Prelude

(after Sappho)

I am lying in a dead body under the dead light on the water.

You are the distance. As I lie here in my body

in the warm dead sea, you are the distance,

the light at the top of the water, the arriving, the leaving.

I stare across the field to the buildings. So many lives

inside that place they move in the light and hide in the dark,

the field inside the dream, where I climbed into the ground

through layers of wires and posts, down into the soil

to find your still living body, having been  there, down

in the earth all this time, and we began to climb up

through layers of pipes and posts,

to move into the light of the field.

You are still dead, asleep in the soil and I wonder who thinks

of your name, goodbye until paradise, until we are

inside the wires.  I touch the surface of the water.

We have sat quietly and suffered the violence. Lost

our interior lives. My eyes are against the water.

My body is beneath you, being slowly deadened,

its attrition. The water has covered my body and I am lying

dead in the water. What a frenzy in my breast raged and by

what cure to be assuaged, what gentle youth I would allure

whom in my haunted heart secure, who does this fractured

life subdue, tell me water, tell me who. You may live

between the sand and the salt and the breath.

We woke inside the dead water. We were scared... like any

newly born baby opening our eyes to a gigantic glow — we

lived in the dead water, our dead bodies glowed, we were

frightened... every knock, every word. We realised our panic

was minute compared to the panic of the mirrors,

and it flashed: We were invincible... because we were

everybody. We held our bodies together in the dead

of the sea. It is a life of attrition I live to refuse, under

the cover of the dead water in my dead body I hold you

to myself, you are still older than I am. I believe that you are

still moving through the world and through time,

through this slow dead water, so beautiful and calm,

the surface that I touch with my palm.

I stopped being living for you.

And this will be your food, the salt of the water.

And this will be your air, my blood and my skin.

And this will be your light, the pulse of my chest.

And this will be your sleep, the sleep of my body.

Look up, so much beauty, look into the ground.

Squint with me, into the middle distance, so far

back and I am dragging you out of the ground.

The escape is corroded. Your overnight balance.

We go out of our minds and tear the skin from fish

I am lying beside you forever and speaking this.

You are moving close again, handing me an open paper bag.

I long for your heart to move. It is still.

The ground is somewhere, gone. Wind tears

the scaffold sheets. But I can barely speak. I lift your body

out of the water and begin to walk, holding you in my arms,

barely speakable. Please fall out of the dead ground. So far

away, and into the hungry earth. I stretched and lifted you

into the dried up air.

The birds are silent (while you remain), in the woods

a complete silence of birds. The beauty of the skies I hold

you there, Come then, I pray, grant me surcease from

sorrow. We are no mercenaries, shaking children unjust

in the soil, we are destroyed at inception, dead in the soil,

dead in the water, the water is dead, dead in the sockets,

dead in the chest. We are dead in the water and the soil. Salt

will be our food. Kill the soil and the water,

I want you to live again. These are my last words

for you, the salt and the water, the birth and the death.

Come away from dying, come and stare at me again.

Grant the sound to cease from sorrow,

quickly the light will follow.

I watch the lives are destroyed.

Give you limbs and teeth, life after life,

up from the soil, up to the air, limbs and a chest

and eyes to stare and the peeling deadened water

and the mouth of the ground.

Of barely seen, hardly noticed, you were in grey and red,

some yellow and the sun in your glass. Would I breathe

at you, strobing yellow, grey flecks of red would my dreams

haunt me your climbing figure dangling from the sand

and salt stained in the sun on the white paper day

I stare down into the bag there’s nothing in it the colours

are flotsam we’d array love arrests my heart it has destroyed

the mind is over is all that is left O, slipping contrast love

robbed my heart.

I love to fall asleep, but I fall asleep to you. I am robbed

of sleep and robbed from the heart. We lurch up together

in the dirty water like wooden deckchairs. I think your chest

is moving, or peeling away from the earth.

There will be eleven more summers, you said.

And my hand moved slowly across the soil.

I am near to screaming for you, because you bob in the soil

like a collapsed deckchair, close the sky and a little

like the light that is coming to touch the sky,

and I do not expect your chest to move, nor for your eyes

to gently fall open, nor for the ground to give you back,

nor for my breath, for paradise singled down to a tiny fleck

of yellow in a sea of gray, or a few red bands.

But I can hear your voice.  

