GENTLY DOES IT

It was only just
   the other night things
felt  our skins collapsing together before
eternal dividers
   settled back their course
the air was impossible collapsed gestures
backed up tears
   at the soft wet bodies
of frogs.

The only thing 
    keeps me from you, this
so called choice, the sudden switch of 
trajectory into
   the road so people say
avoid the collapsing traffic we say: Silence,
for the crush
  of a vehicle keep me from 
your fists or even
  words are terse enough

symbols to make
  my only body position
cross into the mouth of no-christ. The things
  we do for you,
somehow the sight of this body tense you up
to murder
  knowing not the rendition, 
its schema but for the sake of your life
ducking from light
  we go side by side along

the concourse walls & arches tracing
  your brave steps dropping
back the image could put you in a cage away
  from the family uni-
fication through the courts; even a word or a stone
phlegm could detach you...
   ...so we duck & split

into pipes, behind fabrics hating visibility’s action
  altering to the greater quicker
risk over retinal contracts waiting for the light
  to clear this aching pale straight lag
coerced in the map to never break that false
harmony, relations. Never 
  to be broken the dissonance
my life has made; you are still
  so beautiful; soft

in the violence 
  I held back in you. 

Sonnets are Impossible.

What are sonnets? We just don't know.

Currently trying to write one every day. Predictably I wrote a few then charged off into a few days and forgot to do my homework. Posting them here is an act of penitence, because only one of these is any good and the others are very pretentious. I promise to try harder. Sonnets are really difficult.

Slack Against the Comittee

SLACK AGAINST THE COMMITTEE - A CHARM

for Dolly Turing


The moon blushes from worship,
feeling sorry. Ten stories above
the cellar the committee meeting,
people are made to act out,

like lawyers of  precious old
time, & time is currency. Time,
the diurnal departure from life
forced and regulated, pressure valve

turned two quarters to left
airflow, the flume, the unbearable
leaking, traces of hair & skin left
quiet in the boardroom, because fuck

the boardroom, the ballots, proportionally
represented illuminations, each twenty
three by twenty three harmonic inches
basic in a self regulating unconscious

pattern. It's not on purpose. The force
of regulation is a jail the brain walks
in with good will hoping the
wall this time can stand for what,

Justice? A Just jail rising in its concrete
strength to support the weaker weight
of the tired body, the doors and windows
wide open. But they suck, They haven't

the power to slack even for a minute,
every slant is a tooth, albeit soft
& gracious & all the finance we could
dream of. The REM stops and tightens

blinkered, becomes another meeting
in the polystyrene conference hall; those
that meet well eat first the head down
sucker in structure, no moon to take
                                                           the whole the day off.

NEWS: New book. Podcast.

What a crumpled fucking month that was. 

I have news. First of all here's some music. Karl M. V. Waugh and myself get together every now and again to make radio show / podcast things. We have a few drinks and press the record button on the recording device (see below) and play one another music. The beginning (and many other bits of it) are scrappy and un-profesh. Woops. Here's a link: BBC RADIO BINNSCLAGG

In other news, my new book of poems is coming out VERY SOON. It is being printed as we speak. It's a long suite of poems. Some of them are very short. Some are longer. Some prose too. It has acted as a kind of journal documenting my work life over the last two years. It will be released by Contraband Books very shortly, and my thanks go to David Ashford for putting in a lot of hard work on what is really quite an unreasonable book. I will add links for purchase and links to launch event info as soon as everything is solidified and then melted and then split again. Will Rowe has written a note on the text. Here it is:

'The writer is a carer in an institution where the normativity function of world, its disposition of space, occurs as a containment of death. Human empathy in this environment is an irruption of uncontainable disorder. To look at this place produces deep disorder inside: how can one live there? How long is it possible to live at an extreme edge, this kind of edge? The answer relates to truth, sheer insistence on truth, without any resolution by hope. That means pain, without emollients of world.'

GOING ON WITHOUT YOU

When free, revert

to the same

& shame, spoke

the wind, the fennec

fox; and then came past.

There are other tracks

to take to wear

down not

but new ones

and test to remain so

her fennec completely vanished

bellowing head in the wind she spoke

out over the countenance

track becoming, old.

Staying put the same forty

four windows staring

cooked the bolt the bolt gored me

finally where the opened toad

cracks mouth to mouth, halt this

awkward tangible

despair.

gallant audition sequence heart

mentorship

tawse or worse spit on your hair lint

going the bag you puddled drive

entry, so back to the doors.

What did You do to her? How are

the chances the door is exactly two feet squared.

It’s pinched

as well as squared

and is marked up in water

not

like anything but actually.

You can’t ask for guidance.

There feels

suspicious. The mouth. Waiting, eerily

by the window the summer ascents

notes up what we’re to do.

But not knowing, a blurry must

where people end.

Themselves or one another.

A dot on the scale

of hesitancy, waiting hell

for the end in

sight or crashing at it.

Dream Diary 30.12.2016

This is a very unusual dream for me - feeling like nothing particular to myself, more a trick in lucidity. I am a man in my early 20s. The dream takes place in the early years of the second world war. I am at home in a cottage with my wife. She runs in from the garden saying "we've won!". I ask what she means and she explains that we entered a competition draw and that we have won the ration book plus a trip to London to see lots of attractions. I find this strange, because I know that at this point in time such a competition wouldn't probably exist. I also say to her that the prizes will be good but that nowadays (I almost let slip for the first time that "there" - the time and place we're in isn't real) this would be some kind of scam.

We go to London full of excitement and board the river cruiser. We stroll around the deck and meet the captain who jokes about my age and seems intent on mentioning my cheekbones and that there is something not quite right about me, We go to get some food, but my wife (who's name I don't know yet) says she wants to get something more fun to eat. We head to a cafe on deck where they serve spaghetti. Before we go in I confess to her that I'm dreaming, and that I don't know who either of us our in the dream, but that I am enjoying her company and that because I'm dreaming there is a sadness because she will fade away. She tells me not to be so arrogant. That she doesn't know who either of us are either, and that she is also dreaming. I jump back, stunned, and tell her my name in real life. She says "ah, well, my name is Christine. Next time I see you I will wink at you, and then drop something - you'll know it's me". We go into the cafe and resolve to enjoy what we have here and to try to remain asleep for a while. While in the cafe a man becomes aggressive with me, and I assume I have powers to end this by merely making him leave or not be there. As I think this objects I look at begin to fly around the room.

I wake up in a start, get in the shower and go to work. When I get to work there are builders there, as there were when I left and they are building small towers in the garden wall. I can't start working because I want to write down this dream, which I do in almost identical words to these except for this paragraph which I know will need to be filled in but I leave blank because it doesn't exist yet, and start to describe a man who I once knew who was nine feet tall. I stick the fountain pen into my elbow and it is extremely painful. I wake up and there is a real cut there beginning to scab over.

Christmas Aubade

In the open air hesitation

held where the crisp breath was;

we knew nothing & parted. "But the pebbles,

but that sound, beating
on the water?" ...

"That's the pile-driver." The elevated

horizon coughed, the Rookery a haze cloistered

my fist letting her fingers out the three
of us knotted like a fist huddled in the stairs

or at your door at the street's token finish
belting John Ball in the basement

or this screaming white cat winking
 in our new present evening. Still full

of knots the tempting musk of hot knives

 raising up to clink our glasses in departure.