Tag: sundog

91. A Recipe for Children

for you all

Little noisy children, then, aren’t
you nice?
          – just as you should be, yes
everywhere that we can think of
funny little creatures uncommitted yet
to all that crap we must believe & follow
adult masculine English, say
                             uncertain class & age
what commonplace delusions that you don’t
yet share
          of course now lots
totally fucked up & maybe even lost
but most alive & hopeful still
the future such a grasp of faith
actually here embodied
                       open & illuminating

So what do we need?
                    for more
little children to pass through
                                full
sometimes of life, sometimes of quiet
none of this easy & none of it a recipe
but what we’d need then is something like
                        an openness to your growing lives
                        & a way of adjusting all that is around
                        into your flourishing transformations
                        some sorts of food as varied & as comforting
                        as all that can be managed
                                                   & like too
                        spaces open and enclosed, full up & empty
                        you know, just every possibility
                        – someone1 needs to have produced these
                        & someone needs to carry this all on
                        somewhere to run & someone to turn to
                        softness & feeling totally assured
                        others just like when you’re bibbling & bobbling
                        & others totally unlike so you can learn good things
                                                        – whatever you need
                        time as well, to be on your own
                                                        staying engaged
                        & time to be caught up with others
                                                           a mad laughing mob
                                                           rolling down hills
                                                           little hills
                                                           giggling together
                        & words
                                good words attuned to you
                                           & about you
                                           engaging you in colloquy
                                           engaging you in nonsense
                                a constant gentle rain
                                language softened into mud
                                squidged up & scooped
                                                      all over you
                        & things for your bodies & things
                        for your eyes & things for
                        your ears & nose & your hands again
                        water & sand & mud & stone & wood & paper
                        plastic & metal & everything natural
                        & lots that is unnatural
                                                 stories & love
                                                 music & encouragement
                                                 peacefulness & challenge
                                                 & always
                                                          to listen
                                                          & to respond
                        Chinese feasts & barbecues
                        picnics & Christmas
                                            – all with as many others
                                              as you can gather
                        breakfast at Broadstairs or teatime in Coffee Corner
                        sitting on a sofa w/ everyone around or
                        just as many as fit
                                            on a mat out the back
                                            or even a large cardboard box
– this isn’t telling anyone
anything we don‘t know
                       but
just praising what is good
fall quiet now

Hullo?
       – are you alright?
this place needs noise now
needs everything said again
                            & done
whatever ceremonies are proper
that appear out of nothing
(like this whole ridiculous universe
                                     yes?
                                     & like us)
doing what you do to help the child
                     be what you are
                     & will be
                       a person
                       true person
                       playing yourself
                       as your self
                       just as you are
                       can be

This is
        a revolutionary demand I’d say
        to do this truly & fully
        rushing in as absolute & unforgiving
        like a sundog over Harlow2
        like the digging up of relics
        of who we could have been
        like a poem by Sean Bonney
        like an urgent summons
        on someone else’s phone
                                – oh my god it’s you
                                  that’s who they want
                                  you’re wanted now
                                  to help us all
make this much better
                                  if too late for us
                                  for all our children
                                  & yours for ever3

Thank you – this is
a start again to say
the same words really
(oh thank you constraints of form that chose me!
but I don’t care
                 – for what is good
we can say again & again
with no loss of balance, only
just to do better is a gain
our eyes will burn
unless we open them to this light
of the new world continually around us
utopian hope lurking even in unrented shops
& we risk losing it
letting the old drop onto it
suppressing it into what we are
actually bound here as we are
we think ourselves free still
we carers & we parents
we know that you must be
not as we are4
but as we could be
          should be
in a world that is as it should be
as nothing else will preserve our lives
                                & yours

[So much I must say, so much I must finish with, ending what isn’t a recipe, except as I say it is, disordered as late summer sun collapsing into autumn. We must dig out what we need from it, if we’re to get through the coming winter & you, our children, flourish – rooty-tooting like glad tapirs in an uncomplicated alchemy, changing everything we live within into what will sustain us, especially our children for ever. “Always a good time to rebuild, now,” we say, as we serve you this dish to enjoy & nourish

 

 

1 that is us, dear reader or dear audience

 

 

2 or Mortimer’s Cross or the someone else’s Bridge: cold & luminous anyway

 

 

3 The political is children; the psychological is children. Socialism is children. Everything else is profitable infanticide.

