AS THOUGH THE SKIN

Some sub-cutaneous layer of muscle

remembers to tighten my pores,  

making me ready, just as though the skin

still held the feathers I erect for flight

 from in here where the fear is,

my body leans forward against the air,

 not putting weight on the ground

awaiting the moment when a gust

returns me to my proper element.

 

Traces of multiple pasts,

insist on their solutions irrespective

of effectiveness. I imagine

I’d like the sky to enter

my skull, fall through my spine

secure me to land, but my substance

twists on the spindle of old opinions,

 there’s no avoiding the avoidance

the ultimate end and aim of all activity.

 

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THIS IS THE DAY: 1. looking out eastwards

Pulling the curtain aside, looking

for the revelation of the day not

yet come but seeing its promise,

opening the window and looking

out eastwards seeing the banks

of grey, writing my gospel here,

pulling the days aside looking

for validation, transformation of

the ordinary days lived carelessly,

shuffling them into a new order

as though, in themselves, they

were not light enough nor full

nor good enough, seeing out there

a dull mottle covering the higher

cloud as if it were smoke drifted

here from the vast fire of the sun.

THE BITTEN MOON

 

 

 

=================================

The bitten moon was high up

in a dark sky, its great halo

flowering, opening

in ragged petals of light as

patchy cloud poured over it.

INACTION: seven poems

1

Magicians say
the great chain must be
joined, or revealed
in its true form
or heard as a whole
monochord vibrating,
there being,
they insist,
no need to climb
or descend only to breath
in and breath out
which we do already

though unconsciously
without knowing
the secret of the
sequence, the significance
of remembering and forgetting
which enshrine the code,
so that when we remember
we need to hear the pull
of forgetfulness and in
forgetting remember.

They say this is all
we need to find,
the necessity of remembering
to forget and forgetting
to remember,
and to be fair
sometimes we do
remember to remember
but then forget to forget.

=================

2

When something issues forth
from the void, from no visible
or understandable source

we know it is sacred
and immortal, because
having no beginning

it can have no end,
we can easily agree
to this, listening when

we speak or read,
hearing only so far back
before words vaporize.

We hear them issue forth
not seeing or knowing
an end for any let loose

to dance away from us.

=================

3
I watch your words,
the words I read,
skittering through the
maze of my body,
running in erratic spurts,
reaching dead ends,
turning back then
moving on without
finding receptive tissue,
a place to rest.

Minute convulsions,
shake them, they bounce
less jauntily in the
brain than the intestines
their structure roughly parsed
their words re-spelled
their punctuation analysed,
time sucks at them
eventually creates
pellets of memory,
leaves them to atrophy
in contingency store
cupboards.

=======================

4

Perhaps every doing is an undoing,
not in the sense of fate, of ruin,
but in some invisible world
of the undone where whatever we do
undoes a myriad connections.

Just as whatever we say unsays
more than we could list or
suggest intentionally, our
tongues are lawyers that probe,
and burn stubble from fields
from which all sensible mice
have already run.

=================

5

The idea or remembrance of something
outside, beyond, not cosmically
significant, not requiring years of
yoga, or fasting, the ontological
recall of something else
of elseness, of elsnessness,
the emptiness into which
such remembrance can come,
undefined, without specific aim,
the idea or remembrance,
the listening, I forget now
what it was I wanted
or wanted to forget.

=================

6

Now I am nearly
connected
to something.

I feel the hover
of it in the air
I nearly know
how to be here

in relation
to extinction.

=================

7

Is it best to say that
in the ether, in the air itself
are molecules of mercy,

other ways of knowing,

that the divine rushes
like wind across
the grass

find the kindest
delusion and live there
above the flood plane?

=================

BEFORE MID-WINTER

========

I am willing to be ignorant,
to embrace ignorance
as an activity not a fact.

No one instructed me in this.
I was taught to take action,
apply what I know and not wait.

Learning not knowing has
been, is slow, is the reception
of new matter, of transmission
from elsewhere, sitting in
the train, watching the
landscape move.

Not being ignorant for a while
until I know, but continually
unknowing even while actions
are carried out, having an
awareness, a recognised stream
of emptiness flowing always
alongside my Socratian self.

