Seven Days of Late Second Decade Third Millennium

This poem was an attempt at a modernist narrative poem, but the experience of watching my friends’ eyes glaze over gave me an uncontrollable urge to crack it and fragment it, making it more functional. I wrote it as I was walking one route across the city back and forth several times a week, and the photos are photos I took in breaks between writing, or I wrote in the gaps between walking, or I walked in the gaps between taking the pictures or something anyway.

I

Stars, sing.
Night which towers over
like something’s pregnant belly,
hollow song of eternal return of the day.
Sing of the curve of the peaceful
who learned to rage
or lost interest or tired of the game.
Shout the shadow of planet-killer guilt
sing of the ink’s pooling
show us the emptiness of impatient questions
Sing through me, of the twists and turns
of twists
and turns and

Thrown into the world,
like fish into the trawler’s mouth
I walk now under rain
of the stars’ deleting gaze.
A body, an ancient question, shot
into the night by our stencil thought

or, at least a collage
like a dream, the meaning
drained out of, or a line

this infinite jigsaw
coping mechanism
and this false paper page

First and last of people
standard works have said we are
don’t we puddle on the threshold?
Of something we don’t know
and all that went before, poured
through rhythms in the shape of hands
and feet and eyes and mouth and bones
muscle, spleen and bile and oxytocin?
piling a planet and groaning

II

Our questions lie under our feet like wires
rusting, greasing, fragments of a world
buzzing softly, they are ignored. Old question,
we answered you with a shrug

*

maybe we live as ghosts live –
an endless road with graveyard lights
greeting others to be greeted by screams
crumbled suburbs might be Silent Hills
if air-raid sirens screamed

I see a billboard, sticky with car sap
selling sex like they do it on the internet
I speak

III

You may later ask it
where to place the blame?
Two humans sit still

one looks at the other
the other looks away.
They pass in and out of

arousal-flows expressed
in precisely this stillness
They do not see patterns

It looks much like pain with
all the beauty of a
wood-pigeon augury

They leave in the star spray
They are absolutely
relaxed – their words are air

They each have bodily
loyalties and tickets
It is not straightforward.

*

Song of the Hormones

– – – We are in you like you are inside your own moaning
Shut up, shuttup I am trying to sleep
– – – Ah ha, your heart almost stopped for a moment
Oh god oh god where am I please don’t
– – – Predators, predators, predators
I am sitting in a chair. I am trying to relax.
– – – You will need some adrenaline for this
There is nothing, to be done, but still you try
– – – Excellent you have found some food well done
There is nothing that could calm me down, the world could end
and still it wouldn’t
calm me down
– – – We fly, soft as storms from the sky
I am a blank page, I am a shell
which holds the organs

…

The planet is cracking
what will hatch from it
as an oyster pearlesces dirt?
What will come may be considered beautiful
but not by we who burn to become fossil
we who laugh ourselves into a frenzy
just as the beak shatters an opening

We have never been more sure of anything
Than this: we are disequilibriate
But this is not so bad,
Please

IIII

A bell, from the old spire rings
across tarmac into the pub
TV shines out of the dark

A vast industrial
swamp – freight train by-line on
stilts melting from the heat

sweat rounds out the heads pale
skull into a warmer shade
as the horizon thuds –

thuds in at all degrees
the carapace, tree split
dead tree vigil of it

rests where it came to rest
a host of soft split planks
and their wood-worm flock wait

as the sun shatters in
to an owl – perched on beam
and broken cross beneath.

Closed roads bring the crowd
I leave the shop, and blood pools on the concrete
composed by a bus and a badly misjudged step
into something almost but not quite

Tears crawl from my eyes
I have been learning,
how to keep calm as we hurtle, knowing so little
hurtle like asteroids, into dark suns
I need a hug

– – – At this point slowly stop reading
– – – Leave the poem and close the door quietly
– – – Then wait a good while.
– – – Then open the door again
– – – turn off the lights and darkly say
– – – I cannot even represent death
– – – The trick here is to imply

a bricked up door in a wall
one floor up, in a ruined building.

