SIMPLICITY

(see also POVERTY)

I

Man’s estate is war
And man and woman’s estate
And the cancelled place of race
The history of the senses
This theatre this Nuremberg,

Abjection is to feel
And the monuments to touch
And the monoliths
Are kissing on me
Pressing on me a breathless architecture

Melting in the ice-blue eyes
I seize the trust
Now tell me stranger
Where are the hands expressive?

A duck-blue egg
A faded shell
A dug
A pinafore dress
Our faces numb
With a feeling that first returns
To our fingers
A therefore overall
An inverted nipple or a suckled
Bareness

I know by the back of my hand
That you are close brave
Trust on the earthwork
Under clouds settling
Like acid on silver
I am resolved to love you love

Because all this week the building
And all this week cancer
And all the cries my fledgling,
The minds of honest men boggle
Where you fly where you unzip
Where you don’t mind any more

One hundred and ten metres up a matchstick
Tell me stranger where is nature
Expressive?
Romania colleague friend of mine
He eats typewriter for history
And at Almond College
Wives are posted at the third way

But sentiment my sentiment grows numb
As strength returns
To my nerves
Fucking library-books – we are bondsmen
In a fucking sacred place –
No music –

I sold you oysters
Is it any wonder you a woman frame me Mother
Take these women with their sentimental natures
Away and feed me again!

I choose the fourth
And I bridge the four worlds
Because this day that was not today
I achieved the supreme restlessness
To have me an otter, fella named OT

Shoring up the ruin of our teeth
With pick-up sticks
And cultural debentures –
Never contact me here –
Never write to me again –
Don’t phone – don’t ever
Wait for me – get out
Of this city of light mauls
Porn-lite, otherwise
I’ll set Lawrence Ferlinghetti on –

Because the third
Wall man way
Has been removed
To allow us to spectate
From the arena
Of all souls

Because the second
Strokes your glove
And gauntlet with its
Velvet cheek

And the rest is affectation
I belong to the fourth –

Love is a two-card boast
A bluff a royal flush caught short
And taken the wrong way

II

His gesture in the booth
Under a red shade a then-
Prevailing must of secrecy
In shadows on the curtain
Because the grubby candelabra’s
Missing seven bulbs

The dust stirs in the carpet
Under black patent footwear
Only ever worn to this theatre,
Once only ever worn,
And scarlet strap heels
The pile lifting powder
In a listening midnight haze
For the pad of suede brogues
And polyester from the East:

Having outrun the tiger
To descend to bedbugs
And mediocrity –

Or a hat from the scat man brims
With the hard stuff got
For his nice dark exchange,
Palms and fingers below
The vinyl patched banquette –

We laughed but our laughter’s
Shy of meaning
Innocent of difference, still the same
Sick slow code
Will come to mark
Our ensemble’s thievery from meaning
For fear of sensual overload and from
Sensual overload
With a smell like voltage
In a dusty room.

Where my grandmother might be sat
In a rose-slip satin
At the oval mirror now broken
Of her dressing-table
Having thrown her compact
Of faded rose pancake
Two millennia ago
And let the powder turn to grease
And left the black marital exchange
Grow rank as meat
And let the make-up go
Rest in the room’s
Domestic suspension.
Itself unclarified:

The unthought-through stories
Of our immediate predecessors
We have no ancestors
We have your ancestors

– Where is she?
And where is a man expressive?

III

I’ve mapped dark goings-on
Behind the iron curtain
The age of iron’s past

Did I say iron I meant shower
Shoah? Acts of moral deviancy
I resent that last accusation
Stand
Advance
Kneel

Before 1984 the shops were grey
Stand
The fourth Labour government was betrayed
By the invention
Advance
Germaine Greer
Kneel
Who would sacrifice ethical concerns
For emotional connexion
Stand
Advance kneel

Do you think it’ll make any difference?
Stand
Not necessarily advance
I’m from Missouri
You have to show me
And it didn’t piss me off either
Kneel:

Picture it
You ask me and I complete the task:
I followed every one of your commands
I stood I knelt and I advanced
And you broke down

You lay on my knee
And you cried you have been broken
Stand
Advance
Kneel
You are a cracked vessel
Stand
Your piss was purified and confused

Advance
Never lonely bored perhaps
Kneel
You were not conscious
That you have been guilty
Stand
Of everything

