words

V.97 Nightingale II

It was probably a sleepless
thrush, or a lady blackbird out
In the morning to center me.
Later in the week a green tree

(green, you remember green, a sharp
asset, a zone) is filled up
by a murmuration. Words fail
to register all of the ways

that words fail. Over the next months
poetry leaves me as I hold
my black plastic controller and
curl up in bed as the womb hurts

curl up around an old and new
goal, to have the numbers raise up
and buttons click neatly and soft
as the shots of unreal guns sound –

As the game becomes my home, I
hold myself in the vibrant light
and lines cut to suit the dull eye
and suspended in a rest mode

I wait until the suspense that comes
from restraints, as in chess, or love
is suspended in turn and light
of sun over the river grows

Aphorisms XIV

Pronouns again – A teenage girl bought the airfix. “Did she?” says my friend. But here is a place where I might say ‘they’ – uncertainty again being the aspect relevant to explaining why. I don’t know them…

*

Can there be a superlative without the disgust of the ordinary? Yes. In fact, that is a prerequisite. It’s not the difference from the ordinary that makes something superlative, but a superlative relation of that thing to us, experiencing it. And the disgust of the ordinary, the ranking, the military etymology often slides in surreptitiously at the back. It may seem stupid to say that the best film has no relation to other films by that fact, but it is stupider to say that any film could satisfy the language game of suiting the squirly set of conditions for bestness taken in the tool like sense. The best tool for the task does that one job better than the others. But a film without an adjective, has no one task. I guess it’s a classic example of language going on holiday.

*

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V.19

“A witch is more lovely than thought in the mountain rain”

–

My language machine has rusted
elements and black mould. Shut up
the screen and have no more toxic
doses, ignore the buzzing flies

on various empty ice creams.
I can smell mildew soaking my
semantic pillows. I hear her
pen scratching for miles of heathland.

I pull the ripcord over and
over but nothing’s happening
then everything suddenly stops.
I’m too late and no longer care

for the strange way I seem to friends.
Many hundreds of pupate words
have burst from my fingers in her
gaze and honour upon my throat.

The rain which appears throughout life
and reappears like a candle
flutters, appears and she is there
standing with her fellow witches

in a graveyard. I love her style
of fighting. She stands there and wins
against the wind, is motionless.
her presence maketh my thoughts die