, and reborn with a first new word -- Master -- traded for canoe with a kiss.
In this beginning -- a confusion of eat
Or be eaten, place and dogs, fear's eyes
And rat's teeth, vulture's wings and divine teats,
Executing your desire without asking
And unwritten sea, butchering the sacred meat
Of the hearthless and only understanding
The fatherless empty your tight proud cheekful
Of dirt with gold -- your metamorphosing
Wants more to possess your flesh than a soul
Of your own for the price of sugar, guns,
Bullets, beef, ten glass necklaces, a whistle
With a chain, booze, knives, and corrugated iron
Sold by middle men whose one God sends disease
For them to limit the population
To themselves made new, anyone they please
And slaves from outside to replace the universal
Inner drives letting evil starve and freeze.
Declaring all men are created equal
Depends on who hears it: whose property,
Whose sweat, whose whore yields but doesn't fall,
Whose shame, whose God makes slaves and the soul free
To be white sugar purified of brown anything?
It costs a black hand wearing the jewelry
Of blisters and handcuffs, the crime of learning
How to read and write, the brandishing of your name
On the unknown's face and then its erasing
By dull scrapers, dirty motor oil and piss blame
Boiled to read free, but saying illegal,
Nonexisting and never born mean the same,
Especially to your son, finding it normal
To rape everyone except his mother
And be the supreme first victim of rebels
Fed on shit and piss finally to find her
Privileged and pregnant enough for torture
Which he watches -- stripping and the offer
Of the electric prod until she can't endure,
Or rape and blowtorches yanking any more
Of such fetus, breasts, and wounds into a future
Of ash scapulared and communing with a core
Of stone made sterile male and dressed in reason
To applaud their own biology before
It appeals to them to make all women one
Mother and wife without a sex or brain
Except for sacks of ejaculations
Thrown off cattle trucks of workers in pain
To students murdered by students for the sake
Of a slave master's dog appealed to again
And again for salvation not to fake
Its history with dough stretched flat as a ghost
And labour only in blood until you can't take
The hippopotamus hide whips of being lost
And your body heaving its swollen tongue
Like a bloody stump dragging an inner coast
Of iron traps where you hoped to climb the rungs
Back to a paradise where you could stay
And not be alone amidst the unsung.
NIGEL WHEALE
APM
Fields enjoy a scarless healing
but flesh bears a drastic archive.
are sown throughout 33 southern countries
cropping 2,000 strange fruit each month,
one, two, legs, an arm, two eyes
100 million cheap seeds that will fruit for 50 years
denying the land to people, food and animals,
blossoming as disfigurement and poverty.
White phosphorous smoulders for days
in the casualty ward tissue,
an irascible fire provoked by body fluids.
A low-velocity revolver discharged close-up
to the back of the knee takes off the cap,
leaving the legs blinded like eyeless sockets.
Fields enjoy a scarless healing
but flesh bears a drastic archive.
The president speaks before blue drapes
heavy with menace through his mouth
puckered like an aged anus, slow verbal facility,
dumb with active force.
Ordinary people speak their distance from this,
people who wouldn't dream of dropping bombs
on sleeping suburbs.
The satellite footage is bleached like equatorial dust.
Here we see how cheap unit construction behaves
when a side of a building is removed.
The contents of rooms hang over the drop,
a chest of drawers ransacked by a vengeful burglar,
theatre of war, filth of power.
The inhabitants interviewed seem like ordinary people,
as we look on the gaze-to-camera of more people
losing their ordinary blood.
In the wards the olive bodies are swathed
or laid open to view as wounds dictate.
The doctor is angry: she says:
There is a 20-year old man in here
with a broken spine -- Why?
Fields enjoy a scarless healing,
but flesh bears the drastic archive.
PETER MIDDLETON
from
Performance in Several Movements
I
Then they began explaining
what the onlookers were
about to happen to.
No settlements,
no towns within
this largely unknown region, beyond
the eastern littoral, stretched
the eye too far. Made them
forget their safe houses in the chiasm
for a sense of historical freedom
such as few men have ever enjoyed.
This dream was made for men.
The first images were conventionally
recognisable and properly exposed
for requisite attention spans, but
progress acceleration exponentially
flicked slides so fast the blur
lost its audience. Resolved into
sequenced stills one after
the other in public illusions
of smooth movement. Indirect gagging
throat. Knife, snake, foetus.
Shit, sun, blood river
grown significant happily
they hugged the next moment
back to back, each
cantilever to the other, rising
up the spinal ridge of the continent
on the body of the other alone
carried vast distances on its rivers'
improvisation, for the time
it took the sound man Bert
to push into position the screen
can only be represented in
tial
dimensions, a world without already.
Forms misuse.
The first American
sequence shows us producing
as human beings, Lynne
Bert, Altair and me,
whose drama lives in that event
of clamorous lookouts. Wrought
primed steel frames, russet
rusty and stamped on mythology.
The image track during these
wars eliminated epicentric spaces
to arranged existence, bodies
in main etymons, according to
their age only white and grown
can expect land, overlook
to mistake, empty
land where the signs of occupation
are unknown, local effects
on forgotten organs
as weights in mechanical
therefore comprehended, oils
assembled on site,
smoothly sequenced muscle patterns
in their use of our bodies
at a distance. So
the universe has force:
gravitation. Power
dissimulated from relations.
Consider the performers'
attractive power of a body
at a distance, and
notice the responsive moments
in your own parts. Smudged
chalk, devising the varnished floor,
indicates the bounds of action.
The history borders their mark:
America ran out after only a few
centuries use. Much of
what follows is delivered
by one or other of the shattered
cities of world war, performing America. The book,
the cup, the jar. Handled
enough the newspaper
rubs all its print onto your body
illegibly where the performers
represented nothing but presentation.
The future was taken to centuries
beyond the present registered
by our equipment, fiction
between presentation and future
enabled the performers to move
gracefully across large areas
of cognition without falling.
They were friends, friends, and predictors.
The new world shot into the space
between ideas on internal
combustion alone. Burning
solitude until the tappets blow.
Coming down into the exquisite
valleys of the north west potlatch
on a freeway. War
betwen home and touch
continued to dominate the strips.
American plasm
was zoned according to ontogenetic
criteria: withs.
Other countries were the past.
ROBERT HAMPSON
while you work
intersecting events
traces of hormones
in the water
feminized fish
mimic wet lips
blue-veined concerts of
undescended testicles
elegantly flexed disjuncts
reconfigurations
of the body
alkyl-phenolic compounds
from industrial detergents
dishevelled riffs & runs
of boundaries
breakdown products
from pesticides
interactive in social space
interfere with dissemination
of information
heavy typography dioxins
block oestrogen production
sparrows fall silenced
utopian projects
the interval
that is lightness
that is a connection
put through
distortions
rhythmic repetitions
flow fuse part
to leave the city
in the light
sans serif across
bruised purple sheets
sleep foxed by
half-spoken words
phrasebooks
traversed by
internal historicity
umbrella in hand
naked underneath their
clothes the logic of
speed maps onto
slips between
body & action &
language no rest
in production
click on icon to upgrade
with extra frames
memory flashburn of
32-bit candywrapper
technology
anamnesis
masks &
unmasks
the corporate
cowboys
close-ups of
hands
on taskbar
click on
quick & dirty
territorial
imperatives
generate smoke
& mirrors
features not
under cover
JOHN GOODBY
Memo for the Third Period
Comrades! Some of you have expressed reservations
about working with Nazis. Why did the KPD,
the workers' party, parade with Brownshirts
against Versailles in our Red Referendum?