Is all this just mould grown on the planet
left too long in the gloom – vicariousness
to the plant-mind nothingness.
I look up through silhouette of bark
always towering
over human heights

I THINK YOU’RE PROBABLY LONELY

IIIII

On cue manuals of living swarm the doors
– Shit! I cry
frantically blocking them out with a chain
round the handles like you do on TV
vital syllables rend the air
Then a dog-eared bushido breaks the glass,
we retreat to the back.
A reiki handbook, a healing energy guide
blows out W’s brains,
I run out to help
“Thom, help me!” but a squealing bible
has latched onto his face
and apocrypha burst from his stomach.
“Sylvia!” We scan
but she’s nowhere to be seen.
Then, a no holds barred last stand
til – rubbing my eyes, I lock the inner door.
There is nothing good or bad, but
thinking makes it worse
Dust motes, in a solar beam

Why are all things pulled, crushed
down into themselves, trapped
deep in gravity traps?

Is the universe, like
because collapse and end
are what in now most needs?

sparsing a field of dense
folds into itself, black
pins marking finality

and then fizzing softly
in the full cold of dark
til nowhere is distinct?

The guilt builds up
our words just give it form
that deep-state in the head

IIIIII

Tonight the world mellows.
Residual heat from coffee dregs
has warmed the under-soil sufficiently
stupidities germinate
a thousand little heads popping up
from the newspaper mycelium

I have seen the impatient and bored
constructing hells where those
whose metaphysical mouth is marked
can go to be cleansed, til they are clear
and concise and succinct and dead

– – – <for a mess is the worst ontology>
– – – <I will live with a clean cosmology>
– – – <If it’s the last thing I do>

Yeah there’s fear in a handful of dust
but only insofar as its scattered
over a floor they expected to be clean

I try to avoid it, but fainting in the fumes
I spiral around the event horizon, forever.

The air’s revving –
a soft dress moves
with the wind, shouts

as life thunders
quiet as a can
down the pavement.

But I am at home
watching the stock photo slideshow
I barely notice

Hecate [Interlude]

Hey [oh no…] just let me interject,
there is something behind all this, and
it’s me [it’s not her] okay,
I plotted the downfall of a world
in detail down to the damp twig
not quite snapping on the pavement
and when you stepped on it to twist
your ankle, to send a twist down threads
of fate [call it chance it means just the same]
And bring things tangling, sparking
wires full of charge – it was beautiful
to see such a small thing as the mastering
of a world cause despair in all souls
[You float like a rotten plastic bag
caressed by gulf stream currents, you go
with the tide] It was all part of my grand design
[I don’t believe you] as I don my sharp suit
and with it shred the land [I can’t believe you]
Am I not the mask of all your fears
[A moon mask with nothing underneath]
Am I not the answer and enemy?
[Am I not bored and aimless]
But it was all a test… and you pass.

[…]

You know when you get back into
bed and realise the whole day surprised you,
you weren’t ready, and now it’s over?
[Yes] that was me too [I still don’t…]
and when you are having your breakdowns you
are not failing you are just living […]
and doesn’t beauty just ooze from everybody!?

IIIIIII

Sing, city,
engine white noise
and birdsong

The sunset world suffuses
about the pour of hills and distances
The eye beneath the brow of the cloud
in incandescent towering light surrounds

A moment of the world’s sinking
filled with birds
careening under the silver shroud
A storm is coming – or has it passed?
These last moments often last, and sing
as the world lasts
and sings
I stand by this trig which marked the hill
its lightfast verdigris skin
and sweat

An ark retaining its smile
as useless things often reduce
to a molten sky
Here on the hill, this
skull-dome horizon, where
the dog barks and scampers out
a football thwacks the evening
people head home. and for a moment
No proof is offered. No answer.
No question, even. 
I thunder through sparks in darkness
the bookshelves unfold for me forever

I see a page, tumbling in the breeze
In fragments, and weak

– – – You can fork lightning, you can stillen
– – – to the moment’s stillness
– – – All beyonds fall away
– – – and time springs from the earth to engulf us
– – – each moment is real as moment

It’s the brain’s tautological thauming glints
My thoughts fall away, laid within reach
lock-screened
What would we have
if not for these?

let us not expect majestic answers
from a world that barely holds together
Silence throngs in darkness.
whispering parliaments
What was I saying? Dull brain
I swear I was saying something.
Or was I watching this video
of someone

I’ll try again.
Stars, sing.
Sun which towers over
as the forest moves toward us.
I thought that they were clouds
but they must be waves