tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87811730372160896352024-03-08T21:59:25.468+00:00MysletLewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04364287936968808344noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8781173037216089635.post-33559229773036711612013-11-14T21:45:00.001+00:002013-11-14T21:45:41.787+00:00Seasons Such As These<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Math/DTD/mathml2/xhtml-math11-f.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><!--This file was converted to xhtml by LibreOffice - see http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/filter/source/xslt for the code.--><head profile="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8"/><title xml:lang="en-US">Poems</title><meta name="DCTERMS.title" content="Poems" xml:lang="en-US"/><meta name="DCTERMS.language" content="en-US" scheme="DCTERMS.RFC4646"/><meta name="DCTERMS.source" content="http://xml.openoffice.org/odf2xhtml"/><meta name="DCTERMS.creator" content="Lewis Deane"/><meta name="DCTERMS.issued" content="2008-04-18T11:10:00" scheme="DCTERMS.W3CDTF"/><meta name="DCTERMS.modified" content="2013-11-14T19:11:40.046000000" scheme="DCTERMS.W3CDTF"/><meta name="DCTERMS.provenance" content="" xml:lang="en-US"/><meta name="DCTERMS.subject" content="," xml:lang="en-US"/><link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" hreflang="en"/><link rel="schema.DCTERMS" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" hreflang="en"/><link rel="schema.DCTYPE" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/" hreflang="en"/><link rel="schema.DCAM" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcam/" hreflang="en"/><style type="text/css">
@page { }
table { border-collapse:collapse; border-spacing:0; empty-cells:show }
td, th { vertical-align:top; font-size:12pt;}
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { clear:both }
ol, ul { margin:0; padding:0;}
li { list-style: none; margin:0; padding:0;}
<!-- "li span.odfLiEnd" - IE 7 issue-->
li span. { clear: both; line-height:0; width:0; height:0; margin:0; padding:0; }
span.footnodeNumber { padding-right:1em; }
span.annotation_style_by_filter { font-size:95%; font-family:Arial; background-color:#fff000; margin:0; border:0; padding:0; }
* { margin:0;}
.fr1 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; text-align:center; vertical-align:top; writing-mode:lr-tb; background-color:#ffffff; padding:0.0008in; border-style:none; }
.Contents_20_1 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.Contents_20_10 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.7689in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.Contents_20_2 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:0.139in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.Contents_20_3 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:0.278in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.Contents_20_4 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:0.4165in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.Contents_20_5 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:0.5555in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.Contents_20_6 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:0.6945in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.Contents_20_7 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:0.8335in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.Contents_20_8 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:0.972in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.Contents_20_9 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.111in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.Footer { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.Header { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P1 { font-size:8pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:0in; margin-right:0.25in; text-indent:0in; }
.P10 { font-size:9pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.6252in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P11 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.6874in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P12 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.8126in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P13 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.5626in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P14 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.75in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P15 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.25in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P16 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.9374in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P17 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P18 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P19 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P2 { font-size:8pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P20 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P21 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P22 { font-size:11pt; font-family:Arial; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P23 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P24 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:center ! important; }
.P25 { font-size:28pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:center ! important; }
.P26 { font-size:16pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:center ! important; }
.P27 { font-size:14pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:center ! important; }
.P28 { font-size:14pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; font-weight:bold; }
.P29 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:justify ! important; }
.P30 { font-size:18pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P31 { font-size:18pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:justify ! important; }
.P32 { font-size:18pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:center ! important; }
.P33 { font-size:18pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:center ! important; font-weight:bold; }
.P34 { font-size:8pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P35 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P36 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.1811in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P37 { font-size:12.5pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.1811in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P38 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.1811in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P39 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.1811in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P40 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P41 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:center ! important; }
.P42 { font-size:16pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:center ! important; }
.P43 { font-size:18pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:justify ! important; }
.P44 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; text-align:justify ! important; }
