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the more things change [rough story]
It was late in the day, long after the neighbourhood dogs had found freedom to bark. There was coffee in the kitchen, with the smell of still-wet paint. There was a cat curled in to an ammonite, wet fur steaming by the stove. There was the Big Man, gutting fish, telling us we shouldn’t have come ...read more
Untitled
Midnight finds us
Sentimental
Fallibly naked, again
Our bodies
Pressed together
Like hands in prayer,
Are penitent
Impatient at
Intercession, we
Leave our griefs in each other
Walk back to the bay window,
Aching
The people below have their
Heads down, dull
With a responsorial silence
That seconds your
Apology
It wasn’t rape
It isn’t ever rape
Because we are both unwilling.
There are two semi-
perfect
Blood stains on your sheets
Rorschached an image of
Freeze-
dried petals
Belonging to roses,
Lately to roses.
There is a kind of
Clarity, now:
There is your blood group
Tattooed on your leg
The stylised pubic V
Of an old scar
There is this room
That you
Are too small to fill
Furnished with
The ghosts of
Your bodily reprisals.
5/08/008
falling asleep
Thoughts, more
Or less
In winter we wrap ourselves up
As if
Our fragile bodies would break
Hitting the hard
Surface of the cold.
The misery of the infinite is
A dog
A dog with its own leg
For a bone.
I still have the fossil
You found for me
When we were young on
An ancient beach
Saw the water claw
At your nakedness
So
I tore in to it
Jealously.
He’s on the roof now:
Why yous do that?
Why yous do that?
Her face when they left her
Was like
Ground mince
Like white bread used to
Sop red sauce
Don’t fucking tell me
It didn’t happen.
Carpark is a
Concrete tundra
Flatblock is root
Growing in to the ground
Moving soon.
Intuition is
Insipid ghost
Compensates
For the misremembered.
There are poppies
The day she leaves
Some old man shakes
His coin-
can in my face:
They died for you
They died for you
I turn to him
Shaking my head:
Did they fuck, pal
He shrinks inside
The wasted effort of
His clean pressed suit
And I am sorry.
We are
Diligently haunted
Yeats said
The dead need
To feel the wind on their face
Yeats said
The dead need to laugh
He didn’t add
In order to be dead
He’d have thought
That ought
To have been obvious
Guess again.
Shock is such
A stupid word
It is the lack of surprise
That did for me
Life,
Complacently brutal
Death,
A bad habit
That’s all.
If I don’t wake up
If I don’t wake up
Take me to
Some greenish hill
Where I can lie
Corpse-contrary
And remember
This winter
With love.
Ryan’s knot
Two days clear
He tried to hang
Hisself
Cried for help,
I cut him loose
His neck was thick
And red with straining
I shouted then
More at myself
‘Til I coloured, smote
With the same suit
And both of us being
Short of breath
Went our separate ways.
In the feeble lull of
Indifferent hours
I nurse the
Exacerbated knot
That he
In cautious failure
Assumed would tide him
Over
And I remember
My mother
A lonely numeral
In a dim, damp hospital
Her bottom lip chewed
While I lay a docile
And unsuccessful applicant.
Aggie, I’m sorry
For the feeling you’d failed me
Cowed and ashamed by
Your own anger
Ma, I’m sorry
But like Ryan’s knot
All my near misses
Are too late to undo.
14 more things I omitted to mention
#1
In the heat of the afternoon
You counter-
propose
Mutual indifferences,
Sighing.
#2
We worm farm our way
Through another
Morning
Crudely entrenched
Like stereos, settling
Their ...read more
it will be okay
NB: last time
...
It will be okay
I do not share
Her optimism, but
I cling to her red
dress regardless.
Pulled her to my level and lay
In her lap
Reassured against
The soft
Spread of her thighs
Breathing warm milk and
Oestrogen-
Remother me,
I beg her.
I never was much of
A talker
Preferred verbless
Seductions of
Afternoons
No existence expressed
No action inferred
I can’t say now
What happened,
What hurts me
And my oblivious
Protectoress,
How would she
Keep me safe
From something
She doesn’t believe in?
