15/04/20

 

here: the day breaks
like Adam’s rib: clean and impersonal

fuck-birds: their throats full of rust and bullets
: and still the sky keeps calling them home

new leaves swarm: the cursed light
: tight tiny buds: swell up and gestate

yes: my earth: she spins and spins
: moves in languages: I do not understand

: and there are so many replicas: so many things
: and it’s all so virginal: so undisturbed

how I long to see you: the dirty window
and I hurt and I hurt and I hurt and I hurt

 

 

image © Russell Tyler ‘This Must Be the Place’

so today’s poem came from a strange place, I can’t seem to find the musicality in it, but it was conceived during a free-write where I listened to this song, which is almost as good as the original :^)

14/04/20

 

you only want love
like the kind of love
you find in a Richard Siken poem:
raw and anatomical, complex and insolvent.

you want to be spat at and touched.
you want the shyness coaxed out of you and culled.
you want to be surmised
in a series of images, blurry
as well fingered Polaroids

so you cast yourself
as Rich’s vixen, radical and engulfed in heat,
as O’Hara’s filthy handkerchief,
as the yolky object of Williams’ obsession

and this is what stops
the nerve coming too close to the surface –
how such love is driven from one body to another in words
surrendered, spaced, fused
and lit –

how such love exists at all

 

 

 

for NaPoWriMo.

Further reading of mentioned works Adrienne Rich, Frank O’Hara & William C Williams  

and of course Richard Siken

11/04/20

 
Did you hear the one
about the protagonist
asked to find meaning in flowers?

Might as well as her to decipher
the twitch of birds conversing
Might as well ask her

to explain the meaning of life
No,
the protagonist remains stable

in the role of existentially crisied
her calendar
is a calamity of nothing

Sure, she can write essays
on the construction
of ego & identity

Sure, she could blog
about the destruction of feminine ideologies
, as if they even existed

She can mix a metaphor
good as an Old Fashioned
mistaking beauty

as akin to pleasure
Or disturb the ugly earth of her mouth
enough to say something witty

The protagonist is such a star
see how she twists everything
back towards herself

Though today our sun
has the sky by the throat,
clouds deepen like bruises

& she stays stoically ineffable
Did you hear the one about the protagonist
asked to find meaning in flowers?

The punchline is
a bouquet of mixed messages

 

 

photograph© Bill Owens

10/04/20

tonight
– the Moon
loose in the

cold
sober pool
of Her sky

– floats
– a spectre,
whole and pure

while
we watch
– drunk and drowned

bound
to this
earth by bones

and
some stale
sense of gravity

08/04/20

I surrender my
desire to be healed. The blurriness of being alive.

I accept the rub of toes
the static between bones

Oh, to be becoming
old

day after day
to want for nothing other

than to be
entirely composed

/a thrashing heart
a conspiracy of air

a final act of atoms
a diligent gut

a swollen sex:
loud & interrupting

a brain wired, rewired
corrupt & rewritten

an organic, bio-
degradable natural ending

 

 

First two lines kindly borrowed from Richard Siken’s ‘Self Portrait Against Red Wallpaper’ – War of the Foxes

Photo © Guy Bourdin

 

photo

05/04/20

The long night is a toothache
limbering up steadily into pace
the cacophony of silence
off-centre, the swell of it sweet
tasteless and endlessly
English

Insensitive to this he ploughs
on, red-eyed with old sweat
writing blindly, his trembling hand:
a bird’s beak, his pen: a broken record
scratching ink, old as hymns,
into the long arms of the dawn
that never surround him
only breaks him, day after day
with bloom and chatter; Bore Da!
the mirth amongst the branches
fantastical, staged, ecstatic
– a collective of hobbyists
mugging off, sober and patriarchal
their songs ripe and sour to the ear,
their songs spoiling blue the soft pink air

Oh, Cackie

she stopped being brilliant a long time ago
she stopped being

the ghost of herself
dressed up in feathers and haunting
cavities of night made darker
by the shadow cast in her absence

He sleeps. A light breaks in

01/04/20

wasteland

not unusual
this time of year;
a catching of the kindling

sunlight
like real treasure
& shoots green 

an inkling
preserved
in the dirt

or aroused
by the neighbouring
magnolia burgeoning

I pull
my tired bones
between the weeds

where acts of violence
fall like rain,
sweat

or tears.