Two poems - May 2022

11th May 2022

after John James

to love the same records drinking 

the shade of dress

life is wearing

it’s almost like this deliberate

vagueness, dreamlike in the detail

the fantasy when form breaks down

Rain across the valley blurs the air from my Hollingdean window

down the sparrows, cruel rain

settled: the language of contract.

Provided the rain stops 

may I meet you in the hotel with 

yellow borders, green shutters, lay

down at leisure, piss each other off.

25th May 2022

Death Note

after César Vallejo, William Rowe, Sean Bonney 

& NH Prichard

i. 

‘the corpse, ay! went on’ working

reanimation

refusal

out of the body

the soul got up

The Combatant. The Man. The Corpse. 

‘what they have in common 

 is zero’. No names. The multiplication

 describes the dead: ‘All the inhabitants 

 of the earth’,

what they have in common

ii.

Circular cutting device

chainlink. Mutual blur

there’s something there

walking by the certain graves stone

angel two children running ahead

vanish into silence

across the valley 

the signs the mind a high pitched noise. 

iii. 

At the window the valley is cut

so much more so much

they cannot sleep

and who would

‘there is no outside’, ‘the voice

 in the poem is not your friend’

the sound of children playing people

forcibly removed from the earth out

of this world we cannot fall

‘I want to be / pickled like

 they picked enemies / alive / in the Wars  of the Roses’.

Sparrow hope and bound to despair 

love by the angel grieving.

iv.

‘The wrestlyng of this world axith a fall Heer is noon hoom 

 heer is but wildirnesse.’

and

and

and

‘though bowed the to hoom passed’

passage

     passage