It will be okay,
Her Zen rebuke
I retch,
My vulgar meditation
My vision, blurred
She’s a soft expanse
Her own horizon
Rounder and wiser
Than Buddha.
Help me
I do not know how
Not to be lost
Her hands deliver
Another sorrow
Successive familiar,
Draining
Lady cartographer
To a sad condition,
An unholy place
Unhappiness
The rough terrain
The last profanity
This ugliness
Is unacceptable
Ugliness that insists
Ugliness that will
Not be exploited
Made useful
Reincarnate to courage
It is only ugly,
And I
Relapsing
Collapsing
Disgusted
Disgusting
I’ve got no more words for you
Go out and find your own
I want
The silent anatomy of
Aftercare
Her hand between
My shoulder blades.
It will be okay
I do not believe her
I don’t know what that is
Recusant failure,
I need it anyway.
Sunday
11:15 AM:
It snows
London’s green spaces
Sigh to receive
Their holier communion
I remember
How Belfast looked
How a white world seemed
Like an open door,
How nakedness amplified silence.
It snowed ...read more
Tadhg
When we have tired of
Unanimous hazarding
I will walk you through
The green-grey
Afterlife of Sunday
Stand, we will
The shadows surpassing
In the door of the dumb
Cathedral, where
Tractor parts
Enjoin martyrdom
Dustily from
The mutilation
Mute scintillation of years-
There were gleamings in the gloaming,
Child eyes know
Phosphorescence as only holy.
When we have tired,
The feasters fingers dripping
Idly tallowed
Fat on a slow burn
Walk, we will
Splitting
Indifference
In the raftered silence
Where piety cranes
Where God is still
The upward impetus
But house martins
His only
Materialisation.
Cobwebbed Christians kneel
Bound by the thick
Insensitivity of sleep
They gather their concussions immovably
Threshers, ploughshares, puritans.
Tadhg,
There is no blithe sun
No tomorrow to confound
The sceptical conclusions of yesterday
There is only clay
With which we form our affirmations
With which we substantiate
Harrowing.
But Tadhg,
There is a band of light
To soak slowly up and over the town,
A rising water mark
To wash the feet of
The beggared battered places
Where the dead have reconvened
With their duties and nudities
Their instruments and perturbations.
Tadhg,
They ask to burn less brightly now
Equality never was luminous so
Bury all,
The just and unjust
Innocent and guilty
Great Grandfather and
The Guilford Four
Jesus and Joe O'Connell
Death, after all
Excels in contextless.
Tadhg,
The burden of being
Indiscriminate
Is not so great
And without stories we
Settle for truths
And what if all secrets were
Pale indecisions
And what if God is an energy
Not a consciousness?
…
22/03/2008
The Exhibitionists
In the softened study of
Rooms, we sinned
Absorbing light in earnest
Penance the creed of
Our contemplations
Astutely we farcified
The near-
sighted sentiment:
We are only here for
The exhibition ...read more
“Dig up, stupid”/ Cambridge Suite
#1
While we lay lazy-
boning
The storm sore sky
Worked wracked
Fingers back to basics
Two-a-bedding
Tiredly
After we’d been heavy-
petted and sight-
shortened
We allowed the day
To close ...read more
an unsuccessful suicide poem
#1
My song
Is a quiet pocket
Of perseverance
Through with
Its protestations
Of an asymmetrical endlessness
My song
Does not seek
The safety
Of a sanctified inevitable
It knows better than miraculous
Its sense of wonder
Is an unopened door.
My song
Exists to be sung
Its ending is fulfilment
That is the way
For people too
When they’re a measure of
The music in them.
#2
Home is a habit, that’s all
Or
Home is the hard skin
Formed
Around the raw
Needful habits of the heart.
It isn’t a place
It’s a way-of-things
We don’t inhabit home
Home is a thing we enact
Home is the instinct
We inherit
How by repetition
We become mistaken.
#3
I am like the winter
I will not survive
The strengthening influence
Of the thawing instance
I am something that
Needs must live
Weakly and coldly
Or combustion becomes
My only condition.
#4
I am my smallest
Constituent part
Emphatically
Human.