Why did we oppose the Iron Front? Why did we
instruct you to instruct your children
to beat the little Zorgiebels in the playgrounds?
Comrades, the time has come to crush those doubts.
First we must allow that the Nazi threat
has been exaggerated. Historical fact
proves that they are human dust, weak and belated.
Second, Marxism's enemies -- the real traitors
to the proletariat -- are not Nazis,
but the so-called Social Democrats (they act
as Nazism's Left Wing, as Social Fascists).
Should we unite with the butchers of Liebknecht?
The line follows us as night follows day. The SA
want to liquidate us -- but, that apart,
we should welcome Hitler's triumph. Why? Because
he has power anyway, because these tactics
will smash the workers' faith in democracy --
Reaction is the whip of the revolution --
and make them rise (though we continue, of course,
to acquaint fascists with pavements). That's dialectics --
sometimes when you're right, you're wrong. Sometimes
you have to jaw with the devil's grandmother.
We'll break the Nazis as we broke Papp and Cuno
but only against, not with, our Cain-brothers. So
vote now, vote No to 'joint defence', vote Yes for strike.
The eyes of the Comintern are on us all;
Manuilsky's slogan is "After Hitler -- our turn!"
Your blood-lists will be issued at the door.
From the Realms of Gold
Your letters that May start "Dear Idiot Child";
black-and-blue as share values, thin
as academic airs, they gasp at the height
of a thousand an ounce on the Heng San.
Tito didn't have a left leg left to stand on,
Brezhnev had just sneezed -- Aaf- GHANISTAN!
Your bagged and Grimly Feendish eyes
glazed like a T'ang vase. Everyone coined it
except George, stuck in Spain, who caught the Sun
two days too late, and rang his shop to hear: "Boss!
We've sold out! ... What do you mean, 'latest price'?"
The Quarter tintinnabulated; teapots
and candlesticks tomahawked for cash, salvers
pounded and smelted to bullion slaver.
Finals loomed through Hobsbawm's chapter
on Art and Revolution, Silver Poets
of the Seventeenth Century and Keats.
That summer, it was all out on a limb --
once, suddenly through sferics, a news bulletin
told of B52s scrambled for The Rapture,
of uncooked geese; I gave up there and then
giving up on the taste of the Big Country.
But in near-war you sent the sinews of war,
wrapped in advice; your old Shakespeare notes --
foil-stitched -- for books, fish and chips, beer:
"Phosphorous feeds the synapses. Grow some.
Work, but beware Reverse Midas Syndrome.
Drink, but beware the dreaded Korsakov's
Psychosis -- I once read the whole of James,
a chapter each night after the pub, and forget
now whether it was Henry, Joyce, or Jesse.
A Great Author each winter, too (ah, son --
that terrible winter of Dostoyevsky!)"
Up like a rocket; down, slowly, like the stick,
or toasts sunk in Black Velcro -- your half Guinness,
half cider. Five, ten, or fifteen years
couldn't kick-start the K-Tel Thirties --
all South Sea Bubbles and the Rotters XI,
fields of cloth-of-gold that turned pyrites --
where we bit-parted Eisenstein's extras.
You sign off "Yours Auriferously", but croak
like some stormcrow, unable to resist
a final "P.S. I would have given
my right arm to be ambidextrous."
JOHN KINSELLA
I deletion in the avant garde space
Seen around the I are pterygiums (1)
and cataracts, or near, in the space
inside out, the minute particles
split from the avant-garde space,
parasitic like furriers reviving,
in a dying market, or like I
depletions in the seeing
of the new, its potential
variation which is linear
time.
The cost of the op
in a private hospital
is prohibitive, though not
critical if you pay
a premium level
of cover. You see despite not
being aware you've seen.
Entering the light into your
corrected system, your inner sight
risen like an essay
on projective verse.
We see
collectively the night heron (2)
indelible against the photosensitive river,
a something collected
from deep within
the darkroom.
(1) I deletion in the avant-garde space
(2) ibid.
Graphology Canto 1
handwriting resonates
like the voice: larynx's
scrawl calibrating
the signature
or oft mentioned cal-
ligraphy: the cliche
becomes identity
in the autograph, the book
as well fetishized
becomes the programme
we mark as strokes
in the book of hours,
those amateur graph-
ologists from Suetonius
to Poe legal & validated
by time, which fades
like a secret signature,
or -- unearthed
like palimpsest --
predecides beneath
the text or texts
mentioned in parallel
texts fingerprinting as object
in the visualizations
of personality
like the neutral Swiss
taking a great interest
in the addresses
on other people's
letters as traits
ethnographicize
the characterology
of empirical schools
against the fear
of pathology, elemental
in the barometer
of repetitions
in the machine printed
image that allows
only the signature's space
but this IS the age. Degenerating
the unconnected writing
as theory angles
and forms against curves
of food production,
the specialist items
labelled brightly
in the specialist shops:
the upstrokes vigorous
amongst the arrhythmic,
as the nihilists delete
the superfluous,
the detailed attention
and vital opposing of discipline:
that you don't need
an atom smasher & can do it at
home, amateurism
bringing the charlatans
loud against empiricism,
the essentialists
apologizing
as the Marxists
rule straight demo-graphic
lines and print
the written, the ornaments
in Hitler's signature
DO look like
his moustache,
and identical uniovular
twin brothers
produce similar script
with small variations:
the loops & pressure,
end & horizontal strokes
differing slightly
as technology squeezes
out the guts of the twentieth
century: the forgery's
trembling line
the shadow amidst
data: whose who
dressed in the same
fashion, vogue
in the hat's tilt
and an admirer's
or detractor's
description, or sub-
scription to trends
in the attainment of identity:
they might have different
fingerprints -- whorls
and loops & arches --
but still come from
Perth and live
in the same pore
of the social
organism.
They say he writes
with two distinct hands
though thematically
there is common ground
if the script can be
translated, the spacing
clear minded
if irregular
as if to disguise
contradictions
which suggest
to certain critics
a lack of knowledge.
The mechanical skill
of the Victorian cursive
as the moon full & deliberate
flourishes amongst the tide-
riven ripples of the river.
Could it be said, despite
the fluid surface,
it writes with a determined
if shaky hand (?) this stout
image: varying
with its cycle
and the weather
and the climate
and any number
of phenomena WE
can perceive
but cannot
put name to?
Forgery or disguise
or mnemonic codings
that are the character-
ology, that rather
we may not want
to imprison by recognition
but recall for en-
lightenment. As the sand
scrawled by the wind
is blanked by a downpour
or the crystallography
of salt flourishes
despite the deed of title
an obituary witnessed
by the bank as it closes
the mortgage
on an unproductive
property on the edge
of the wheatbelt
where language is worth-
less without rain,
the ambidextrous scribblings
of water. Body of water.
