past

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.119

A laminated floor with chips
is cold when you place your hand there –
to pick up a dirty foam ball,
and quick throw it at some classmate.

The same floor is in the deep past
in the badminton hall where squeaks
happen and the thud and the thud
of an unknown body’s collapse

and blue face. I watch him dying
flanked by dark angels as I say
“It’s gonna be okay”. You lie
but do not know you are lying.

How can a floor, the floor you learn
collects grit, as your palm feels it,
with the rubber face of a doll
designed to resuscitate us

How can a floor, where I once danced
with my ginger haired instructor
whose smell made me blush, not knowing
why. How can a floor give resource

A blank floor. The sound of running
gets through the headphones. Electric
resources given by Four Tet –
in the gym I think of the past

Poem From Page 45 of the Butterfly Notebook

If a house holds old things of you;
such as you, leant on a wall
trying to cry to ‘An Ending: Ascent‘

or you, sat on a step
the salmon carpet wet with tears
your hair, the faintest warmness

even you, on the dark landing
taking a glance into partial rooms
where concepts of girlhood collide

It will also hold the sublime
the purposeless snare trap of time
things you can see, but never know –

A few of a godfather’s schoolbooks
a tool chest full of tools and old signs
and those we love, who see us with sad eyes.

Zodiac

I

Your week this week will go off
like a rotten egg. Such is life.
This fragment of a year will crack
and spill all over you, achieve

new heights of boredom and disgust.
Why? Do you ask why the fungus
grows at the tree’s base and grows
rotten? Come on. Just accept it

like you accept that your eyes
will look where you decide
and not just swing around like
billiard balls in a washing machine.

Next week brings with it new challenges
as exactly the same thing happens
for the hundred and eleventh time.
But this one, this is the one, I can feel it.

II

The stars are spread out in the orrery
like thick yeast extract on toast.
Things are everywhere finding it difficult
to connect. Take Bellatrix

for example. A salty taste on the tongue
just don’t let it touch an open cut.
Inside this emptiness of pain feeling
there is another expanse of tiny stars –

from each new star, we see new constellations
and the red bloom in Orion
is aching to reach them.
Close one eye for a while and things look flat.

There are an endless array of bears in the sky
clouds, atoms, birds, planes, galaxies –
all of these are bears if you look closely.
This week will bring bears.

Continue reading →

V.60

In the background things pass away
making a noise like dark fire
crackling. We go around nudging
remains into the embers with

our feet. There, fragments of wire lie
where authoritarian
structures once rocked back and forth. Life
burns and brings sadness. The brambles

are so green but in the fire, lines
of red-gold crisp light steam and curl
around the blackening leaves. Feel
the substance behind beliefs fall

away and reveal the golden
embers and their heat that can sting,
as the smoke curls up around you
wherever you walk round the flames.

On the drive home, it turns out that
the universe conspired to build
Nick Drake so he could soundtrack this
night. I feel complete in the car,

with the moon, moon, moon, moon, and me.
As I turn the corner to home,
I see the subtle moon, pink haze.
The record sleeve hangs in the real.

V.6

Oh my god we were all such dolts
in high school. I say that, but what
are you going to do about
it? I mean myself. I only

live to apologise for my
past crimes. It gives me something to
hope for. All of a sudden I
see sun I see everything seems

poetic to me again. Must
do better. Just that time of year
when life seems written by Hiyao
Miyazaki and my high school

wrongs seem a warm subplot with which
to throw shade. Context of current
millennial life: we have phones.
I turn up the soundtrack. I turn

to Spirited Away, where ghosts
are turned and made to serve children.
River spirits and lake spirits
are high. Here in the city trees

spread blossom around like golden
syrup on my unseasonal
thoughts. I drop my sister at the
café to meet a guy and drive

V.4

No matter how hard we all try
the future will remain unknown
soldier to the past’s graveyard.
A singularity. Is it not

trying hard enough. Is it not
easy to imagine the move
beyond. To imagine grass green,
a massive overproduction,

see life changing as we stop, give
out. And the computer’s structure
being where the strong motive force
is in fact the human motion

blur. It is hard to describe what
a piece of work are machine life
goals, intentions and what drives them
mad. We are likely to end up

selling trillions of useless things
so called objects the ‘first A.I’
so called, produced, mistaken that
process was all it needed and

then saw god as a nicely phrased
meme. A ladybird landed here
and the sun, appropriate to
these four kinds of full-sun musings

Hercules

It happens sometimes, this odd feeling –
that things aren’t quite what I thought they were.
For instance, now, on the morning bus
I sit and watch her hair making greased
marks on the windows, and feel the warmth
and the gentle rocking of the seats
this sleepy morning. And I reason
that I am happy, and that nothing
is lacking here as we cross the bridge.

But I used to want more. I used to
feel singeing terror that I would reach
this dull moment. That I would give up
wanting to murder the next lion
rampaging across the rainy hills,
or that simply seeing the Hydra
with its roiling whipknot of sharp heads
would make me feel such fatigue, make me
lie down in the darkness and wonder –

but then one day I woke up. Something
had changed, and all my possibles
were scattered around me in pieces
on the mosaic floor, the old kline couch
the wicker chair, and their blood was all
I could see. That was the beginning.
Immense strength is not just for blasting –
now I make cups of tea, get biscuits
for my colleagues with a cooling ease.

I used to know I would rather die
than live like this – how often this life
shows us with what smallness we think.
It’s really not so bad once you’re here.
The muses, grown old and decrepit
fuss around my head from time to time
making sure I’ve done this or that task –
immortality is truly real
when only the same small things repeat

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