#5
It is okay
Nothing must pulse too
Must exercise itself
Through something
It chose me
It is only dumb luck.
It is okay
You and your
Golden hair and
Preventative measures
You did not fail
Something stronger succeeded
A song must declare itself
As the red shock of
Hope must …
I have been so unhappy
So long
One too many
There are too many tomorrows, and sometimes I can feel the world turning. It turns too fast, ‘til the coloured lights merge like mad in my head, spin-cycling in to the infinity that isn’t. And never was. And never will be…
I went drinking with my Da. He kept telling me ...read more
a bad idea
intro:
She’s lit,
Like Vegas at Christmas
I could hold
Each breast
Like I’m weighing
A brain at an autopsy
Could balance two nut-
brown tits
Like blind justice
It’s all about sword and scales ...read more
so I told you about my f-ing dreams. happy now.
I tried to time my breathing with the breakwater, to match the ragged exhalation of the tide.
I went with stick and sun behind me, flat feet slapping nude brown mud that bore no resemblance to sand. I stood to shield my eyes, and the hot air quivered. The thin furrow I had ploughed ...read more
confused record of some thoughts preceding suicide attempt
In the top field the birds break
With the day
There is no camaraderie
In migration
They are a black seam lacing
The dour morning
Then they
Come apart
As the wind tears in to them
They go their separate ...read more
something old, something new
NB: the first I unearthed in an old sketch book. the second sort of slopped out of me, like so much poetic purgative after this- a particularly shitty- weekend. there comes a time in every man’s life when he has to admit he’s a bit of an eejit. being an unhappy eejit doesn’t make him any less of a ...read more
a home truth...
As we thread-
needle
Our way
Through the
Fruitless
Arse-ends of
Afternoons
Cutting the crust
From our wanting
We might reflect on
A few choice truths-
We must all
Lose each other
To ...read more
limbo dancing
I have been too much alive
Too short a time
Too much was met in me
Figure-eighted by
One hundred sorry
Intersections,
Seared and seamed
I have been
Too much alive.
*
I was my ...read more
Deep Sky Objects
Like an empty handed Cassiopeia
You neither rise nor set
But revolve without rest
About my pineal
Polaris
I watch from the rocker
Small and gutspent
With no name left
To call myself
My naming has receded
Stars have exhausted
My slender means
I suffer their extinctions
Like radiant fools
Your light leaks from
Absorption lines
Two arms outstretched
For the bright reunion
White fantastic
Spectral peculiar.
Your death
Is more than life
Not less
You toil through astrologies
Sentenced to sky
Breaking mandalas
Like rocks
Nebulous labours and
Luminous feats
You are my
Lugh
Lonnbeimnech
You are my shape-
shifting supercolliding
Lightbringer
You’ve a skill to serve a king.
Your death
Is more than life
Not less
Yours is the other kind of sleep
The one that prospects silence
And guilds itself
With mercury
I see you,
Shining one
In millennial multiples
I see you
White fantastic
Spectral peculiar.
Fuck the segregating Earth
Keeps me from your mouth
Magnanimous and moist
Fuck gravity,
Strict she-chaperone
Fuck living,
Muscular ordinary
Tired of rocking
Small and gutspent
Vacated by names
Beset by sky myths
Will slip terra-
firma’s noose
Renounce the non-flammable world
Suicend for you
White fantastic
Spectral peculiar
That is what my wings were waiting for.