.P45 { font-size:7.5pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:2.6583in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P46 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:0.9846in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P47 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P48 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P49 { font-size:10pt; margin-left:0.278in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P5 { font-size:9pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.4374in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P50 { font-size:10pt; margin-left:0.278in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P51 { font-size:14pt; margin-left:0in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:-0.1374in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P52 { font-size:14pt; margin-left:0in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:-0.1374in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.P53 { font-size:26pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P54 { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.1811in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P55 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:2.3126in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P56 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.3752in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P57 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.3752in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P58 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.4374in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P59 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.4374in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P6 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.4374in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P60 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.5in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P61 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.5in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P62 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.3126in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P63 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.3126in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P64 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.1874in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P65 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.1874in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P66 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.6252in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P67 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.6252in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P68 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.6874in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P69 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.8126in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P7 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.5in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P70 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.8126in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P71 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.5626in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P72 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.5626in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P73 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:2in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P74 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.75in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P75 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.25in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P76 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.9374in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P77 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P78 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:2.0626in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P79 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.8752in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P8 { font-size:9pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.5in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.P80 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0417in; margin-top:0.1665in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:2.0673in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; font-style:italic; }
.P9 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:1.6252in; margin-right:0in; text-indent:0in; }
.Standard { font-size:10pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.Sect2 { writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.Sect3 { writing-mode:lr-tb; }
.T1 { font-size:8pt; }
.T3 { font-size:14pt; font-weight:bold; }
.T4 { font-size:14pt; }
.T5 { font-size:12pt; }
.T6 { font-family:Arial; font-size:11pt; }
<!-- ODF styles with no properties representable as CSS -->
.Sect1 .Index_20_Link .Page_20_Number .WW8Num1z0 .WW8Num1z1 .WW8Num1z2 .WW8Num1z3 .WW8Num1z4 .WW8Num1z5 .WW8Num1z6 .WW8Num1z7 .WW8Num1z8 { }
</style></head><body dir="ltr" style="max-width:8.5in;margin-top:0.6in; margin-bottom:0.6in; margin-left:1.25in; margin-right:1.25in; writing-mode:lr-tb; "><p class="P53"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="P24"> </p><p class="P25">Seasons Such As These</p><p class="P24"> </p><p class="P24"> </p><p class="P24"> </p><p class="P26">by</p><p class="P24"> </p><p class="P24"> </p><p class="P24"> </p><p class="P27">Lewis Deane</p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="P18"> </p><p class="P54"> </p><p class="P39"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P37"> </p><p class="P38">Poor, naked wretches, where so e’er you are,</p><p class="P38"> </p><p class="P38">That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,</p><p class="P38"> </p><p class="P38">How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides,</p><p class="P38"> </p><p class="P38">Your loop'd and window’d raggedness, defend you</p><p class="P38"> </p><p class="P38">From seasons such as these?</p><p class="P36"> </p><p class="P45">King Lear Act III, Scene IV, Lines 28-32.</p><p class="P41"> </p><p class="P42">Contents</p><p class="P47"> </p><p class="Standard"><span class="T3">Part 1</span><span class="T4">.