Unwritten the characterized
fleshly interest expressed
as the blood
as symmetry
as co-ordinations
to mark as standard,
the model against which
all measurings
are conducted, the measure
kept in vaults, exact-ness
allowing ramblings
and ponderous
deliberations
of bureaucracy.
PETER HUGHES
from
Paul Klee's Diary
there are dives you can't pull out of
breath-grey ones every hour
vertiginous Prussian blue ones a few a decade
and the steep white stoop
OK
so
far
etc
in the middle of all this
the trombone insists on an
interesting range of attention-seeking strategies
& we cannot but defer
if only we could remember what had been sacrificed
to be here blah grumble mumble rake your marbles
Barry Guy laces benign pins
between the strings of his lover's body
hunkers into the first thinly veneered scrum
a high ball in a falling sky
13 July 1995 sweating smoke in the Vortex
where Evan Parker changes a wheel
on soprano without pulling in from the fast lane
now there are two paintbrushes
quivering weft in the double-bass's dark loom
the pigment along the inside of my arm
is tingling in the tasty decay whose aroma
is music that bag of ants
Rory Gallagher dead
Formication Blues man
////
coming together
pretence of coherence
smeared attractively on the centrifuge walls
look at the facts
you can light a fag at Pecy's violin style
Lewandowsky fawns and stretches his mouth on the 'cello
(if he'd tried that shit on the horizontal bars
he'd've broken his neck years ago)
& down the hall there's a glimpse of
Russ Conway on acid in the mirror
it is a fabulous understatement to say
in its present states
this is not the only possible world
the sallow hovers over the offal
in County Offaly the breeze sings songs --
frustrations, indecencies, fetid clumps
strung up above tarnished brass: rank lettuce
on the other side of the time changes
a chord shifts to a disconnected phone
in the company of strangers straining
capo infected with misallegiance
& it's lower them down in A minor
at the end of the night I hoover up salt
grey with spilt Rosso del Piemonte
wind shifting out of sight of each other
leaves in a wind through the same wide-rooted tree
it is inadequate to announce
you can't get AIDS from the Blarney Stone
////
marriage Munich moths
let me list:
Cezanne the greatest teacher in my eyes
Kandinsky who said to stop interfering with nature
& get fluent on the Kosmic Kolour Keyboard
Delaunay Matisse Goya
the business of parallel & interpenetrating universes
has more to do with painting
than with the new Gothic physics
it's a question of tone & specifics though:
shelling peas opening the seam something falls
then flutters up to perch on the ceiling
Wagner's on the radio on tiptoe
in his chef's hat his penis protruding
through a gilded doughnut that hums when full
the creepy splendour of its seasickness
its relentless stress-mismanagement
striding & salivating like a wobblyman
suddenly I want a drink that's crisp strong & see-through
well it's not always clear what's needed
bollacks
what's needed is justice & work
////
the boy is born I make a bottle
test it on my eyelid
what I'm interested in at least right now
is the precise tone & value of the individual work
this watercolour wet on wet
hues bleeding into new information
barely predictable realization
paper spattered with water
flicked with brief reflections quick edgy work
sprinkled with winks & attention
a span of surface & non-payment
buy this
buy the next
buy some for Lulu
frustrations, indecencies, fetid clumps of months
here in the space we share before the fire
in the updraught flooding the chimney with exhaust
the moving house emits into the vast & public night
unemployment led my pupil's father to drink
before he fled from guilt
shaking round airport lounges
all the way from Liverpool to Philadelphia
the boat's engines are thudding now muffled
now exposed by the starry wind
salt in my sleep
sidling into space freed from corrosion & memory
now there's no going back
a distant trombone gives a glimpse of the end
the work shifts into its final shape
& they put you back in the mine
meanwhile the stuff's in my hand until I make land
////
oh Barry Guy I bet you're shit at knitting
the trombone can be ignored
only for so long Edwardian raygun
boggy ankle-clamp
black hole on a stick
troglodyte pastry-cutter
flattening from the percussive pancake
up a rough glissade
negotiating a melting ski slope
the solemn glee of each note
coated in blastocolla
exquisitely tuned dark wet honey dog growl
that is also the apotheosis of the cat
having its furry nuts investigated
by friendly presences
one unusually game acquaintance
moving in for the kill
the one that's been skirting the herd for years
who winces at these amplified desert melodies
who knows English Angels cost £1.50 each
STEVE HARRIS
Puss
From the barrios, the outskirts, he takes in
Townfolk as a snuff of dust; as tang of raw flesh
Disapproval is tuned in
Like scissoring out a hang-nail
He scopes the stupidity of approval-seeking --
Groundbone slithers the boondocks begging
In the slobber soap & moonlit bay of lunacy
That mangy Moriarty
That skin of chien collared to slave yards
That baffled pantmeister & fluke flunkey
Sits at the base of a petrified tree
Barking up into the boughs his wows
Thinking himself in it.
It'd be good TV if he could hang
Himself w. his own ears; amusing to tick
That pendulous carcass off the list
Amid pertussis of furballs or sagebrush:
This is what the watcher wants as stealth
Sweeps in low, slow as steam from rivers drying
& shimmering a seethe of undercarpet angers;
Dreams bowl along the Serengeti mind
& swallow a sleeve of chaos sneezed into being.
Lick the bleeding; heal the wound; nigh,
Time is a scavenger of the soul --
Time is soon to be snacked up & spat in a few faces
As the stranger steals into town,
Revenge pulled down, shading a brim of tight wanting;
He has not time for smiles.
The desert wind sticks in his teeth
Like cactus flowers that only bloom for night
In the darkest
part of him, beauty glistens & waits.
His clawtips quiver like cats' tails
Stalking prey, that miaow is stuck in his craw
Like a coin that buys a way by rivers;
It tastes like milk left too long in the sun.
Looks into the sun & slits his pupils
Pervaded by long memory of laughters' callow aim
The sky rolls around him, belly up,
Welds a silhouette hard to the horizon.
Swells a scent & fills his forwandered chest
Passes it over aching bronchioles
Weeds out the one he wants & follows hollow.
Now light begins to blink up in the windows
The road is disappearing & shadows become him
The buildings of the town are on him
This fluid flash who slinks in & out of doorways
Prowling, yowling,
& here come the cicadas
Close out in a percussion of close down.
Stroke this, he says.
Marseilles
The effect on a stranger is unsettling:
The affect is to make conspicuous status as stranger:
Windows have eyelids storm-shutter louvres wink
& gaunt grim/aces w. smile traces
like dried rain dirtying glass
Loom shadow's wool of doorway angel.
Streetcafes consist snoopers in plain sight
Watching w. smirks, slouched, arms folded,
Eyes slanted into smoke
Gauloise adroop, lip corner cradled
As fingers file chin bristle find
a last outpost for berets cocked to drop
but stapled to scalp w. looks
that are always sidelong --
Swarthy is in superabundance & addled with mercurochrome
menace in seawashed leather less distressed
as dissolved & even beauty
is uneven, is seedy; is caught in net
stockings & slatternly gait -- the girls skiving
School & smoking & chatting to tikes on Lambrettas.