========

========

No wonder we know for
sure that the word comes
from god, or the great tree,

or some thing or being
beyond and behind
or above the word

so powerful that when
we hear it we partake
of its divinity.

No wonder we know
that all words are creations
and being written or spoken

are recreations,
and being seen or said
again, fall further from

their origin; that
the word is only visible
for an instant

it evaporates cannot be kept,
nor resorted to,
cannot be offered as proof

or dangled as enticement;
beautiful words flash from our
mouths as bubbles

from fish,
as seeds in the wind
already in decay

before they convey birth,
everyone knows to ignore
the contamination of interpreters.

========

When something issues forth
from the void, from no visible
or understandable source

we know it is sacred
and immortal, because
having no beginning

it can have no end,
we can easily agree
to this, listening when

we speak or read,
hearing only so far back
before words vaporize.

We hear them issue forth
not seeing or knowing
an end for any let loose

to dance away from us.

========

The idea or remembrance of something
outside, beyond, not cosmically
significant, not requiring years of
yoga, or fasting, the ontological
recall of something else
of elseness, of elsnessness,
the emptiness into which
such remembrance can come,
undefined, without specific aim,
the idea or remembrance,
the listening, I forget now
what it was I wanted,
or wanted to forget.

========

FIVE POEMS FOUND WHILE TIDYING

FIVE POEMS FOUND WHILE TIDYING

It was very bright in the room
and the brightness was deceptive,
under it sat darkness waiting,
and not quitetly, nor stilly,
but actively asserting
its right to overcome.
The others did not see
it there, they talked on
as though they were relevant.

=======================
=======================

A feather of spring mist
holds down the day
a light confining
anaesthetic spray
a gentle restriction
or contraction of
the spirit and will,
waiting made visible.

This slight recoiling from
activity, the agreement
to sit still allows the rise
of small items of enquiry
made temporarily buoyant
or noticeable by general
motionless before
their matter appears to
dissolve or sink into
a milky interior.

=======================
=======================

The banks and bed define
so much of the river, its
sperad and speed of flow.
They are it’s narrative,

seem to be it, but they
are not, not its origin
nor food, we are deceived
by seeming containment,

continuity, our communal
use of it, usually we forget
that land is secondary,
a body worn by water.

=======================
=======================

Priscilla felt power emanating
from other people and fed on it
till she exhausted them,
they ran down like batteries
or scattered like hens.
If not, she pushed a grater over
their skins or poked twigs
in their eyes until they
noticed her and she
could refuse to stop.

=======================
=======================

I like the armour of the day,
the protection of the armour,
the illusion of protection.

I will roll through the library
until coated in peacefulness
my presence polished to a sheen
that forms the thin shell that shows
the species I belong to, and is
precisely what I want to be
a mollusc among molluscs.

=======================
=======================

MID-WINTER POEMS

I

OUTSIDE THE AIR

was stirred by
flows of birds,
not being a flock
but racing
on clearly
converging
collision tracks,
then gone,
more completely
than the dream
I’ve woken from.

————

BEHIND MY EYES inside the black
hole of my head a dry tongue clings
to the sandy gritty feel of the palate,
the sour washes of saliva

from the back of my mouth and
sweet ones underneath the tongue,
knuckles sit under my upper jaw
and over the lower pressing

cheeks into teeth, and words
rush out as bubbles in a fish tank.
I might as well look at these
and intuit their individual stories

as set down my active and passive
physical impulses, or talk about
the faint reflection of the lattice work on
my nightdress white on a white
screen, or the itching, touches
of cloth, the longing to travel on,
to find a core, some thing or place
where understanding is living

separately from the things it illumines,
some light in which the hologramic
cells of self acquire consciousness
of each other.

————–

UNHELPFUL
cranky theories about
the redemption
of molecules, or
the influence of hidden planets,
the formation of new bodies,
the cessation of time,

the codes of plants and texts,
ancient assumptions about divine
power and submission to it,
all these can be dried out and
looked at in museums, like

so many species of seaweed
taken from their environment
their gleam lost, their smell
evaporated, their true glories
not just lost but negated and

valued only as curiosities;
and then a day may come,
when half asleep on a bus,
or just out of nowhere these
odd unlikely forms appear

brush against experience,
and you think yes, and you feel
what they wanted you to feel,
and you see why it was set out
like that, and these ancient

foods re-hydrate. So probably what
we are doing is a squirrel activity
for future generations, and mostly
what we knit and plait will not act
as confirmations, but we can’t

be deflected from the attempt.
It is the mind’s urge to procreate
out of the unfathomable and we
must bequeath the absurd rendering
of our own fat.

