When the engine rattled itself to a stop he opened the driver’s door letting the damp afternoon displace the snug of travel. He was home after a long day watching the half hours pass and his students come and go. And now they had gone until next year leaving cards and little gifts.
 
The cats appeared. The pigeons flapped woodenly. A dog barked down the lane. The post van passed.
 
The house from the yard was gaunt and cold in its terracotta red. Only the adjacent cottage with its backdoor, bottles filling the window ledges, and tiled roof, seemed to invite him in. It was not his house, but temporarily his home. He loved to wander into the garden and approach the house from the front, purposefully. He would then take in the disordered flowerbeds and the encroaching apple trees where his cats played tag falling in spectacular fashion through the branches. He liked to stand back from the house and see it entire, its fine chimneys, the 16C brickwork, the grey-shuttered living room, and his bedroom studio from whose window he could stretch out and touch the elderberries.
 
Inside, the storage heaters giving out a provisional warmth, he left the lights be and placed the kettle on the stove, laid out on the scrubbed table a tea ***, milk jug, a china mug, a cake tin, On the wall, above the vast fireplace, hung a painting of the fields beyond the house dusty in a harvest sunset, the stubble crackling under foot, under his sockless sandals, walking, walking as he so often felt compelled to do, criss-crossing the unploughed fields of the chalk escarpment.
 
Now a week before St Lucy’s Day he sat in Tim’s chair and watched the night unmask itself, the twilight owl glimmer past the window, a cat on his knee, a cat on the window ledge, porcelain-still.
 
He let his thoughts steal themselves across the table to an empty chair, imagining her holding a mug in both hands, her long graceful legs crossed under her flowing skirt. When she lay in bed she crossed her legs, lying on her back like the pre-Raphaelite model she had shown him once, Ruskin’s ****** wife, Effie. ‘I was in a pub with some friends and I looked out of the window and there he was, painting the church walls’, she said musingly, ‘I knew I would marry him’. He was older of course; with a warm voice that brought forth a childhood in the 1930s spent at a private schools, a wartime naval career (still in his teens), then Oxford and the Slade. He owned nothing except a bag of necessary clothes, his paints of course and an ever-present portfolio of sketches. Tim lived simply and could (and did) work anywhere. Then there was Alison, then a passion that nearly drowned him before her Quaker family took him to themselves, adoring his quiet grace, his love of music, his ability to cook, to make and mend, to garden like a God.
 
Sitting in her husband’s chair he constantly replayed his first meeting with her. Out in the yard, they had arrived together, it was Palm Sunday and returning from Mass he gave her his palm as a greeting. He loved her smile, her awkwardness, her passion for the violin, and her beautiful children. He felt he had always known her, known her in another life . . . then she had touched his hand as he ascended the kitchen stairs in her London home, and he was lost in guilt.
 
Tonight he would eat mackerel with vicious mustard and a colcannon of vegetables. He would imagine he was Tim alone after a day in his studio, take himself upstairs to his bedroom space where on his drawing board lay this work for solo violin, his Tapisserie, seven studies and Chaconne. For her of course; of the previous summer in Pembrokeshire; of a moment in the early morning sailing gently across Dale sound, the water glass-like and the reflections, the intense mirroring of light on water  . . . so these studies became mirrors too, palindromes in fact.
 
The cats slept on his sagging quilted bed where he knew she had often slept, where he often felt her presence as he woke in the early hours to sit at his desk with tea to drag his music little by little into sense and reason.
 
When Jenny came she slept fitfully, in this bed, in his arms, always worried by her fear of rejection, always hoping he would never let her go, envelope her with love she had never had, leave his music be, be with her totally, rest with her, own her, take her outside into the night and make love to her under the apple trees. She had suggested it once and he had looked at her curiously, as though he couldn’t fathom why bed was not sufficient unto itself, why the gentleness he always felt with her had to become hurt and discomfort.
 
He had acquired a drawing board because Elizabeth Lutyens had one in her studio, a very large one, at which she stood to compose. He liked pushing sketches and manuscript paper around into different configurations. He would write the same passage in different rhythmical values, different transpositions, and compare and contrast. After a few hours his hearing became so acute that he rarely had to go downstairs to check a phrase at the piano.
 
Later, when he was too tired to stand he would go into the cold sitting room, light some candles, wrap himself in a blanket and read. He would make coffee and write to Jenny, telling her the minutiae of the place she loved to come to but didn’t understand. She loved the natural world of this remote corner of Essex. Even in winter he would find her walking the field paths in skirt and t-shirt insensible of the cold, in sandals, even bare feet, oblivious of the mud. He would guide her home and wash her with a gentleness that first would arouse her, then send her to sleep. He knew she was still repairing herself.
 
One evening, after a concert he had conducted, Jenny and Alison found themselves at the same table in the bar. Jenny had grasped his hand, drawing it onto her lap, suddenly knowing that in Alison’s presence he was not hers. And that night, after phoning her sister to say she would not be home, she had pulled herself to him, her mass of chestnut hair flowing across her shoulders and down his chest as she kissed his hands and his arms, those moving appendages she had watched as he had stood in front of this student orchestra playing the score she had played, once, before this passion had taken hold. At those first rehearsals she had blushed deeply whenever he spoke to her, always encouraging, gentle with her, wondering at her gauche but wondrous beauty, her pear-shaped green eyes, her small hands.
 
He threw the cats out into the chill December air. He closed the door, extinguished the lights and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. In bed, in the sheer darkness of this Ember night, the house creaked like an old sailing ship moored in a tide race. For a few moments he lay examining the soundscape, listening for anything new and different. With the nearest occupied house a good mile away there had been scares, heart-thumping moments when at three in the morning a knock at the door and people in the yard shouting. He carried Tim’s shotgun downstairs turning on every light he could find on the way, shouting bravely ‘Who’s there?’. Flinging open the door, there was nothing, no one. A disorientated blackbird sang from the lower garden . . .

He turned his head into the pillow and settled into mind-images of an afternoon in Dr Marling’s house in Booth Bay. In his little bedroom he had listened to the bell buoy clanging too and fro out in the sea mist, the steady swish, swash of the tide turning above the mussled beach.

There once was a boy who was but a slender
Line in a portrait or a smudge on a fender
Nothing more than would be passed by your eye
Was the boy so young who did nothing but cry

The world was a cruel one, but he wasn't so tainted
His picture more perfect than of David's statue painted
But the world would soon tear this boy apart
It would end in the mind what began in the heart

You see, innocence thrives where ignorance rules
For blissfulness is the kindest of the ignorant's tools
But this boy would be taught to feel and to hurt
His tears turned to ash as they fall from lips to dirt

He was now cold and ****** and swore
His opinions had changed when his brother died in the war
There was no point to heaven and less point to hell
When they called out your name, you either stood up or fell

Chipped bricks covered in posters past
Graffiti from people of phrases that last
Like one-liners, humourless, gaining a laugh
And the three-word with the sketch of a heart cut in half

The best philosophes of this past generation
Write thoughts on the wall from their closed imagination
And the boy with his eyes red grew darker
As he reached in his pocket and pulled out a marker

With a couple quick slashes a ballot was drawn
And he labeled the man in the voting booth "pawn"
Underneath it he wrote what might be a phrase
That just didn't catch on in those olden days:

It said, "A stone cast down as in defeat
Will hit thine foot before the street
For he who gives up his voting right
Will have no say in where we fight."

The boy capped the pen and he walked away
He had written down all that he wanted to say
His hands now were smudged from the marks on the wall
And he thought to himself, "In short time, it'll fall"

Right around the corner he was halted by the law
"You thought no one was watching, but guess what, kid? I saw.
The truth is, you're right, we vote for our wars
But the man up on top of the nation? He's yours."

The boy smiled slightly, for this cop was wrong
And he reached deep past the tears in himself to be strong
"That man isn't mine; he approved of this war
And congress has made my brother break the oath that he swore"

The cop looked at boy and the boy at the cop
They weren't talking graffiti, but the man up on top
Two strangers, two people, agreeing the fact
That the choice on the ballot was a serious act

"Most kids don't realize just what a vote can mean
They don't attribute the choice to the step in between
Old ideas corrupted or improved upon
All they know is their voice can make the other guy gone"

The boy nodded and looked the cop right in the eye
Saying, "This president let my brother ship out to die
If you try to make us think that his empathy wasn't fake
Contradiction in contrite diction will no conviction make

"You can't justify death because the harder you try
The more your arguments fade like the clouds in the sky
But before they dissolve and assimilate with the air
They leave behind pain to show that they were there"

The cop nodded, waved, and went back to the beat
More hoodlums and lost souls to help off the street
He passed a dark alley and his instincts erupted
His mind yelling to him, "Check for something corrupted!"

So he turned down in darkness to check out the spot
It looked like a place where blackmarket is hot
The fungus and mold that once grew peeled off
Leaving yellowish stains and the urge to cough

A voice near the brickwork called out saying, "Hey,"
"If it's not to much trouble, mister, couldja stay?
See honest to goodness, mister, I tried to stay clean
But when you take your own product, separation is mean"

"I don't know exactly who is to blame"
Said cop to the girl he could see but not name
"There's no one to blame," said the girl to the man
"There's things that will happen, and with time they all can

"For a creature that thrives on flesh alone
Will bite through the skin to steal the bone
And he must be careful, lest he find
That he's been feasting upon his own behind"

"Yes, sometimes it's true: Desire drives us too fast
Sometimes to places where sanity's long since passed
But sanity's fleeting and must be sought after
Come; let me find you some lodgings and laughter"

"No, mister! I'm a lost cause, my fate's without hope!
Permit me now to symbolize: I'm at the end of my rope!"
"Now miss don't you think like that, No one's soldered to their fate
Such thinking will confine you like a cage with bitter bait!"

This world's harsh and confusing and you've had the short stick
But don't let hopelessness be the only thing that's gonna make you tick
Like treading water in the ocean, panic makes you die
Find beauty out of terror, spread your arms and fly!"

The girl sat there blinking. She'd never heard such talk
She'd never been another thought on anybody's walk
"Now let me tell you, I'm not short on self doubt
But I've got to say: that's not what it's all about

See I met this boy earlier, who told me his story
About how the status of the world often makes him worry
This boy's actin' out, but he'll turn out just fine
But if you're giving up hope, then you're crossing the line

Because we've never needed Merry Men and Robin Hood
To stand up at bugle-call to turn the world good
We just need to remember: We're in it forever!
Fight the urge to look upward and shout angrily, 'Never!'

The world, good and bad, is mixed unto itself
And you can't take you your recipe book from the shelf
And add pinches of falsehoods like seasonings for a mask
You must fix it internally, for that is your task

See, though you've given up, that's something I just won't allow
You're gonna go out and fix it, let somebody show you how
Because there's more than one way to a proper conclusion
Some ways are hard and still others illusion

But become obsessed with the truth, with doin' things right
Become a shining green beacon to lead others at night
Promise me, here and now, in this alley proclaim!
That you will set forth and make good of your name."