for John a brief history
Embattled day,
You three bags full of
Wine and bad examples
Telling me you’ve fallen
Not from
But in to grace
Me, a baffled dead-weight
Pressed
Between desk and over-
head projector
Body’s black ...read more
panic-stricken drunk to hell poems
Some petals persevere
But not many
You, with them
Are drowsing toward winter
Neither feeling cold nor looking up
Last chance,
Take care
I don’t want to see you here
When tall trees have
Shed their sun and
Abandoned birds like hope
I do not want to see you here
Gestating brightly on the forest floor
Full of the pangs of your colour
*
I should learn
To shut the fuck up
But my would be love
For you
Escapes me like
A scream
In those high-pitched gripped
And panicked places
It will have out
Distorting doggedly
Making me monstrous
[Such generous monstrosity]
*
I should learn
To shut the fuck up
But I am not sober
I am jealous of you
Unbroken as egg,
Girding your gold
I am jealous of you
And your inward-
facing
Immortality
You can take your spirit
In your hands
Something small but
Substantial-
Stone for skimming
-You took your time
Weighed up your
Becoming
*
I need you
Not only in
The solidarity of
Friction
But as sentry to
Sleep’s scorching ground
I could keep quiet
I could bend hell to
Uneat my words
Only,
Don’t leave me
I changed my mind
I need to know how
Dreams work
How sorrows are saved
For special occasions
I need permission to
Imagine
Need to borrow your
Trajectories
Caruso chiaroscuro
It isn’t an aspect of water
It is a condition of fire
Supple drinks,
Not stiff
While us away like
Unwanted hours
For frail flame’s Frère
Jacques
Equivocates long
In to the night.
This is where I stir
In the slow traumas
Of getting grace
Accentuating stray hairs
To broad besilvered smiles
Rorschaching stupors
Shamelessly-
I lie,
In short
Sating myself on misaffections,
Ceding to coincidence.
I will show you,
It is not hard to destroy yourself
Sink your pallid solace
Beneath the spoken word
Scour your wry
Resuscitations
Back
To their bare inkling minimums
Relay on exhalation to
Sustain you
In your
Laborious liquidity.
See,
It is not hard
This is where I stir
At the somnolent rock-bottom
Where evasions and predictions collide
Head thick with
Mineral magisterium
Vulgar with that dowsing fire
Pale as superstition.
See how it is,
Poetry’s a function of drowning
We suffocate backwards
And facilitate burning.
*
You’re right
I still wear my wings
But they are in-growing,
They hurt
I raise the red rag of repentance
Reprise my riddances,
Good and bad
I drink percussively
Blow by blow
The other I play
With sleeves rolled up
Pluck self
Like bardic harp
And shiver
Where those notes course.
*
I will teach you this,
The anatomy of dissolution
Ply my conundrums
Them as I pried
From the vellum-
dark sea place
Scruples sleep
Fast inside shells
Teach you this,
I will
To sway at superior angles
Curved like a compound fracture
Crept against the crest of
Unpaired bone
Be blank in your beauty
Before bones’ shot-
glass dumb-
show
Peaky with
Pivotal grace
Beholden to stars under
Occipital moon’s
Sly acrimony
Dwell where I stir
Buried
In drunken opacity.
Unable
My faith cannot fend for itself
It must make conversions
Evangelise matter to
Born-again energy
Tonight I am host to
A frail craving
Something weak and
Insistent
Something slowly
Enlarging-
I don’t want to go ...read more
mauve thoughts
NB: same old. sorry.
...
Look see morning make mistakes
Manslaughtered mauve
In fibrous silence
Dawn come like
A slip of the tongue
Incriminates red-
rimmed
Anthill rooftops.
Watch us ...read more
Dead Boy
NB: Because poetic merit is lacking, it lives here rather than there, as all bar-napkin efforts do. I wouldn't recommend it.
...
Okay
I grew up country,
I am not appalled by death
I suffer green
Bones to be
Saponified
And bodies become
Long adipocere candles
Cede to Sarcophagidae
And succumb to Casper’s Law
Okay
I grew up country,
I am not appalled by death
I know that you
Have since ceased
To resemble yourself,
Eaten with patient
Dispassion despite
Your Celtic shirt and
Black
Bomber jacket
Okay
I am not a child,
My heart hardened taphonomically
To fleshflies, blowflies and green-
bottle
And you,
Regressed in to infinite fugue.
No
It doesn’t frighten me
I can count
These multiples of mortis
On my pink living fingers:
Pallor
Algor
Rigor
Livor
And it doesn’t bother me
All these relentless waxy reducings
Of man to fats and gasses
No
I grew up country,
I am not appalled by death-
But
Today the thought of you
Without shape
Brought me up sharp
With panic
When the sleeves of your
Plaid shirt hung hollow
And your stone was green
With mutinous grasses
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