I am Tube, the vivisectionist. The sky tonight

is an absolute banger. I do not expect to touch the sky,

but it bangs and it aches like fuck. He said to me, Sappho,

you sick little vermin. I said, ‘but you're married.

Just like a cop’.

A bit of your voice, a tiny glint of how you would speak

with a little creak fleck of yellow, red and tongue

the glass, but where we were or trace of you in a carpark

as I sat there alone, like the soil. Sometimes buried

to me or sometimes that one time so alive and climbing

back into the world, older and able to move

through wires and tubes in the ground. And what you do

to the heaving chest though never my eyes

dusted in soil and decomposed, just a piece of your light

seeping into the creaking air.  

How the aching sky tugs the tiny chests from the ground.

I clench all of my teeth. Deep into the scaffold sheet howls

the cladding wind, paper and gold, grey or gray, two strips

of red, eleven new summers, I am the birth and the death

and the light that is coming, the hopeless stunted light

that is come to go again, lain against the water’s top. Red

on red I am dead to hope I know not what to do:

I have two minds. In doubt I am, I have two minds,

one is grey, the other a hopeless splash of yellow or gold

I know not what to do. With my two arms

I lift your tired body from the speechless ground,

so, like a child after its mother, I flutter like a scaffold

in the tearing wind. The eyes of my head scan tenderly

left to right, the eyes in the sockets of my body in the water

stare up at the soil through the salt at your chest.

To me thou didst seem a small and ungraceful sea.

Now that we are allowed on the grass will you not speak.

I will not speak. Your voice with a tiny creak.

You drank in the water forever, every single piece

of the water inside you, but you shall ever lie dead;

it feels as though everyone has forgotten, that I alone burn

for you to live, that tiny blotch of colour by the gate

of the car park. Now we are allowed to go onto the grass

you wander unnoticed even through death folding

into the shadows and fixed to the gloom

where memory seeps away like the water

you drink in forever.

I clench my wet fists, shot up in colour.

The killing of a wave in the colours

of the field, the rain is done the sun is come.

Circuits and the stars about the grey moon

throw down their red beauty.

I know one day that you will come,

that your madness will step aboard the world,

do not try to save me, stay in my arms.

Do not save me.

Down in the leaves press to my cheek

the grassy eyes of the hollow bare ground.

The motions of soil from the motions of the ground

from the motions of water from the motions of your chest

from the motions of the water from the motions

of the ground to the motions of the soil;

I stand chest deep in your grave, my eyes gently scream

in the rain. Why were the ground why were the chest

why were the indicants of the field. Now we go

are allowed to the grass and the grass for our feet

is the life in the arc, we are falling and moaning,

smiling and sharing, a prelude to taking you into the earth.

I am stood in your grave neck deep,

trying to dry out the last of my eyes.

They will not come dry. They are like the dead water

that won’t stop pouring into your mouth.

The never ending drinking of the dead water

and the never stopping fleck of yellow or gold

the grey and the grain of the floor, that pillar,

the yellow tree in the corner, the birth and the death,

the pillar, upside down, jutting from the hard grey ground,

slowly lilting in the warm cool water,

holding in a trance to our chests.

Sweet victims in the soil

chewing salt,

I am so glad we’re allowed to go out onto the grass,

best to a tender front may I liken you

to the quiet water’s top

there was no other, no other sound but your quiet chest

please come back to the grass,

stir not the pebbles, I am standing in a grave,

up to my shins, and the rain has stopped.

We are alone, with blushes and gently darting eyes;

our kind voices reach up to incredible colour

in the air, in the water, the bulb and the gaping tube,

gathering chests and holding in the longing swell

as soil to grey against red to the last fleck of yellow or gold

creaking into the dead grey light

on the water, the light of your life pouring out

to the haunted and emptied shore.   