The girl gently nodded and as time's hands were wound
She grew like a flower from that dank piece of ground
It's the tiny conversations that can so alter life
And cut the crust of complication like a peace-bringing knife

The boy with his brother who'd gone up in the fight
Was just like the cop said: he turned out alright
He put his mind to better things, gave up the childish art
And in the realm of history, his bio did its part

Because he realized how tangible the change he wanted was
He set aside resentments as the true reformer does
He spoke of love, acceptance. . . And then switched to compromise
Because when you're just a visionary, the vision always dies

He used the good and bad to weld a better, stronger, net
To catch the lost and lonely, his was the best support to get
He filled the heads of others with the change that he once viewed
And little inch by little inch corruption and violence met with feud

A verbal dispute filled with picketing people
Who shouted, "Change!" from their electronic steeple
And the media members had themselves a field day
As they caught on the camera what the boy had to say:

"Too often we forget, that apathy isn't peace
But we allow ourselves to be served it by the leaders filled with grease
And we skip along, ignoring things that should rightly upset us
Bombs abroad are wholly fine but not the one that's gonna get us

We've got to think of the whole picture, got to figure out the puzzle
Though you think the lion's fierce, it always has time to nuzzle
So let's switch the view and take on that trait
And put aside the thought that nuzzling can wait."

The cop saw the boy who was on T.V.
And said to himself, "that kid talked to me!
He smiled a bit, "his speech is pleasing as a wren
And in the case of my boasting, I'll say I knew him when!"

The girl wasn't taped, but she was out changing lives
By having conversations that we've likened to knives
And so it was when time was up on the impending revolution
Armed with words she voyaged forth to fufill her resolution

The boy and she stood side by side and led the people on
And using power words of choice, the old regime was gone
What started out as compromise, effloresced to peace and love
And the cop the two had talked to nodded at boy and girl above

A change in heart, a change in mind, can spark a worldly change
Though originality is difficult, ideas can rearrange
To fit the modern times, and indeed to mold it best
And the answer's sometimes difficult, but as we all know: life's a test

This boy and girl were lost, then found, and so was their whole world
And their string of conversations were around their finger curled
Reminding them that there was out there a better way to live
And revolution was the message that the cop had had to give

She opened the door of the gallery and there it was, there it lay, before her, nearly perfect: her exhibition. The opening was an hour or so away and there were, naturally, a few adjustments to make, but in essence it was right, and as she walked to the middle of the rectangular space (to survey the full effect ) she felt held by the quiet wonder of it all; that she had made all this and with ‘the quality control of nature’s accidents’. He’d written those words some years previous when a solo show was but a dream she would enter between sleep and wakefulness, when she would think of the west coast of Scotland and the poetry of its seashore, the infinite variety in the seashore strand between sand and sea. It was such natural accidents of form and transformation by nature’s hand that had guided her imagination into rightness and towards this exhibition.

At breakfast that morning she had come to the table dressed to greet her audience, and for the first time as a featured artist in a festival of some repute. She had felt the quiet joy of choosing the right combination of clothes to be the public person she had now become. He had loved the new dress she had bought to clothe her gallery persona. She had been conscious of his eyes following the lines this frock so generously drew around her body’s shape and form, the way the material fell across her *******, lay smoothly on her thighs.  It was a very grownup frock and with the jacket and scarf made her look purposeful, confident. His looking made such confidence possible, his admiration and what she could tell was that coming together of love and passion that, her being dressed in this formal way, so often evoked.

In the gallery she had worried over the lighting, climbed up the metal ladder with the fluffy green glove thoughtfully provided to enable those small adjustments of direction to be made on a hot spotlight. There were four large pieces flanking a corner that had embossed lines running across their surfaces, lines that needed oblique light to reveal the shadowing of this effect of swirls and marks of a retreating tide on sand.  Two smaller pieces needed rearranging; she’d placed them, late the evening before, in the wrong sequence. Poster boards were to be filled with her poster and put outside on the pavement by the gallery entrance. She opened the main door, a very green door with its top and bottom bolts and black-painted handle ring. The street outside was a welcoming mix of 18th and 19th C buildings, hardly one the same, the sort of three storey buildings that had simple plaques prominently placed into the brickwork from a distant past when proud builders would describe a structure’s use or ownership with a title and date. By ten o'clock this one-way street was lined with parked cars, but now there was little traffic. It was a quiet sunny morning in a market town.

‘Don’t mind the dog, ‘ he said. ‘He’s used to coming in here.’ It was a long-haired verging on the side of scruffy sort of dog, used to keeping its own counsel, probably used to being taken to exhibitions. ‘Just popping in,’ he said, this man who, and she couldn’t help noticing this, seemed to hold much in common with his dog; the long, but retreating on the forehead, hair, slightly scruffy from the want of a comb or a good brush (like his dog), he had dressed without much thought (because who dressed thoughtfully to walk a dog?), and that’s what he was doing, walking the dog and, seeing the Gallery open, thought he ought to look in.

Giving him her brightest smile, she embarked on performing the artist’s music of conversation, that score holding gentle melodies and welcoming harmonies. Although she had become quite practised in talking to her audience there was always the challenging inquiry that would catch her off guard.

‘Well, are you finished with the seashore now?’ said the man with the look-alike dog. For a moment a half dozen possible answers seemed possible. ‘Could one ever finish with something so extraordinary and various as that hinterland between land and sea?’ No, that was seemed a mite critical and clever. ‘Oh, I’ve hardly started’ was tempting, but rather smug and too confident by half. ‘I just love the seaside’ would probably do, as no one else was listening. ‘Merleau-Ponty says the complexity of the seashore is a metaphor in the search for self-identity’. She did wonder what he’d make of that, but finally decided on ‘It’s such a rich source of ideas and images I’m sure there’s a lot more I want to do with the subject.’

”It’s all the same colour”. She’d had that one a few times. ‘When I’m on the beach I’m fascinated as much by the texture and shape of what I see  and feel than the colour. I like the subtlety of the colours in the sand. I think my pieces – and she waved her hand towards what she had titled her Sand Marks pieces – show so many of the different shades of colours you find on the seashore.’

Those Sand Marks, a collection of variously dyed and marked two metre plus linen-lengths, dominated one wall of the gallery. They floated a few centimetres from the white wall, and when people moved past them the slight shadows cast by the linen lengths seemed to ripple in the human-made breeze. She could never look at them without thinking how their very accidental making – binding a linen cloth with inner placed objects and using the natural dye of tea – could create such absorbing results. She would follow with her gaze one of the linen-lengths from bottom to top (or top to bottom) and find herself walking on the wet sand of a Scottish beach, overwhelmed by the clear light and space with only the sea sound surrounding. He would tell her, had told her often, how moved, how affected he had been when he first saw them hung. To him, these ‘marks’ carried an essence of this aesthetic she now owned and for which had become recognised.

Even on this, her first day, she had been visited by a small number of admirers and supporters, some travelling distances to see her work with the aura of the original, a truer view than that possible on the back-lit screen of their computer monitors. Ladies who loved textiles, the containment and privacy to sew and stitch secured in their busy lives. These friendly and smiley women (the comfortable side of sixty) understood something of what she was doing here, and perhaps imagined themselves as thirty-somethings walking Scottish beaches free from children and the relentless list-making of house and home and occupation, able to create imaginary worlds of marks and folds, pleats and textures. Full of enthusiasm for the medium, what they perhaps didn’t have was the skill of seeing, a skill she had grown up with, had always owned to some degree: found, fostered, honed, developed into a second-nature activity of always looking.

There would be the occasional brief lull when the gallery was empty or close to empty, as though needing the space to come up for breath after being occupied by people and their movement. She would then walk slowly around the long well-lit room viewing her pieces and her arrangements of pieces from different angles. She would look at his poems placed antiphonally between her work, commissioned for her catalogue, her book of images of the sea shore paired with, incorporating even, her made pieces. She’d chosen a favoured few she’d felt caught the essence of being in the sea’s company, in the sand and shore’s domain. Like everything he did it had been undertaken with the utmost intensity of purpose. She saw him now in her mind’s eye with his notebook sitting against rocks, paddling in the great shallow pools, walking head down along the tide line, those bright days on a Scottish island and before, before on that ellipse of beach by the fishing station.

He would tease out an idea formed from a little motif of words, perhaps like the very music that was his private territory: here, alone, apart we are marked by the tide’s turn. Yes, we are marked by being solitary in such unconfining space, the marks at our feet become the lines, the mounts, the fingers, those interruptions, breaks and blockages found in the tridents, chains and crosses of the art of palmistry. We read the seashore as a psychic oracle reads the hand, hoping, as Kathleen Jamie so rightly says, for the marvellous. And marvellous it so often is.

Standing in this gallery was like being gathered about by the seashore. It was a short jump in the imagination’s miracle to hear the soft breathing of the sea, the wind caressing the face, the warmth of the afternoon sun on the freckled cheek.

See how those we love are transformed
when the sea is their only boundary

a figure stands before a sand bar
in a crescent of water left by the tide
an affecting geometry of solitude
. . .

These words had always stopped her in her perambulating tracks. She thought of her son, far distant on the beach, at rest for once, still, motionless within the confluence of the elements of the beach, at the epicentre of her gaze, all things flowing to and from his tiny, far-away figure.

