UNTITLED GOOSE POEM
Dead flies on the window frame
Remind me that I'm home
Secret message in the run-out groove
Put there for ME ALONE
I take all my food in sandwich form
Because you've got to have a ~system~
Haven't used my thumbs since... '94?
...can't say that I've missed them
She moved in during gala week
There were flags up round the town
And then a few days later
They'd already took them down
Between the hours of one and three
That's when we're at our most lethal
Ragdoll physics when I'm with her
(we fall about like real people)
You know you're special
When your prison number is a palindrome
But you know you're done for
When you'll go anywhere instead of home
And at some point in our time on the floor
She says we'll be "friends forever"
Full of vodka and Corinthian Love
We'll tell each other whatever
She's never seen me at my best
You never know, she might be impressed
But it's cold and late and I just need a rest
And I think that maybe I could?
Although I'm not the sort of person who normally would
And there's no way that this is ending good
But when she sighs and rolls her eyes
LIKE I'M SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THAT SIGNIFIES
I try to stay awake, and try to stay alive
And when I said "DON'T HOLD ME BACK"
What I really meant was "HOLD ME BACK"
Because I'm clinging onto what I know for fact
-- Jonathan Hellion Mumble
KLÆDELIG (INSPIRED BY PUSHKIN)
Dine klæder klæder din krop i dag,
bourdaux er en af dine farver.
En snoromsnøret og stropløs sag
der dels forfører dels forarger
For man kan se dine hår
under armene når
du fægtene står
og foredrager.
For dine klæder klæder din krop i dag
og jeg glæder mig til
at jeg kan klæde dig af.
-- Frederik B
La lugubre gondola
I
Some sort of passage –
neither here nor there.
Throw the shroud aside,
bore a hole into its twill.
Circumscribe the sentence
backwards as it streams.
II
Whatever it is, it’s amiss.
As if meant to be poured
into collapsing funnels.
Darkness, thoroughly sieved,
flicks the eye into its cleft.
Something keeps watch.
III
Comes a sign: an undigested
rind, awaiting echoing.
Although the paper’s parlance
is of spare parts, scraps
and delicately wrought coils,
not a seal is left unbroken.
IV
It abides as the flume draws
a fugue out of its fumes – an
unforeseen event. It is night.
The gondola glides along. I
am wherever the refraction
of a furnace breaks its fall.
V
A yarn now, dangled to and fro,
spun out of a distaff. You
pitch it anew with each retelling
and shove the maze aside
for a mesh with which to catch
some semblance of a clang.
VI
Was that it, then? The pith,
the unmistakable spoor
of a retraction? I cannot say
as long as the alluvium’s
fault lines start and stir.
All is pitilessly left in tatters.
VII
Were there matter somewhere
within these muttered words,
an uncowed song could emerge
and suck up the vague sea
across which figments of lips
trawl the depths for sustenance.
-- pomenitul
ANAMNESIS
Remember when you wanted what you have;
it took two dreams of dog bites,
a month of mosey,
year by the sill;
caught sibling wishes
in fettered breath
soothed regal guilt
from nosing the tufts
(though mostly wilt)
Now new night spills
like scarlet to sink
The old oaken limbs
kiss streetlamps unlit
The cats mimick -
all shadows awry
I cultivated calm
now new night is mine
-- meaulnes
Whatever you're thinking, I THOUGHT IT FIRST
However you feel, I FEEL WORSE
I took three buses to get here tonight
And smoking's only sexy in black and white
The migraine pills will get me through it
A shotgun with a torch taped to it
A paper bag to breathe into
And a drink for every thought of you
Little Timmy would have gave her the world
But LITTLE TIMMY AIN'T INTO GIRLS
He's into Some Came Running and The Great Pretender
And nostalgia for days he can't remember
Sandinista! from his bed
Six sides just to clear his head
The beats will fade then what we got?
Time-and-a-half, but all for what?
"Corbusien Purity", the "Boy/Girl Aesthetic"
Filtered through his dialectic
Half-past-nothing and I can't feel my legs
Just concentrate on the last thing said
Reflected glory comes in waves
And starts to sting my eyes again
Flinch from a ghost, snow falls on snow
Where did all the good times go?
