city

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

V.121

In the city, the Christians
grew accustomed. The empire war,
which had been waging for long years
had its opponents. Casualties –

always fighting, giving leaflets –
learning unaccountable truths –
no concept is safe from the earth.
Boys carry little flags, and gurn,

dragging the flags on the damp stone.
Empire and humanity, age
and mix, as womens’ hair is caught
on long lines of dancing metal

tearing it from their heads. This world
– this economy – transfixes
the human, tears it. Dresses it up
in uniform, in dead structure

We soon turn back, to watch its path
when only we remain. Staring
as images pile up on streets
that are dragged through the shifting dust

The city filled with glowing points
like a lost tangle of string-lights.
We try and unweave it, but soon
crackle and break, changing something

The Unplanned

Note: Descartes’ aesthetics held that a creation of many minds can never be as beautiful as one mind, a creation made by an isolated or lone consciousness. This is an interesting analog to his epistemology. However,  the idea of an isolated consciousness, aesthetic or otherwise, is incoherent, and so…

What better way
to give the lie
to Descartes

than to stand
in the muggy heat
here, on the periphery

where seed foam rises
up between us –
the city in a depth of shade

Where cloud and sun judder –
undecided
who will win the day.

The heat and sweat will have it
drawing the patchwork
city deeper into distances.

No one mind held this.
And yet – here it is
Miyazaki perfect.

All the Sky’s a Stage and all the Clouds are Merely Players.

You walk down the unnoticeable incline into the city. You look to the skies where the weather systems rehearse a performance they will give you
next time. You see the bowl of the heavens reflect the skull’s roundness – and all car sounds in its persistence. You love this. It is, you think, the mark of a walk’s greatness to array contingency in its random archways. You sigh. And walk on through the headache as the white grey blues yellow

27/02/18

Brambles cut with snow
are the earth’s bronze crown
of thorns in the sun

This sun – glancing the snow
I walk under – and my ears
tilt to the birdsong now –

this spring beginning with snow
A fox-path diverts from mine
to the deeper more humanless parts

And cars through the sleet
as my ears grow colder
the houses are there, dusted

with drybrush grey-white crusts
plucked from a model of
the apocalypse – each is empty

Others walk by to arrive somewhere
as I stand and look
at the fallen tree, sliced with a gap.

A half frozen lake waits
for me, and duck ripples
there is no escape, but this

is an escape, the frozen sheet
the tree’s twisting bark
the wood-pigeon’s cold thrum

May this be preserved
this tas of remnants
this precision of life

which clings to us like a scar.
‘Do not go in the water’
it would be piercing quiet

Then dull, but I do not need telling
twice – to not miss
by brash action – a moment.

Behind the patient moon,
a meteor – as I walk home
watch my head coalesce

into the white materia – holy.

Two Fragments

I –

The rain sets a gradient on greens –
old lithograph fade, with yellows
as if cloud, slate-dark depressed
is mindlessly flicking through filters.
Only at twilight, such a light.

After, the streetlamps, pale as soggy
worm corpses, settle on the streets.
I miss the phosphor orange glow
of the days when I was younger.
Today, I miss it. Maybe not tomorrow

II –

Pylons grew out of the flesh of the land.
Iron bones of blood-rust thrust through
scaffolds to hold up the sky – how
insufficient were the rocks, now
heaven had grown heavier and heavier –
only metal and electrics could halt it
as it dropped off hurtling downward
toward the cold earth’s plates

The City Moves in Me

Terror swims inside me like a basking shark –
it is my sullen wake, it fills the air behind
as I’m drawn along suburban stone.
I see the wild forgotten as a dream is forgotten
I know I dreamed, but what was it?

I stand on a hill and see the city
draining down its valley plughole –
soft scars left in the grading air.
I see this city move as a scrapheap moves
slowly downwards, churning the earth.

Waiting for a bus I wait too long
and my figure, mistaken for a statue
by some routine artist in a tatty book
is selected for the top of the heap
which moves, and the wild falls further.

In a shifting forest, in the past beyond thought
a foraging girl picks out an acorn
from a skin of dry leaves, her breath
marks the air. She leaves it
and the earth hurtles out from beneath

Respite

Unnanounced in the cities spring up
unattended eddies in the flow
hiding quiet and held in check
by walkers whose solitary paths
attain the force of stone.

And from time to time, erupt
in a long awaited silence
in some valley, some alley in the back
where aerial trees cling drinking
the living city rain, and biding.

A silence which, like a sigh
after a long day’s work and walk
after the bag’s down, tea’s brewing
and you raise your hand to your eyes and rub
and the air empties itself of talk;

So, calm descends in the sun’s heat
and the car-noise lends you pity –
lets you breathe freely, unassailed
by unnoticed constant tack and tear;
the cold stress of a city