</span></p><p class="Standard"> </p><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" class="Sect1"><colgroup/><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__51_1915631257">Road.vii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__53_1915631257">This Place No Good.viii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__55_1915631257">Tramp.ix</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__57_1915631257">Autumn.x</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__59_1915631257">The Street I.xi</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__61_1915631257">First Love.xii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__63_1915631257">Awaiting An Answer.xiii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__65_1915631257">Decisions Of A Life.xv</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__67_1915631257">London.xvii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__69_1915631257">Child At The Window.xix</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__71_1915631257">The Apology.xxii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__73_1915631257">The street II.xxvi</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__75_1915631257">She.xxviii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__77_1915631257">Strange Meeting.xxxi</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__79_1915631257">Now different.xxxii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__81_1915631257">Postcard.xxxiii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__83_1915631257">Tatters Of Fact.xxxiv</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__85_1915631257">The City.xxxv</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__87_1915631257">Fumbled Epitaph.xxxvi</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__89_1915631257">Belief.xxxvii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__91_1915631257">Dialectic.xxxviii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__93_1915631257">The Flag.xl</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P50"><a href="#__RefHeading__95_1915631257"/></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P35"/></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P28">Part 2.</p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P35"/></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P50"><a href="#__RefHeading__95_1915631257">Tested.xlv</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__97_1915631257">That Dangerous Road.xlvi</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__99_1915631257">Hovel.xlvii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__101_1915631257">Smile.xlviii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__103_1915631257">Violence.xlix</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__105_1915631257">Sometimes.l</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__107_1915631257">Horizons.li</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__109_1915631257">Voyeur.lii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__111_1915631257">Morning.liii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__113_1915631257">Park.liv</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__115_1915631257">0povrženíhodný.lv</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__117_1915631257">Gardens.lvi</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__119_1915631257">What Do I Know Now?lvii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__121_1915631257">Poison.lviii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__123_1915631257">Bad Verse.lix</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__125_1915631257">Quietlx</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__127_1915631257">Laugh.lxi</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__129_1915631257">Failure.lxii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__131_1915631257">Home.lxiii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__133_1915631257">Drink.lxiv</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__135_1915631257">“Never!”lxv</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__137_1915631257">Moth.lxvi</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__139_1915631257">Brno, 1993.lxvii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__141_1915631257">‘Culture.’lxviii</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__143_1915631257">Summer.lxix</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__145_1915631257">Family.lxx</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__147_1915631257">House For Sale.lxxi</a></p></td></tr><tr><td><p class="P49"><a href="#__RefHeading__149_1915631257">The Waylxxii</a></p></td></tr></table><!--Next 'div' was a 'text:section'.--><div class="Sect2" id="Section2"><p class="P48"/><p class="P40"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="Standard"> </p><p class="P30"> </p><p class="P30"> </p><p class="P30"> </p><p class="P30"> </p><p class="P30"> </p><p class="P30"> </p><p class="P33">Part 1</p><p class="P40"> </p><p class="P40"> </p><p class="P34"> </p></div><!--Next 'div' was a 'text:section'.--><div class="Sect3" id="Section3"><h3 class="P55"><a id="a__Road_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__252_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__51_1915631257"/>Road.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">“Down that road I went.” He said, pointing somewhere.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">I thought you were near, a companion of mine,</p><p class="P21">The sun hot, softening a brittle floor,</p><p class="P21">And I here dawdling, walking as if drunk:</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">White not exactly white, blue which stretched beyond blue.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P56"><a id="a__This_Place_No_Good_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__254_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__53_1915631257"/>This Place No Good.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Restlessly wandering for a place</p><p class="P21">Of silence and poise: is this life?</p><p class="P21">Hot brush on a canvas of desert dust:</p><p class="P21">In the beginning white paper, ashes swirl, mindless.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Here a cafe, time is nine, place Holborn: tea.</p><p class="P21">An occasional diner shuffles an entrance.</p><p class="P21">To quote: “This place no good.”</p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P58"><a id="a__Tramp_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__256_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__55_1915631257"/> Tramp.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Forgotten towers</p><p class="P21">Broken in my presence.</p><p class="P21">Or I’m a tramp</p><p class="P21">Exhausted in travelling,</p><p class="P21">Beaten by brooms.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Just as I was saying</p><p class="P21">“Yes, I realise...”</p><p class="P21">She kicked me from the stair,</p><p class="P21">Emptied me like a bucket</p><p class="P21">On the street,</p><p class="P21">Spilling to the cat flaps,</p><p class="P21">Simultaneous purr on each door,</p><p class="P21">Preaching like Jesus</p><p class="P21">“I’ll heal no one!"</p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P60"><a id="a__Autumn_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__258_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__57_1915631257"/>Autumn.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Below the cry of a bat</p><p class="P21">Foots shadow on frozen faces:</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Wan luxuries,</p><p class="P21">Chilled notes of dawn.