-- Jonathan Hellion Mumble
Seurat Upon the Asteroid
Seurat upon the asteroid
found the lack of atmosphere
oppressive. Nothing softened, rounded,
everything displayed unwanted harshness.
Seurat upon the asteroid
complained most of the monochrome
and felt embittered by its ill-adaptedness
to the pallette he was fond of.
He found the jagged edges of light too sharp
beyond what his tender eyes could accept.
He gripped his brush in impotent rage
against the bleakness and barbarity there.
Seurat upon the asteroid sat, and sighed,
and soothed his loss in dreaming,
attempting to fill his empty surroundings
by lingering in the intangible.
"Must I invent it all again" he thought,
"the muslins, bustles, upswept hair?
"The trees that secretly are clouds?
"Here such inventions seem beyond impossibility."
Obstinate, without intention, the asteroid
imposed itself upon the artist, until
Seurat upon the asteroid reconciled himself
to the angularity of the shattered light - and painted.
-- Aimless
My Daughter's Misfortunes
My daughter's misfortunes seem never to end.
They accumulate beyond counting, beyond tears.
For three decades I have shared her struggles.
Her body is as near to useless as a body can be.
She cannot move herself, she waits to be moved.
She cannot speak, her mind is fathomless to me,
Yet sometimes her face can be read like a book.
She never laughs, a smile is the limit of her delight.
She never cries, for tears could bring her no relief.
In autumn a surgeon cut off part of her femur.
In winter she nearly joined the legion of ghosts.
In spring a permanent slit was put in her bladder
So that a tube might empty the urine from it to a bag.
For her, my wife, and I, these few bald lines
Describe nothing other than a daily truth,
The texture of her entire life and half of ours.
It is hard to tell others how it is we live.
Around strangers I dread their conventional questions,
Our mutual awkwardness as my poor answers are revealed.
But there is nothing here that is unspeakable.
On Sundays we all visit together without exception.
We lie down all three adjacent, close, familiar.
I place my head against her head, lightly touching,
And she relaxes hers to mine, accepting the contact.
For an hour or two there is space for contentment.
This one thing, more than any other, is how we live.
-- Aimless
3 fragments of a Work in Progress
3.
No wonder the dinosaurs
threw in the towel,
would for a softer ending, a coo at last light's
intense waveforms, but no, instead it's
the first time we've been forced to think
about how we fight war.
Is that the raclette or the diaper
of history bestirring my schnoz?
The aged loosen and it's a fright.
I palpate but the air is filled with zither music and
haggling in Vietnamese,
my intentions likely misplaced
as I tongue congee off a cleaver.
Snort all you want. Let's pretend we're viruses.
I call nipah and supply the mansions
with palm toddy, chucking thoat swabs
in the dustbin. Some were violent, and screaming;
they were pacified with injections.
I wanted to craft fictions.
It's a skull thump
on concrete.
6.
The people of Des Moines, Iowa, are no strangers
to economic upheaval.
It never goes out of style.
He cleared the pipe and passed it.
We all close like water, and once
this floodplain hitched to the coast, blubbering over the scape.
My observations inform me
his real ambition was to start a band
playing music in the vein
of Jimmy Buffett—
he liked the relaxed lifestyles, baby let's cruise
away from here:
"how to wreck a hard drive,"
"water damage to a notebook computer."
Just browsing, treading, it's not illegal
to not want to be found. It's been explained
repeatedly. The tourists are covered in crude,
the schoolchildren started to vomit
scanning for shore. Nothing on the cameras
perchance to dream how the film depicted
in light's painful rigor a thirst
unplugged, a handwritten note left
in the unremarkable room
where we burned our papers
and set off the alarm.
A crowd gathers
on a strip of grass.
7.
A particularly telling symbol is an absence.
My shame is right on, then,
the spreading thorn
strapped and surfing copper
unease crisp a celebration
of life padding parking lots and structures'
demanded lineation, looking behind me lustily.
It was all dell, surrender surrender
in fluxed splendor the jumbo word find
a recursive embrace of hurt's spillage,
pump up the contrast the orders
a view dimmed to gruel.
-- the table is the table
On a Rooftop in Manhattan
The planes performed their dance above LaGuardia,
banking lightly into a slow descent.
Margaret regarded the procession with envy.
When she was younger she thought the whole world moved
like gears inside a clock, churning indifferently
around the mounting catastrophe of her life.