Nursery Rhymes

Over the last few years I have written a fair bit about how stupid protest slogans have been, and each time I have been yelled at. Each time I've been to a protest and people have been there with idiot comedic placards every time they shout into my ears and the guilt at not joining them, feeling my unlinked arms. I'm sure a lot of people know what this is, but the residual guilt gives way to the repeat motion. People tell me they are like nursery rhymes: "Hey, ho! Theresa May has got to go". That is not a nursery rhyme. Nursery rhymes are cloaks of horror and history - distinct myths. You sing them to babies, and they go into their heads, their mouths, their language formation.  I seriously think that everyone who has ever chanted that slogan has let Theresa May go into the houses of those less advantaged than them and do her violence. Not on purpose, but when lives are at stake it doesn't matter what you think you mean. The People's March in London was perhaps the epicenter; a middle class who despise the poor, spit on subjectivity and utterly detest poetry parading about speaking in an abstract language about a very real violence. How can we oppose anything when these people step into our mouths and we are not allowed to let the stuttering painful speech we live inside conduct our feet and our hands towards the reality of systemics? I wrote this because just now I read this from Sean Bonney: "One royal car one screaming mob". Three strong beats marching over a stuttered division between people and people who hate people; one lives in its position as "royal" the other is always "screaming", one is a car the other is a collective. This really happened but it was also never allowed to happen again. A nursery rhyme is the scar of a history you are not allowed to comprehend.

A Creeping Suspicion

First off this is just a short note which I want to think through further. I am a little afraid to publish it but also it has been creeping around in my mind for a while and I want to at least unblock the dialogue.

A lot of poetry has become really subjectively localised and fairly narcissistic, as in resolved to not go on beyond itself / the self that composes it - the poet as a kind of deflated subordinate against the world. I think one reason for this is a very understandable suspicion of speaking on behalf of others or even posturing. However, I see this strand of writing really closing itself and its contemporaries down and I feel it comes from on the one hand a very fearful place. Fear from the rise of hate crimes. The pressure of austerities. Colossal uncertainty. I feel it also rises out of a latent and harmful pressure to testify. What use are you if you are not testifying to your own subjective pain? That kind of very harmful pressure that is so horribly present in the assumptions of roles for marginalised artists. "Can you tell us all about your journey?" etc. The personal as political but with the "personal" horribly fetishised. A kind of axiomatic totality of selfless. I also see it as a reaction against certain strands of poetry that have been historically difficult and inaccessible. However, I think this opens up a new zone of exclusion - another aesthetic blocking point. A friend recently described a lot of the poetry at a reading as similar to snippets of social media posts interspersed with responses to certain books of theory. The most suspicious part of me wants to name this as a turn away from the kinds of ambitious scope of poetics in terms of speaking about really really terrifying and impossible things for the reasons detailed above, but something that can easily be steered or steer itself into mere personal ambition; a place where a different kind of posturing can grow. What happens when poets decide only to speak for or with themselves.

Four Sonnets (after Theresa)

And how I made a bed for you, and how

    before I’m sick that outburst shudders on

         in bed late payments leave their stains. I vow

in necks and sick to chuck the eldest son.

    So now alive, lay you my gentle dog

         head down upon your gorgeous tired stomach.

I am so out of love, but your back taut

    in knots through early hours, of a feeling

         sick with guilt in debt it thinks of you

without a lucid blot of false relief;

    the damp of air. To sing: Why do I hear

         the thundering panels sick yourself again.

So dream of finding lives to swallow up

    and lever up your own heart into dust.

Oh you like none have never truly planned

    for anyone sent out an even chance

         of not returning but to your command

the cadence waves of what they will have left.

    Drifting up to gaping air for breath

         the ingrain left upon the bench is death.

Heaving for the sky they were your take;

    bodies stutter ‘it was no mistake’.

         Cram your shoes back on and draw a lake;

the shore is close and we will be alive.

    So you watch them sink but first you take

         a sodden breath and push yourself far on.

Inside the weather you well understand

    it is time to go, and swallow up the sand.

Then if I am disgusted in your life

    it’s not because of you, but as you are:

         Imagine being sick but more like you;

              to find a little self care really hard.

Don’t be fearful love it’s not your fault:

    The terminal regime you called your life.

         I made a creepy home for you in salt

              and didn’t see you getting on the plane.

Destinies my fierce heart has rendered

    called “draconian”. I made them work for us,

         how in fucking hell I am remembered

              like being sick on holiday again.

Still with all the safeguards set in place

    you will  not eat what others put to waste.

Watching you eating the brain as it popped

    and I have been up with my stomach in hearts

a twitching nest of caterpillar nails

    nothing happened tenderly again, so

nowhere as acute or I would sick

    like nothing sick I made a creepy life,

oh you like none like perfect you my dog.

    In sick I made draconian my seas;

on holiday again to swallow down

    they gaze up lifeless but they must because

the gentle scream “hostility”, I said.

    Brain open as it popped and let the smell;

like nothing sick will happen when you die

    you chuck yourself and fade out from the air.

