Poems – Surreal?

RUST & SILT

(After Tristan and Iseult)

The darkness opened
And small iron filings poured to the granite floor
among the blood. His cries scraped through the air
shattered marks in the slate cliffs
later mistaken for runes
names
cold in the rock.
The sea watched, and felt nothing.
Greening waves in the depths
The great stone-work shifting of leviathans
moved in her like neurons, twisting
up into a bundle of gravity –
moon had left long ago, the sea
was flat and had no hopes or goals.

rust-mother looked on his face
and its platings, hammered, forged in the womb-forge
and smiled and tears broke on her lids
as waves crashed on dark cliffs
and she passed into darkness as through
a sharp internal pain draining presence
or walking into a sun-warmed bedroom –

rust was left in the cold-cornish air
a patina shining on his iron body
began to write with the oxygen of the air
the lay of his life – already peeling
his eyes were squeaking
as he blinked and squinted.

* * * Continue reading →

David Oluwale

Q. Two things were offered to the river: a statue – and a man. For which do you think England grieved the most?

A. St Geórgios will rise from the Aire with David, cos a martyr knows a martyr

Q. Take five smooth stones from the river bed, which formed a pillow for his head. Take five stones, and then?

A. Somewhere goliath is waiting

Q. And on the Headrow the trees of Sherwood forest sway with their shadows. Who is the avenger stalking among them?

A. A bow and arrow are rising

A Silent Coaching

To be better feels like being a rose, opening

under the moon, a cut rose in a vase.

I want to feel like that rose, in our house –

It is an issue for me, it is unclear why –

this flower. I am involved, we are involved,

in each day, plumping ourselves like a bouquet.

The key feature is this – the satin petal,

curving, and of course the thorns. 

I assume so much each hour, I cannot move

but for assuming – If anything, I have sat

in quiet rooms, making plans for transformations

that would impact me later, my feet in the water, 

my head opening, giving me more options

for living – like absorbing the air through my skin,

and making a painting. 

I might just sit here for an eternity,

playing videogames with my friends – 

or I might eat a peach ice cream. 

I would build a world more just, and expand

into intergalactic space, a rose, orbiting these suns. 

My friend would do this better – don’t I know it.

On a scale, these options are as practical,

as ever anything was practical – a bee

climbs into a flower, brushing pollen on its legs –

that is practical.  No, I will sit in my vase,

dropping petals. Specifically, I will wilt.

Support me in this, support me

by allowing me to be away from you. Know

that I love you even as I go into the other room. 

There is no deadline for this – there is only

the living root line which knots around us, finally.

I will take a step out of the door, know I will return,

later, with flowers which you may cut and vase,

before we arrange and eat our lunch.

V.137

Ends are lamps, like things in the fog
like dust clouds birthing new stars – no –
like lamps in the fog, with cut-glass;
spiderwebs in the lead-lined vents…

O friends, there is no end. Missiles
rain on my friends, there will be no
end. Just think of the desert life
vanished in the trinity test:

There is no end. Things just transform.
A paper plane flown over fields
into the lithium furnace.
Batteries to recharge and change.

Decay. Cycle again, but end?
Pages turn, like brown leaves, become
paths – monotype of the footstep –
lamps receding into the fog.

Everything’s but a pile, my friends.
A pile of such delicate mould.
Such delicate, beautiful mould.
I grow old, and softer, and old.

An end is time’s crisping edge, no –
it’s every line, every letter
An end repeats what’s never past –
An end is something just like this:

V.136

The house was on a steep. The sun
was belly button of the sky –
hot head, the red light of my blood
pearled with bright neuronal pearling.

They were shouting, I could hear it
from upstairs. There is so much love
in an exasperated scream.
In a textured chocolate croissant.

Sleep will take me soon and collapse
lose pertinence. After such days,
brimming call-centres of the heat
enrich my dreams. Hello you’re through –

Oh Sam, I know you’ve lost so much
and words are not the kind of thing
that can change our minds – but sometimes
I try to try – you were captain.

Life is a penguin, no life is
penguin egg cracked and just sizzling
on a cast iron pan. Oceans
shifted and took your ship out south.

