94. Poetic Thought: A Painful Crawl

Poetic thought – unbidden mostly & destructive
its truths so brutish they can’t work
English stuff I suppose, full skinhead rage
the old banal burden of what we are & speak

Filthy after it again – oh bless us!
the muscine after ooze of this disordered kitsch
marred and obvious as any screen memory
I want it to end now, please, please

And then I see that long war with ourselves again
free as gods, full members of a warband: weigh
this illusion too: like, fuck me, it’s autumn now
that smell’s the explanation: oh we are!

It’ll take time to crawl up this beach again
welcome back stranger! You know all too well this world
pounding the bladderwrack won’t help or prove fun
trust the crawling reflex even as we fade

86. Something Now We Can All Agree Upon

oh – all these memories then
pretty sloppy if you want what happened
they catch the shine, that’s all
nothing solid left to return to

no – not one thing (that
ended – just another – call it process
yesterday’s landing craft today’s tourism
but they still keep on diving of course

all this huge & thingy world then
a homeless migrant out of nothing
something like spontaneous fireworks
ending up with just what you are

natural language brilliant for fantasies
makes mud smell of nutmeg if we ask
though it may tell us nothing of here
existing too much likewise in its own right

lost on now some ridiculous plane
totally unsure of what is outside (more rain
always the same abased elements here
until the sky & land no longer know what colour

elastic in what? – I’d say warped & rotten
woven up wretchedly on the cheapest of looms
let’s start up again w/ Harlow & fun
gangs of noisy actual children – agreed upon this

71. A Poetry That Allows the Broadcast Now

Our lives here a disordered commonplace
                         – so let it be
what we must do unapparent & compulsive
                         – these are the cunningest things

but need met mud then something grew
                         – look, keeping moving balance with
the wider world, those relics of that green one
                         – once mutually sustaining

yes we are born with its memories still
                         – even here, the 3rd millennium
oh what a hopeless mess, a buzzy smog
                         – so let it all go

sometimes overwhelmed by nostalgia for birthrights
                         – we grow new things
constant creation our means of transformation
                         – so I here miswrite

we & all of us inside the fading of our failure
                         – live out each slow day
light playing no matter how greyly
                         – never halting what must be

69. Our Lives Lived Here in the Dark

for UKPoetry ListServ & especially for Keith Tuma

Our lives lived as we know we ought
our lives lived in ordinary disorder
strangeness smiling at the heart of what we are
half-illumination by clumsy ochre light

Lives must now be living tenderly
each worthless object irradiated by wonder
the future always let be postponed
leading us into screen memory in its maze

& laws, inescapable & unwanted
people unaware they are people or dust
everything held into the missing dimensions
the ones that pretend the unconditional

Can we still manage w/in this improvisation?
Spicer found this pressure absolute & fatal
the mind overtaken by particular certainties
infinite consequences bleeding out the brain

Nowhere, I think nowhere, is here
flesh suddenly unapparent, worthless, fake
oh shit! – this total suspension, no
lived again & again just here in the dark