Fruit on the Casbah stalls glistens
dewy or aluminium dusted & stucco breathes
Emphysemic fog smoking out a million wounds
a lung left hanging hawks & plays agony
(more squeezeboxes per capita than cigarettes)
listen to Moroccan haggling & gulls &
caged monkeys tearing a fez apart or
pieds noirs gaining tongue ties as
parakeets screech & sellers unpeg & roll carpets
& a catamite is arranged & baba begs a light...
The city is a loup-garou unneedful of moonlight;
howling from its cobbles & fits hobbling on foul
beckoning bodies rank w. the halitosis of sea
engaged in a torridity, in a turmoil
as smackful fish hunker & swell on wistful tides.
Iron lamps cower to gloom's caress
& smoke's sidling wishes; jaundicing sky
where the moon's curious eye sneaks by topaz
tinged cloud, spying day become dusk
almost unnoticed.
Distantly; police sirens swelter; doors bang awide
Drunken laughter & women screams spiral
Closer: crockery smashes, a solenoid expires,
a switchblade clicks & interrupting
the breakers' shrading sarsh & sough
a muffled cry
a surreptitious sound of exertion
a splash
the discovery of a tourist's wallet
inserts a vulnerability
mice know w. cats
Poplar /Paracme
Free from Blackwall Tunnel's feculent choke.
Free from its vibrating drone of echoing engines.
Free into a devitrified sunlight; a polaroid blur.
Free into a lime-haunched road; a city in etiolation.
Theo unwinds, lets motion cool our mobile oven.
To the right we see a migraine of roadworks
And non-architecture, buildings like gadgets;
Dishes, antennae, needles transmitting modernity.
We pass, see vast gas canisters, water towers,
Pumping stations, gabions, gantries and cranes
Scabbing the distant Thames' writhing scaly spine;
Brick stacks that seep pale tongues of toxins,
A cement works like a grimy Pompidou Centre
Swathed in sun-consuming hobnailed plate,
Hawsers and pipe, with defunct company names
Like shadowplays, dead insects fossilized in coal,
Fans whirling where windows once were, belching dust.
From between dank expansive sheet-brick warehouses
Tenements slip out as bony grids of concrete
With long slit walkways draped in dowdy washing.
They appear, then loom away...
No warning, no fanfare, it's there, then it's not.
We leave London's memorial to how once it was
For its imago; from the land developers forgot,
Fit only for film-sets of future apocalypse into...
We have no further nomenclature for dereliction.
This is our processionary devolution.
Trapped and citified by procrustean progress,
Trapped and isolated in a car in a hot summer,
Trapped into an imitation of contentment,
Trapped, leaving Poplar for another kind of ugliness. We won't look back.
David Rees
The London
1. The Tower
From one bar to the opposite bar,
from the park bench to Tower Hill
pub signs like epic signposts are
left the Black Mitre, Right the Iron Mill.
2. Tower Hill
The Singing head, the different metal head
with his hood nailed to the back of his head
he was burned until he was nearly dead.
The burns on his arms were beautiful red.
3. The Mint
Left the Tower, right the Royal Mint,
scurvy cough patterns the threshold block.
Sea-home but hostel-bound, money spent,
cash from the pure and rags in stock.
4. Whitechapel
Tenter tenter pull it tenter
together. Now, tenter,
stretch it tenter,
pull it tenter.
5. Aldgate
By the measure of Stoneman's foot
outside where Buries Marks his share
out. Where dogs are slung J. am put.
Outside the square.
6. Spitalfields
Weaver through between the crop rows
where the sick dug and the garden grows.
Blue spit from tubercular Rose
voids through her nose. Her mouth is closed.
7. Liverpool Street
Known one's station. As likely to be asked
to show a ticket as to touch toes
and kiss a gaudy Master's arse,
a Dyer, Grocer or guildy flogger of hose.
8. Moorfields
They had fences. The map shows a stile
over the water in pools. Here's the hospital,
just there the crosshatch of some tidy pile.
O what could it be so close to the Mile?
9. Bunhill Fields
Hard beside the Artillery, by the right quick,
stone pegs grass to every happy head,
every bed of Cretin and the chronicled sick,
castaway beside the left behind and sick.
10. Old Street
Everything you see here is for sale.
Deciding that James's Luke lacked detail
and PRIDE we got a needle and a nail
and we screwed home the donkey tail.
11. Barbican
Milton, happy under St. Giles'
can hear the music over all the bells'
tan tin tan round the square miles.
All in heaven damn down tin hell.
12. Charterhouse
Like Copford Dane over flaggd flor,
skind and bannered and pulld across dor.
Flayed liken Bartlemy, Bartlemy's sore
and his fair is a fair for the poor, the poor.
13. Smithfield
Blood let by the fire-martyr's iron cooks
burning keen to get at his goodest meat,
fat from the fat-trap and skin from the hooks
and the flavour of pudding in the grease.
14. Ely Place
Show this boxed cherry, we are told
"Around this tree the Old Queen and her gold
duke danced." All the land was sold,
the saffron failed. The hole's so cold.
15. Holborn Circus
Doctor Fist is kindled and the tin sparks catch
the powder and the tinder things he saw last.
Andrew's healthy children pose and watch
behind the fireground the fair mirror glassed.
16. The Fleet
Everything's kickback after this line,
all bonus. Blown along on the sting of lime
from the rounding g-gutter go round is a rhyme
and a play in words; spices and time.
17. Blackfriars
The King castled our jewels in the ward
of the Orange Star Cathedral and the Red
Admiral's box. Tonight a birdfight, board
and crack on the rob's profits and then bed.
18. Garlickhythe
Shaker the maniron at the shiten lock
on Santiago Matamoros' snowy flock.
A tumblehome slave hulk spilt on the dock
favours spices over its troublesome stock.
19. Cannon Street
You can stand on Vauxhall Bridge and still
pick up the Walbrook's smell. Via. By way
of eyeholes and tubing out Dowgate Hill;
where we had the Rome boys that was a day.
20. London Bridge
Near the Kiting Gullivore I foot the land
to show them all how tall I am.
I think I soon will have to stand
to show them all how tall I really am.
21. The Tower
From one bar to the opposite bar,
from the park bench to Tower Hill
pub signs like epic signposts are
left the Black Mitre, Right the Iron Mill.
City Road
The modern gut wicket. Signs in big metal
might stand for the gate. Monoxide glue,
ruber and lead combined at electron level,
dead blue gives it away, the first clue.
St. John's Gate
Circle the spectacle, the last sank-savant
pops his mobile for a lager, ends his search
for the mime-cup, finds a vessel adjusted form the giant
who came a cropper (your HEAD) under the four-hand arch.
Commercial Street
Owner traders made the walls and windows long,
donated streets, then christened them as sons
catalysed by spirit from the bloc, and songs
by which to gauge the rhythm of the looms.
St Paul's
Information is encrypted in the supertones
of Donne's name, wrung from Tom's one drone.
Not the great model nor the synagogue of Jones,
just quads of slab and the cop-out false mass zone.
Monument
Of fire fire fire I am a conducting rod,
under Magnus burned Henry's Henry's grave,
the sunmark fetish was no periapt for acts of god;
so Yevele's pupa split under the flags of the nave.