I was stranded, you said, in cold
and night that lasted months. A light
on my far sailboat caught your eye –
you look up from your fire, and cry

The Witch of Endor

A worried king came to me, lord knows why
to measure his luck against the Philistines.
Strange how an eldritch technique can change
from heresy to dogma for reasons of state –
anyway, for all my murdered sisters I gave
him just enough doubt to put off his aim –
he’ll lay down his sword from anxiety, then
lie down and slide along it, slowly, to rest.
I slaughtered a calf to give precursive thanks
and fed him libation to his own pierced flank.

When the gods ascend from out the earth,
justice sees tyrants come off the worse.

The Flood

The Rain: streaming with direct argument through the air.
The Sea: calm as children swam with their dogs at the whispering surface.
The First Doubts: felt by those who stood by the rivers as they rose.
Torrents: under arches, creaking bridges.
The Water: rising, day on day – perhaps we had hit a galactic cloud of ice, which melted through the plum atmosphere. But it was so relaxing that the scientists lay down, or swam with their dogs in the lakes which were overcoming the cities on the plain.
God: when contacted, denied involvement.
The Priests: unworried, they lay in the belfry and felt the water lap their ears.
The Spire: up out of the water, the church became a rock in the sea, which pierced the bottom of a boat that had been constructed for fun.
The Boat Crew: relaxed. Went into the water slowly and quietly.
Soon: the earth was blue and yet the rain didn’t stop. It poured between the stars in an unknown mechanism, doubtless to do with the meanings imbued in some partial beginning when pure energy thundered out of the centre of things.
Soon: water filled the galaxy, and then the spaces between the galaxies.
Underwater Stars: booming in the depths.
Comets: moving very slowly, leaving trails in the intergalactic ice as it spread in the manner of mould with a dispersed origin.
The Water: perhaps streaming from black holes, connected to another, drowning, diluvian plane.
The Water: glub.
The Water: glub.
The Water: glub.

V.128

<< In-between two redbrick houses
there is an alcove and a shed
topped with a mossy corrugate.
On the campus. A leaf dances

shivers, hovers, behind the moss –
blown as if a storm plucked at it
on a taught invisible string.
I’m still in front of the horror >>

<< There is a leaf on the road home
I see in the peripheral
behind me when I look back down
the hill – on the grey concrete steps

It jumps and slaps the ground so fast
and in paroxysms of dance
confined to its small space – I blank
on everything and watch the glitch >>

<< Roland Barthes was crossing the road
when he suddenly stopped – in front
on the path ahead a brown leaf
shivered as if it was burning

but there was no smoke. Enraptured
he didn’t notice the milk truck.
As the blood pooled the leaf flew up
to hover over him, spinning >>

V.127

I wake in the dark and get up.
My heart palpitates. I listen.
My arm is cold, and the bird song
is half audible – I listen

There is a noise out in the air
I cannot place it – a night hum
beyond the cars whining – the woods
is a valley and they echo…

A high pitched hum – a dead discourse
of a ghost who sits in my sink
and mouth open lets out this noise
I avert my mind but listen

Yes there are new air raid sirens
being tested in the morning
over the cold roofs and wet fields –
not meant as a warning – merely

set to register the white flash
with a note of receipt so faint,
(Warmongering philosophers
stride in black across Odessa)

en deuil, les victimes à venir.
As I lie still, I can hear it –
the vedic wind resonating
on the moors, a landscape om

V.126 To work//and back

The Past is a Dream – it recurs
exactly as thoughts from a dream
as droplets from a cracked clay vase
in a forgotten desert spring –

drips from a rusted waterwheel
in a green abandoned valley.
Pigeons courting on a warehouse
in the golden morning let see

the past through this hectic event –
Always bowing, no matter why –
bowing to each other – honour
of one pigeon to another//

Isn’t it mad how supernovas
burn in incredible vibrance
and leave civilisations there
in their path like a residue

All the material on streets
of red brick trentes glorieuses
is the debris from a power –
Strange things happen to the star corpse

I make tracks out from the city
and hear fireworks in the cool dusk.
Ribs of light. Le Petit Prince walks
alongside me with his flower