For every single time I stumbled on loose sidewalk brickwork
I have allowed a so what? smile to cross my face
this is no roadmap
flat as the earth was all those years ago
this path is uneven
and littered with fragments of the lives of others
others who at one point may have walked down this same sidewalk
only to stumble on loose brickwork
so what?
and each parked car
that I may have kissed while backing up
has its own life
maybe the owner spends hours in discussion
how the hell did I get that scratch?
well you are welcome -
so what?
and just maybe
if you call that number
stenciled and fading in the weathered concrete beneath the bridge
you will have a good time
so what?
the homeless man I saw one morning
taking the cans out of my recycling bin
and putting them in a duffel bag
was once a ten year old boy
who did things that every ten year old boy does
so what?
and maybe every single dumb poem I pen
makes its way into the heart
of just one person
and maybe they just fly upwards
into the atmosphere
where they dissolve into wind
*so what?

lessons in graffiti, or the Pinocchio giraffe;
and was the H absolutely necessary
when otherwise asking of a cappuccino
or at your local caf? evidently there was distinction
with the mocha too, but that won't matter,
otherwise the language isn't used... but abused.

lessons in graffiti, or other confectionary products,
while you ooze the shopping experience
on your daily commute,
       *skittels on brickwork with the origins
of the #, cut short by simply the graffiti tag,
      you wrote tag, without the collective hash,
  not so much noughts and crosses gaming,
or remembering your phone number,
                  here graffiti: or the rekindling of
trademarks in the urban scenic bypass,
or: truly under the bridge.
             writing on money does very little:
but writing on newspapers? that say a lot,
the odd day i write something on a newspaper
review section and feel almighty -
        which is much more than the rage against
the machine instructions are about:
   write a message on a penny, it's still a penny,
write a message on a dollar, it's still a dollar,
but write a message on a newspaper:
you's basically encapsulating shouting at a protest!
() hence the picture.
             r.s. (receptui scriptum):
         i never knew whether the dot belonged in
the ). or the .) part of encapsulation, if that's to be
worded or acutely pill-sized embryo,
that bypasses the oesophagus workout before
the hydrochloric gym acidity.
   how is one to make science human again?
how is one to make science lessened in the Frankenstein
myth and the ostracized ostrich citizens
that scientists very much so, actually are?
       my notes on the matter?
non-existent: i see the feminist movement
i.e. there are more women than men as such
as not a case of **** culture, but as a case of "i'm not
getting any!" call in the Vikings,
mind you, even the supermarket cashier looked
astounded in between Friday and Saturday,
  on Friday a litre of whiskey
    on Saturday a litre of whiskey...
and some men climb the Everest or walk the moon...
while some envision their liver
as a Klitschko - the tetragrammaton exists only
because people made aesthetic suggestions / blunders,
it's a suggestion in the sur- or what's otherwise a surd /
a silent nonetheless inserted atom of sprechen:
like Nietzsche and Klitschko: you say less than you
write... out pops the tetragrammaton -
        if ever Caesar Octavian needed a teacher
my vanity suggests i'd done better teaching him
than Aristotle teaching Alexander, or Seneca teaching
Nero...
                  it's all down to excessive spelling, or
the keeping up of appearances, or simply looking
bizarre, and like in mathematics, there's a remainder,
what yhwh represents is in linguistic terms
as in mathematical terms: what's left over, scraps...
see it differently and it becomes gold:
five fish, two loaves of bread sort of scenario.
                           it's a remainder -
it cannot be eradicated, denied or be left into a limbo
of diminished responsibility
      it's man concern with how language should
look and how painting should feel:
               the fact that we created art from letters
and forgot our concern for art representing forms
is not postmodernism, it's post-Platonism; finally!
of course the s and the z are the crude and the refined
versions of each other via the transition of
being modulated by the chirality enzyme,
          but they're still called zigzag twins -
there's no delta involved akin to one face of a pyramid.
how grand then, to be living in a time
when a single phonetic encoding of sound
transcends into complex meaning:
akin to s and sigma and what's mathematically
the sum / total of constipated matter...
                    strange how the Cartesian model
falters thus,
           the fact that i think is never the ending
causality of my being's summation:
           it's but a summary, but never the summation /
sum - it's never the arithmetically sound answer:
hence the god-implant, or as i said:
the remainder, which i can't erase from the realm
of thought.
                 by the way? no Jew could have wrote as
much about their god as i have:
as said: the crucifixion was worthwhile,
      but there was no question that Latin had
to remain -
                     what was saved was the Latin encoding,
not some puny redemption from doing ****...
**** no! you couldn't create robotics or write
software without Latin: no other encoding has as
many "blank" hula hoops as already provided:
Q, R, o, P, p, A, a, D, d, g, b, B...
        26 x 2? 52 - and of those how many are spies
that we are descended from the gods and can
create our slowly-ascending replicas in robotics?
as the list suggests: 12.
     should i call up St. Peter and the rest to work
out the ******* numbers of correlation in
the framework of mirror / anti?
                      ah, the eagerly waiting public:
speak of the devil... and he shall appear.
      that ****'s been going on since the death of a man
in the year 1900...
           and oh my, the search has been gruelling,
you have Western Europe remembering the 1st
and Eastern Europe trying to not remember the 2nd...
   the name's Mars... while i say: try Moby **** first:
because god knows what's lurking in the depth.
or maybe i got my bearings wrong? maybe language
truly is a statement of Bermuda magnetics
that makes all compasses into twirling ballerinas?
to me? what comes with authenticity is a good joke,
nothing remotely suggesting a seriousness:
or as Wittgenstein said: have a joke, make a joke,
compose everything with a joke in mind -
        oh the fringe minority still have a bargain on
identity in this field, they're brewing their next cup
of tea brown-nosing and fidgeting over how to
answer... oh i'm mad enough to turn on the Mr. Bombastic
attitude, 1L of whiskey in a single night goes a long
way in terms of unwinding and making vocab verbiage,
or counter to that: something worthy of an antique status.
still, a reminder, the yhwh is the Jews' great
present, expressed dutifully in English as equivalent
of the mathematical remainder:
                      only because the diacritical bargain
wasn't met with much approval:
what with the elites wanting to push a global rather than
a solely Mediterranean twist on the plot of how:
a revival?          well... combing back to the ulterior
motive for graffiti, an elitist sport, your handwriting
over printed press rather than Coca Cola sorta similar
on a brick wall: i'm telling you, handwriting is
a bit like wanking these days...
         but isn't it true that when we write we are
sorta becoming radiologists? aren't poems essential
x-rays? am i not simply showing you my bones?
these isn't skeletal? you sure?
and there's me thinking that America is on
the threshold of romanticising the French Revolution,
with the former concern? to reinstate a Polish
state, i.e. the Duchy of Warsaw...
              but it's not really a first world war reparations
injustice while the Germans used money instead
of wood to warm themselves in winter...
no, nothing can be said that would ever appeal
to the fact that the Third ***** was milked:
not even Indiana Jones had a ******* of that horror;
me? i took the best of the ****** affair,
the fully bewildered insurance broker of the zeitgeist:
Heidegger, and yes, i made more apologetics with
him than philosophy: as with an fatal attraction:
be it the bazar flute charmer of the cobra -
this one is bound to sting in the ***.
then another thing hit me, usually an internet
variance off state media... you ever wonder why
very claustrophobic pronoun usage (frequent interchange)
is almost equivalent of brawling with someone?
dreams of Angelique:
                     imagine a scene at a protest (two people):
- i doesn't matter what you think! your opinions are not relevant!
- true, as is the case of: you don't matter with regards
                 to what i think.
anyone spot this concentrated pronoun use
for the purpose of aversed violence via a degradation
emphasis, concerned with defending sported violence
but not social injustice : turned into justified violence?
   (yes, colon as ratio, variant of fractions,
meaning? less comparative literature of the fraction,
   and more divergence of authority within the Libra
of what's necessarily unfair: the whole is no authority
to distribute fairness);
  it's just that i feel the relentless overuse of pronouns
in a confrontation symbolises a need to use the body
rather than the tongue -
when too many pronouns are interchanged
and the repugnant pronoun collectivisation begins
the paranoid "they" and the sane "we" -
            well... Rη-oh! Rη-oh! Rη-oh!     (sheen sheen Mecca
       ism)
                             well hardly ref. to Brazil: rhy ate!
rhy ate!
                see how that tetragrammaton remainder just,
like, plops up like a baby gazelle from the mama
gazelle's ******? plop! and no diapers either.
ah: the cruelty. or as someone said:
  few letters are given geometric status, or at least
something remotely symbolising twins,
but still there are a few:
   m - sine (trigonometry)
   w - cosine (     "              )
  Δ - Pythagoras for short
      LΓ - the right hand
                  and the left hand in the non-superimposable
          categorisation of things
   ψ - the devil's barrister / i.e. a fork
     also 8008135 upside-down on a calculator screen
(insert a weird face) -
   χ - compass convergence, i.e. the point b
        you need to get to from your starting point oh,
and i guess H       for a rugby goal...
             oh hell, only a few phonetic encodings make
it out of blah blah land -
                       and without really wanting
to orientate myself on the origins of things:
i'm getting a suntan basking in all of this
in the immediate sense: actually using it.
                             and to think: we actually think
about what we talk about using only 26 symbols?
that's ****** effective,
                             which is why we were so keen
to spread out encoding system to think / say things.
and why the Chinese felt the greatest pull of gravity
in all of mankind and due to their ideograms
got pulled way way down and just say there:
which enabled them to reproduce on a scale such as
is apparent to us exporting our manual labour to
them: who the hell would want to learn
unit wording when it can be wording units?
       they have words we treat as onomatopoeia
shrapnel -
                   which is why we have enshrined ourselves
to sit on laurel leaves with Mozart:
     if ever us, then never us: linguistic atomists
                                            who perversely dissect
words into, what i can only call: a Lingua Table of
the 26 elements. it's there, it's naked, compared
with the diacritical approach: English is all
and Adam & Eve ready for a voyeuristic spelling
out of realities - hence the plural:
    there was never one intentional crowd-surfer out
there to make people form cults, plagiarise
and sooner than later: get lost.

Grinding....

Leaving it silenced, drawn and quartered
Clawing for the scraps left over

Predicament I found myself in
Or, towards the end of it
Slipping from the edges
Forager focused on finding any way back home
Sidetracked by some apparition left crying
Alone, in the corner

Grinding...

Paused, with rain drops weighted, heavy sense in the air
I can feel my lips turning blue and
Twitching

It's more literal than I would dare dream in a waking nightmare
The smell of every molecule tantamount to another realm

Hangs motionless in the air
The stone transposed becomes a rooftop asylum, overlooking such uncouth misanthropic parcels, self absorbed in this grotesque imagery, a veritable wall of self hate puzzle pieces

Grinding...

Low, on an almost ominous note, still grows colder in my ears
Blowing on winds filled with the spite and righteous
Anti holy
Fully rupturing sound of far off laughter of the
New root

My lips still moving
No sound produced
And my mind
Grinding...

I still pray to god for you
Beset on all sides by the same wickedness
Still afflicted by myself

Argue for arguments sake
****** up on the uptake
I thought that you might want it
I guess I forgot all the subtle ways
The fires spring to life at night

Arguably the wrong choice is
Looking at him
I try not to
Catch that glimpse in his eye
Already my mind races
And my bones are shivering
At the thought alone

Brickwork backing
Still swells maggots
And filing paperwork
For entrapment habits

Grinding

Seldom doth man stop and stare
At the caste iron manhole cover there,
Seldom doth he analyze
The majesty, which beneath it lies.
The pipe work systems vast and long
Dark catacombs so precise and strong,
Buried deep beneath our feet
Extending forth from street to street,
Out across the breadth of town
Those secret fluids trickle down.


Laser levels carve the pathway
Through the walls of solid stone,
Shovels scrape and dig with effort
Forging hard trajectories home.
Digging, digging metal mountains
Sweat cascades upon the brow,
We lay the pipes in straight formation
Precision's satisfaction now.


An Artisan's great work is hidden
Lost beneath the earth's grey stone,
Appreciation camouflaged in that,
The cast iron manhole stands alone.
Magnificence unrealized
For deep beneath your feet,
A subterranean Michelangelo's
Sisteen Chapel, lays discreet.


Unsuspected rivers
Flowing darkly to the sea
In caverns of unwanted waste
Quite unbeknown to thee.
Vaulting brickwork chambers
Which are ancient works of art,
Carry oceans of excretement
Far from where their journey's start.


