Sappho - Hymn to Aphrodite / Fragment

Hymn to Aphrodite

I climbed into the sky today

and all todays; the sky kills ((o so lovely

body & hands ((o slippy contrast

                      ((love robbed my heart.

There; in the sky snapping over

the Brutal, guarding their land

((spare me o

((shake not my
                         shake our sky’s heart.

                        ((Past times,

we’d array your voice & mine

would rush in tandem to it.

A billion throats crack in the sky.

You have climbed my heart, screeching

of the sky: (His iridite golden sanctum)

The tether, nor iridite: pinion,, arrayed

to suppose extremities of shame

the ground here is a clubbing blade.

The bustling figure down here

                       she dallys for the sky

                       to   end.

What has become yet demean your

soiled,, shed skin,, shed be shamed

you asked; come, and awash,

                 avast! ((Sentimental

                 & squirming in the through-space.

Love, ((& billions running after as behind

retracting as you flood;

it is a choiceless unforgiven

flag

        ((the will that stretches in your beck.

I would call out, the dancing plague

wring each hand & total some billion

array to sky-crack,, voices ((throats

             be; retracted & flooding (( all so promises. 

*

[rrr,                          ]

     ... is this tangent

garlands

        ...         had a garden

boys & guards,,

garlands, back away…

              ...               R,

just to nestle in

Publications

Hello. I've had a few things out recently, and I thought it'd be good to put a note up here. I'll post them, and post a couple of things people have said about them to give you an idea of what's there.

THIS from Barque Press:

GIDEON

 'Gideon is a hex; a sigil. The three sections record and contest alternate histories, quick-scoping again and again the same target, only to pronounce him dead already and absolutely immortal. The three sections are counterparts - Gideon, Isis and Eris. A grotesque and unmanageable trinity.'

The book can be got here: GIDEON

*

THIS from Veer Books (Burner Veer):

BALCONETTE

 **** 'What is real? What is the situation that forces you to resort to the power of death? What is the state that has no answer to that question? The reach of this work, its co-ordinates - its cosmology - includes our intimate relation with destruction. The dictatorship of the proletariat hurled against the conditions of now. Pain without transcendence. Start there. It also includes the utmost tenderness (the naked, not the pathetic). Where do we move from there?' (William Rowe) ****

Total Disclosure (if it ruins narcissism)

I've been posting here a lot recently. Sorry for the onslaught. It's just that at the moment I'm in the position of having a job I'll be starting fairly soon and also having a bit of time to think. Without feeling constantly worried, guilty etc. The strange thing is, its done some odd things to my wants. The impulse to smash stuff up is still there. But it's a lot more stupid and funny. The only way to respond to any kind of personal anger is to grab something really big and chuck it as hard and far as you can in any direction. Imagine if more people did that. It's why I love the countryside so much, in fact it's the only reason I like the fact that we're not all packed in to a completely solid form where we can't move at all. Some people would say that is literally the case, but they're wrong. I mean, for some people it's really close to that, and anyone who's ever got to move down a road or corridor should count themselves extremely lucky. My point is that I like space and I like how it is interupted by stupid representations of law. I don't 'like' that. I'm not signing up to it as a good thing. It's the enemy, right, law. But I do like the walls because jouisance is chucking something at one of them, or at another stupid fragile thing, even by mistake. Or actually it's being chucked against them from time to time yourself if you're anything like me. It scares me all the time that we'll probably always need law. Whatever law it is. 

For a while people have been talking about total sexual disclosure. What worries me about this as a principal for poetics is that its focal point ends up in the tone row of the symptom, so the music perhaps relies upon an understanding of an exit from the law based on what we do in private, making it public. That, for me, doesn't feel like a deracination. It actually feels like something of a surrender, and I worry that certain subjectivities are ignored in its wake. Perhaps a more interesting approach would be a disclosure of that particular need. But this sounds like strategy again, like there's some perfection to strive for, some ultimate end; a place in history. That, for me, is often the active broadening stem of the kind of thought that should be absolutely distrusted. On the other hand, I'm not going to start prescribing some altruistic self negation. Abandon ship and hope for the best. So how do we keep our disclosures away from narcissism? Or keep narcissism away from us, when the walls and precious objects are everywhere. 

