the classics

eros

I

The angel came again
Past the ivy-shelled house
Only a day after
The photograph was taken

In this embrace
Can't you see?
We're dying

In certain pictures of the ascension
She looks at him
Over the shoulder of a lover
Invisible

The only clue
To his existence
In her expression
Of having been interrupted
In the middle of something
Important

The painter looks from heaven
This adorational subject

I imagine he could not see
In whose arms she was held
Whose body she enclosed
With her own
Supplicant arms
Mistakenly depicted
Encircling nothing

As if raising an emptiness
To the place of the ineffable
Foreclosed to him the lover
By his invisibility

He sees the angel of the ascension
A dramatic interior
Her start her gesture
Belies his absence

If god couldn't see
Would he be lifted up
By her? Had he any chance?

II

The angel passes before I've time
And call the children
Staring up at windows that reflect the sky

Almost my life
Staring up at windows that reflect the night

A strange profile cut by light general
In the ivy on the mullioned panes

Besides he's nude
In light particular

Do I want them to see whom I've invented
To be scared by an adult despair
At the absolute theatre of the body?

The car-crash of history continues
Expensively achieved

In this embrace you grow old
Another opportunity missed

Here are your lines here are mine

III

The photograph pretends
Exactly like
A mariolatrous painter

We're not hanging to the precipice of time

I'm in the temple staking justice
Against peace
Gaming on every fall of the die

The appearance of one of a couple
Against two of a kind
On the opposite unequal die

I've already palmed in play
On entering Jerusalem two dice

One surpassing fair
Two of the same die
To gain her skin of honey

A six to hold
The air was seven
Seven sided
And not give in
To the stone
Or perfume of hope

The quantity of years
Pressed from the olive
Buying nothing
Nothing nothing one die
And nothing
That one die

And luck will have the quality of an action

IV

Before the photograph wants to have
Needs it like water

And then he drew it
Incense from the mouth
Absence of justice

With in a voice
Within a voice
Inmost in

Close to breath
Closed on a breath
Inmost of all in

Separable thread
The near below
Threads the near
Under the near

Can't you see?
In closing a way?

Farther away
From the neck
Her sweet bone link
Going and forgoing still

And broken still
And broken from us
That I can't go on

But threw us unreconciled
Into the promised embrace

V

Between the scapulae and
Slow-filling dish of our loins
It appears

The eclipse of what we felt
By what we see

On tables pushed back to the walls
To encourage dancing
Sincerely attended by mums and dads
In whose number for some reason
We don't count ourselves

Whose resolution has rubbed out the sum
This shared sense of loathing
One of the strongest bonding forces

There is because I ask
No knowledge in chains

Not one sided I ask
Not seven faced either I ask you
Freely to give

For a story made on painted sand
You to ask not him
Questioning beauty not him

Near under
Under the gloom
Light pixels in dusk
Light below

A theatre of love and blood
Here with dirt between floorboards
And fly spots on the puppets
Belonging yet not

In a classical room
Furnished with satires of the baroque

Chained yet not belonging
You to ask
Are the children dancing?
Not yet.

VI

I don't want you to write like that anymore
I don't want you thinking

I don't like you washing
To think all these
Chemicals make water

A hanging garden of tears and heights
Rubbing your hands
Then drying your feet
Bathing the wounds

We don't speak in real words anymore
For the peace for peace
To distinguish the man in mankind

I hope we make justice
About this proposal
Its portion adjusted
To fit an eggshell of convenience

And it's so very dry
The tins mottled by rust in the air
Off the scar

Nobody dances except air itself here
As if to mark the oppressing presence
Of a difficult landscape

Nobody assays to eat cake
The mothers are so very ill at ease
And the fathers off the mothers
Understand the renditioning
That makes the air dither so

So elsewhere those pieces turn up
That are absent here

The scars are shells and
Imagination quarantines
Lagers them that offer opportunity

Such is the colonial riddle
Prefers from the tyranny of distance
An offertory plate
To the distant tyrant

When they sleep we're awake
The party's in full swing when I enter
You on my arm
I am a thing

Accepting change

An empty lavabo
Tiered above the ewer
Time on a cast iron stand

VII

Extinguish the lights better
To hide the cracks

Everything has poured away from
Leaving a residue of dissent

Not unlike a sheet of paper
Between content content and form
Form guttering in the dry riverbed

My mind is a story made from painted sand
While happiness writes white

Guttering in a language belonging
Yet not belonging
Travelling that crumbles
On its feet

To long be
To own
To be own
To be

Not unlike a photograph
Taken only a day ago

In this image
Can you see?
The ruined figure

Who has paused for something
For effect
For particular affect
For something
Important to happen

Then continues on
Before I've time
And call the children

Who dance now

Who is there
Who is innocent

Who is there
For a breath
Who continues on

(November, 2005)

Artemis variations

I

Life is impossible
To live is unattainable
For one who's killed another
Or who's uncertain -
My enemy divides me.

I'm both here in a voice
I've found and despise
And gone.

Once is many times
One word, one thrust
One open afternoon
Its promise is every act of love,

One note and statement of belief
One reaction destroys all music
In its potential to substitute for feeling

Two or three
Animals - you choose
The one that runs and shoot it.

The noise stays with you.