With thunder's crash and lightning flash
And torrents of cold rain,
The road's awash and gutters flow
Through roadside grates to drain.
Gushing torrents cascade down
In waves of flowing might
To the storm water system
Which promptly swallows it from sight.


Magic, you say ?
Nay, nay I say unto you
That the drain layers artistry
Is unappreciated, that's true !
That the Herculean effort wrought
In winning his great fights
Is largely lost to all and sundry
Who avoid construction sites.
They miss the planning and the layout
And meticulousness too
And the rubber seals which stop the leaks
Which really bother you.
The massive holes and danger
Of being buried in collapse
And the wondrous satisfaction
Of achieving downhill flows... Perhaps!


Marshalg
Apprentice drain layer
MHX Beachcroft site and Eastport
19 September 2009

Who is amused?
there's primordial ivy clinging  on my brickwork
and an incident of blank verse at my poetry club,
possible unemployment rearing its head for moi.
Before my downsizing commences,
I've  been busy buying more CD's
but that's my contre jour
befittingly everybody else is into  iTunes,
I can only listen to myself,
even if music be the devils tune
I'll  soon be home for more,
burning fossil fuels willingly
of Mesohippus's and other three toes.

I

Winter is long in this climate
and spring—a matter of a few days
only,—a flower or two picked
from mud or from among wet leaves
or at best against treacherous
bitterness of wind, and sky shining
teasingly, then closing in black
and sudden, with fierce jaws.

     II

March,
           you reminded me of
the pyramids, our pyramids—
stript of the polished stone
that used to guard them!
                                    March,
you are like Fra Angelico
at Fiesole, painting on plaster!

March,
             you are like a band of
young poets that have not learned
the blessedness of warmth
(or have forgotten it).
At any rate—
I am moved to write poetry
for the warmth there is in it
and for the loneliness—
a poem that shall have you
    in it March.

     III

See!
         Ashur-ban-i-pal,
the archer king, on horse-back,
in blue and yellow enamel!
with drawn bow—facing lions
standing on their hind legs,
fangs bared!  his shafts
bristling in their necks!

Sacred bulls—dragons
in embossed brickwork
marching—in four tiers—
along the sacred way to
Nebuchadnezzar’s throne hall!
They shine in the sun,
they that have been marching—
marching under the dust of
ten thousand dirt years.

Now—
they are coming into bloom again!
See them!
marching still, bared by
the storms from my calender
—winds that blow back the sand!
winds that enfilade dirt!
winds that by strange craft
have whipt up a black army
that by pick and shovel
bare a procession to
                               the god, Marduk!

Natives cursing and digging
for pay unearth dragons with
upright tails and sacred bulls
alternately—
                      in four tiers—
lining the way to an old altar!
Natives digging at old walls—
digging me warmth—digging me sweet loneliness
high enamelled walls.

     IV

My second spring—
passed in a monastery
with plaster walls—in Fiesole
on the hill above ‘Florence.
My second spring—painted
a ******—in a blue aureole
sitting on a three-legged stool,
arms crossed—
she is intently serious,
                                  and still
watching an angel
with colored wings
half kneeling before her—
and smiling—the angel’s eyes
holding the eyes of Mary
as a snake’s hold a bird’s.
On the ground there are flowers,
trees are in leaf.

     V

But! now for the battle!
Now for ******—now for the real thing!
My third springtime is approaching!
Winds!
lean, serious as a ******,
seeking, seeking the flowers of March.

Seeking
flowers nowhere to be found,
they twine among the bare branches
in insatiable eagerness—
they whirl up the snow
seeking under it—
they—the winds—snakelike
roar among yellow reeds
seeking flowers—flowers.

I spring among them
seeking one flower
in which to warm myself!

I deride with all the ridicule
of misery—
my own starved misery.

Counter-cutting winds
    strike against me
refreshing their fury!

Come, good, cold fellows!
    Have we no flowers?
Defy then with even more
desperation than ever—being
    lean and frozen!

But though you are lean and frozen—
think of the blue bulls of Babylon.

Fling yourselves upon
    their empty roses—
              cut savagely!

But—
think of the painted monastery
  at Fiesole.

There, amongst the northern skies,
Tears driven by ghostly squalls to
Fall on the blackened, bleak rooftops
Of this northern town, forgotten.
Left to a grey Victorian rot
Decaying factory ceilings collapsing on,
Litter strewn floors, newspapers decompose
With triumphs from yester year
Industrial dust stained brickwork
Grimy reminder, of the grim past
Haunted dim gaslight probing the fog
Days, nights only separated by murky light
A ghostly silence, hangs like a grimy fog
Cloaking lost sounds of dull beating on metal,
Boots tramping over cobbled stones,
The sounds of clocking on, clocking off, no more

Fortunately, there were five modern toilets having
Lavatory flushing cisterns like those invented by
Sir Harrington in one thousand five hundred ninety-six, being
Built near the kitchen because the air in this room was dry.


This cook-room was constructed in a place where it was deemed safe
To have a cooking fire; it had a good layer of lime
With an air space to insulate the brickwork from the unsafe
Adjacent timber; the brick walls were expensive at that time.

The room had two brick fireplaces and boiling was the method
Of cooking while three coppers with lids were set in the brickwork.
With some funnels passing through the deck head, they were connected
That protected the kitchen and allowed the steam to perk.

Firing on the uproll could mean a shot going into
The rigging; the sailors and the passengers took the pumps
To extinguish this fire, doing all they had to do.
The pumps made of leather were assembled from the dumps.


And coupled every fifty feet with brass fittings; their length
Was about twenty-three meters; this ******* worm engine
Was made by John Lofting in 1690; its strength
Was pumped by a team of men working to relieve the tension.


The fire was small, but it could extend to the cabin cruisers,
Which were nearby; while the men were working hard to escape
The danger, the strange man as one of the fast movers
Deliberately entered the gun room; Cruz saw his shape

Entering and descended the stairs in a hurry
To stop him; he entered the gun room and took a gun.
The stranger turned to Cruz and shut him, but his eyes got blurry,
When the room was suddenly filled with the rays of the sun.

(Cruz shut this man in the face. Both of them fell down. The women were in a boat and Fargo made efforts to bring them to the shore.)

A big wave hit the boat, causing Geraldine to go
Overboard; she fell off the boat into the water.
Fargo jumped in the sea to save her and started to swim below
The water; she screamed for help; the waves rose up to scatter.

She could not remember how she fell; her head and arms
Were barely visible above the waves; Fargo swam
Toward her and brought her aboard, '' you're safe from harms.''
She vomited, ''I want to be far away from where I am.''

Meanwhile, Bella lost her balance, and within a split second,
She fell off the boat and tried in vain to hold onto
Chiara's hands while asking for help, but her fate beckoned
When a giant jellyfish stung her arm on back to fronto.


Chiara saw her treading the water and moving her head,
But lost the sight of her after a few seconds ''She's gone, '
Said Chiara; after saving Geraldine, Fargo said ''she's dead, ''
He turned around the boat, ''Look, that jellyfish is coming on! ''

(Fargo jumped in the sea to rescue Bella. He brought her aboard, but she has been underwater much more than she could resist. His resuscitation efforts were unsuccessful. All along the ragged shore, there were a lot of stones under the water. They got down out of the boat and walked in the water while bringing the boat to shore. Meanwhile, ten pirates, after swimming in the water, climbed on the carrack to **** everyone on the board. Fortunately, they didn't see the boat.)

(To be continued...)

Poem by Marieta Maglas

it's a common theme, a pastoral even... a sing-along with the words: when i was in Rotherham... i was never in England... when i was a Rotherham i was never going to imagine myself eating falafel. yes, it's that ****** ugly, which is why i'm hardly a premature ejaculator into assembling myself as bulldog Brit - use the language: well, obviously... but assemble the other bits and bobs? can't happen... it's like asking: tell a Jew to not be a Jew by sitting in one place for a long period of time... the nomad in him will evidently counter that proposal and say: **** it! see you on Mars! and to think that i could have actually invested my life into a diameter that's Poland... people still find it a bit odd: oh, wait, are they back on the map? that's us, Jews of the north... can't believe we're being blamed for the failure of the treaty of Rome: all because the English stopped flirting with the idea of Turkey being in the union: even though they dabble in a lamb kebab after binging on *****... but hey, no one want to be a hypocrite these days... that's of course provisional given your Jose Mourinho relationship: is as special as you suppose with the lady and the trump; someone tell Disney to stop writing those ****** scripts! how thoughtful of a prophet-merchant (merchant of Mecca, Shakespeare should have written that one) to have encouraged the sigma-bleaching-project: one world, one book, one something or other: either the telescope or the microscope answers: otherwise evolving into ****-naked baboons and elsewhere furry Gucci to strut the feline ****; it's not like i want to go back to the past, but i certainly don't want to experience a Monday in the year 2086 either.