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P62"><a id="a__The_Street_I_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__260_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__59_1915631257"/>The Street I.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Corners catching</p><p class="P21">A broken moon:</p><p class="P21">That and the tumble</p><p class="P21">Of drunken feet,</p><p class="P21">Splash of voices.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Thirst among the lamps pools,</p><p class="P21">Cry from the slashed mouth,</p><p class="P21">Flutter of lids and the street</p><p class="P21">Like the stamped pieces</p><p class="P21">Of a fractured vision.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P60"><a id="a__First_Love_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__262_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__61_1915631257"/>First Love.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">A naked figurine in a green shrub</p><p class="P21">Or adorning the neglected lawn</p><p class="P21">The one comical illusion of one mind - mine.</p><p class="P21">And the great barn hall, stacked with dust,</p><p class="P21">Echoing the straw</p><p class="P21">Upon which we might have lain.</p><p class="P21">And, as your fingers curled the keys,</p><p class="P21">I was there in courtly guise,</p><p class="P21">Attendant, dancing upon your cast tunes,</p><p class="P21">Counterfeit of your desires.</p><p class="P21">Did you see?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P64"><a id="a__Awaiting_An_Answer_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__264_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__63_1915631257"/>Awaiting An Answer.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P11">.1.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Tempered, awkward key</p><p class="P21">Of that pianos sound</p><p class="P21">Disturbs sunlit dust,</p><p class="P21">This corpse's epidermis.</p><p class="P21">And on afternoons,</p><p class="P21">It seemed long and desperate,</p><p class="P21">Searches for that glimpse of woman</p><p class="P21">Heard in sounds of Joan</p><p class="P21">Or other musty romances.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Perhaps merely the hair</p><p class="P21">Reminded of the dust</p><p class="P21">Of those old school days</p><p class="P21">Or a pure line expressed</p><p class="P21">In the profile, catching</p><p class="P21">A last evaporate fantasy;</p><p class="P21">Maybe some dim sympathy,</p><p class="P21">Merely the union of interest</p><p class="P21">In one trajected plain,</p><p class="P21">Slim yet a basis for partnership.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P14">.II.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">If I’d found a place</p><p class="P21">It was, as always, momentary,</p><p class="P21">Caught in a second’s glance of sun:</p><p class="P21">Blue, common bell chimed its noiseless scent</p><p class="P21">More irritant to plans, more conducive</p><p class="P21">To the forgotten, forgetful days of school.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">But those other ones: rather a feeling</p><p class="P21">Than tissue of incident where one hung</p><p class="P21">At the most appropriate place</p><p class="P21">As for a meal. Separate, I’d tempt</p><p class="P21">A natural force to come swing my way.</p><h3 class="P64"><a id="a__Decisions_Of_A_Life_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__266_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__65_1915631257"/>Decisions Of A Life.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P11">.I.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">She headed to the door</p><p class="P21">Of some burnt out world</p><p class="P21">Lost to the dried flare</p><p class="P21">Of Apocalypse. With words</p><p class="P21">Telling of that special place</p><p class="P21">Her mind halved its voices</p><p class="P21">Where one would call “Where?”</p><p class="P21">To the others reassurance of</p><p class="P21">“One foot more, one age less.”</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">And held by the endless tide</p><p class="P21">Of works companions</p><p class="P21">Some sense of proportion was lost.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">At home a dear friend</p><p class="P21">Had uttered the martyred cliché of</p><p class="P21">“Be yourself!” A thousand victims -</p><p class="P21">Were there more?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P9">.II.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Down the battle broken world</p><p class="P21">Where the shadows left around:</p><p class="P21">Corpses, corpses flew</p><p class="P21">To glare their unholy cries.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P13">.III.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">And among the luggage of travel</p><p class="P21">A niche was found:</p><p class="P21">Here a shadow shared a bottle</p><p class="P21">With a friend or two,</p><p class="P21">Words scattered among the unintended,</p><p class="P21">Formed their partial puzzles.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P9">.V.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">One friendly companion,</p><p class="P21">Whose ever forming grin disturbed,</p><p class="P21">Pronounced, heartily,</p><p class="P21">Some ending term,</p><p class="P21">Some clause of binding.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Sealed by the wax of finality</p><p class="P21">She considered her attention weak:</p><p class="P21">It had stopped at the cover,</p><p class="P21">Started at the completion of smiles,</p><p class="P21">Had broken at the ribboned bow.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Twisted in a distracting knot</p><p class="P21">These decisions had been made. </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P62"><a id="a__London_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__268_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__67_1915631257"/>London.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P7">.I.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">It was a comic sight:</p><p class="P21">His earnest face forward</p><p class="P21">In the fury of impotence,</p><p class="P21">Awkward and shyly expressed,</p><p class="P21">And she agile in her agreements</p><p class="P21">Reassurance with a “Yes, yes, yes.”</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Had muddy eloquence enchained her</p><p class="P21">Or the force of that will</p><p class="P21">Desperation implies</p><p class="P21">Perhaps afraid of turning keys</p><p class="P21">Of murderous desire:</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Who knows the end of these things?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> .II.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">In the street and in the rain</p><p class="P21">He let her dwindle like his voice</p><p class="P21">That, lost and inept,</p><p class="P21">Had weakly made a pledge</p><p class="P21">Diverted by the beer</p><p class="P21">She ordered at the bar:</p><p class="P21">Words stopped in a shock stare,</p><p class="P21">He and she were released</p><p class="P21">From the embarrassment of proposal:</p><p class="P21">“You must avoid awkward promise of intent</p><p class="P21">Striving for a perfect civic form</p><p class="P21">Impossible and blind.”