Someone told her that this fantasy was called libertarianism,
evoking images of gun shows and New Hampshire
that quickly dissipated into a mosaic haze.
Margaret had no judgments and no ideals
at this moment in time,
and she caught herself saying that fatigue was a kind of nihilism
when she meant to ask for another drink.
-- treeship.
Oh had I but a cup of coffee
or perhaps a mug of tea
my heart, which as of now is awfully
sad, would would fill with joy and glee.
My dim and incoherent thinking
would, with just a bit of drinking,
become beautiful and bright
and tell my fingers what to write.
I know now that the drought is ending,
as now is done my daily toil,
and on my stove water doth boil.
but woe... I shan't go on pretending...
One thing would be even more dear:
Oh had I but a glass of beer!
-- Frederik B
new church Kidbrooke
I rode a new bus today, the 335 to Kidbrooke
they only introduced it a few weeks ago
and the announcements were broken -
instead of '335 to Kidbrooke' it said
'new. church! Kidbrooke'
so really it was like I was joining a cult and
route 335 was the cult
here's what happened next
but first about route 422, there's a
20-metre stretch of road in the middle
of the route where both the inbound
and outbound buses use the
same lane of the same road
in the same direction, that's the 422 lore
and now you know it too and
there's no way to not know it
so yeah this happened
the 380 goes past my house and
it seems to be more often much more often
than you'd expect from
the law of averages
that the inbound and outbound buses meet
at the crossroads i live on
and one of them has to stop to let the other past
by now i was ecstatic
to tell you about the 763
which doesn't exist yet but when it does
it will have a point on its route
where it has to do a three-point turn
in the middle of the traffic
while the driver sings
his favourite hymns and drums the wheel
so now i'm on the 8004
and we're flying into
~the hexagon~
which is where this route terminates
it is a beautiful place I hear
engines are running
you can queue for the next bus
there is ample shelter
-- imago
Ranging in twilight’s palsied silver, at the summit of autumn’s blaze.
Acorn litter, balled under arches –
Demosthenean props, rolled around the woods’ bronzed gape.
Beyond this, nothing is said.
Instead, we go undeceived, suspended in the updrafts of the old silence.
Rooks roil westward, lint in the eye of the sun’s liquid falling.
We crouch at a field edge, thick with dewy foreshadows;
you gather chestnut husks, the needles lancing your palms.
Then: a studied tilt, a new pressure behind your eyes, and there
not ten feet away, belly-deep, scrape-hidden, a deer. A deer.
Before, I’d carry you out, out to sleep off the afternoon’s bright daydreams,
and the deer would always come. They were your anxious, peering avatars,
come to see this strange two-fronted stalker abroad in their crucible of beech-caught light.
Once, walking through a pixellated summer night, a deer watched us home,
A distant, timid chaperon of dusk’s rough palisades.
Now, as the woods shrink, as time shrinks, acre by sodden acre, they come less frequently.
But I feel them, a soft presence at the edge of things,
a modest, unspoken rapture.
We gather each other, and for the briefest moment I wonder if you’re going to stay.
Not yet, I think; not just yet.
-- Chinaski
Your River, My River
You wanted a river
classically organised
explicable in every tongue and
not burdened or bridled with
oil and tar
A lovely great groundswell
of that old terror beauty
A beauty to be fit over the face
as a veil
of golden, shimmering reverence
I flew apart everywhere
casting sackfuls of sawdust
into unspeakable crevices
Acupuncture horizon
got its god-fearing back broken
right down the seam
I held the split
atwixt a crumbling endpiece
and shouted into it
for your river
Waiting, I listened
Static flashing on and off
like the primeval beginning
of cinematic entombment
Aeons buttered my feet
and then one day I heard it
A focal shifting
and the light
moved
like
this
with big balmy pulses
A diagonal triangulation
on what we had taken
to be river
Here it was then
For you
but really for me
Rippled gunshots in all directions
A crinkled ugly
too horrible to bear
and overdosing on sun
No life
No Wordsworth
But enough liquid matter
to flood
all the droughts in the world
-- tangenttangent
TOE HELL WITH REALITY
Blab blab BLAND sockaroo
I ingest WE INGEST seventeen CRICKET INFESTED PONCHOS
martyrFUCKER
here's the real poem
today at the football just after they equalised
a wagtail flew over the stand
and I was like ah ok a pied wagtail
but it could have been a grey wagtail
and in the end i didn't know but it was
enough that it was a wagtail
this isn't the poem either is it
new tack: i'm listening to total eclipse of the heart
while watching a light aircraft approach landing
on a stream of the cricket, it is a doughty plane
now lady by styx on imperial command
versablutions
commodore inefficacies
the song is good hail howitzer
exactamundo, by gordon
slightly now i am writing a poem and it cannot end now
nu-gold dream drainage dripping
i beef you in writhes
we contangle a biscuit gauntlet
burrett
gondling
haxmet
corbucky
such are the names of elspeth and swot
you've become useless and unfiltered!