i wouldn't have been one of them, their services required
a nobility, which i can partially claim,
but partially discredit as:
a family squabble, where the Eden
project would have flourished -
because of the lies -
         but you know, no biggie,
or the notorious -
one part of my family actually did
settle in america with my seven
tongued great-grandfather *sprechen güt
it's necessarily applied here:
hence it's not gút: miracles!
                     who would have thought
that trigonometry bit into the *****
of those pixy, foxy whatever clot in the
English department....
that's the thing with immigration and
integration and ethnic cleansing:
when i write,
    the desk is as rickety as a bed when
i **** a *******
and she tells me i'm a decent chap -
and says a variant of awe because i paid
£10 extra to pucker her floral arrangement
and she feels ashamed at having had
an ******: and all the feminists are
out there, in the cold, with their banter
     slogans that reach Zeno via
turtle, as snail, to compete with Achilles:
yeah, that hurt, because you enjoyed it
on the hobnob you call a job.
******* pretty enough for you now?
   well: two ***** and a smoking ****** later:
it better be!
               people think that you can just
"integrate" into a foreign land...
they coerce a foretfulfulnes that you
sometimes practice etymology -
        and find yourself a bit like a Jew
but more of a Slav, feeling at most romantic about
the land that is cleft to your ***** in terms
of language patriotism still leech-like,
because you can't forget the asking
that's already there: from the Baltic Sea
toward the Black Sea: our commonwealth was,
and could have been!
          globalisation is so Emi ******* M -
you bleach throughout, and so suddenly,
people get bothered -
         like a Cluedo but unlike who did it?
who's who?
             i write this on a rickety table,
like i might **** an Amsterdam dame of the credo
in all that's left: red -
       baby, that brickwork with your chub
layers does it for me: always a Puerto Rican to
have a laugh with...
20+ years in England and the roses are still
roses, but nettles in some obscure Greece island
designated for offshore debauchery -
hey, no one is a saint: but give a little -
   have at least the remote humanity in you
to breed the ******* Beatles rather than an antiquated
variation of Breivik.
                obviously not to be.
i payed because i wasn't getting any:
hands up, sycamore! so scythe so more -
i just feel uprooted and Jew -
  dispositioned like i have to have an inferiority
complex tattooed on my **** designated for
halal butchers -
           there's a problem though...
i have patriotism with regards to the tongue:
but to the people? a true Conrad (minus the Joseph)
would sell you out, like you already
have: to the highest Saudi bidder -
           ethnicity reemerges - strangely enough:
even after all that ethnic cleansing that's politely
called globalisation: because English cultural
emphasis is plain said: ****!
                      a bunch of fairies say i can't feel
a certain way because it will hardly become economised
and benefit an inbreeding:
so i outsourced you there,
   Dover Monsieur without his Turk and Mongol
invaders -
                   you could call it romantic:
but i'm not writing from an ivory tower within
framework of the land that needs tilling by
a familiar hand,
                 the last time i spoke to a Pollack -
it was in a shady alley at night, debating the clues
to making a living on Ebay -
                  so much for the romantics -
fair game in learning the tongue, but to attack
ethnicity? you have to be ******* me...
they call it the exotica in England:
all that coconut milk went to their heads -
   Baltic coconuts? sure... once you start eating
the pickled herrings like us: quasi-Scandi devils.
     so ******* twinned with Israel:
they said Amsterdam was the Venice of the north
they said Edinburgh was the Athens of the north
they might as well call it Tel Aviv Warsaw
and Jerusalem Krakow - too little to be said
otherwise.
             you could say Moscow and St. Petersburg:
oh sure, seen a bit of the world: ought to be
a *******...           really?
       does the world need another Golgotha
congregation? i just don't see why i require
to give more than linguistic acumen -
i'd never sing god save the queen
because i'd probably sing queen save the taxman...
and it really is a shame i can't engage in
any sort of nationalism - whether over there
or over here, it's a true shame...
           well i do have a grand history to aspire to,
variously interpreted with what gets my heart
thumping:
          ogniem i mieczem - hussaria ginie
(with fire and with sword - winged hussars die) /
          krzesimir dębski:
which i also translate in feeling within
the framework of Górecki's (3rd symphony?
fun-*******-tastic reassembling jazz's double
base, or bees, or other variations of humming
drones: anti-thesis of the crescendo)
three olden pieces, no. ii -
and yes: without cinema classical music would
be dead... the only classical music these days
is cinematic transcript -
                 the complexity of a Liszt or a Chopin
is frowned at, what has remained and endured
is a Satie yawn - a brushing of a piano like
a dustmaid: a sort of accenting the silence -
nothing with a technical claustrophobia of
smug finger litanies of the abacus:
that swamp women's feelings with eerie ahs
and yesses in would be marriage proposals.
   i wish i could be a lazy Welshman
or a Scot that forgot Celtic in order to glorify
a Glaswegian idiosyncratic-syllabalisation
    of wee, as in small: high off my rockers
on the Afghani thought train that's *****.
  i wish i were that ****** lazy...
  as to simply let go of where i was and where
i wasn't...
       as someone in Cardiff once said:
never been to London -
or as someone in Glasgow once said:
           a banch of ****** all with the Edinburgh
Judases.
              i don't think i could ever
have enough lost self-respect to not play the ethnic
joker card without a romantic agitation -
but it's still the piano that truly survives in
the modern world of pop **** trance i-wish-i-were-shot,
any other name from american beauty -
once again: the minimalism is self-explanatory.
no, i don't think i could ever fully integrate:
and happy are those who have their
lives filled with the existentially trivial:
never moved home, never descended a class below
or rise a class above their parent's status -
what a grand scheme of lotto!
                    i love these squamish pixies -
i love them so much that i experience nausea when
hearing about their lot in life...
  after which i turn to a lullaby, handpicked,
christopher young's - something to think about
from the hellraiser franchise, or as i like to call it:
i like these sort of tracks, these life infuriating
   chattering:
              like throwing yourself into either
nouns or onomatopoeias:
                           and yes, art is difficult:
because it's supposedly lazy -
                   oh the plumber in me that never was,
oh the roofer of industrial sized roofs in me that
somehow was, but then wasn't...
            the part of me that writes like Joseph Conrad
but actually wants to scream:
                       zzé skury odrzeć! (variant: ob-      +
-drzec)    to strip the skin.
                 a z tym: nadać ducha gniew alter solo
wbrew temu co mówi, czyli: razem;
                    nawet katedra św. piotra nie jest
                   minimalizm zwany: Golgota.
              (and with this: give the ghost's anger
alter solo, against that, which says,
namely: together; even st. peter's cathedral
                 isn't the minimalism of Golgotha).

A firetruck races past the isolate Blue Fox and infinity. Dulcimer clatters fading brickwork on the cross markets and churches where blind men are the imagining heaven. Luminescent Volcanic leaves heated from sunfire beautiful in the Spring choke lanes which are battered by abstract cavern homes. What happened to the Orient Harpsichord Serenity? Where does the Blue Fox go? Incense Markets Sauna with Smoke are busy in Denpasar while I'm here at a North American shopping mall where Ivory Columns cradled in violet fauna do wait sturdy and enchanted in rows.
Here I'm waiting by the leather clay shade bench in silent meditation breathing community whispers and listening clear to water pour from the lionhead fountain. Parrots caw atop a wide gated ceiling facing Empyreus.

There is a fire in America. The Blue Fox is hidden beneath firs and palms bathing in humidity. The Blue Fox is writing prophecies of economic collapse and rampant pointless murders making the newspapers. Ash storms blazing while banana painted trucks row on row attend to Victorian wood panels cooling to onyx powder in too short a time. There is no room for learning when The End Times go too quickly.
I'm listening to Bob Dylan scream instrumental prayer on harmonica rough against my ears. The Blue Fox treads February Beaches a few hundred miles from Australia and whistling the words of flowers in his head. He chews on wheatgrass jangling change in his fur pockets like those cartoons. He is the vision of Bohemia, he is an active star dazzled in this beguiled galaxy, yet in his spine he carries the turmoil doppleganger kept by all and known by none.
The firetrucks are doing all they can to quell the lung-poison vase boiling an apartment dancing inside but it continues to grow in its enraged fury.

There's a fire in America boys and girls, come around and see.
Canoes of memorial gold row through oppression and genocide, the Inuits and First Peoples of ancient years are wondering too where the blue fox went when agony cries the air. Stories of wisdom replaced with stories of war. Balaclavas labyrinthine through  exotic Bazaars thick with music and plants hanging off fishhooks and brass coat hangers while I write and dream of such Valhallas in my shopping mall on a quiet afternoon.
Bill is playing the banjo with faded paint and a single broken string, there he is on Yates! Cowboy hat made of charcoal velvet holding a meager collection of change.  
Stephen Schizophrenia is lying on his back watching aluminum kingdoms hover on by expanding nimbus clouds. He has eleven dollars to his name along with a damaged half torn belt with his initials engraved on the buckle  He taps his feet to Edith Piaf howling "La Vie En Rose" while an Airplane collides with his sacred personal aluminum palace, suddenly he can't block out the repressed memories he's fought decades to hide deep and dark in his bleak jazz enthralled brains.

Maybe we're all supposed to fall apart. Maybe we're designed to hurt and cause hurt. Where is that ****** Blue Fox? He's ebullient, thoughts fragmented in sharp bliss glass cutting him through while he rolls around the sands catching Buddha particles in his paws digging holes on Kuta Beach to his Idyllic land where happiness is forever and therefore false.

The Blue Fox falls in love overwhelming with everybody and every soul. So many souls by the billions every place! Even the tyrants. Even the demons. Even the necrophiliac scoring an OD'd brunette at twenty six from Anaheim who collapsed flatlined by prescriptions on a 3rd floor Complex.
He adores the narcissist who loves everybody as fully as The Blue Fox as long as they are herself. She is the harmonic untainted flytrap unaware of its own venomous nature but jealous of Summer and jealous of those whose names are heralded through generation to generation.
He adores The addict who is hollow of everything but the ****** sizzling under his patchy skin while he sinks from divinity swelling through his heart. He smiles while the remaining light dies inside him, left with only the regret remedies of suicide.
He adores The artist who fled to the big City and became nothing but watered down pigment after the Capitalists tossed him off the nearest skyscraper shouting pretentious metaphors.

The Blue Fox loves them all! He has no concept of the corrupt, or the lazy, or the greedy and needy and crazy and forgotten. They are all equal to him! The Blue Fox is knelt on paisley carpet smooth and spectacular! His regular India ashram, uplifting his body and his mind. The blue fox knows no doubt. Or anxiety, frailty or tears. He has no impulse or desire. The Blue Fox is joy in form and breathing spectrums of color mixing to combinations we cannot perceive.

There is a fire in america. It rages on unstoppable. It engulfs countries thousands of miles and histories away. It swallows the morning, noon and night. It protrudes disease in its wake. It heats up the ozone layer allowing radiation to make us more than cancer the zodiac. It causes our terror. It blots out our ardor. It havocs our heroes. Nothing is clean anymore. There is a fire in America.

And America is the world!  I'm watching out the front doors of this shopping mall where an elderly man trips at the food court escalator and becomes more renowned with every lethal collision down the tiles of freedom. Paramedics arrive shortly after and attend to another scalded by that same fire.
Up and up it goes!

I

Winter is long in this climate
and spring—a matter of a few days
only,—a flower or two picked
from mud or from among wet leaves
or at best against treacherous
bitterness of wind, and sky shining
teasingly, then closing in black
and sudden, with fierce jaws.

     II

March,
           you reminded me of
the pyramids, our pyramids—
stript of the polished stone
that used to guard them!
                                    March,
you are like Fra Angelico
at Fiesole, painting on plaster!

March,
             you are like a band of
young poets that have not learned
the blessedness of warmth
(or have forgotten it).
At any rate—
I am moved to write poetry
for the warmth there is in it
and for the loneliness—
a poem that shall have you
    in it March.

     III

See!
         Ashur-ban-i-pal,
the archer king, on horse-back,
in blue and yellow enamel!
with drawn bow—facing lions
standing on their hind legs,
fangs bared!  his shafts
bristling in their necks!

Sacred bulls—dragons
in embossed brickwork
marching—in four tiers—
along the sacred way to
Nebuchadnezzar’s throne hall!
They shine in the sun,
they that have been marching—
marching under the dust of
ten thousand dirt years.

Now—
they are coming into bloom again!
See them!
marching still, bared by
the storms from my calender
—winds that blow back the sand!
winds that enfilade dirt!
winds that by strange craft
have whipt up a black army
that by pick and shovel
bare a procession to
                               the god, Marduk!

Natives cursing and digging
for pay unearth dragons with
upright tails and sacred bulls
alternately—
                      in four tiers—
lining the way to an old altar!
Natives digging at old walls—
digging me warmth—digging me sweet loneliness
high enamelled walls.