Picture it
Advance
How it felt
Kneel
Having knelt
Having a sandwich three years old.
You have been guilty
Stand
Of giving me to believe
And giving only this belief
You are not conscious

Law
You needed me
Stand
Advance
Kneel
I’m sucked into your need
I burnt when you burnt
Show me

My eyes were blue
And I was ordinary for having been
Consciously broken
Stand
Advance
I pity my pity
Kneel
I suck at the hem
Law
I suck at the tongue
Law
Stand
Kneel
Advance

Picture it jam
I’m now two weeks old
I’m new again
Fourteen days old
My sea is pity
My law is grey
Stand
Perform this for me
Stand
Kneel advance

Even this even so
As I command it
Is cauterised
Stuck
Serpentine
And healing you you
Guilty of everything

Show me
Stand kneel
Advance
Piss of horse
Dead nation
And fury
Of law

Once you had a first-rate team
Now you have me
I stand I kneel I advance
Back to back
I’ve seen you
Sucked dry.

IV

I’m supposed to come in
And get you where you are
And the summation you give
Is heavy with the possibility of becoming and
I’m supposed to know the way,

I ought to know the way in
It’s claimed we put her here we two –
Who is silent?
What is silent?
Where are the feet?
Where are the hands? –
We like two snowflakes
Are the same
They cancel each other out
And so they feel they feel
They’re losing their roots:

It must not be
It’s so fucked up it must not be
So what they’re paper doilies so what?
Gertrude Stein
Primary narcissism never imputed to a woman
Who feathered the mane of her horse
With bestial becomings and tail
Rosa

Good thing this third
Sex of light
Light of hypo-
Campus I punish and she rewards
Punishment such

Romantic love
What will I do?
The cut is to a boy
He wins the sword
He whets it on so many stones
He sticks it in
But the wound is dry
The body all is water

And in the orientalism
Of that fine order
Of men arrayed in ranks
Below the demon use of power
Any despot knows
The bleeding butter-cuntedness
The sunshine soul
Nightlong substitute of drawing
And drawing and withdrawing
That point
The mind-boggling melt
Of the world –

I walk in chaos
A chance his weal
No Will no jealousy
But the will to lie

Ever after
Our period of great fictions
Comforts her
Not at all
Like certain kings
Who are to the reins
Only a bit –

When was my mouth of that mettle?
I took out my tongue when I drew you in
Now I can’t drink enough to replace the loss
What is silence?

Expressive in the screaming music outside
The library emoting in the dance of senses
You bleed water you lose atmosphere:

My friends I want you all around
So this fool can bear off its hips
If only rocks were not also living
The impossible quest we can’t face
Is the oracular histrionics of my womb
Becomes probable and I’m supposed
To come in and get you where you are

Only by science not an available
Opening and stand and kneel and advance
Dissolution looks anyhow attractive:

Where is it expressive the you?
When sex completes the eye
In a place damned by looking –

Much like a mirror
A sick sick puppy returns to his mistress
Trusts even a shot to the head will spare him
Such pathos romance! another chance…

My friends avert and suspend here their attention
This is private between me and the puppy
They’re not being discreet or acting from a sense
Of decorum this is where questions are answered
Sick and pathetic
Rootless and dying
We might be if not by love
Then by law

V

Cleaner safer streets
Water that’s fit to drink
The ship’s boy in his nest
The Ship itself constructed
Of all his lovers’ bones
And faded plush of aureoles

Bloodless pinkish
Ploughing Spice
The labial furrow opens
And shuts
And yet he still finds time
To piss on it all fluently
Before he succumbs to thirst
In the crow’s nest

Her wrists creak
Her lungs pump below the gunnels
Her heels dig in to the lymph-like wake
And gulls a solitary cormorant
Remand her to the islands of yesterday
Where Hannah Arendt translates

Her theme with toast and jam
To those dogs at the political gymnasia
Her fingers unknit all the bleach-white knots
And articulations jaundice-yellow
Not to mention piss and the septic reek and
The stuff in the hold that looks like women’s shoes

Below the water-line and calcified and barnacle-
Encrusted incunabula from lost sexual rites
(Sexual to whom?)

The boy the golden cunt peels his own
Husk from the willow
He takes the dried black valve in his mouth
Of his body’s thing
Like a sun-baked worm on the footpath
A pitch dripping

Blows his pennants and his curls
And the bulls dance for a spell
Of what kind of aesthetic violence?