 

 

4 insipid ghosts

64bis. All My Own Words Now:

some pasquinades & squibs consequent to the preceding, that were passed around the crowds, as is the tradition

to write on paper
is an absolute act

 
as an author
             invisible
 

cadences writing poems
& fertile glitters
hallucinatory appeal finished
dead joy spilt

 
the water bubbles & coils
falls down then rises
slowly coming up
                 everywhere

 
& the children gather
learning to be serious as old folk
but breaking into bursts
of occasional glee
 

and we do have free choice
        – in small matters

 
lolloping along
an English bulldog
agape through carefully bred
inherent malformation
 

& how can we make these people real?
– w/ names, attributes & no inner being
endlessly repeated yet fortunately
each operation marred

 
The sun in splendour shines through wintriest skies
 

Perfection:
– oh, that’s brief, alright

35. Off We Go

So here in a low winter sun, to write
what the words are saying today. They
hear it all, really they do, even this far
past the absolute point where we all died.
First Mark D was shot, then the police laughed & lied
and it all took off, and then we crashed.
Nothing changed where we are – but what we want
no longer nameless. We can’t utter yet our future.
It sits on the chair and laughs.

Glad to have escaped Tone Vale. Its scars
the tokens of what formed us – imposed power
the Head Which Is Not in its dutiful pleasure.

Everyone’s story is the same. They haven’t
told it yet is all it means
decaff is bad, and missed deliveries
if you have a meeting on a monday
why not? at the granular level the balance
wavers & havers, you can’t tell or understand
go through with it, please, eyes open
it’s a pretty minimal joy isn’t it?
but it may be sufficient here
you’re so keen, then off we go.

A mouse, a mandarin, the talking horse &
the ever-bleeding head of liberty, removed
from underneath the White Tower, stolen out
from its jewelled reliquary in the basement of the Chapel
of the Opened Book.
This is narrative now
which I am glad the laws of avant-garde poetry don’t allow1.

There isn’t any more consistency than this in anything
OK? with gods above and gods below, they allow

whatever sort of cake we choose to eat.

Shots of Our Gracie leading the mill girls dancing down the street
amazing what a sundog does for you once seen aright
optic effects our tokens of hope & delight.

And then they all sat down to tea.

After blue, red, the mouse decides
not to modulate, but shine
delight is clear, bright, we hope now open.

 

 

1 exceptions made for some Cambridge poets I believe

34. Behold Our KitschN;-) Gods Displayed

kitschn godslit

My head, the head which is not, the head of ancient liberty, staked on a traffic cone, my head which remembers always sundogs shining in the south‑western sky, my old head reads that scabs are rats, my head reads that art will fight & flourish, my head can never stop splashing & shaking. All excesses are mine.

Oh, my fingernails, the tokens of laborious growth, my fingernails scratch the text beneath, rearrange it as a game of go1, my fingernails exceed my flesh, they rake your flesh gently, & excited will pleasure you, clicking w/ laughter.

Ah, my mouth, the mouth with which to eat & talk, inhales, exhales, the nameless mouth, the mouth of disgust, the mouth that is tight & keeps its own counsel, unpredictable & cruel. More is more divine, says the mouth, less too, more blue.

What do mice2 do? Happen in amazement, stuck to this big conceptual mess. Blue & red modulate to grey & pink. Areas of white flourish variously. Don’t trust what you can’t bite or write.

 

 

1 weiqi

 

 

2 are you really saying this is a bear?

24. More Mongrel Theory

It was the tattoo that told me all
a collar of S’s on his Staffie
                               disgust
I’d inscribe on its back to let it scream
the Sun in Splendour! the Neon Cross!
no excesses! no German! no bloody quotations!
just the right size in the right place
– now that’s what I call ein gutes Gedicht!

We’re all going to hell in a handcart
the little one sang so I relented then, a bit
the air reeked of buddleia & country-rock as well
the signs of an English summer as it all turns to kitsch
I accept no responsibility
                           not for your choices now
a true radical poetry can’t be written in English
what it utters cost too many lives

Is there any language where the word for “blood”
does not thrill you to the heart w/ all that’s lost?
OK, that’s what the dog said, & it knows
– not as a concept but a syrupy smell
yeah, like summer, like poetry, like radical chic
coming back again & again & sticking to us, oozing
to loopily annoy our skin
                          I won’t hurt it now

Encrust it all with gore! stick its Staffie head
on top of Bassett’s Pole – know nothing but hate
coating me up like ancient gloss paint – tacky
my eyes water for the little children covered with our hate
our excesses scar their lives already
what we lost in our long war with ourselves
gone absolutely: time for total strip out
I’m sorry about the dog
                        not it’s fault either
chuck the rubbish maybe & then get digging

Nothing holding us here once the dog’s dead – let’s
steal away, far from the buddleia, now, the salvia
all the chrysanthemums & dahlias that flock & flutter
they give me no pleasure
                         no understanding or ignorance
just gardeners filled with joy at their plugging of the void

I ought to like this world & trust but don’t
                                             who would?
time to stop killing dogs, then maybe to get some fun