     IV

My second spring—
passed in a monastery
with plaster walls—in Fiesole
on the hill above ‘Florence.
My second spring—painted
a ******—in a blue aureole
sitting on a three-legged stool,
arms crossed—
she is intently serious,
                                  and still
watching an angel
with colored wings
half kneeling before her—
and smiling—the angel’s eyes
holding the eyes of Mary
as a snake’s hold a bird’s.
On the ground there are flowers,
trees are in leaf.

     V

But! now for the battle!
Now for ******—now for the real thing!
My third springtime is approaching!
Winds!
lean, serious as a ******,
seeking, seeking the flowers of March.

Seeking
flowers nowhere to be found,
they twine among the bare branches
in insatiable eagerness—
they whirl up the snow
seeking under it—
they—the winds—snakelike
roar among yellow reeds
seeking flowers—flowers.

I spring among them
seeking one flower
in which to warm myself!

I deride with all the ridicule
of misery—
my own starved misery.

Counter-cutting winds
    strike against me
refreshing their fury!

Come, good, cold fellows!
    Have we no flowers?
Defy then with even more
desperation than ever—being
    lean and frozen!

But though you are lean and frozen—
think of the blue bulls of Babylon.

Fling yourselves upon
    their empty roses—
              cut savagely!

But—
think of the painted monastery
  at Fiesole.

The moon dangled hard through the city
and the moth-lamps hummed discord with the wetness.
The dripping stars like accidents in spilt milk,
waited for a mop.

Walking home I hallucinated men
coiled up with the smoke-stacks.
They pressed through the brickwork and
as shadows flickered in the street-light.

Though my torch cut them down like saplings
and the moon ripped off their heads like scarecrows,
each man was a sermon,
a vastness straining the borders of sight.

A tailored uselessness hung there arms,
waspish currents tore from their mouths.
Starlings turned on their cross-wind,
as messengers of some sleeveless silence.

The moonlight fell on them like whorls,
like hurricane petals, hostile
were the shopsigns, they moved backhandedly.
The gulls raged. The crows filled silence they left.

The shadows all danced to the back of my head.
And when I turned they were gone.
I'm plucking for life and a body.
That shrinks the world to their size.

Artificial city-dwellers
Discard all humanity
Carbon fired tin cans
Pierce the serenity.

Anonymous collisions
Fifty floors below
Each passer by a stranger
You will never know.

Pedestrians, travellers
And their vehicles
Droplets in a river,
Altering the tidal flow.

Irrigation passages
Absorb the elements
Hedge fund panellists,
Bankers and workers flee.

Eye rolling baby boomers
Sit, tutting one by one.
Nervous millennials adorned
In clothes for moths to eat.

Breaking point carriages
Century old tunnelling
A lone foot tapping
And quiet page turning.

Brakes hit the track
Piercing the murmur
Eighty jarred necks
External motion blur.

Sliding carriage doors
A not-so-subtle beep
Dust kicked from dawn
Falls onto the city streets.

Blue tower inhabitants
Busting out of the seams
Water molecules collide
But nothing sinks the fleet.

Smartly suited eye-darters
Push and pull for space
Rolling up the banks
Humanity erased again.

I settle on the brickwork
Until the storm retreats
Circadian commuters
Run to rest their feet.

A few lonely meanders remain
Wondering down the beach
Forlorn festivies fog over
Swinging shop-signs squeak.  

As the lighting rig descends
And once blue ceiling stains
The beige brickwork turns red
The high tide admits defeat.

Pink light turns to navy blue
A faint moonbeam lights the sky
Obscured by one cloud then a few
Vague incandescence frames the scene.

The streetlights flicker overhead
One worn out passenger now leaves
Shrouded, cold, hungry and fulfilled;
Abandonment for some is peace.

I wonder how you feel to-day
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?

For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalized me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.

Help me to hold it! First it left
The yellow fennel, run to seed
There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft,
Some old tomb’s ruin: yonder ****
Took up the floating weft,

Where one small orange cup amassed
Five beetles,—blind and green they *****
Among the honey meal: and last,
Everywhere on the grassy *****
O traced it. Hold it fast!

The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air—
Rome’s ghost since her decease.

Such life here, through such lengths of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While heaven looks from its towers!

How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?
I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more.
Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? What the core
O’ the wound, since wound must be?

I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul’s springs,— your part my part
In life, for good and ill.

No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul’s warmth,— I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak—
Then the good minute goes.

Already how am I so far
Our of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The Old trick! Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

This lack of
Professional identity.
wakes me too soon,
With the dawn moon.

The building tones on a single stone note,
Like blood through ears.
Overlooked, but for the silence
Of time unbooked.

I go stumbling
into a different fame.
Where smaller applause lulls me,
Like crumbling brickwork,
The flashing indented,
Re-invenited,
Like ancient sea rocks,
Soft to the shells of clinging creatures
And the feathers of gulls.

Somewhere along the way the
silver threads that embroider daylight with dreams
have melted, losing architectured edges and I find
these days it's harder to tell whether I'm
even awake at all.

Trance chaos, but curiously calm,
considering and sleepy.
My corridor is long but I
have no reason to hurry.

Broken lamps against the walls
dusty apartments to spiders and fluff.
No lightbulbs.
Only husks of maybe
once upon a time ideals.

There is a familiar light of
gossamer gold murmurs over me
I've been here before and
there isn't much farther left to go.
Incandescent airspace
pulsing like a living heart
rising, ebbing, coaxing me on.

The lamps are a silent vigil to my journey.

Again I am here at my tabula rasa.
The door is laid with bricks, sealed by my own earthly hands
Will not open! Will not open! Un-opening door.
And as far as I've ever come.
Light all around, fleeing from robinred tetris brickwork.
Intimate, tantalizing, maddening
Bone aching Mystery.

Yet. Yet. Yet. Yet. Yet.
I yet.
Yet again.
I am here.
Crossroads. Yield to trains.
There is no last stop until I
play cartographer
and circumnavigate
Wasteland concepts. Swamps of muted wishes.

Until I put my broken lamps back together
I am here.
Wandering,
waiting,

a ghost.

Now everything is falling
like a tonne of bricks
I only blame myself
because I got myself into this.
I miss memories bliss
each falling brick shatters
that clattered mess underneath
my feet.
And I miss her
but I don't think it matters,
the shattered bricks
miss me by an inch
and how I wish it didn't.

This year we were not alone.
In convoy by car,
and now on a lower path,
past the ruined cottages
with their sagging brickwork
past redemption,
we had formed a line
******* a hedged path
towards a distant wood.

And all the while a child,
a child we loved and cared for,
savaged anything in reach
with a pair of sticks.

As a delicate rain fell,
the aggressive shout
of wood on wood.
numbed the senses.
There seemed no end
to this wanton litany of
violence and aggressive hurt.

For an hour or more this child,
this child we loved and cared for,
had been denied the living world
of the backlit screen.

Was there really nothing worthy
of attention here? So dull and damp
and dreary were these empty fields,
this persistent woodland.

horror movie tactic: or the abrupt / concentrated
                                                                              crescendo -
                              the shrill -
the chalk on the blackboard -
                                  all there, horror prime is
not the images,
                       but the music,
                                                  horror is defined by
music - the the lack of -
                           as are epics, with humanity being
inspired rather than ****** -
                and i dare say, i made my first collage worthy of
the aged Matisse: exhibit (a) a newspaper,
(b) a packet of cigarettes,
                       (c) a bottle of whiskey
and finally (d) heidegger's pondering(s) ii - vi;
i told you i was mad enough to buy a copy instead of:
when books are concerned, it's hard to imitate a
taste for designer ware, for a:
        my great grandfather invented / founded so and so...
how easily you can become elitist with books,
a bargain at £30 when usually $60...
                                        and, honestly?
i do feel less snobbish and more powerful,
                 i wield a variation of Egyptology's term:
precious artefact, something from the Third *****,
an intellectual output that doesn't bother Schindler
and the cinematography of the kamiński
red, amongst all the obvious bloodshed -
here's me, some years from the devastation,
feeling insecure about the need to call them Jews
(when they were primarily Poles) to anti,
  to anti justify when the two labels are considered
with variation on the pristine assumed nature of
Israel's policy -
                      sounds different when you consider them
Poles rather than Jews -
                           and here i ventured into the complexity
of thesaurus rex stomping ground the dictionary
keeps reverent - i'm not an Catholic escapist artist,
you won't find any argument to suit my awareness there -
          Jesus can have my writ of concerned antisemitism -
i already said that the tight-rope event by a Frenchman
was and will forever be more spectacular than
the crucifixion -
                                             he was a prophet born
without a conscious involvement in the three magi
and the star of Bethlehem -
                                       i don't believe he was born to be
recipient of a pristine banking on the matter:
         that all depends on how we behaved later,
evidently the Romans respected Jewish c.v.
none were handed down to Roman authorities to
build the coliseum - they were left pristine in their
Pharisee guises, and then the supposed "god" (level
it with the existentialists, the ditto means ~, approx.
or ambiguity, passed down, like a neared concern with
mythology) usurped the religious movements
the Roman respected and never employed the rites
of passage prescribed by Ramses and Nebuchadnezzar;
          or as i continually say:
you rather hear the word ****, or your face being
punched by my fist?
                                       why not, why not talk
***** and keep the *** acts pristine in accordance with
the rule of life? you think that not talking *****
will keep your ****** ******* haloed?
                   for the case of life: i rather talk *******
and **** with effectiveness than
                 put my tongue into a ****** and talk
pretty pretty, and **** like an imbecile...
                                      because i need to become a fuhrer
when she's doing her bit, and i'm doing her bit...
                i equate censoring peasant cordiality with
the things that destroys us: famines, earthquakes etc.,
   with the rise of ****** perversity -
to not talk oath words is as much as talking ******* pretty
and engaging with paedophilia -
                    or something quiet similar to it.
          **** me, talk *****, you don't even have to eat
shellfish: the grand scavengers of the depths -
                      better talk ***** than throw punches
or engage in unspeakable blasphemies;
so why are they trying to make you talk pretty
when you're bound to stuff that **** in your mouth?
you think that will resolve the matter,
thinking *** is ***** thereby enforcing a pristine way
to say hello; really?
              because that's where it's heading -
and it won't do much good when you say:
i can't say akin with the lark what the hell i want,
because another force is rummaging in the same area
saying: i can do what the hell i want, with or without
****** annoying lark singing me onomatopoeia(s)!
              sure, a mind that feels caged will flutter into
ambivalent freedom with the tongue,
       as will a tongue that feels caged flutter into
ambivalent freedom of the tongue:
enter?           a Rothschild -
         have you noticed how things have changed since
Descartes equated the dualism of thought and doubt
as the medium of being?
         apart from Heidegger, the finite increment posit
of what's the centimetres of a person's lifetime?
i think
                1 centimetre
                                        i doubt
                                                       1 centimetre
           precipitates into
                                                i am
                                                                 also, 1 centimetre,
existentialism took the i doubt from the equation
and replaced it with: i deny -
                                                and so called it bad faith...
denial is a subtler version of lying, or perhaps: a more
eloquent expression of it:
       god, i acknowledge the fact that the thesaurus is
an enemy of logic - i.e. close proximity synonyms and
                                      extensively divergent synonyms:
the first tool of rhetoric exposed,
i.e. say red ten times... sure!
      crimson, burgundy, wine, rust,
                      ruby, dahlia, geranium, maroon,
              scarlet, titian
                                               (nouns are primarily synonyms,
their existential purpose is to be synonyms,
   to compensate the existential flaw in Darwinism in
terms of the high tier of variant evolutionary consideration
        and investing in / creating a manageable vocabulary,
kindred of agricultural expertise / -ease, not as suggested
       aesthetic; tee off, a variant wording: games aside,
    but truly a word game, or golf; mankind has staged
the greatest war with its communicative system:
politics v. crosswords: two games - and none are enjoyable,
better leave the games to the symbols 0 - 9);
oh right, d'uh, back to the Rothschild "problem",
                you confront someone like that,
you won't hear a word of doubt, you'll hear the words
of denial... the point is: stunted emotional withdrawal -
just put the whole dynamic into a school playground,
                     people like that can't doubt their actions,
they can only deny them, which is why existentialism
exposed an very emotional variation of cogito ergo sum,
       the sentio ergo sum, or what one calls the Cartesian
extension: c.c.t.v. - like any viral infection: mass paranoia
stemming from a dichotomy rather than a duality
imbued by thinking and acting according to a balance.
the worded confrontation is a summary of a delayed reflex
of the staged confrontation, hence the need for the status of
"the shadow people", to deny and then exert force is
to deny and then to later manipulate certain factors into
an equation: bomb a place, **** anonymous "a", etc.,
             the fact is: it's algebra incorporated into language,
the general concern being about: the nonsense of
a Mr. Smith class system incorporated into all the brickwork
layers of the pyramid...
       sure, a Rothschild will feel vulnerable when question,
and he'll deny rather than doubt, and he'll think his
***** is 1 centimetre tall when ***** and is protruding from
his forehead... but that same person will react with
the "doubt" part of the equation:
                           he'll invest in an arm's deal that will
slaughter ten thousand Colombians over a kilogram
of *******... and he'll then doubt whether those ten thousand
Colombians had social security numbers or passports
or whatever it is they actually had...
                     courtesy?      sure: doubt they ever did anything,
keeps you thinking...
                        deny them the idiotic lie of proxy?
oh sure: they're into higher powers too! don't you know
that evil also works miracles?
                          there are proxy miracles,
are there are immediate miracles of: well, why not be
a saint for the day?
                                 my advice is:
doubt propels thinking, it's an instigator of thinking
  which some call: non-being...
                                but i consider thinking to be a variation
of being:
                                 as in: an aversion to watch a football match
and join a herd...
                       negation? the existential alter to coupling
thinking that's to translate into being?
      &