In the cultural bourse so fey
As to be flattered by terrorists
Freedom yes is a weakness
And every sense complicates
The world with its demands
And how expensive is it
It is art to feel

Taste yes the killer
Going high lowing in the stable
Languishment an infantile condition
Non-sequiturous myrrh
Frankincense and Madeleine
I pick out the grain
From the blue postcard
In fact I distinguish the gold
From their teeth the thorn
From the song ‘the son of thorns’

Demon genius a quickie
In the shadow of two towers
We secure and applaud you
Have done and hope to
Carpathian athlete
Of the intellect or analect
Or Georgic or jestplain scribblin
Suck on the wiener roasted in my hole
Because I identify my hole with the PM
Phallic mother but hotter – nummer…

Henry Darger live my life again
I don’t want to know
What I can’t experience
The Chaplinesque paedophile
Is pawing my copy of Woman’s Day
And I want her China Madrid children
Dying in doorways,

A badly drawn bikini girl steps
From behind a curtain (Kingsford Body Parts)
A diamond bikini-girl steps out
From behind the curtain
(Second-rate couture and Full Employment
Women’s Movement – FEWM is the acronym:)
Gottim! Language proliferates around a crisis

I want her where the party is expressive
Where the sides one takes
Equal the square of the sides one doesn’t
But no win comprehends a single loss
For a realist the question remains at best

Where are the hands expressive? The nummest

VI

Eye checked to a clerk
In the making hail
Storms the house
I am scared
Where is my coat?

Without my coat how can I prepare?
For the flattery of chaos

Chance events advertisements for Pizza Hut?
Are you not prepared?
Am I about to be saved alone?

Who alone felt electricity
From the back of her hand
Or called in the electric dawn
Walked in conversation by the ice-rink
Propped my knee up for her
To lean on

The marked knee
The Tiger’s back –

The shock one or two
Times in my life
The moment was immovable
Ought to take a lifetime
To play out –

We saw in the moonlight
But could
As a death is said to do
Be a private thing
A violent loss hurting you alone

In your bed alone
In your shirt
In the winter trees
On the embankment
With that smell of almonds
My operation pending
And a pre-op I couldn’t share
Shouldn’t and couldn’t cancel

Wanting to say
Having all the time to say it
In the world alone
And hurting by its very expression
Honesty my ghost is between
Two soiled sheets:

It would take more to explain
As Friedrich Nietzsche the moment
Coarsens into the present which elapses
And for me
Is a fine fine weapon

VII

An unprepared recumbent person
Doesn’t know the hole to watch
Ersatz or true

The stock is uniquely carved
And it’s curious that life can be
Of limitless extent yet fixed
Duration –

The entry into one so quick and narrow
The exit slow and so wide
As to be everywhere at once

Asking intensely
You a principled person
Will brook no discussion
Nor truck with a moral answer
Toxic or tonic

Womanly stranger man hater
The eyes take away the will
Grey Athena
Whose tears bring to love
The justice of forgetting

Tears that are sap-white
Eyes the grey of poppy-fields
The very old pinned on the very young
Pinned:

Our socialist utopias
Were the opposite of war
Where is it where what is effective
Is also expressive?

The wellspring of creativity
Comes from a response to some very basic
Element of the four –
Where the date-palm
But a mirage –

Fear
Ire
Wrath and
Atter.

VIII

After such a week the smoke
To my right become more sinister
Suggestive of a fearful network
Obscuring its accomplices

The children’s bands play martial airs
And the edges of suburbia
Of understanding grow back calcine
With votes of salt
For the kings of liars

Lift up their hands
Your immigrant hands
At the social conservatism in schools
That kids think it’s too complicated
To fix everything
In prayer
The two Koreas
(I’m using very glamorous examples)
Pursue their glacial progress
Towards reconciliation:

We have renounced our secularism
As a failure

The fire burns
What cannot come to creation

It starts where chance was set traps
And where the players steamed
In the sick and
Pornographically refined
Machines

It started beyond the means of my art
To say but you will tell me
From your immovable point

It had begun already
From your masthead
In your median voice

What
In your country
Expresses it?
And what
In your country
Do you express?

It leapt straightaway
For the hair between my legs
As if hungry there for the wetness
That would quench it
And from your nest you said,

You’re useless to me as a pile of ashes
Are you burnt?

Yes

You’re lying
Are you a pile of ashes?

No

Well then
That’s why

(July – August, 2004)