many rock stars have been or become sociopaths, NOT JUST REO SPEEDWAGON
the informations got worse
I tried to type got not for
PRODIGAL SON
i don't know
KEEP ON LOVING YOU but wait here's a GUMBUTTON
drunken
here's the real poem
the reeal one:
_
_
we will or won't fast-forward through dipmunks of
no that wasn't it either
the only truth i can communicate right now
is that if I truly understood and drank in the music
of the late 1970s and early 1980s
i would transcend myself and achieve everything
that i want to achieve
and you would too
and that the only truth of the next decade
is the truth of whoever makes ELO but of the 2020s
that is no longer my truth
okay here is the scenario
there are three wizards
one of them is Tolesmord
one Barthsy
one Gonfrak
Tolesmord says: "Ho my spell" and zorks a banister from his gunk
Barthsy yodels in four languages before producing a parcel of penises
Gonfrak is invisible to dogs.
All are competing!
A judger of wizard looms before them, cape a-ghast
They utter some words: "You are all so special,
But I order that the winner is GONFRAK"
And this is so unusual and out of order
because they all thought they were going to win equally
that the three wizards organise the following array:
Judger, BANISTER PROTRUDING FROM GUNK
is not only invisible to dogs but is being LICKED and MATED WITH (rude!)
even though the dogs do not know why they are mating
and actually they are yodelling
think on that as your world disintegrates like mine
think on that as you are consumed in language
think on that and of that and in that and through that and while that
is the thing you think of
as i say that you
are the martyr
-- imago
-------------------------------------
ive a clock ticking fifty seconds a minute
not a ten second gap at one end, or within it
nor spaced so the rhythms are even but slow
just ten odd-second gaps where a tick doesnt show
on the wall in the kitchen it hangs and it chides me
reminds me my time isnt filled as it should be
a man cannot sit and be still with such stutters
an audible heartbeat that randomly flutters
id been minded to bring to a sure resolution
this case of a-one-in-six-missed revolution
but a damnable fact that has turned out in time
is this odd missing tick suits my rhythm just fine
a fellas time cannot be pursed, is the message
into regular moments of dignified passage
that hours are more than the sum of their parts
whether fittingly fitful in stops or in starts
so it hangs as it hangs, and well hang it i say
what's a couple a thousand less ticks in the day
we'll offer them up to the god of the gaps
gift moments presented that land in our lapse
-- darraghmac
in a smallshit factory town down west
the college is hosted macabrely
between st marys, where the nurses now train
(amongst the easier cases)
and teresas
johnny was easy. hed wander the campus
asking have ye fags, have ye fags- he was harmless
but startling
fergus another, he wandered around once
one thursday (id had an accounting exam)
saying i kilt a man
i kilt a man ah god help us i kilt a man
hed stabbed johnny five times in the back,
out the back
fergal probably shouldnt have been in st marys,
we reckoned
that was for easier cases
the other flank of my beloved alma mater
was teresas: secure, for the difficult cases.
secured to their beds
or secured by prescription
or secured in the first and last instance by mick
who was alright of a guy, all considered
i never got used to visiting teresas
but many years later, with clipboard and tie
i carried out duties vested in my person
by the county of mayo-god-help-us
and a fella climbed onto my car while i did so
and wouldnt come down til they threatened the doctor
and i thought
ive had worse visits to this fucking kip
that left worse dents and scratches
and at least this time its on the clock
and none of my brothers are crying
-- darraghmac
― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 24 November 2019 19:27 (four years ago) link