fade away from sunlight
the dogs are keeping the neighbors up
a shadow is cast from God's smiting hands
it looks like heaven
Watch me slowly drip down the storm drain
one nerve ending at a time
I saw a crib in an alleyway
by the big green dumpster
and the story behind it
is too terrible for me to ruminate on
cracked brickwork reveals the ****** history of these streets
Monroe Park Campus used to be all nightclubs
and crack spots
the coke was good - I hear
I'm snorting up lines of cigarette ash
high on hypocrisy
high on self-loathing masochism
and mirror checking narcissism
megalomaniac with a chip on his shoulder
watch all the pins line themselves up
only to wave at the gutterball
motive? intent?
these words don't concern me
I'm just trying to keep this fire alive tonight
so I can ward off all the moonlight predators  
these stars will be long dead
by the time I reach them

you'd always come home via the garden path, reveling in the crunching of the twigs, the slooshing of the leaves, the endless clackering of misfound footfalls. till the day, after a particularly satisfying stomp snapping, you looked underfoot and saw the remains of the fallen sparrow's nest


it took you five days to soak out the blood


tonight's supposed to be the biggest moon in 68 years. Biggest moon! Wow.


a girl at the party says it's stupid to care what others think. i agreed with her. She agreed with my agreeance, and then burst into tears. i ignored her and walked away. i'm a frigid *****, but theys' gotsta learn, they


God, the flies, it's such a cliché, but it's true, as you trek down into the sludge you can't see them but you can hear it, the buzzing, you can always, from everywhere, the buzzing


when our flatmate left, he deconstructed his bed. he didn't take it with him, he just, took the mattress, threw it in the water closet, left the headboard on the stairway landing, and the sides and springs'n-**** in the garage
                      i really respect the gesture


in the gully between the graveyard and the mine, they built a highschool. a ******* highschool. lord knows why. it looks like a ******* campers lodge, all the kids climb up the banks and the uni students sell them acid in lolly mix nickel bags. everyone i've ever known came from that school, one way or another. heavens know why. hey, look at the big chimney, guess the furnace is on. it's still in use, huh? probably shouldn't be loitering. anyway-


the big diggerman's dig up the concrete, put it in a bucket.
the big diggermans with the big digger truck, with all the cones and stop signs.
Bawm! Bwam! the big muscle arm, full of strewn piping and pistons, bab's the ground bab bab. Take that, ground! Bab Bab!! the spinning chair vibrates, the man gyrates, and the big arm up's and downs, down down, swivel, dump.


remember when we were thirteen, and the idiot boys made a game of standing in a circle, trying to **** into their own mouths? you wanted to punch them in the face, but didn't want to get your hands *****. if only you'd known, back then, that your limbs were really just overgrown turnips, would you of been so insistent at keeping your distance? keeping the world at arms length? that's always the irony, isn't it. the world was inside you all along

–

At the end of the cemetery, past the hedges, a car park, overlooking the hill, where there's a huge oak tree, and all the concrete is just fractured under its weight, and the asphalt is in tar stricken colours a blackbird in mid-dive splatter. Anyway. Sorry,-

god, you're making porridge? Porridge? *******, are you even hungry, or did you just ******* want to see the ******* oat-*****-muchus coat everything you

-just, there, in this graveside car-park overlooking the city but also in the middle of nowhere, there's two cars. One, a ******* Mitsubishi GT, all slick and weltering plastic, pure pristine millionaire CEO's toy phallus, and beside it, a banged up old Datsun, and it all seems like an allegory for something, but it isn't, it's just, someone dumped these two ******* cars here, but they're not even dumped per see, the registry in the windows are up to date and everything, but they're just there


      all the damp men take the STOP out the truck, stand on the road, hold the cones, watch the digger man seat shuffling; gotta shuffle move up the pavement before you big hand down


You were too clever, weren't you? to bash her head, right there, in the corner, there, above the left cheek bone, so i couldn't tell, right? to make her look like just one more corpse, among the rot? obscure that one side, turned away? left to decompose, mid-perch, on a desert highway? well, maybe it wasn't, maybe it was just someone else, but the fact that you knew, you knew i'd check above the left temple, and that you ****** chose that as the point of rupture, it shows, it just ******* shows, the


the flies never gather, at the point of death, they just breed in the damp, the gulleys surrounding it, why is that


and just look at you now, sitting there, naked as a newborn, crying to yourself, wiping your weepy eyes with your simpering turnip paws, and it's just pathetic, isn't it? And i love you, i do, it's the one moment i can say it, i can feel it with burning, simple purity, with self effacing truth and clarity, because, here, i don't matter. you don't need me, you need a body to hold, an arm to hug you. in loving you i can be absolved of all qualities, and so, for once, i do, i do

Yeah no! In sixty-eight years! What even is the moon



it's amazing, i've eaten nothing in the last thirty-six hours, except a single dried apricot. yet
                                   i need to *****

  you know that feeling? What a feeling. You need to retch, but there's nothing to retch, and there you are, just standing there, at 5am gagging to yourself in a damp field. A stomach, trying to turn away, fold upon and shaft itself a vicissitude. A stomach, no, no, yes, you see?  You need to empty yourself of this bile. What bile? Exactly. There's nothing. Nothing up-emptied onto nothing. And that's all there is, right, that's all that life is, is given right there; the gag, the convulsion, the upturning unto itself, the attempt, attempt, you understand? Of the cathexis, of the innerworld, taken to contain only the unspeakable within itself, miserly bile, a concomitant of all the worlds ills and would be ills and then upon it taken as an ill unto itself, a single nebulous fluid husk of malignant umbra, held in *******, bound in fleshy lining. But then the expulsion, the retch, is attempted, to take all the seething disease of the inner and to project, upturn it onto the outer world. Where? It doesn't matter. In the bin, into the shrubbery, Anywhere but in here. Once it's gone, it gone, that's all that matters, gone, go, go, get. The body tries to push the malaise of(as) the internal unto the external, the outer, but in doing so, finds itself(boundary) empty, where it thought it incubated only vile, there was instead, only nothing, but still, somehow, the convulsing, the retching, the act itself, remains. And that's it, you see? That's all it is, all the emotional turmoil, all the half-hearted hallucentric episodes, the all of everything, is just that, just an, an emptiness trying to upend itself but finding there's nothing to upend, but it still asserts itself as process, as an unending nausea, unresolvable nausea, both grounding and thrown, the throwing and that-which-is-cast, bent under itself,  nausea



the swamp reclaimed the garden last summer. flood season, after all. some days the stagnant waves came right up to the brickwork, can still see the lines, see? your old swing set's a gonna though. all the rabbits either abandoned their dens, or were drowned out. lord knows how many micro-organisms died as well. lot's of new ones were probably borne though, right? hear those flies, bzzt, bzzt. life loves damp heat. you can never tell, never tell really.

Autumn in the city makes me feel lost-
Raise your voice. Shoulders back.
I bury myself, because I cannot flee-
Curve your lips. Fill your lungs.
Threads of geese passing by-
I can. I can.
Over the road, across the sky*

One year ago in a public park, wooded and frosted
with ice and the gold crunch of sleeping grass
I saw a wolf. It held my gaze. Drew near, waited.
Just the huff of our breath, little stormclouds of silver reason.

Premonition. The wolf was I. One year later,
come to tell me that I would be alright.
I can blow down even brickwork now.

Turn on

I
This is the BBC news at 1 o'clock.
A rambling diatribe,
lost boys, a lost war.
The falling cost of stamps.
'What do you think of the deficit,
Graham from Newquay?'

II
Some bald man
holds a cadaverous gaze.
'She don't want me no more Pauline.'
The ware and tear
of Albert Square
immortalised
in one ***** stare.

III
Ella looked into the eyes of
the African children with bloated
stomachs, scooping up brown water
she wouldn't even dip her toe in.
For a moment, they were face to face.

VI
Margret! Margret!

Look what they're...

Check the cupboard,
have we still got...

uh...

tinned peaches and caster sugar.

V
Our hands, in every listless waft,
wander through an electric soup,
thick as frog-spawn.
Spermatozoa of information.
A gentle fuzz of creation,
our atmosphere is
pregnant with
separate universes that
embed themselves
inside our own.
We broadcast
our noisy planet
to the skies.

