58. OK, Then, Let’s Take the Road East to Harlow & Never Mind the Dark

In London
& the Duggan Inquest shows that
the police can shoot you & lie
& lie & fake the evidence & fool
some people still

Darrel (or Karla)
you left your parents’ house
you really did need to
your parents can’t afford your room any longer
& next they’ll cut your Housing Benefit
So you’ll’ve nowhere to live at all
     – har har hardy-har har!
     snort the Bullingdon Boys
     & all their little hangerson

In Sainsburys
oh white lights of infinite choice
– we still live within
this state of illusion

On the way home
the moon inside her armature of light
cuts a silver window through cloud

Baraka
. . . Build the new world out of reality, and new vision
we come to find out what there is of the world
to understand what there is here in the world!
to visualize change, and force it.
we worship revolution1

Amiri Baraka, “When We’ll Worship Jesus”, emailed to UKPoetry ListServ, Fri, 10 Jan 2014 by Anthony John on hearing news on the ListServ of Baraka’s death

Just written
You don’t accept improvisation – just do it, tenderly & in wonder.

The practice of outside
outside
where the vagrants live
all the cold & pain
we hit against
each other

Jarvis
     He had to get to Harlow before dark.2
In Hertfordshire the loneliest certainties are
     trod into pavements of the patient dust.

Simon Jarvis, The Unconditional: A lyric (Barque Press, 2005), p 17

Spicer
Things fit together. We knew that – it is the principle of magic. Two inconsequential things can combine together to become a consequence. This is true of poems too. A poem is never to be judged by itself alone. A poem is never by itself alone.

Jack Spicer, “Admonitions” (“Dear Robin, . . .”), The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, edited Robin Blaser (Black Sparrow Press, 1975), p 61

Brecht
Fröhlich vom Fleisch zu essen, das saftige Lendenstück
Und mit dem Roggenbrot, dem ausgebackenen, duftenden
Den Käse vom großen Laib und aus dem Krug3
Das kalte Bier zu trinken . . .

Brecht, “Fröhlich vom Fleisch zu essen”, from http://www.fleischwirtschaft.de/dokumentation/kunstkultur/pages/2.html on fleischwirtschaft.de

 

 

1 Another embalmed head cult here, so watch out. Anything needing or demanding worship is self-evidently a demonic or delusory fetish. On poetry, revolution and psychotic delusion, read Sean Bonney, Notes on Militant Poetics, http://www.mediafire.com/view/ez1idi117qns675/Bonney%20 %20Notes%20on%20Militant%20Poetics%20%28imposed%29.pdf. I think he records symptoms rather than any remedy. There isn’t – carry on adjusting & attacking as we adapt to it & it to us. Cutting through it all in desperation merely detaches heads and fetishises the consequences.

 

 

2 This line I admire most of the poem, when the inherent & self-regarding London-Cambridge axis admits (though of course in suspension) another path for movement than its own mock-epyllionary oscillations.

 

 

3 Grossness is all

55. Fault Code Readings No. 2

Winter inimical & turbid – its scars
remain after, stories to commemorate our flight
minimal markers to show where we veered to
danced out of the future planned for us.1

So we’ll sing this again – to summon
who we are & should be in clear air
like wine, like anything that nourishes
swinging away husks of ancientest corruption.2

 

 

1 one of absolute commitment to those who know better & ably direct all things

 

 

2 cross reference examples of “emergence of high status elites” across all archaeological journals

54. Enochian Translation No.1

Enochian translation No 1

All these things are held in here ready to ripen
to fly off free like a god or delusion into the mountains
whence may come our aid because we believe in this or
just gravity rolling down – ah, dear momentum
you can be extraordinary if we summon our speed & our daring
sidestepping how they will block us – oh something peregrine & vagrant
we’ll sweep beside & over them, trust then to our formlessness
& improvise our pleasure. Well, alright then, let’s hope
& spring out, joyous as kitsch and irresistible
there are no lines to hold nor commitments to resolve
except the flight of human liberty, the flock of us
all diving out of the sun. Hold on this please
we have wandered long to reach here from
Tottenham through Broadstairs to Hardanger Vidda lakeside
hiding amongst the reindeer & prostrate willows, bare stones
that remain for millennia. The air is clear
we reform & blend – wilderness like wine, pristine heights
cheering, sustaining. Let us write what we feel &
what we have found out amongst ourselves now and
lay it out in full despite of the self-chosen elite – no
recognition of their statuses & rights, oppose separation
refusal to live on the common basis of all other beings
hoarding up capital, laws, propaganda & guns like
dung beetles.

52. A Recipe for I Don’t Know What

for someone close to me

Can I really give you this advice
everything hanging in frozen air
great stillness and profound arranging
all this emptiness within
we know one moment it will switch
a full plenary of rain
or the dingy mush when heaven is obscured
but today bright, delicious

OK, well, how can I
except as an other
in a world where what the gods wrote
is a phrase for laughter
& quite rightly not honour
for what the gods are is familiar
as ourselves
             their huge absoluteness
like vast capital letters
to say: this is more than troubled optics
dismal banality of entoptic flux
oh let them then be counters or relics
we shuffle to work out the final sums
our lives suddenly ending up as here

So, they’re contained & quivering
vibrating within this flawed blue bowl
heaped then in holiness
                        children &
                        parents &
                        partners &
                        families &
                        houses &
                        distances &
                        money &
                        its lack and
                        the decay of things
                        their inadequacy
                        & besides
                        the whole nature
                        of rule & control
                        & the point at which
                        what we’ve got is still better
                        than the guys w/ hatchets & big hammers
                        & then too
                        that absolute
                        sense of difference
                        to the world
                        & people
                        we are variously
                        born into