</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P17"> .III.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">That was the last time he saw her:</p><p class="P21">The idea afloat for a while</p><p class="P21">Till stress and ulcer and the starving age</p><p class="P21">Each had slashed its way </p><p class="P21">Through to his cognisance.</p><p class="P21">All the point was gone:</p><p class="P21">What had been a mirage</p><p class="P21">Of tempting possibility</p><p class="P21">Was a joke a city smiled at</p><p class="P21">In its busy search for gold. </p><h3 class="P62"><a id="a__Child_At_The_Window_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__270_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__69_1915631257"/>Child At The Window.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P22">Raining again among the ash pots<br/>And hardened flies of a garden.<br/><br/>And the expected face at the window<br/>Seemingly wet, staring at the one broken tree<br/>Toppled on the late roots of a burning.<br/><br/>Eyes amongst clogged weeds<br/>Tossed through the sly greys of morn<br/>The reception he demanded:<br/><br/>Blank and called at dawn<br/>To witness the first vision<br/>Of a broken, scattered soul<br/>Ever to stay hidden<br/>In destined torment<br/>Of childish pains.</p><p class="P22"> </p><p class="P22"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T6">After Hours<br/><br/>.I.<br/><br/>Those noises in the blank hour<br/></span><span class="T5">Between twelve and one,</span></p><p class="P21">The ingenuous girl singing a song</p><p class="P21">Perhaps borne from the late closed pub,</p><p class="P21">The car alarm that mischievously sputters</p><p class="P21">Its unfrightening sound off and on,</p><p class="P21">Drinkers warming themselves</p><p class="P21">Over the hollow sound</p><p class="P21">Of their chanted slogans</p><p class="P21">Ready to beat, in the unifying desire</p><p class="P21">Of oblivion, any fellow man;</p><p class="P21">And, in between, quiet and quiet,</p><p class="P21">This slow, singing, melancholy hour.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">And, to distract, the thought of you asleep</p><p class="P21">Comes and goes like that crying alarm:</p><p class="P21">Dog barking desires of my frightful cellar.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> .II.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">If, in this sphere of solitude,</p><p class="P21">Egocentric and sentimental,</p><p class="P21">You could somehow intrude,</p><p class="P21">Could arrive with bags and face turned</p><p class="P21">To that obscure, private life we somehow share</p><p class="P21">What, in the broken paces of private habit,</p><p class="P21">What movement outside it and therefore hope,</p><p class="P21">Could bloom, stare its tired stare,</p><p class="P21">Bare from beaten limb (yes, that fellow)</p><p class="P21">The one, doubled, solitary flower?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P17"> .III.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Among the insomniac cars</p><p class="P21">My shattered face stares whitely</p><p class="P21">At the moon. The blown flowers</p><p class="P21">Of our common school die quietly</p><p class="P21">Aged gestures of a beaten face.</p><p class="P21">Conversation, left</p><p class="P21">In my struggling, conceiving days,</p><p class="P21">Bouncing back from that rough, gauged place,</p><p class="P21">Poses the question of our death.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Am I then, in this absurd posture,</p><p class="P21">Abstracted by the flying blue lights</p><p class="P21">Making those correct, forewarned waves?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Death is a sordid thing</p><p class="P21">Done by sordid men</p><p class="P21">Use to a sordid world:</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">This our modern way</p><p class="P21">We love but cannot have</p><p class="P21">The once promised life?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P12">.IV.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">My mind has not the peace that’s promised</p><p class="P21">But a rage, a rage at a limb and joints</p><p class="P21">Incomplete, broken desire,</p><p class="P21">The unforewarned abstraction of our death.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">And yet if you were here like the nurse</p><p class="P21">You would find only words of blood</p><p class="P21">And the absurd indignity of this mans fall.</p><p class="P21">Death crying (sentimental) among</p><p class="P21">The blotted whiteness of a ward,</p><p class="P21">Silhouettes of urgent shadow </p><p class="P21">And the dark faces beaten beyond</p><h3 class="P66"><a id="a__The_Apology_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__272_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__71_1915631257"/> The Apology.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> .I.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">The heat folded in an airless layer.</p><p class="P21">So you see my seeming arctic heart</p><p class="P21">How foolish this tearful child and babbling eye</p><p class="P21">Which is drunk and staggers,</p><p class="P21">Broken below your stairs.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">We never could lift up our waxen wings</p><p class="P21">Or lifted did not the hateful, burning accident</p><p class="P21">Dissolve then drown its flesh? You and I </p><p class="P21">Adrift among the pillared trees,</p><p class="P21">Charred in our two dreams wary sleep.</p><p class="P21">We float on the lazy but then unstoppable streams.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">So, to be left in the arctic land,</p><p class="P21">Here, where the bell broods hollow.</p><p class="P21">Among the clattering ice </p><p class="P21">Of your eyes dream</p><p class="P21">Never where we so formed </p><p class="P21">Nor oned like our lips seal.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Then darling (you permit me thus?)</p><p class="P21">I have fought the darker things</p><p class="P21">That instant light extinguished,</p><p class="P21">That here with fortune rise.</p><p class="P21">And age but the second tide.</p><p class="P21">Oh, perhaps sensed beneath the skin</p><p class="P21">Youths wild but aesthetic bone.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Then how we might laugh, how dream</p><p class="P21">As the tedium formed stalagmites</p><p class="P21">Count our mortality.</p><p class="P21">Blushes for the flesh</p><p class="P21">And a pointed limestone world.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P17">Yes. But love? Words that patter on the floor:</p><p class="P21">It will not utter, it will not speak, disclose.</p><p class="P21">Our memory will blow like dust in the common wind,</p><p class="P21">Absorbed in a million pores it will forget itself.