CHRISTOPHER BARNES
To Isadora Duncan
leaden butterflies
balletic in sepia music
falling like trees
rising like rocks
express the difficulty of loving
heart-weary and head-solemn
void of gravity
pulling the silence
between the notes
until all is claustrophobic
waiting for the air
after the cadence they fall
strength returns
once again elevation comes
taut as an expectant string
heavier than a moon-sigh
suddenly discordant free rhythm
shows the way out
they follow energetically
find the exit and are free
St. Nicholas' Hospital
(non-garden)
tear-gravelled
fishbowl of tides
in you I shuffle
blind
each old workhouse wall
blanks
(high-walled)
beyond grey glass
madness stings
like salt
flattening arteries
ghosts of non-people
jerk aimlessly
without light
from this box of light
no scream escapes undead
Wire
around the tunnelled wind
rave music graves
like a mechanical frog
echoing the night's wail
barely significant
in the desert whole
unpartying Saturday
as boiled acrylic melts
clean shapeless loops
the cry of "oh no this dirt
life will never end"
itches into the silent
mouse-head of a scream
through the bleeding bath
the gay illuminous current
hair-frizzes the root
dread wet brain of alcohol
blue tears of everyday appetency
snap on and off
below the accusing siren
PETER MANSON
Widows and Orphans ( rhetorical fragment)
The walls' burden, Erato, appended
as who will speak, linear gold
Collapse thought down to the sixty
words you own, dumb in impaction
An epitaph's outflow in beeswax,
the twice-reddened wick
speechcraft
II
Hoverers' cunning frees revels
frozen a thousand seasons
red brick white washed for what
phantom annex, Kirlian snapshot
A whole ghosted clapboard pyramid
is a visual pun on fire, nightly at ten
III
Solidity transit, I suck Artex
partitioned touch-contents, distributed law
Effortless snuffed people derided by broken
concrete, concrete that snapped them in wartime
Queues for a tile transfusion,
splicing the dead stuff in
IV
The couple in plaster, a cast of an eye
in a wall, sealed-in, steel bands clasping the head
An indexical doorsign
ear, nose and throat
of a gilded monk in a temple jug
Cupping the skin-caked death mask,
lost wax from a doll with real hair
V
Hearth, the place of relations
fanning the boneless to lime
Absorption spectra sign the shadow
puppet 'Kokoschka'
drop forged light
Settling, enlivens a plastic stoppage
to no end two knuckle skins gone brown
Colour of body in this, what fat does, cooling
lips evict yeast-breath, the tongue clicks, rising to tap
KARLIEN VAN DEN BEUKEL
from
Pitch Lake
J'ouvert morning:
And tarmac lurexed.
Bring your own body
to the brass-o-rama
abandon its orbit
on slaking pitch.
Bring your own body
O, to the fooling:
mirth as music
of division lets
the rest be his.
Bring your own body
to the savannah
pasquinaded hot-
pants shot through
nebular hypotheses,
to trail the gauze
slack, then tacking.
In castored mantle
Marquis de Maintenon
seized the sequins
flung from coffer-
dam his samba beat
gave out the heart
to stop it beating
time, wanton, but
so rum in the ichor
eyes raised again
all spangled lashes
to shrine sublime.
As one alights with
tar-studded soles
once more to run
by orchesography
of heaven, one
leaves earthenware
by the way it gives
the lie, so give it
The lie. There is not
enough rice to go
round, not enough
to go round on, it is
a fastness into you,
o, a rudeness into
you, not to go round.
ROB MACKENZIE
Deleuzian fly-tipping
on the rock vide'open-cast of Lewis
weak as an O-level o'n uachdar gus an uachdar.
on the split-level gas silk sperm or enamel.
on the english and its one size fits all speaking
countries once pure at one wi'paradox an'growth.
on the reterritorialised strung an'bagged gaidhlig.
do Iain Murchadh MacCoinnich, as a Rhu.
Red
the obverse fog, cho snog, mulled by'r radial families
an'ourselves ulnar, pair-wise, chic cut'f foggy shifts.
the parabolas gone strap for the bra an'body alow
set fair no' waur' for its chakral iridescence.
the millionth volume o' dust her undusted cheek scrievan'
any general look weary'f the dustblown square.
as a prime number
the healed-mercury joy of our being wed.
what small acnodal claim I have my melt-hole acquiesced
content that life exists beyond its style into the maelstrom like a feculent point
so twirling you not then to waltz but left right behind th'economy
rack myself on th'asymptote that's left behind th'exponential slink t'drone
you know how intransigence can change you to cough up all the waves' momenta
ah Bergvall I remember death and smoke smiling permissibly at those young enough
O'Connor's dream
flat flappin' o'ma map o duisg do mhothachadh
miscast time in space again flex y'r fingers for the set
that'll halt the arrow mid air: y'staff'f daith or
form of life an' awe that ceo kilting in equations
lapse rate, the scale, thrown ground t' delimit th'infinite
much's our flat pan at's meat's miasma i'the graph
Jig o ' slurs
o duisg do mhothachadh o wake your sense
o'n uachdar gus an uachdar from the top to the top
cho snog so pretty and comfortable
set fair no' waur' getting better not worse
a dedication to Ian M. MacKenzie, Point
ceo fog
DAN LANE
Radiation Therapy in Blue
if i knew
things
as they are
for you
would it matter
?
light
purge
sidereal
black place
a surge of tooth
paste
on the lips
desire
slips
we
the French
river Once
begat
new definitions
in a beat
the hard beat
a
straight bird
a
butting bull
a
sky wide trap
a
bale of names
as vague
as paralysis
lies
detuned
still in credit
an arrow feather
on
a warbler
in
the cat's cradle
a
stale street
winds
natural motor oil
first hand
& seamless
the smallest metal pipe
line
sucks and blows
shoe
prints
astride
a
kango
an assembly
of new entries
going
on
loam
implants
august
polars
blue iris
time limit
for the field
of mistakes
a
dry
kiss
beneath the trees
butterflies
flutter over
retromingently
flowing
golden
streams
uncurl your
tingling tongue
in honey dew
the cafe
kittenette
with
a
late
closing
cleavage
&
an under employed
gear change crescendo
Caligari's Journal (a fragment)
the soft night wails loudest & is
unmitigated over the fore sheet
inside indolent pity to a head
sacked by disturbance overload
this silken blood lust mood moves
the carry of each unsure foot
over the pure terrain
VITTORIA VAUGHAN
world in a spin
(the whirling dervishes )
they feel it like pain,
that is obvious,
that nothing is certain,
nothing so absolute.
it pulls all theories apart,
threads of conception turned on their heads,
for this is a spiralling weightlessness,
a getting of things off the ground.
it is a cosmic energy also,
the circling of one sun, one moon,
around and in between one another,
like predators, like friends.
to begin with there is a need for separation,
but how quickly they bend, sheet themselves together,
like an edifice, weave each other out
to silken second-skins.
and upon this they build,
their monument to the future; to the past,
they offer time and their interpretation,
their secret, sacred texts.
occasionally, they tear the veiled open,
as if their mystique were the gates of a heaven
or a need, a hunger
to prove themselves not alone.
and so, in the end, they are reconciled
to seclusion, and their spirits,
having raised an exhortation,
are lowered to the ground.
BARRY MACSWEENEY
from
The Book of Demons
Free Pet With Every Cage
Get out the shotgun put it in the gunrack.
