The Haunted Inch

THE HAUNTED INCH

for Timothy Thornton

Our view is identical, crossed

out. At the end of these

walls is total minus:

Some absolute nothing

is there

         poised, imperfect

stasis. Containers, us too,

quietly humming eyes

pinned loose to peeling

shadows, the last planet

         to a final

         glint. Gone in us.

         Catching your face out

         & across;

nothing I have to prove

to you, that enormous face

in the sand, its curving vectors,

the gravity of its transmit

which is a wholly strange delicacy

wrought & gliding over

containers: Everywhere in stasis

         beyond this door,

the drop

without a centre; nothing to move deleted

vectors; a drop without a ground.

The slipped horizon a peaceful

nastiness wrought in faces & sick.

         The entire

         transmit sadness

holds the inch. The fucking inch

I am in I am in you & the, the snap

you answer, answer nothing. Nothing

calling back; save for a low terrible

         rumble miles below

         the sky, a minus.

We are quite alone but for these strange

movements, chilled mark near wall

where we are given over to

a once familiar now patched up

         moment, more fear in

         it. At some kind of desk, the lamp

for a way perhaps to stare down

or out. Out, the mistaken ambit,

this lamp, a view to a terrible darkness.

The perfect inch of air between

         frames is crammed with ghost.

         It is the haunted inch.

You put your eye into the inch;

it is locked out, to find the inch

a square, a neatly folded distance

in its softness

         unable to unpack.

         Standing there over

my head & shoulders

there is the form & shape of a man

moving over & around, standing right

behind me, we are adamant

         occasionally; there are

         four of us there

wearing nothing but ghosts.

Old Carts

The needle in your brain turns about
to the south where is

The river
what river, any at all and like pins in the sky they flit
and steel your super-vision

cuts them sky to ground
         moving the surface
of the taught river, then slack, then taught

to have met him, that took you through
the frosty clear dark, to the carts

each strange query reflects in us
an innate sense of care. I do believe that

and that I love you so much even now
tearing like a pin in the air to south
as you stretch north right back

to the garden of my childhood to the street
river of my current uncertainty
and yours, certain futures

cut out of the sky lying back to cart
frost cut the sky through smog

to make us speak.

Dream Diary 22.10.2016

Not us much detail as the last one. I am getting married. Fiona and Catherine have arranged the marriage. They won't tell me who I am marrying, just that I need to get into my wedding dress and sleep in it because there won't be time in the morning. They help me into it. I meet Theseus in the Duke of Norfolk to take a delivery. That is what happened in my dream. Ok.

Dream Diary 21.10.2016

Between 5am and 7am.

I am in a town, or finding out how to get there, and the town is more or less like Lewes, but with some of the buildings including my childhood home in Acomb. I am there with my old boss, who is running some kind of artistic event, though it turns out to be more like an activist gathering. Who the activists are is very unclear, but it turns into a conference which people from all over the world are attending. Kim Jong Un is there and Dolly tells me that I have to meet him because I won't get the chance to meet him again. I start to talk to him and feel I ought to bow to him which I do and as I bow something radiates from my head like paint spray and in tandem with my bow a tie appears around his neck and following my stoop descends down to just above his waist. If I stay bowed he will be wearing a tie but if I stand up it will be gone. I stand up and it is gone. This is the first hint at lucidity. Then Keston comes over and shouts "of course!" and shakes Kim warmly by the hand at which point the Internationale comes on. Kim doesn't know the words, even though I am able to sing it in any language I choose. I sing it to him in Korean then French. He can just about make it through the first verse in French. Keston whispers to me that we should leave him alone because he's evil. We talk about innate evil with a group of activists from Denmark who turn out to be extremely Islamophobic. My new boss has taken over the event and the event is now studded with my colleagues from work. They seem to be friendly. I can trust them where I can't trust the activists. My new boss says the police are coming for a routine search. I suddenly realise there is a rucksack that I must hide. It isn't mine but it has my name on it and it is full of drugs I've never heard of. I open the drugs education pamphlet I was given in year seven, but none of the names or pictures match. I don't know what most of the drugs are anyhow, but the rucksack which isn't mine has to be taken outside where me and a school friend from year seven put it under a very light millstone with space below it and cover it with grass. Two police officers appear and ask me where the rucksack is. I decide to be honest, remembering when Colin Baker (playing Doctor Who) in Trial of a Timelord stated "the truth can't harm me" before being led standing on a cart inside the Matrix to his executing - remembering that he himself is putting himself to death, thinking about the passage Keston sent me from Beckett's Molloy and about containers. I am not scared but I will go to prison so I am scared. I keep sliding between not being scared and being scared really quickly as I open the rucksack for the two smiling police officers and pour out bags of crystals and herbs which they decided before they came to work were now illegal. I will go to prison for this. My best bet is to play the "mad card". I asked them how they knew about the rucksack which I now know was mine all along. They tell me the name of the workmate who tipped them off. She is a very kind person indeed, and I cry to her asking her why she has done what she has done. She seems nonplussed as she explains that if the police ask you something you tell them something.