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P16">.II.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">I have fought this long hard day to contain you</p><p class="P21">But you where ever braver than I:</p><p class="P21">Will I always, thus, fall under your hammer</p><p class="P21">Auctioned at the obscurest price?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">And how, then, do the ages tell</p><p class="P21">You from your dalliance,</p><p class="P21">Those ages that could never tell</p><p class="P21">Old bones from new dust.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">And how then, pray, will you find</p><p class="P21">A companionable skeleton </p><p class="P21">There for me to commune </p><p class="P21">Through it’s blown skin ribs?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P17"> .III.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Our talk has a fungal form</p><p class="P21">Or metaphysic and directed down</p><p class="P21">From some ill hell it wiry swells</p><p class="P21">Like creeping ivy through the gloom.</p><p class="P21">Sad and distempered a fiery rage</p><p class="P21">Infects its veins and illuminates</p><p class="P21">A wistful steam that pales the face.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">And, how, across this space,</p><p class="P21">That when I look stretches dizzy,</p><p class="P21">As if with ambition coils the Earth,</p><p class="P21">Can we again drown the cold</p><p class="P21">In ignorant passion?</p><p class="P21">Our desires recoil and wrap</p><p class="P21">In frigid, spiritful fire</p><p class="P21">Till love is all but a little,</p><p class="P21">Indistinguishable, sanctuary flame</p><p class="P21">For how long burning?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">If the branches here do touch</p><p class="P21">Can the steal there then melt?</p><p class="P21">And, if inflamed, would you despise</p><p class="P21">The uncontrolled, fast beating heart</p><p class="P21">Or, then, mourn ices wavering</p><p class="P21">Or unwished loss of our loved</p><p class="P21">Stone, statuesque, seeming godhead?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P17"> .IV.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Caught in the webbed distraction of a gaze</p><p class="P21">Buzzed impossibilities, Utopic dreams.</p><p class="P21">Your breath dragged at a thousand coattails</p><p class="P21">Saying seeming unity. I was aware of slurs</p><p class="P21">Genetic tales drowned in its inaction.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">And you said: ”Then this sole point I put there?”</p><p class="P21">“Our land marks, thus devised in the conscience,</p><p class="P21">Display an open world, inessential.</p><p class="P21">Such mortality and such the way its tunes</p><p class="P21">Out echo as the corpse the body.” So thus I.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P68"><a id="a__The_street_II_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__274_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__73_1915631257"/>The street II.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T5">Now and then a curtain flits and a stare</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P21">At second or third floor windows opposite,</p><p class="P21">Half inquisitive of hotel happenings,</p><p class="P21">Half irritated by mock grandeur,</p><p class="P21">Brute noise this particular Victorian,</p><p class="P21">Part empty site displays. It’s the habit </p><p class="P21">Of some drawn up to face, across the nightly peace</p><p class="P21">Of no mans land, the street, dull combatants </p><p class="P21">On each side: Perhaps poverty separates you </p><p class="P21">From the pub downstairs, a certain angst </p><p class="P21">About the pull of popular haunts,</p><p class="P21">Getting more than your fair share of inarticulate friends.</p><p class="P21">A chance modern law decides </p><p class="P21">Dividing speech and the neighbourhood,</p><p class="P21">Forming false battles, situating </p><p class="P21">Between you and it a televisual screen,</p><p class="P21">Your thought on some Heaven </p><p class="P21">Where face to face we met,</p><p class="P21">Your eyes on some dark glass of a window.</p><p class="P21">You’re seen, the curtains drawn.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">It’s something to be remarked upon,</p><p class="P21">Odd how every night it is done </p><p class="P21">Not only by you but repeated </p><p class="P21">Down the street, each side a sentinel,</p><p class="P21">If not throwing sticks in a fire, then</p><p class="P21">Looking out to see who’s watching who,</p><p class="P21">Catching the nightly skirmishes that,</p><p class="P21">With not uncommon frequency, continue </p><p class="P21">To punctuate a phoney war. Now and then </p><p class="P21">That irregular exchange of cigarettes </p><p class="P21">Or your side strikes the light, mine offers the fag.</p><p class="P21">Usually, though, askers are causalities </p><p class="P21">Rejected by us both, mostly ignored,</p><p class="P21">Often sleeping somewhere out of sight,</p><p class="P21">Under a bridge or whatever bomb shelter </p><p class="P21">Accident has devised, they roll in slumber </p><p class="P21">Tight into a plastic bag or the damp,</p><p class="P21">Soggy cardboard once used to wrap our guns,</p><p class="P21">Tanks, communications, surveillance units.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">It is to be remarked upon how little </p><p class="P21">I see of you, how quickly you disappear,</p><p class="P21">How suspicious of you and I this neutral,</p><p class="P21">Unneutral status makes us: Together </p><p class="P21">Manufactured means of war – now we test them out.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">But I’m bored of killing, it’s become such a </p><p class="P21">Common exercise – I wish you’d sign a truce.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P69"><a id="a__She_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__276_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__75_1915631257"/>She.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> .I.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">It is not for this that I waited alone,</p><p class="P21">Listless afore a feeble fire,</p><p class="P21">The sun impatient to have done.</p><p class="P21">All the lighting bad no matter its source,</p><p class="P21">The coarse street shoppers shouting excitement </p><p class="P21">In fears oblivion: I was patient, </p><p class="P21">Reading horrid Milton, sipping cheap tea,</p><p class="P21">Smoking a haze of desire in troubled Pandamonia.</p><p class="P21">And those ‘after thoughts’ circling a vortex </p><p class="P21">In the blackened hole of incurable want.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> .II.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">To long and a chair to comfortable </p><p class="P21">Excusing the silence of passive desistance:</p><p class="P21">I claimed ignorance, then corruption,</p><p class="P21">Then the impossible greatness of the task </p><p class="P21">And so destiny: fated thus </p><p class="P21">To the eternal Ovidian whine,</p><p class="P21">Claiming sanctuary in exile.