————

STORIES TRY TO
take us out of time by
reframing events into past or future
by distressing, expanding or contracting,
speeding or slowing what cannot be
meddled with except in fantasy.
The seduction of story is thus
the illusion of remaining still
as the narrative unrolls,
while, with unpardonable stealth,
time changes all our functioning
loosening what was tight and
tightening what was loose
externally and internally
readying us for the long flight.

———-

SEE THE ENAMELED surface, the bright
circle inside which the orchard trees
shine with apples, the now familiar
snake on legs is the worm that
corrupts flesh and it is speaking,
just as god has also spoken.
Words created paradise
and words wrecked it.

Because, being sequential
words can only exist in time.
In their multiplicity they also
split the Word substantially,
creatively like cells in the womb,
or later on destructively
when their memories fail
and they have lost their
original instructions.

Words are perfectly imperfect,
the accidental spoors
left overnight in the laboratory
or the letter we ought not to
have posted.

————

THIS HAS TAKEN
me in a direction not aimed for,
who would want to dwell
on or in the apparent descent
from order to chaos.

No, the function of myth,
is to give us a set
of interacting images,
a net which catches
the splitting fragments.

————

MYTH IS A NEST of mirrors
in which to lay words.

————

MYTHS ARE AMOEBAS shrugging
their boundaries seductively
from their gleaming shoulders,
enticing us with desire for
the very fixity from which
we most need to escape.
No sooner is the impossible
formulated than we want to
achieve it, or else we
beat our autumnal wings
against windowpanes
wanting to be let in to die
in warm structured spaces,
and are condemned for it.

Myths are for watching,
wondering at how they
change significance,
telling us everything
in numerous series of
conflicting understandings,
they let us know we cannot

continue to worship you,
as you leaned over the Formica
covered table and your hair fell
forward and love spurted
through our veins.
They tell us why, and new
every morning is the why,
the specific why of the day
which many assume is
invalid, scorning
multivalence
as we do, saying:
this is the product
of ignorance and error,
they lack what we embrace,
the insane drilling of holes
through everything to find
the one intact substance,
the narrowing of truth
into the sharpest most
dangerous, single point.

————

‘TELL ME, TELL ME, how it all ends?’
It ends in the boiling mass of spiteful
wish fulfilment, embraced by
gentle hearts,
that none the less
are pleased
to see,
‘them get
theirs’.

————

AS MY GRANDMOTHER told me
in amazement about my cousin
Myrtle, who had converted
to something extreme.

She knows that when
she dies she will be saved,
but we, you and I, will burn
in hell for ever. She seems
happy about it.

So, somewhere within
lies the desire for vengeance,
which, as we have been wisely
instructed, we should leave
to god, or put more simply
not engage in at all.

But still, the conflagration
when only the just shall be
hauled upwards as
though from a VIP
travellers lounge
is a confusing notion
of punishment
when related
to the start of things.

And personally I would like
to disassociate myself from
such an infantile act of
imaginary punishment,
except that yesterday
coming from the post office
after that man behind the grill
lifted his leg and sprayed
me with the smell of his
own resentment, some of
it adhered. My surface was not
smooth or not clean enough to
let his substance roll away
from me. It found damp patches
of latent resentment and began
to reproduce there, small
dramas in which his
suffering featured,
and I watched them unroll
in astonishment, and shook
my shoulders and whole
body, washed them in the air
so that the contagion
shrivelled, though even now
the memory of his bitter mouth
and child-like resentful eyes
impresses.

————

WHEN I WAS young, I read
the Revelation of St John
and noticed only some nouns
set in ecclesiastical glass
in glowing colours.
I felt the intoxication of vision,
didn’t hear the verbs,
or connect the movement
of the story, I accepted as
fact the wrapping and eliding
of Alpha and Omega,
didn’t try to disentangle
the numerically significant
stars/candlesticks/men/
and churches, did not
question the validity of words
spoken by a man
‘begotten of the dead’.

