100bis. For Eleni Sikelianos: “Let Us Carry on Activating This Habit of Error”1

It’s tomorrow and
Hallowe’en’s all over this white island
we let out the dead to day
to celebrate our rotting flesh and next
the hard bones left smiling at the end
yeah, yeah, yeah, every bit of it is fake
but isn’t that all the pleasure of our brief lives
?

What we remember and understand
we don’t
but if we let it all act through us then
we might get somewhere, even this stupid night
little elves and witches calling, and their cats
let’s change everybody into being everything we are
charged fully in our most complete expressions yet

 

 

1“Heard or misheard or miswritten or misread at Xing the Line, October 30, 2014”

100. Never Naive Enough 1

That’s it then, yes, time
drop everything & rummage
time in a bubble different
it’s not what you need – no
outbreaks of tapirs & bards
we need utopian noise
hey, let’s invent music now

All these new solidarities
can’t life be simpler
                      if loneliest
no no no – it’s a lovely process
improvise the magic to achieve illumination
everyone together who’s that naïve
show your voice to join with ours as if you wished2

 

 

1 “Ah well, that’s me told then. The disingenuous old bugger.”

 

 

2 “Exiting, is he not? with a final swish & flounce of the curtains, moth-eaten & dingy as you like. Still, alright, I’ll try & do this too, just to help the old relic out:

83. Some Distich, Alright?

At this time we are brought to a crisis, an acute worry, that glitters with joy that here at this point we, the ordinary mongrels, must move to act against the non-humans (for so they have declared themselves – self distancing from ordinary people’s lives as if we were bêches de mer crawling across the sea bottom, and they full human beings collecting us from above to sell and eat1.

At this time the carnival opens, with scarlet flaggings and well-dappled pellicules covering the quay, at night-time with all the glorious creatures we hope to become: tapirs, gryphons, anything with hooves – alas! we cannot be reborn as these – unless we choose not to be victims & break at last, burst through all the forces that threaten us, so that then, in an eyeblink, all of history turns miswritten & we are at last welders of new being for ourselves, using laughter not worry, as the pattering sparks fall harmlessly into the dust & their fierce shine will protect us, here on the quayside at midnight now, suddenly smelling of meadowsweet2, let’s gather at carnival & meet.

 

 

1 trepanging

 

 

2 from the banks of the Torridge here

77. Some Sloppy Debris, Unabased, Yet as Tragically True as Everything Else

And then in a paradise of sea & boats
the surf ran its sloppy debris up
OK, not dark native mud, just sand
polished clean as words, as bones
we play upon once and ever

Cast up at Broadstairs yet again
oh, family things – you know, that compulsion
paint peels then slowly renewed
but the foreign students wander yet
                                – lost on the same maps
                      circumstances do come round again
edges softened & removed through rolling erosions
picked over continually by gulls & ravens
fr a late-blooming career at Thanet Cat Shelter
helping run workshops in the new Town Shed
yes! all boons to elderly gentlemen & blokes
the sea & the sun cast us all up here
daily patrolling The Esplanade w/ ice creams
childhood repeated more slowly this time
even français: oo-where is thee boating-poule?
please sirr? no matter
stick w/ the seagulls & do what you do

Let’s play on the bouncy castle first!
it’s a fine tall young giraffe we see
tenderly holding us & uplifting lightly
I could believe
                (if I wasn’t dead
it was just birth I’d come through not
all the slow mucky stuff at this end

Let’s catch the bubbles though!
they’re birds & worlds & words & brief
yes, like all of this, fat slippery
membranes holding nothing from nothing

Time – – no, not for nothing here
it’s all gone, long gone, a dream
that this wasn’t a dream, or that praise
will still buy us out from somewhere where
there isn’t an out:
                    the world here
alone & fragile now as always

Brutish it is, then brutish it must be
we can all start again at Totnes – oh
real mud along the Dart, smelling of nutmeg
are we lowly or just the dead giants?
yeah, both I guess & the mud not
as much spicy as oozily vital