Here I am gargoyled and gargled out,
foam then blood,
Flatface to Nilsville. In the toe-tag toerag dark,
siege upon his paling, wires berserk like cyborg fingers
in the demon neon's placid acid rain.
All the faery cars are shattered, over
parked.
This is the hell time of the final testament,
the ultimate booking, the whipped out ticket, little Hitler
with Spitfire pencil on permanent jack-up; when he's not red carding
your fanned-out fked up Bournville chocolate cheekbones
he's planning an invasion down your throat.
Big Jack with the bad crack,
just so peak and gleaming visor, ferret eyes
gleamy like fresh poured Tizer -- the seepage in the coleslaw,
the duff mayonnaise.
This is the season of firestorm lightning, torment time
of hell is beautiful.
Wide-awake hell, hell with fingers in a little vice,
forget the teeming armies of little white mice,
hell beribboned with garroted larks and lice.
Yes, hell is beautiful, the weirdest ABC ever spoken
here in the dead letter box
in Crap Future Lane.
Wind clicks the metal leaves tonight.
I speed alive in sequence deep,
beast field rain
throbbing to the lipless pulse of windwonder.
O tormented landscape, handscape,
deathbone shewed
at my pouldrons and gorgets. Down
in the tarred and feathered department
of gutted souls the cry is so wimp: What's in it for me
but the Labour Party and geometric raisin bread?
Chomp, chomp, go the pink bleat sheep,
down to Walworth Road.
I'm such a bad and drunken lad, a fiend fellow
in the useless art of swallowing and wallowing,
as to invite brazenly her puckerage, her mayoral
address of correction, her buzzing network
of helplines flashing down the gorge.
Just look, I snarled my lute
in waspish worsement, claggy gob
clipped shut.
I sledged it fast off my funny bondage tongue
but no-one believed me above the cellar: I died
every day since I gave up poetry
and swapped it for a lake from the chateaux of France
and all of the saints -- Bede, Bob, Sexton, Messrs Rotten, Johnson
and Cash -- abandoned me.
Perhaps the plush purple pansies have an answer today.
Only my little yellow lanterns
sprung vinelike
in their breezy Jerusalem
aiming for victory over the ordinary sunne.
Hell is the pavement against my shit face.
And the devil has seen Robert off on the bus.
The light of recovery is just a format.
The light of recovery is just a lost fairy tale
seeping with ferndamp
in the bluebell vales of your childhood.
The light of recovery is an ex-starre, furious with everlasting darkness.
I am the addict, strapping on his monumental thirst.
The sky is livid like jigsawed lace
and there are no happy endings.
Daddy wants to murder me
I write poetry at the age of seven and Daddy wants to murder me.
He does a good imitation of it: he beats me with a leather belt
and tears my little book in strips.
I wonder why my little poetry book, which is blue, is in strips.
It's falling to the carpet like rain.
Strips and stripes, my daddy. An awesome man.
I sit in the garden reading Homer, shy lad
under a folding one-man tent, and daddy wants to murder me.
Daddy, I caught a trout. Honest I did Dad.
Daddy, I caught a dace away on holiday in Dorset
and it was argent like the moon when I ran, I ran, I ran away
for fear of everything and you. It was argent like the moon.
It was argent daddy, but Daddy wants to murder me.
Daddy, the wind murmurs and hoys against my shins
and I am alone upon my little pins in dales and hills
but my heart is chill: because Daddy wants to murder me.
Daddy, do you want me to stop using the word daddy
and not write like Sylvia Plath at all?
Do you want me to write about my shrub of bay
which we can stroke on our way
out to the bender to have a hoolie and a ball? Do you daddy?
Normally, in recent literary history, it is women
who write about their daddies, daddy. But now it's me.
Daddy, da, pa, everytime I hear your name I want to flee, flee, flee.
When the word failure fled into into my dictionary
one page after facetious, I thought of you, daddy.
Words were my war weapon daddy, no matter how much
you loved Dickens, daddy. All the names and words of endearment
I never called you, and you could never find in your dictionary
to call me, daddy, all the names of dearness, daddy, when I spat
at you in the street, and ridiculed you in public, joying at the response,
to the ridicule, and my way with words as war weapons.
Daddy, when the word hatred sprang up in class or conversation,
daddy you were top of the league, you were beside the word.
And it rained
And I love the rain, daddy, but you were never part of it.
I was out on the lawn, daddy, and it was a rosy September.
Mother was addicted to wobbly eggs, and she made herself that way,
daddy, with your tremendous help. You were good at that, daddy,
I give you that. Daddy, when the word broken fled into the
dictionary, your oleaginous self was there smiling
to give it a helping hand. Only you would have been there, daddy.
Daddy, when ostentation fled to the hills into my upland notebook
I flaunted it right back in your direction, daddy. You knew what
it meant. O goodness, daddy, I've dropped my dictionary,
and my knowledge of words and phrases, punctuation and properly-placed
full-stops, but I know I'm alright daddy, I can steer clear
of my stupid awfulness. You'll be there, daddy,
with a welter of words. With a punishment of punctuation.
Daddy, you personally placed the sin in syntax.
And I'll be there, daddy.
And I went to the Durham Family Practitioner Committee,
daddy, and they were very kind and told me straight.
One day, daddy, and this is what they said from the
bottom of their professional hearts. One day, with
rain from Sligo sheeting in the poor street, or
rain from the desolate areas of unkindly Strabhan,
or from Denton Burn for that matter, or Waddington
Street, where my heart is in storage, in a furnace,
oddly enough, daddy, not a freezer, or an ice-cube
tray (yellow, not transparent) -- and don't ever forget
my dear dear da, don't ever forget. The French verb
is oublier, daddy, that when you sent your devil letter
your snide, sneering, your Demon With Knives In the Mouth,
daddy, when you posted it at 14.45 in the beautiful city
of Cambridge, daddy, a city that does not need your evil,
there is the letter, daddy, in the grate, where we
burned it daddy, and when we did we burned you.
And when I had been to the Durham Family Practitioner Committee,
and it is housed in a marvellous building abutting the
Western Hill, and I cock my head at it always, and
when I had been to the vale, and all of the other hills
which lie in my soul, and their souls, and the souls
of all of those who have walked them and loved them
and hoped their souls would be collected and loved by
a poet who would always be scorned by his da, daddy,
I stood in the street at four in the day and on the
headphones on my head, da, was Heaven-17, even though I
was not wearing any, daddy, but I know it is the kind
of factual annoyance that you dislike, pere, Mr Not Sit Him
On Your Knee, so I deliver it to you in this poem,
on my way back to the home of my great beloved, whom you
will never meet, evil devil daddy, from the handsome
home of the Durham Family Practitioner Committee, who
told me, without saying one word, one verb, one sentence,
there were no subjunctive clauses or split infinitives
lying on the waiting area table, daddy, and when they told me:
when the rains of Sparty all the way from the ferry landings of
Ireland, from the land of spuds and stout, and pipes
and the great glens of poetry, and the loughs of swans
and swanning it if you fancy on a very soft day, daddy. Let
me tell you how it is now, all the press releases have
been sent and those who received them in the world
of poetry and demons upstairs have shredded them and their faxes.