I entered the realm of vision
myself, was not dismayed
by the bullying threats
and promises, I remember
feeling the cold hard matter
of marble and gold,
the metal crowns
the blinding light,
the endless singing,
the narrowing focus
and it was as though
the vision itself lifted
upwards and away detaching
itself from me, till it became
a pinhole in the sky.

————

THREAT AND PROMISE,
them and us,
these are the pairings
that generate
further falls from unity,
hell and heaven,
are the words
of the Word, still splitting
and confusing, trying to
imagine a return
through every violent,
despotic means,
at whatever cost
to them, the ones
who bear the marks of
our nastiness in Post
Office and after.

————

MY FRIEND’S MOTHER told
her to interpret a bird’s
contact with a window
as death. When she was
pregnant with her second
child a bird smashed
itself against the glass
while she watched, she
said she knew immediately
that her baby was dead.

————

HERE BIRDS HAVE flown
safely by my window
without touching it for years,
but in these last months many
have crashed, thudding
against the glass as though
the flocks have lost some
essential functioning,
or as though they correspond,
as folklore says they do,
to the inhabitants who
are themselves disturbed
by uncertainties, flailing
and bumping into new
possibilities without
navigational skills.

————

MOSTLY WE REFUSE to live
in acknowledgement of
ignorance, of the gap
or gaps that lie between
moments of awareness,
the micro-chasms of
discontinuity and if we
could see them we would
give our lives to finding
ways to join them to the
rest of our consciousness,
but this is impossible as
moment by moment these
tiny drifts of nothingness
expand and our beings,

which are made of fragmenting
islands of delusory
knowledge, are carried
further and further from
each other. Unsurprisingly
we cling to birds, or the stars,
to diet or psychiatry, to law,
or god, to taxes and building
regulations, to bridge the
unbridgeable severed atoms
of time.

————
————

——————————————————————
——————————————————————

LATE SUMMER POEMS 2008

I know that over there,
by the far bank,
under the overhanging trees
the river will be running black
its thick skin pierced by rain,
each puncture makes a milky
rim, and over here, where I
stand, on the side I walk on,
the river will be flowing white
under the clouded sky its skin
gleaming, its wounds arked
by dark ripples, and nothing
crosses from here to there,
though I also know that round
the bend before me
someone is killing time.

—————————————-

This can not be addressed directly
there needs to be intercession
a careful approach, respectful
waiting, maybe gifts, we should
stay back, feed the altar fire with
twigs, not hurl our own bodies
to break on its marble slab,
nor open our veins to tempt
it with the smell of blood.

—————————————-

Now my skin is asleep
and the air around it is hazy
the motion is to retreat
inwards, to sink back, but

I look out, when my eyes
send beams to touch the
outer world, they change
me by connection, the
rays bounce on walls
and objects they recreate
me in space, are a radar
that tells me where I am.
When my gaze is put
outside, rather than
drawn or taken, the being
within remains aware,
the being remains within.

But some things drag
my being from me,
the screen sucks awareness
into it, I am fused with it and
then gone, my gaze powerless
finding no limit, no stopping
place in the light, I need to
see the frame and beyond
it the green of my table top,
see the whole computer
with my hands crabbing
across the keys, my wrists
disappearing into my
sleeves that waft like
seaweed, I need to contain
the whole machine in my
field of vision, this way
I stay connected not
consumed.

Sometimes it seems as though
the entire world seeks my eyes
so it can suckle on them.

There are sensations of bubbling
and sharp squirting

—————————————-

Sometimes I see myself, as I am,
walking along the alley stuck
with a thousand delicate thorns
bristling from my body like fine
hair, I am applying tweezers
but they are ineffective, the
thorns re-enter, and around me
there is only a limited zone
in which the air pressure does
not push them further into my
body. These microscopic sleights
from years ago consume me like
predatory emotional bacteria
and will never leave me while I
am willing to exude the sweet
sap we both feed on.

—————————————-

hooting
like owls,
squeaking
like mice, they
manifest at dusk,
separated forms of air
and food vibrating need
and effort, but elsewhere
the body and the self are
one, doing and being are
effortless, but, before
and after that, they
manifest at dusk
like owls
hooting,
like mice
squeaking

—————————————-