(28.03.2019)

Hopelessness IX

IX

For going to sleep by your side is too dangerous to live for, when both the eyes are closed and all the tube is left exposed; the nozzle that has made my pain is flapping like a gorgeous mouth to taunt my mystic shadow in the meadow, gleaming empty. No for I will not again beholden pure to loss getting out
and going back and getting out again, the clot that walks me back along the slowness of the tube as if you shudder back to life beneath the wirey soil pressed back in and go back to begin again as if it never happened making up the movement from the underground refinery, cause to cause to edge of loss and death you lick back up again, once proud inside the meadow going to die there by yourself. My practice, officer, could best be described as moving slowly, then very quickly, then very slowly backwards down the tube away from my body.

“Don’t trust me. Never fully trust me.”
“How will I know?”
“If you go to my house and go to the bedroom and if you find there a small grey solid thing, it is a wedge of limescale, slightly coloured with brick red, and it has an imprint in the shape of an “o” and either a “v” or an “n”. It is 3.7 inches furthest end to end. If you were to, for example, find something like that, there on the windowsill, then you’d know that you couldn’t trust me.”
“You keep it by the window?”
“If indeed I have it, and by the  bedroom window… yes.”
“Why?”
“Suppose I found it in their kettle, took it, and kept it. Set it down on the windowsill one day, for want of anywhere else.”
“Can I trust you on this?”
“You’ll have to check for yourself.”
“Then I can trust you.”
“If it is there.”
“Then I can.”
“Then you can trust me.”
Oh quiet and horrible life, tighten your belt etc. A thudding of the air, a wiry fuckup. We would wince at our thoughts. Were told we were collateral, nothing new to report but in new voice, and as attuned we were remained the same. Keep still but don’t. Move but stay.
“Naturally!”
“Naturally…”

Naturally, a natural union between a man and a woman in the sweet meadow. They go face to face. “So tired.”
“You’ll pick up”
“What shall we eat?”
“Zovirax.”
“Again?”
“Again and again.”
“How will I trust you?”
“See for yourself”
“I do.”
“I know.”.

Hopelessness

And forgotten as the pressing logics that astrict the voice in the situation; the ones that are wrong to do: What is the function of the bank to a human customer struggling? A level of underlying panic is deliberately played into the life of somebody not in a position to make “good decisions”, asked again and again when making “bad decisions” if they think they are making good or bad decisions; this is consent. The low panic is the incentive not to be in it, and until the trap door closes up you can hover just above iy, ducking under, being the most profitable you, only working to pay the bank in daily charges, loan repayments and charges for going over which happens several times a month; it is maintained in text alerts which come just at the right time of the morning, which you are afraid to stop for want of losing more, but which builds in you an energy of panic not indistinct from the energy needed to move through the day, not at all indistinct, so whatever must be done to absolve them and you is almost impossible to do, so that when you make the call your voice clogs up like a choking budgie, just enough to stutter out the meanings of the transfers, they look you up and down, your expenditure, every little thing under the eyes of somebody at work. Someone who is managing to be not where you are. You’ve known these people, three of them. One was a Christian who routinely sneered at the friends you kept and your drinking (so you thought) and the other two are two of the kindest people in the world. Kind people operating slow death switches, which in turn jettison themselves, and the kindness you have felt, not ever wanting to ask again, going back and back slowly then quickly; yards down the tube, away from your body which swings in the havoc lighting of the office as somebody at work leafs kindly through your expenditure and makes decisions according to the maintenance of slow, chronic and often terminal panic at the other end of the line, at the very bottom, meanwhile António Horta Osório makes £4000 an hour which Stephanie Bon, who works for the bank at a low level on £7 an hour raises alarms about on social media and is summarily sacked, and somewhere along this chain of false returns a terrible zeitgeist future flashes bleak red: A blog somewhere, a tiny one, with a tiny readership. It flags up the story of the sacking you are panicked to death in your chair ignoring it still the terrible havoc light flashes gentle as songbirds. The link is made to a Jesuit background, then friends in Israel. The panic is expertly levitated to a broken surface. You glare back at it, the stupid fonts and wallpaper. The glue in your throat on the phone. The tube spinning madly in the distance, unable to be attached now the experts have left the building, fumbling glue fingers after it. You tear on your high vis and screech into the street. Death until the empty meadow seethes in chronic calm. Let me die in pieces.