                        I can’t see
                        really
                        your collection
                        I expect
                        I’ve put
                        the ingredients here
                        & then
                        what processes
                        of lives & aging
                        of saying & not saying
                        of meaning & projecting
                        of hoping & of fantasising
                        carried on or rejected
                        the rules are rigorous
                        & I don’t understand them either
                        I think it needs
                        negotiating tenderly
                        as if a dark room
                        approaching the little one
                        & I know
                        you can do this
                        & do it so often
                        that all can be well
                        as the room’s vacuity
                        will surely decay
                        within hazes of nothingness
                        into human love acting

Then, like
it’s starting to bake
let it cohere
around what there is
& who there is
that runs around
laughing with life
believe in this
as your gods
hidden within
this sorry world
to redeem us yourself

[I got this from nowhere but here, and having stood here, all my life.1 I don’t really know what can help you; here is where “hope” and “faith”, like brown and red sauce in an unreconstructed cafe, make the whole mess better is the plan. Somehow & nevertheless these things may work – tenderly, not splurging, never to gain, but to live within & give. Yes?

But nothing is really from nowhere & I did get some of this recipe from Kenneth Rexroth’s poem “A Sword in a Cloud of Light”, from the sequence “The Lights in the Sky Are Stars” (dedicated to his daughter, Mary), The Collected Shorter Poems (New Directions, 1966), p 239 – tho first encountered by me with surprised delight on an A-level English “unseen poem” paper I was teaching.]

 

 

1 To lead on further, through the pressure of the maintaining of the reality of powerfully projected mental forms I’m exploring, as you know, through Dion Fortune, Stortford’s greatest student. Thank you here then too, Dr Theodore Moriarty, and all at The Grange.

45. A Recipe for the Commitment of an Imprecise Poem

for the Veer Collective, who spat out what was offered them1

OK, no pressure, guys: your choice
is your choice & no one could think that
something this impaired could match what you require
publishing is hard but what you value I thought clear
but, well, I am reduced to talking snarkily just now
to say I find those values of commitment and precision to be
well, fucking inhuman – dead abstractions
orders from the mouths of disembodied heads2
I am disgusted by these words & turn
to where my attention is more upon the care of little ones
it isn’t that I believe in Liberty3 but
that comes from inside, yes? not
some retro Between-the-Wars ModernistTM delusion
planning the relaunch of New Masses yet again
now that’s what I call real corrosive kitsch
I prefer the stuff people do in kitchens for
more revolutions start over food than verse

OK then, dudes, I hear you say
so what are you working on? what
‘s new out of Bishops Stortford? OK
the game goes on & we start
                            where we are:
so no food & drink, my friends
                    no bread & water
but stones & gasoline for you to throw – OK?

And then to list my ingredients all dutifully?
they’re around us I reckon in common human actions
not committed to separation & asylums
but communal, messy & just happening:
      loudly saying no
      & calling out wrong decisions
      joining together against these
      & at the worst4 some
      active stand in opposition
      even with the risk of loss
                            or wound
      & we’d take from that
      human fellow feeling to
      see how a new ordering
      can form itself, as
      utopian dreams get realised
      through kitschy rituals so
      this should be then made into
      something joyful & sustaining
      no I can’t give you instructions how
      but suggest feeling & emotion, good
      like in a poem, OK, imprecise
      & what it is committed to
      never externally determined or adopted

      And all the processes that affect us
      huge & frightening
      new high status elites
      bursting from the carcass of the old
      seizing in their mandibles
      all common necessities
      & making us then pay
      over our entire lives
      just to exist in this world
      they claim they’ve bought
      & demonstrate possession
      by making all that there is good
      funnel into them & theirs
      it happens continually
      it is at
               that moment of change
      maybe now to be upset
      but how to do so
      without smashing our own life support
      or not surviving the guns they have already hired
      rather more effective than our poems I would guess
      no, I don’t know how
      & if you think you do
      oh you precise & committed ones
      then try it if you like
      but we are done with leninism
      as it brings nothing
      but another new elite
      – don’t you know?

The presentation of our change
must be less obvious, less
cut off in self-righteous correctness
but engaged through our human actions
which must include for us our writing
as that is what we have to do and if
we commit to something other than what’s our poetry
I think we’d be wasting our own best efforts then
I know it’s not heroic nor what you’d call political
but that too needs some total metamorphosis
not repetition of past failures yet again
“keep the line, boys, keep the line”
no – this is not the field of status games
but the whole of our human life

In the southwestern sky
that sun of winter dies
nonetheless, though we hibernate
or fly, burrow underneath
forage dutifully amongst the rubble
we’ll work for what comes after us
not for the absolute precise but
just a better life somehow

[I got this just from what I’ve lived and seen. It cost me (& 80 colleagues) our jobs; looks like it’ll cost me publication too now. That’s all I can say at present. Sorry if it’s not adequate; but not if not found precise or not demonstrating some image of commitment. It’s what I have found more important than adopted stances, disembodied thought & the glee songs that built mass movements. Memo: write poems, find some better publisher[5], carry on with the care of little ones and the preparation of our food.]

 

 

1 “Thanks for submitting the work. Veer editors have read it and reached the decision that it doesn’t fall within the currently more precise and committed stance that we are adopting.” Email dated November 16, 2013

 

 

2 that means Charlie Marx & Big Ted, remember? & now Paulina the Staffie bitch

 

 

3 as you know, free Americans have pissed all over this word, like mice raiding a larder

 

 

4 usually that means usually

 

 

5 any suggestions, please? anyone?