Poets, you poets haven’t any age
not any more than tidal litter
it’s a grand life beached up here
planning on our next break through
we’re all food for sandhoppers, son
daughter, all the other people gathered up
is this the really The Esplanade?
at last & at here, attention then

62. Skipping Behind Waitrose for Bêche-de-Mer & Moths

My friend came down into the ‘itchen wherein i was writin’ and as she opened the fridge door i said listen to this opening sentence and launched off out loud into the first sentence after that preface, the one beginning with the line:

“Each time you unscrew the head the truths burn out”

and i like it as a line even though it is set as “justified” prose and read for several lines as if they were / are lines:

“and fly away above the stack of basements inundated

in aboriginal mucus, elevating the impeccable,”

at which point that residual sense of line was forced into a prose flow as the network of thoughts expanded or was tumbled. Conjoining the rigid meat, budget pizzas and devirginated arctic rolls with miso paste, bok choy and basil seed drinks we get cheap here but weirdly sexualizing everything by this point. Later we celebrated Chinese New Year with sea cucumber, spinach and black buckwheat tea and she got a fortune cookie barely containing the extraordinary phrase “what’s the speed of dark?” i came back home sat down to this text, carried on looking back over that long drying cycle of a sentence with its pulsating ejaculatory cadences which at one point i thought had finished shuddering and trended ending only to realise and realize i was clutching at closure saving time and effort and money. in the midst of a bracket …

Closing the open url to thrownness the next throes to open was to Reclus On Vegetarianism where:

“How can it be that men having had the happiness of being caressed by their mother, and taught in school the words “justice” and “kindness,” how can it be that these wild beasts with human faces take pleasure in tying Chinese together by their garments and their pigtails before throwing them into a river? How is it that they kill off the wounded, and make the prisoners dig their own graves before shooting them?”

leaped out at me. I’m not making this shit up! Or, “fortune favors the prepared mind” as Louis Pasteur quipped

from a posting by cris cheek to UKPoetry ListServ, Feb 3, 2014, “opening The Odes to TL61P”

These little things come together we believe
synchronicity & magic moths1 – oh how we like them
hold on to the end to familiar tales
exotic & redemptive

So – OK, we’re making tapioca – really?
that’s it, just portions of the Empire’s mush
will get us there? Not delicious but
stodgy delusions. These long nights oppress
hallucinatory, we appeal to familiar gods (o gelded ones!)
Please bring comfort & our favourite lies. Odd
bits of the real hang on as dead leaves this February

Just add more turpentine! I heard
someone say – but it was just the apparatus creaking
In this city, winter now at fullest splurge
snow on the uplands, mud & mire here
We’ll write this neatly though, keep out the moths
& never eat the bêche-de-mer2 or read another ode
For poetry won’t wash any more & holothurians are a man’s thing
while the moths remind us only of the mess we used to be
There are so many stories in this city – none of ‘em true
but all so convincing: laughter not honour
Keep changing the frame, 24 times shuttering a second
and when the light plays through, don’t applaud, leave
This isn’t the real world, but where we all live
shared amongst ourselves in hatred & bondage, exploitation & love.

All in all, this work appears wasted & futile
each touch to the keyboard a further annoyance
how can we lift our eyes from off this mire
to see beyond the ever-darkening rainclouds?

Mirroring & variation are good – meanwhile
an orgy of streetfood – I mean right off the street
well – everything ends & will transform thus:
what is needed improving like good little ramekins
until you drop them – oh jiminy, it’s split!
the disgusting stuff oozes into the gutter

Welcome to post-apocalyptic country – years
will have passed to get you to this place, all empty
it’s dry then we’re all back skipping behind Waitrose again

 

 

1 Robin Blaser, The Moth Poems (Open Space, 1965) – Blaser somewhere has written or spoken about how the writing of these poems caused moths to appear.

 

 

2 Heidegger’s favourite food. He, too, regarded it as a vegetable, one whose quality was of being thrown down into the depths of the ocean. In fact, though, “they [echinoderms] rank as our closest genealogical cousins among the invertebrate phyla.” Stephen Jay Gould & Rosamund Wolff Purcell, Crossing Over: where art and science meet (Three Rivers Press, 2000), p 143.