It will rain, which is a day I love most, daddy. It will
pour and drip like a wound in the funny black sky. And I
will be a badly repaired car in a field not quite the green
of the paint on at least one of the walls of the Durham Family
Practitioner's Committee surgery in its handsome
building, daddy. And I think, daddy, that the car will
be black. And I will hunch out of the driver's seat, and
I will look at the rain and strangely enough be glad of the
rain. And this is what I learned, this is what my headwounds
and my heartstrips, and my bookstrips were written on, pa,
da, daddy, pere, this is what they told me in the red wounds which are woven across me like very bad ribbons, daddy.
They were very reasonable, daddy, most personable,
no slyness involved, no letters unsigned posted in
Cambridge from the Headquarters of Insecure Fathers,
for that is what you are, daddy, after all, a father.
But believe me, the cheeky chappy behind you in the
miserable family photographs, you were never a father to me.
you were never a father and you were never a friend.
You saved my brother from drowning, daddy, you saved
your youngest son, daddy. O thank God, daddy. If you can love a brother more than a brother, da, I love Paul.
Our Paul, da. But it is not enough to try and find a
redundant welder in the Durham Family Practitioner Committee,
and after angry handshakes at the closure of another
worldwide great shipyard that I might in my poetic
unappreciated nightmare about you, daddy, ask for
flux to weld my utterly broken heart to yours in
some kind of common long lost at last agreement. I
cannot daddy, I just cannot. The keys of my agelong
Olympia typewriter, my brilliant friend, which I carry with
me from here to there, all of those thousands of words
which I heaped against you one way or the other, for
hatred of you, or for lost love of you, and that you
never respected me for what I did.
And what they told me -- and they did not know that they
had told me -- in the Durham Family
Practitioner's Committee, is that one day, daddy,
I will stand
As the wind and the western rain swept in from
Strabhan, I would fulge my shoulders fro the lean-
to window, all the time thinking of my beloved,
who you will never meet, daddy, for she is wonderful. But
let me tell you daddy, what they told me, in between
the units leaflets, when I was reading them on the
badly late bus going home, this is what they told me.
I would be getting out of the driver seat of the
poorly marked badly repaired car going home
in the ploughed field in the streaming rains of Strabhan
in the sight of the bungalows, and they are always bungalows daddy,
and the poorly repaired car is always black, da, it's
always black in a spud-filled field. And I will
get out of the car, daddy, and I will heave my boots
across the turf and beyond the spuds, daddy,
do you remember why we all left Ireland, daddy,
that's why we were always so envious of America, daddy, that's
why we were always so Popish proud, and it was raining daddy,
you know the rain, da, the rain we love so much, the soft rain
and the hard rain, on the rivers and hills, when we went fishing,
and it swept our love away. And every day when we wake up, it was there
as we walked up it was right in our faces.
And I will be almost half out of the black car daddy, the Austin
A40, knee deep, God help me already, in the stricken wastes
of Crossmaglen and ugly Strabhan, in the permanent borders
of cross-fire, bull-horn warnings, rain-dulled crackle of
walkie talkies barely heard from soaking ditches, and the cross-hairs
of my heart, for his terrain, and terrain is all it is, a word with
a bleakness to it all of its own, despite a false disguise of green,
there my heart will be, cold as the street on the outskirts, bizarre
as the surreal paintings on gable ends of those horse-riding men
in grand plumage and cockades.
Rain sheets down Hollywood-style, bigger than it is in nature.
No use hunching against it now. Collar up and the clava on and
right hand in pocket as the white painted and pebble-dashed
bungalows worm out before me in their cheap mediocrity. The
rain is their priceless diadem.
What goes through my cross-hairs heart at this time, in the final trudge,
are the beatings and berations, the betrayals of one who expected to
be loved. But then the ultimate thanks after the beltings and verbal
child abuse, when I sped myself through sport and poetry to be a
robust youth with knock down ideas of his own. And here was the
bungie, no more than a byre with net curtain, sidelights, and
a leaden crossed porch torch as depicted on miscellaneous false
Yuletide postcards -- and a white oblong chime bell, which I pressed.
At least it was not Beethoven's Fifth and no dog barked: unusual.
All of that gunfire in the choke of the city, just over there. Orange
city council lights psychedelically flashed with Black and Tan
electric blue sweeps. We rocked like that in the sixties when we
fled from the various dictators and authorities. You for example, daddy. Now it's life.
A lad, a snow-haired cheeky chappy lad with a little tuned up smile
came to the door with an eager I'll get it as he ran down the short hall
to the unsnecked horsehair inner handle and yanked it in. Not more
than five, seven maybe, a wee white shirt, short pants and Clark's sandals, eyes
still drugged with the wonders of what he had been reading in his
pocket Aesop's Fables. He wasn't daft at all. You could see the
awesomely distasteful glow of the red bulb imitation coal effect
from the living room fire, and he ushered me in the little snow haired
lad with his hand outstretched inviting me from outside the pebbleglass inner
doors I asked him in a voice loud enough only for you to hear:
Is your daddy home?
Scholia
J'ouvert (Jour ouvert) is the first day of the Mardi Gras carnival in Trinidad.
MAGGIE HELWIG
Desire and Distance
bels dous amics, ben vos posc en ver dir
que anc no fo qu'ieu estes ses desir
pos vos conven que.us tenc per fin aman;
ni anc no fo qu'ieu non agues talan,
bels dous amics, qu'ieu soven no.us vezes;
ni anc no fo sazons que m'en pentis.
Tibors, woman troubador, 12th century
The fields are so impossibly innocent on the plateaus. It is very early morning, mist is crowded thick between the mountains, and the fields are lying under this, all the green in the world, so absurdly innocent, believing in general, personal goodness and universal salva tion, believing that everything is finally very simple.
These fields are lambs and I could wish to protect them. But I am far too complex, my love; far more like -- I'm afraid -- the armies of faith and fire that tore up the fields some centuries ago. And it is early morning, and we are leaving this small village to walk to Montsegur.
The mountains are something else. The mountains are pure desire, frozen into stone.
God creates only space and desire, and all other things fall out from that. Falling lives, the unintended result of the yearnings of atoms, the secret shapes of space and velocity.
Yesterday I remembered the name of the Good Thief, Saint Dismas, and how I grew up across the street from the Church of the Good Thief. (Suddenly on a train -- interrupting you to say, "I remembered the name of the good thief!", quite without connection to previous discussions.) This is probably why I have always worried about the contradictions of morality.
Lord we are dark in our bones and tongues
and the mountains are terrible
I do know about the longing for a perfect, an impossible purity, know about the years I spent trying to hammer my own body and heart into one pure and absolute holy desire.
I know that, however little it may seem that way, trying to be perfectly pure is the same as trying to love perfectly. I mean I just wanted to be able to touch somebody's hand and be sure<\I>it was the right thing to do.
What I learned was how impossible this is, and how unbearable that knowledge is.
To this day I can't explain where I finally came to (where I am now), though I have written poems and parables and stories about it. I can say it is about living inside paradox, or I can say it is about a small dirty wounded figure walking down a road under thunderclouds, who is the Messiah. None of which explains it really. But that's why there is something very close to me about the Cathars, about their terrible purity and a sort of sweetness so many people apparently found in them, something I understand better than almost anything in the world.