It means a shadow -
The nickering in the palm
Of the tame as you approach
With sugar and field-nights
Hauling the body beside the fence
Home to abattoir

A radio, a calendar
A family, the oil and wired hooves
Of the faun hung in its membrane
With the smell of scalded milk;

I crawl my knife over the sand's mounded silica
With only the wound of noise -
It's hopeless but not yet jesus
In the miracle of a half-life

Split between the lizard's
Photographic eye
And the style of hate
And survival, both

Needles of tender beasts
Hurting as they mend
An unsuturable cleft
With these threads
Of tongue.

It's only the third you've killed
Losing her caramel skin
Shouting at it and
Trampling on it
Like a shadow with you
You want
Pressed to your lips

Because it's my enemy
You want
Because love
Is reasonable and just
Completes the half.

II

Life is impossible
To live is unattainable
For one who kills another
Or for me
Who loves another
Like an enemy, my lover
Divides me into parts

I'm a voice I've found
I've found I despise -
It's the piercing
Shrill tone of the sea
The decay and collapse
Of will power

It's the dissolution
The reverse of the lizard's
Photographic eye:
It's a cavity of the image -

It's the skin within -
Skin cannot be touched -
Skin isn't touching skin -

It's the eye and actor
It's the sex of the eye
That sees and sloughs off a still
Like its own dead skin complete
Complete in its orbit everywhere

And I'm a raised voice
As if I lifted a curtain
Behind which a character gesticulates
With desperate language
And indicates the Mother
Screaming terrorised
In twisted metal

Who plays a role
Bears a child
Who in turn
With the delay
Of a miracle
Echoes, echoes cry
Down the years
And corridor

In a cascade effect of gravity
And light
The serious child
Has those Greek arrows
Which, arrive at the bow,
After the target,
Last at the back of your head,
Compelling to an end
To the math and tautology.

The soul who observes
The actor and eye meeting
Who bleeds and smokes
Who takes in and allows -
Like an enemy
She splits me into positions.

III

I'm a word, a thrust, a promise

And in the promise
Of an open afternoon
Every future act of love
Divides every past
Act of love
By itself

And itself an object
Of possession
The voice I've found
Stays with
Like a subject of rights

Who taught herself to read
Listening to rain
From the mountain
From the sea
On the corrugated iron

When salt and cloud
And another snow
Three visitors will come in
Wiping their boots
One bringing food
For the other two
Will sit down

Despite he might hope
To be read by her
The one who stands
Won't be leaving

Because belly and sex
And his eyes will stick out

Like they did at the schoolgirl bar
In a way beautiful easy

On the backs of his arms and legs
The skin loose
The joints uncircumcised
Swimming underneath

They'll hump in the bare flat
In his adjoining room
The needles will come out

It's cold without the fire

(August, 2005)

philomel

I hear the men with one voice
A frog, a frog's voice
I hear them from the bedroom
Talking, talking into their blue lapels.

From my backyard stoop
From my sink and
From my cell
I hear them laughing

Have they found the girl?
Have they found the woman in the girl?

Where did they find her?
Why have they got her?
How have they won her?

There are eggs in the jelly
Words in the stream
The water's always running
Fanning out

I heard the men behind the fence
Now they're at the gate
They swore
They coughed up little frogs
Who came into the metal-tasting air

I heard the men along the steel sides
Of garages swearing to themselves
Burping in the grass and bringing up
Small packages of air
Reproducing down the wire

I heard them beating at the door
I heard their thin legs
I heard them slapping
I heard them bursting on the shelves
I heard the gas whistle
Through this tin diaphragm
Inside my phone I heard them
Spawning

I hear the men with one voice
They fan out on the field
The field of being -
The anti-being
The package -
The anti-package
My lips are blue

Where is she?
How have they won her?

They play, they comb, they weave
In the grass
They watch the field

I hear the search-party fan out
Across the field

Being taken -
How can she hide herself?
Being hidden -
How does she hide herself?

They play at clues
They comb its hair, its hair
They wash the field down

They play at signs
They rake their fingers -
Hose them down

They spread out webs
Across the field
With threads that go in one direction
Lines that run in one direction

They string out strings
Of words which resonate
In the water, always running

I used to sneer
When I was healthy
I used to hear the men
Laughing at night

I heard them leaning out
Car-windows laughing

Then the drone of wire
The spider's special home

I hear the men
I hear the groupings and
The intervals, I hear their
Antiphonal question and
Answer

We are at sea -
The anti-singing
I hear them in my room
Talking
The talking in their pockets

It's deep deep blue the elegy
I composed
Blue down amongst the grass-roots
The stalks

To find her taken
Having taken her
In the same interval to have her
Having held her

To find her kept
And keep her

I hear the men talking
I hear them anti-singing
How did they hear me?

I heard them coming out into the metal-
Tasting air to find me
In the same interval
Between sight and second-sight
To find me,
Their sight, their second-sight
To find me

A word
And then the drone of wire -
The drone of wire
That is the answer

The strong wire
The voice, the drone, the word,
The wire -
One colour and the same

The glass wire
That sees everything
The filament and the fuse
And the life-
Line:

That is the dumbest excuse
I've heard and the worst
I've ever used.

(March, 2004)

telemachus

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)