</p><p class="P21">The dark obliged, the nocturnal vigil,</p><p class="P21">The lack of vitamin D:</p><p class="P21">Cold, an empty gullet, the night.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P17"> .III.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">One Sunday I ventured out:</p><p class="P21">The street was the same shabby bin </p><p class="P21">Of flowering tin and copulent flies.</p><p class="P21">I discovered the polluted sea</p><p class="P21">As I had discovered her before:</p><p class="P21">From the strand and at a distance,</p><p class="P21">Reflecting a sapien backside,</p><p class="P21">Resigned, as passive as a slave,</p><p class="P21">To complexions blare. And so,</p><p class="P21">Seeing the mutual indifference </p><p class="P21">Of man and water, I did not protest,</p><p class="P21">I certainly was not shocked,</p><p class="P21">I retreated back to my door:</p><p class="P21">Another forty days vigil </p><p class="P21">In the barrel of my bed,</p><p class="P21">Expecting Alexander</p><p class="P21">With a preprepared, laconic tongue </p><p class="P21">So to list instructions </p><p class="P21">Confused but tolerable.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> .IV.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Next the eye saw around </p><p class="P21">The hostility of the times,</p><p class="P21">The self sacrifice requisite to repair </p><p class="P21">Deep holes in the fabric </p><p class="P21">Torn in an uncaring glance.</p><p class="P21">This was She who held the power to maim,</p><p class="P21">Taking what accident had gathered </p><p class="P21">In a forceful hands fine brutality.</p><p class="P21">Pain of a posterior enervation </p><p class="P21">Left the relics of charred anatomy </p><p class="P21">Scattered as an after burn </p><p class="P21">Whether the death, the caput mortuum </p><p class="P21">Of an alchemical change </p><p class="P21">Or the autograph of a miracle – </p><p class="P21">Who knows?</p><p class="P46"> .v.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Who dances in the Elysian fields </p><p class="P21">Or laughs in the alley of posterity?</p><p class="P21">No songs past memories rest: all, all a ball </p><p class="P21">Of billowing winds wrapping chaos </p><p class="P21">In the cries of vulgar sentience;</p><p class="P21">Or the mechanics of bombardment </p><p class="P21">And the assorted atom contending </p><p class="P21">For upper air in feverish necessities, </p><p class="P21">Scratched epitaphs of void.</p><p class="P21">Death is a place past illusion </p><p class="P21">Where permanents and eternity </p><p class="P21">Are finally confounded </p><p class="P21">As dust across a plain </p><p class="P21">When a plain has gone.</p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P71"><a id="a__Strange_Meeting_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__278_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__77_1915631257"/>Strange Meeting.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Not many years after that we realigned,</p><p class="P21">Catching eye to eye a second sight:</p><p class="P21">With age had come the clearer thought that sees </p><p class="P21">And does not like, the in become the out.</p><p class="P21">Lining the brow with an ignorant script </p><p class="P21">Intervening chance and all those things not done </p><p class="P21">As two. And this chance that’s worst of all.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">She seemed to say through move of eye and mouth </p><p class="P21">(Though she asked the usual things one asks) </p><p class="P21">That, where ever once we’d met, those people </p><p class="P21">Then had ceased to plague a time unfortunate </p><p class="P21">And dead: who were these gathered on a chance </p><p class="P21">It did not matter, an inconsequence</p><p class="P21">Set up to sting a faded photograph.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Faded, yes, but not gone: we both had kept </p><p class="P21">The odds and ends of our separate lives </p><p class="P21">And, this one conjunction amongst them all </p><p class="P21">Illusion, like the rest: one recovered,</p><p class="P21">The other not: “The lies that we call soul </p><p class="P21">I see and yet I cannot dispense with soul </p><p class="P21">But have kept that wound festeringly bad.”</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">And so her to I had not forgot. But,</p><p class="P21">As usual, I blindly circumscribed </p><p class="P21">My image there on cast. And though her face </p><p class="P21">Discouraged all it had not changed for me </p><p class="P21">But grew inside till it at last cracked out.</p><p class="P21">Shocked and battered and in retreat she said:</p><p class="P21">“Well, must be off. Another day, perhaps?”</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P71"><a id="a__Now_different_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__280_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__79_1915631257"/>Now different.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T5">I see you different, now, flattened by age</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P21">Till every feature lines the white of your skin </p><p class="P21">Like contours on a map. Pale, you luminess </p><p class="P21">A past of hopes, loves and lands seasons </p><p class="P21">Have obscured, a moon through thin cloud you show</p><p class="P21">Nothing I can recognise.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">A loss and a feeling </p><p class="P21">Of a power that was important,</p><p class="P21">Whose tug still irritates, whose decline </p><p class="P21">Still saddens, I stare over the walls </p><p class="P21">Of Europe, see you in this town or that,</p><p class="P21">Ask meaningless questions, gain meaningless </p><p class="P21">Replies, each letter ending “Love –“,</p><p class="P21">The expected lie.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P69"><a id="a__Postcard_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__282_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__81_1915631257"/>Postcard.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> .I.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">That postcard, whipped with the wind off the Hudson,</p><p class="P21">Monosyllabic and exasperated,</p><p class="P21">Words sped to a staccato breath like a wave bye, bye.</p><p class="P21">And I lying still, only by chance, tilted to catch</p><p class="P21">These paper words tumbling through the air.</p><p class="P21">How much attenuated, the spoken thought,</p><p class="P21">Its time crushed, instantaneous arrival </p><p class="P21">Expected and found on an American train </p><p class="P21">Saying, “Distance does not matter.”</p><p class="P21">And I believing the lie.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> .II.