I said -- the Watchers
dance on our dimming floors
race through our bodies like panic
and fall, fall endlessly past us
into fantastic ruin
We walk down into the gorge. I do not want you to touch me while we are on our way there. I'm afraid this hurts you, and I can't seem to explain it properly, even to myself. But sometimes there are things I have to do, ways I have to do things.
The wind is wild and bright.
A Manichee myth -- when Satan first tried to trap human souls inside bodies, he built bodies out of glass, and brought the souls to them by playing a flute, and they were charmed by the delicacy of the glass and entered inside. And in their glass bodies they built cities of glass, whole civilizations, ephemeral transparent histories, a whole blown-glass story of needs and passions. But their glass bodies shattered -- perhaps the first time that they tried to touch...
We have been walking for several hours when we see a small waterfall rushing down from the top of one of the hills, losing itself in the rocks.
You walking beside me, your odd fascinations and skills and eccentric erudition, this sweet particular intricate love which is still rather new in my life, still finding its place in my own maps of need and tenderness. Why I talk about desire in different ways now. Why -- though this may not seem to make sense -- I go back to the Cathars, the desert hermits, the vagabond monks, recognize them that much more beside me on my own necessary troublesome road.
Not to suggest that this is perfectly easy or that things fall transparently into place, but if I hadn't come to Montsegur with you I probably never would have come at all.
Out of the gorge, we scramble through the woods, up the muddy slope of one of the mountains. I am out of breath, my muscles aching, my shoes full of mud. Finally we come out onto level ground, a ride that runs along the side of the mountain, and we turn round a curve and Montsegur is there, still tiny in the distance, across the valley.
The Crusaders came from the other direction, southwards from Foix.
This country, the Languedoc, scrubby trees and rocks and the swift shallow river Aude, the sharp herbal air.
When Montsegur surrendered, after a siege of almost a year, they agreed that the credentes, the ordinary believers, would be allowed to leave, but the perfecti would be burned. Of course no-one could really tell them apart. So when they came out of the fortress two hundred and twenty five perfecti identified themselves, including seventeen who had only been through the final ceremony the night before. They just came out of the fortress and said, "Yes. I am one of them. Burn me." There is no report that even a single one of them recanted or lied.
They were that pure and that terrible, that they just came out in the sharp air and walked, one supposes with calm, into the fire.
If you want something badly enough. If you want it badly enough. If that desire is the only thing left in you, and you can only let it take you, whether it takes you into the fire -- or somewhere else, into the complicated corners of the city (any city), leaning against a stone wall, at night, in the middle of the graffiti and the music.
But remember again the good thief, and endless paradox. Remember that humility is also endless, and that possibly humility consists in coming back, in walking out of that gorgeous tempting fire rather than letting it burn you through. In refusing to be perfect.
Simone Weil -- who also lived near here for a while -- starved herself to death, a modern Cathar of sorts (some of them did it too, it was called the endura). But she refused to be baptized. She died believing herself to be actually and literally cut off from God forever, because humility is also endless and it was necessary.
And there is also this step -- to refuse to starve, even if it is the perfect thing to do, maybe becauseit is the perfect thing to do. Because the last absolutes are love and humility, and love and humility leave no room for perfection.
If you want something that badly.
So much, finally, is just about being made of flesh, being infinitely sensitive, yet mortal, confusing, and changeable, infinitely open to chance and calculation.
This body, my body -- difficult, demanding, fragile -- this problematic ground of my experiments, this speech, my body.
Your body, still foreign to me in many ways, which perhaps always will be in part, years from now, however long. Strong and warm and smooth, another language, another world.
It is early afternoon when we climb the last rocks up to the fortress. We walk around the perimeter, outside the walls, and I note places, all my intricate book-derived memories connecting along my nerves with the actual sight. This is where the Crusaders had their catapult. These are the cells where the perfecti lived. Loops of dark green mountains around us, and the lower ridges and plains leading northwest to Foix.
You climb out onto a dangerous plateau, a thin slice of the cliff that was a battleground once, the night the Crusaders took the nearest peak. We are very far up into the sky.
The Montsegur fort itself is no bigger than a high-school gym, with carefully carved small windows left over from its original use as a convent. Parts of it seem to be built around piles of rock, outcroppings of the mountain which were simply incorporated into the walls.
These are some of the things they found in the fortress, centuries later -- a whistle; some small bells; a pair of dice; a fish-hook; a shoelace; a small ring; a belt buckle; a spatula; a pair of scissors; a key.
These are the things they left, what is left of them, the ones who burned under the peak or the ones who simply left, lived whatever lives they could afterwards, died somewhere else, quietly, wondering what it was they had lived through.
I hold your hand as we walk back through the village below the peak, wish I was not so complicated and troubling, travelling on so many endless interlocking quests.
Later, in a room that looks out towards the Montsegur peak, you lean over me, kiss my breasts, my stomach, your hands moving across me. I hold the weight of your compact body against mine, and shelter in the soft warmth of your skin. Your fingers, your tongue, swift images of electricity and atoms running through me, the embrace of gravity on planets in love somewhere in space, green mountains exploding from my body.
The Languedoc was also the first country of the troubadors, those strange worshipful souls (and in the Languedoc, some of them were women) who were also travelling at the demands of desire, refining their souls on the edge of a love that was never really attainable, that was perhaps too pure to be real, somewhere between need and surrender.
And somewhere inside the complexities of language, meanings created in puns and ambiguities and complex chains of rhyme, the kind of language that is really about longing and impossibility.
Desire and distance. What everything is finally made of.
And because I am a child of my own time, I say desire and distance, and add velocity and electricity, but it is not so very different.
The Inquisitors treated troubador poetry as a sort of Catharism -- there are records of poets being forced to swear to papal legates that they would stop writing- -- and probably they knew what they were talking about.
(As I write this now, I am far away from you
It is so hot, the stars are bursting in the sky like grapes, the houses are melting and running down into the sidewalk, I am swollen and white with the heat, this sticky fluid caramel heat filling up the air.
Kids in basements, so they say, are drilling holes in their heads and sticking wires in, giving themselves electroshock, this is how far you can take body piercing, if you are really determined. Brain-hackers. Whether or not the stories are true, we are still that desperate to dig shafts right down into the body and pull up our true desires. Whirl them up right out of our DNA spirals and into the light.
I am thinking of water, and a high-strung city that is all skeleton and metatext with the river wild around the centre of it, and I am thinking of my fingers around the inside of your mouth, you are etched into me like an invisible piece of art, like a burnt portrait, the fine delicate outlines of your heart.)
You tell me the original name of the island of Hokkaido means "the quiet land of human beings."
But this is a quiet land too.
All the history somehow cannot make these fields less quiet (I think of other fields and mountains at war now, the fields and mountains around Dili and Manatuto, around Sarajevo, and wonder -- can't put it any other way -- how they feel, how these fields and mountains felt, how they will all feel in yet some other time). Nor finally make us any less helplessly, astonishingly human.
The alarm on the clock goes off before sunrise. You pull me into your arms, and I want to stay there, but we are leaving, in a morning so full of mist it is almost solid water, far too full of mist to see Montsegur behind us in the chilly dark-blue light.