Delicacy has to sear through pain as pain must rest on care. Care lives in terror as terror falls out of violence. What is a collision? When violent subject says: 'I am not always submissive but just now I always am." to which non-violent subject says 'I am not always dominant but today I always am'. A harmonic arrangement / agreement. That arrangement totals in social outcomes like gender, work, sexuality and confession. Terror is the right to break the harmony of one law while exacting another, and it's women who suffer the beginning of that new law. 

The totaling of a song that totals desire to the point of absolute weakness could be strength in reaching past terror, over the horizon. When really you want to talk about the unjustified, the shameful and innate; the bit in your memory that feels untraceable, a rendezvous that was always there and was once never there. Okay, I'm feeling very confused now, and I should carry on filling in these forms. God bless you, one and all. xx

A Letter to the Staff of Portslade Jobcentre Plus, Boundary Road.

Dear staff,

                   I've had a lot on my mind, and yesterday a lot of it was you. What it means to be cooked inside an oven. Please don't be scared. I actually want to thank you, with any genuine quark I can shoot across. My writing is often filled with hatred. I want to say something else - that you helped me. And you did. I wrote a death list, all your regional managers. And I know what you're battling. I can't imagine being put in such a horrific position. A while ago I was in the dole office and a young man who I think had mental health issues, who I think shouldn't have had to be there, begging you for the shitty insult of life expectancy you're allowed to give out, he was asked 'have you done any paid work in the last two weeks?' to which he replied 'I've sold a bit of weed'. Now, there's a lot in there. First of all I want to wish him all the best. Sincerely. I hope he claims JSA for as long as possible while at the same time selling loads of weed. I hope it's good stuff, the kind that alights the consciousness, or so I'm told. Whatever it is. I hope he gets rich. I hope the gangster capitalist terrors stay away from his door too. I hope one day David Starkey meets him in the street, sees the angles singing in his pupils, falls to his knees, stabs a cut throat razor into his larynx and uses the last blood bubbles in his throat to say 'thank you'. I don't hope that. I don't hope or wish violence on anyone. I know I talk about it a lot, but seriously, I can't imagine a revolution without some kind of terror; I don't want that. We'd rather get there peacefully, right? So I'll step back from this masculinist brag, the easy valour of postured attack.When you find a dot or point you find the web it's stuck in and follow its course. Sorry for sidetracking - the Jobcentre Plus worker told him 'you shouldn't say that!' and put the guy's claim through. This was around six months ago. If you're a manager reading this, which you're not, you're not reading this, thinking about some enquiry, the person who did that got sacked or is dead or never existed or now runs in local government or is the face on my stomach your ass is kissing. I don't know. Dear staff, thank for stuff like that. Stay strong. Think about striking. Think about the Sussex council refuse worker strikes, how people can't bare being left with their own rubbish and how your claimants are considered detritus by most people. Take that weapon in your hands. Mangle their rule book any way you can.

And next go through West London near Wigmore street. That area where the clothes shops have bouncers on the door and take with you some poems by Frances Kruk. My friend Will told me 'there's an insect inside every word in Frances Kruk's poetry'. That's absolutely true. And it is an insect as an insect is to a person. The spectral imagining of the mechanics of a death-fuck. Sometimes people talk about poems like they're strategies. That feels like a depleted life to me. I keep coming back to that book. Every note on every page is a point on a strand of a web, and it takes you to its ends only to confront you with more attachments, patterns and spirals. Kruk's poetry is not a ventriloquist. I trust it. It distrusts itself enough to form a sincerity that is at once totally violent and coherently domestic. It stalks around the tombs of women subjected to the labours of upkeep, unwaged, inhibitors etc etc. It's not the kind of poetry that tells you things or describes things to you. It's the kind of stuff that is alive inside its unheimlich; scratches suspiciously at the laws the meant.

I'm sure you're a bit confused by all this, but I went through London the other day reading that book. I also used to read it like a spell or a prayer outside your place of work in the rain. Did it work? Well, expecting this kind of poetry to work, to do something for you; rain to rain. I'm just not sure what there is to want from it, except that it is there binding me to the fucking ground pinching my head and tearing it into the sky. The kind of stuff that can, by its will, step out of time and act on the moment. Some of the best stuff there is. Anyway. I got listening to this music. Here's a link: Ingrid Plum. That and the poems do and say more than I ever can. Thanks again. Keep up the banishing rituals if it helps / if you like. xx

'today I weep for spiders
soaked in LSD
their Brocades broken Scaffolds
made hilarious by Camera's Eye:
Lonely Contraction
spooks Me into Clothing'