VI
'I've seen what's going on,
you don't have to tell me!
I know what they're doing.'
The walls are closing in,
as each breath from her
dusting lungs is getting tighter.
'Besides, my eyes won't let me, or
my knees these days, It's all i'm
good for'  
She wheezes.
'I can see all I need from here.'

VII
Click
I swear 400
*******
channels
And there's nothing on

VIII
As I approach the blue glare
of the living room, I know
she's in there. Not even
watching,
she's on her
iPad. We don't talk.
We went to the
Maldives
once,
after the wedding.
she couldn't keep her eyes off me.

IX
Dead square.
Silent pixels.
Nothings watching.

X
We crept down in the morning - my sister
and me, before anyone else was up and squabbled
what loud cartoon violence would take our attention.
Nightie, pyjama cotton siblings, sewn in to the 7 to 9 o'clock schedule,
we were as vital to each other as sleeping bags and cereal.
Our building blocks stood in a castle,
we were unaware that one day,
they would be strewn across the floor
as we grew up.

XI
We're not going out tonight.
I just want to slip my hands down your
pants and touch you while
we watch game of thrones...
Deal?

XII
Smoke rises behind the mosque
in an arabesque twirl.
The blinding sunlight behind the minaret
crashes on the lens, like a flash bang.

The call to prayer is empty bodies, iconographic art,
cars hollowed, alien tongues, history, a melting *** culture,
cockroach romances, squalid graves, body hewn tunnels, little cuts on
trigger fingers, trained monkeys, orphans, marble carvings,
the stench of petrol, jobless drug habits, brickwork, wiring,
forbidden love, lust, teenagers, plastic explosive, god, work,
prayer, tears, life and death    

and briefly the box is the world in our homes.
We must see who's behind it.

feel

I’ve forgotten how to

        My nerves are on fire but I
        don’t understand what it means

Do something
Give me

        Give me *anything

I need a way out
I need to feel

Pixels are shouting at me and

        I think I’m going deaf
        please help

I know who did what and when

        I know you
        I know your ups and downs and dreams and fears

I am the ultimate ******

        And so are you

And I don’t know how to
I don’t know how to stop

        Make it stop
        Give me anything

Something real
Something physical

        Give me pain
        needles and knives and back-alley mistakes

Rough brickwork bruising a back

        Is it my back? I
        can’t tell anymore give me more

Cement scraping skin from fat from muscle from bone

        What does marrow taste like?
        Google it

Blood pouring from eyes but
we’ve seen worse in CoD

        Give me more

Rip the bones from the flesh through a hole in the skin
Taste the inside of a tongue

        Let’s practice Frenching

I can’t tell anymore is this pain or
is it pleasure is it hunger or satiation

        Spellcheck

Is this death or is it euphoria

        *Why should I care

There is a mist that settles
close to the earth
It has no hope of surviving the sun
Whose warmth and glow
Displaces its watery blanket
Freeing the short grass
and hidden flowers
To strain with the breeze
Two feet venture across the moors
Heavily booted
Over non-matching socks
There is silence to be gained
on the plains
Suppressing the tarred brickwork
Of houses nestled together
Homes to hop-filled words
Pointing fingers
Contorted faces
Harsh ugly spewing outbursts
Love was for outsiders
And loneliness a gift within
The sky seems so close to the tips
Of your raised fingers
A gesture - a reach
For places you will leave behind

Stagnancy living
in colorless morning.
sunflower sunshine disconsolate
the rooster sings
eulogies and clamored verses
ringing alarm bells in cockcrow
cough drone weary eyes
dew-tied memories of
reverie weepy
aching legs and chest pains
cotton cozied pills crashing
underneath plastic caps
prescription taps
Tylenol Benzedrine
relapse body thinning
cities wearing
ergonomic tragedies
encircling business quarter
daffodil rooftops
steady rain descending onto
varnished sidewalks.

Addicts pirouette dazzled the
hazed-minds dreaming of
Aprils and consistent harmonious
ecstasy visions stampeded
by the brickwork flickered with
lamplight demons overcast this illusory Babylon
trembling flesh retreats into the shadows it came
and nightmares remain similar to days before and after.
Recycled horrors lightning flash abhorrent death
whether they be wearing black suits or black robes
scythe or satchel the wide eyes scour gaunt alleys
for fixes to fix the monotonous life bewitched
with false material variety anxiety deity
Desecration City express way to depression
oppressed people hide away in simultaneous acts of
camouflaging fireballs
spiraling into decadence.

Diamond days few and far between
communal woe reverberates through skins
and skeletons in opening of top story windows
during Winter. Despite the fragrance chaos,
pandemic paranoia,
extinguishing elation,
All bodies continue to be
alone.

(A wall with grainy, white tile misses being appreciated by the passive glance!)

This open Hotel window reveals the encasement of a city wearing its own
Labels stirring distinctly

Monochrome sculptures
Increasing eye the gradiant of
A voice
The dialogue of a coffin sleeping
And the
Waterfront smokes tired cruiselines and
Already wishes for Sundown & good spirits.

Some burdened Animal lept from
Its grindings of clean survival &
Has written an essay on

Fire in relation to psychological warmth
& the associative memory response to comfort

(The fireplace is your Childhood & lost Faerie Mother)

The lapse of this Tidal Concerto
As wet pebbles ripple over each other like Tokyo haircuts,

I am the collector of
Distant and missed opportunities

I keep them close as potentialities and not regrets

I have a fishtank full of drowned Bees
& phonecall revelations

As Humidity only sensed and not sweated
Boils from a desk drawer in the Summertime

LAUGHING STAIRCASES/
LOBOTOMY IN NIGHTMARES OF VICIOUS ORCHIDS/
THE CRIB HAS LOST ITS FUNCTION/

           A CRABSHELL HAS REPLACED
           THE PILLOW/
          
           MY TEETH ARE NUMB
           WITH YOUR KISS
          
           YOUR KISS ERASED BY
           THE SUDDEN SALTWATER OF A
           HIGHTENED MOMENT
          
           DO NOT RETREAT BACK TO
           BRASS SPEECH
           OR COMMON BELIEF


Stresses paused on
Gysins colorful meditations
& Nat King Cole sings of no
Orange Colored Sky instead
A silent rotating lightbulb
And the sensation of lifting off my chair

(few nights in a row of this ambience behind a glass door)

"-the illusion of existing on the edge of a comforting unalterable space and in being so close to it, I blend into it!
A man with a telescope residing on a mountain top can observe the town below in a detailed entirety. It's the larger and more obvious/physically active space. The mountain distant from the town is a space of reflection, where things are less chaotic. Where peace is more inwardly recognized in its external shelter. In the corner I have this illusory telescope and I am perched on the mountain, who's properties have flattened to the dimensions of a coffee shop, or a general interior. The wholeness of the mountain reserved to the confines of a dark corner. Behind the brickwork exists a vast valley where this mountain once stood in its humble yet ferocious silence. The space which now exists in an imaginary context. The expansion of darkness in front of us!"

           Come forth from that Mexican
           Practice
           Or the vengeance of a sobbing
           Hand,
           Friend

I, willing to play weary in
ur aztec smile/
Am to slip from a shivering
Elevator
To ***** my finger with a name

A name that I have never interacted with until now!

"UNE FEMME EST UNE FEMME"
Followed by gossiping
& accommodations
Downstairs,

I hope you wake easy to find my
Skinny hand warming you from December's hesitant grave.

Fleeting thoughts swirl up like vapour
escaping this thick bone chamber
flickering with irrationality through
the endless prism of false labour.

For life’s lust is lost in a paranoid wreckage:
mystery paradigm proclaim yourself more
than enigmatic refuse, ruminating unreasonably
in this hotshot ******* driven battle against

the weak, the slow, the poor and trapped
the meek who run computer cracks
just to stay connected to the planet
which span them out of tune.

We are a danger unto ourselves, for a foggy
lane in summer sits a head firmly back
on shoulders, slovenly my ego
shrinks beneath quivering boulders.

Sparks fly from my torso, out of my solar plexus
as I spur a perennial twitch of trepidation
to reignite my lust; to help those who seldom
see the sun, or laughter running off the tongue.

My drift wood frame spurns, deceivingly incognito;
my cognition conjures disdain for all false frivolity:
The chasm behind the mind of those who relish
finite goods and cherish only their immediate

surroundings, the sinkhole of inadequate lobbying
peers who snort and cackle away the thought
of true democracy. This disdain we grow pushes
brickwork barriers to breaking point, where stones

and dust yield to gravitational collapse
Only a fool clutches the words of the wise
and writes them in the mind, yet only a fool
would paraphrase words which altered lives.

So ever the jester I must warn the top-bracket
bureaucrats that the harder you push down
liberty the more she grows out to the side
the 'greed of man will pass and tyrannies die'

For now 'We are buried beneath the weight
of information, which is being confused
with knowledge; quantity confused
with abundance and wealth with happiness.  

'We are monkeys with money and guns.’
running a mock of our planet and crowning
ourselves above all odds as a likely contender
to colonise further than our means. Though...

‘the good earth is rich and can provide for all
Our knowledge has made us cynical.
Our cleverness hard and unkind.
We think too much and feel too little'

Yet have mastered the sea and the sky
as nebulas appear through concave lenses
far and wide, the thieves who stop progression
have much to answer for, dwarfing mankind’s

potential and making extinction inevitable as ice
ages come and clean the planet even giants
die out, but those who can work to a common goal,
I promise, we’ll leave these fools behind.

Train track sonnets, the drunk piano,
old trumpets and dreams of West Virginia;
gold tobacco in an antique pipe,
finding a new look in outdated surroundings.
Patients of self-hate stand in bandages,
long sleeves, and in brickwork formation,
all this to the beat of the white man blues,
a country guitar, harsh vocal, the sleepless smoker
on the bedside; new speakers for old tunes.
A new look amongst past disguises, ancient lies,
angry blisters on the road to recovery,
pathetic bottle of emptied red wine.
Tom still sings Hold On through bad hands and lotteries,
he will stay to drink with me, when on a winning streak.

The sun cracks the sky where the albatross
flies; the clockwork waves splash
Lunacy, the morning haze disbands.

Your patchwork raft, the labour, the scars;
The salt and the spray assault
the ballet: the majestic way you stand.

Your teeming suitcase, a thousand journals,
Their iridescence forms a compass
gleaming north to your merits.

Mountains ahead are distant, hills behind are old
Marvel in awe, gasp as your youth
floats passed, whipping up paths of sand.

Grow and glow, perspire and expand,
shadows are cast for eyes to follow
a menorah of promised plans.

Sand turns to brickwork, pebbles to mortar
squint across the water and scuff a hoof
lunge and press digits on freshly laid girders.

Pull back the bow and aim, no doubt
In grey-matter but a quiver
full of knowledge, a diver in a mirage
A bridge to greener land.