I am called in for my interview which I assume will be with the police or with a lawyer or a judge and suddenly know that I know nothing of the law, of my rights, of what I can and shouldn't say and how the entire structure of law works in any case at all. It's a huge relief when I discover that my interview is actually an interview about poetry conducted by the poet Laura Kilbride, and that my lover, Dolly, will be there. We will be discussing the divergent methods of poetic composition we use. We will answer the questions in turn. We are in a giant cot and Laura Kilbride is at the bottom of it smiling at us and pouring completely green tea while asking us a really difficult question about poetic forms we've never heard of, and anyway in the parallel, the conference, I have to get a train home soon. The giant cot lurches forward and I realise that though I am extremely comfortable and relieved to be in it I am also restrained, whereas Dolly is not. A small face appears in the wall smiling uncomfortably at me. I use my slightly awake mind to undo the restraints, and then give a blistering answer on the form that I've never heard of. Dolly gives a still more blistering answer; the form starts to appear as a physical object which is irresistibly beautiful. Laura touches it with her left foot and it spins around. We make jokes about the terrible concrete/sound poet we met in Athens. But the restraints are back and the cot is gently rotating and my new boss falls past the window, which is the train I am missing. And then I woke up and it was all a dream.

the                the
                    distinction
                   "inside"
                   "outside"
the                same
the                image
                     picked from
                     two distances

                     so called
                     the same (?)
diagram        look at the
                     diagram
                     two
                     of the same.

SHREW'S FIDDLE BEING USED

         One minute, this all night & unable

to feel a thing, how your head flung about

slips into the field; I see a bundle of leaves

yelling

 that you cannot go.

           Scattered far out over the country

through the sky’s field

     are other parts of you

flung

down here; down here your own danger

carried out at night, parting, resolving

lying. Then

                                        You appear there

         Speaking

                                         Your elf voice

                  private confessional for chastity:

The outside world enrols the inside.

I can see a butterfly;

  the history of containment

is outside power, the majorative. Where neither of us

are, but the thing plaits, abstracting our places,

for this moment local. The hotel taken in red ivy

a monstrously fucking unfair pejorative “we”, I am

  someone just walked over my grave.

  Perhaps it was a Yeti.

For a while at least, it is a little open ended. Noticed

a lack or a kneeling stockade. Barely knowable

person there fallen

under the sky’s random release mechanism

now that

     someone knows. That someone elsewhere.

  

           

         A puppy cage wrought &

         good. Especially sad

                                                 are the emptied bars of

          mouth slumps some

          times its stitched blank

         openness is the exact permission needed to fault it

        

         betrays the whole world.

                                           A real cage

                                           Far better than that.

What is Life?

It's no exaggeration to say that all of a sudden an album I have only listened to once is probably the best album I've ever heard. It was with a weird rush of joy and pain that we sat there and listened to the whole thing through. Late at night, after a tediously repetitive work shift, in my deadening routine. Blooms What is Life is a labour of devotion. It feels extremely sorrofwul and lost at times. That sorrow and that loss is broken through with what sound like the sounds of actual illumination. There is such an immensity of expression; such a sense of time - the universal turning in to the personal; a realised separation of those two things, and a realisation of there being no two distinct things. Sorry. I know I can get a bit confusing, and I'm expressing my own micro-narrative which is probably a far cry from what is actually there. What I will say is that it is rare I feel so loved by music, and finding things that have profound emotional effects on me is often a bit of game of chance cards. This album is stunningly beautiful, and I think I will value it forever. I'm going to listen to it again now as I walk anxiously about in town. For fans of the void, masturbation as self love, dancing and jellyfish moving about in the sea.

NPD

The problem is life. Every time you think you are breathing you are fucking the dead. The problem is the midlands. Every time you read a book. Every time you correct someone you are a violent Tory. Every time you think you are correct. Every time you think you're embracing the outer. Every time you feel bad about yourself. Every time you carve up your body image. Fuck, this is futile and imitation. Every time you say "I'm quite OCD'. Every time you self diagnose as neurotypical, yeah, it's you motherfucker. Get your head in my throat in my hands. Every time you imitate me I will do the same to you. Every time "I don't have a voice". The problem with the establishment of "spoken word" as an art form is that even the people who attend it think it's shit. The problem with Kate Tempest is the same as the Midlands and drama school. The problem with me is I'm lost and bitter and a fucking traitor to myself. The problem with every problem is the score of its ultimatum written badly on the sky or on the stars if you look to the stars for guidance or beauty you cannot be trusted. The problem with you is you're afraid of Theresa May the same as I was and that problem is the desire for a neurotypical grandfather who won't let go of your leg whilst he hangs you over the balcony like *********who was a sex offender like the nebula like the sea like the sand under the sea which is, now I think about it, the wettest thing in the world. Stop fucking following me. When you try to write down the thoughts that come into your head you usually try to stop them then try to start them again. William Burroughs has nothing to offer you. You already know. There is nothing here. I have nothing to offer you. Poetry is fucking stupid. You are fucking stupid. That punk in the Blue Man, he is on the spectrum. That neurotypical support worker, she is on the spectrum. The moon is on the fucking spectrum. "We're all a bit autistic", no, You're. Then you can get up and then be sick then you can say some of these words to make yourself feel more comfortable. ************ is a fucking creep. All his poems are enemies. I haven't read them. It is rare that this much disclosure. Oh but it's a special occasion. There is a every time there is a national poetry day you write a poem. A very long time ago Hans Falada was trending in Waterstones. I am running out. I am not a clear voice. Don't ingest me like you would botox. Get over your desires. If you're not reading by next week someone you hadn't heard of last week you are killing yourself. If you can read you are already in hell. The neurotypical discipline is a white fantasy in lieu of visible slaves. Teach yourself not to listen.

NOTICE

NOTICE

Tell yourself the way out; again,

again, again. Force your will to play out;

what the fuck is inside you?

Such a little madam,

ratified by habit. The pulse

of daily loss, arrested little heart.

Torn up one by failing one

nothing left to clarify,

in littlespace you’re quaking

where once you were personified.

What is that left behind you?

Leave until you die.

What the fuck is in you? Never

latch the door. You have not been ruined.

Not quite,

being ruined isn’t shit:

Things become sucked out of you.

Wrongness basted every hole...

Waste became internalised, permission

never given. Take your tiny self

away strangled by your ribbon.