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Ill eyes abed smoke the sour jaundice </p><p class="P21">Of an English room. And that picture </p><p class="P21">Of New York an agony of ground glass </p><p class="P21">Stabbing each window the fragmented </p><p class="P21">Possibility of an absent wave.</p><p class="P21">The sky the same drab, abstract balm </p><p class="P21">Its saving, enhanced, artificial grace </p><p class="P21">I can stare at here. Only you, turning </p><p class="P21">North or south the Hudson way,</p><p class="P21">Were missed in person, a shadow cast,</p><p class="P21">Edging an American infinite.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P71"><a id="a__Tatters_Of_Fact_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__284_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__83_1915631257"/>Tatters Of Fact.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T5">All the body’s turnings merely serve</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P21">To enshroud the certain loss of departure,</p><p class="P21">Once gratitude. A time measured by absence,</p><p class="P21">Forced forgettings, I stare up indeterminate </p><p class="P21">Distance, find only the severance </p><p class="P21">Of memory, a murder performed in a week.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">We have resurrections as comedies </p><p class="P21">Their buffoons and twice now we have toured </p><p class="P21">The shifted bargain of lies we told </p><p class="P21">Our two nights. Hills of Utopian flesh </p><p class="P21">Made a nightmare of a need to be </p><p class="P21">Always central to a two oned self.</p><p class="P21">Illusion of integrity our line </p><p class="P21">And bait, echo and echo of enquiry </p><p class="P21">Till, shattered all light, tungsten snapped, we fall away.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Gathered such half real, remembered imagery </p><p class="P21">A perfect pastoral in the dark.</p><p class="P21">Sleep pierces; I wake to the tatters of fact.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P73"><a id="a__The_City_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__286_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__85_1915631257"/>The City.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T5">A Sundays gentle cycle through seas of empty streets</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P21">Shadowing the shadow of Paul. We are expecting death,</p><p class="P21">September’s enervation as yet unyellowed, </p><p class="P21">A stilled silence at the grieving bed.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Or the hidden poor that scuttle out of view, the boxed porter,</p><p class="P21">Trader, shopmen with wives babed, again gestating.</p><p class="P21">The desperation of pubs bellowed by tongues of swollen want,</p><p class="P21">The dissipation of drunks, sickened </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">By that tumbled sense of all in one oned on Saturday,</p><p class="P21">Now stirred to listless cry of child, distorted hand of care.</p><p class="P21">On the makeshift carpet of grass men and women quiesced </p><p class="P21">By capital poison of fat and food.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">An empty hall of towered streets, sepulchre of feet’s</p><p class="P21">Ghostly echo, the solitary essence of crowd, work, money,</p><p class="P21">The staccato knock of question and frigid stone.</p><p class="P21">Lost the prepared confusion of route,</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">The lanes that rebelled to be straightened, Wrens </p><p class="P21">Imperfect gloom twisted to a bridge and Thames.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P58"><a id="a__Fumbled_Epitaph_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__288_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__87_1915631257"/>Fumbled Epitaph.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">That stilled, ineffable frown,</p><p class="P21">A photograph of faded shock </p><p class="P21">Where had leaned impotence </p><p class="P21">On query, cold rejection…</p><p class="P21">Or, frozen in a concrete angst,</p><p class="P21">This fumbled epitaph…</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Lines straightened, surveyed </p><p class="P21">The taut geometry of a choice </p><p class="P21">Your absence has defined:</p><p class="P21">A last hour when fear fought </p><p class="P21">The swollen lip, the offered cheek,</p><p class="P21">I faced that end of you and me</p><p class="P21">Snatched in a flinching hand.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">What final count you have made,</p><p class="P21">I find burdens in its silence:</p><p class="P21">Pressure of reluctant flesh,</p><p class="P21">That ending, lie of an easy stroll. </p><p class="P21">I booze till cash is gone.</p><p class="P21">The delayed hours of listless grief </p><p class="P21">Stretched on the wrack of damp England,</p><p class="P21">Surveyed the possibilities,</p><p class="P21">You on that Wien restaurant tour,</p><p class="P21">Me, the room, the DT’s.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P68"><a id="a__Belief_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__290_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__89_1915631257"/>Belief.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">That hug, epitaph to a tube stop,</p><p class="P21">Was too much full of the response I’d wished for.</p><p class="P21">And more? A compassion? Or the lame </p><p class="P21">Departure of the ‘brother’ and the ‘lover’,</p><p class="P21">Our two desires dislocation? Of course,</p><p class="P21">I returned to the party, already over,</p><p class="P21">Deciding to recall a blindness</p><p class="P21">That disappearance broke and not succeeding.</p><p class="P21">Ending in the decline of the unwritten and the postponed.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">I have watched the many dawns since </p><p class="P21">Only with those ‘inane’ and fond regrets </p><p class="P21">A youth’s ‘first love’ is supposed to be designed for.</p><p class="P21">We don’t believe or, if we do,</p><p class="P21">What should all these visions amount to </p><p class="P21">But the superintended echo </p><p class="P21">Of passion itself. Like insomnia </p><p class="P21">Or a living out of sorts.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P66"><a id="a__Dialectic_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__292_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__91_1915631257"/>Dialectic.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> .I.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">You deal only with the hard present,</p><p class="P21">Something I envy: your record’s written </p><p class="P21">By another, no one cares at the time </p><p class="P21">To stop you, drink doesn’t kill you or, </p><p class="P21">If it does, it’s at the end, a full stop </p><p class="P21">To who you are. We die, some of us,</p><p class="P21">Still incomplete and some whose life is nothing </p><p class="P21">But the presence of failure. I write this </p><p class="P21">Like a man who sits in the comfort </p><p class="P21">Of possibilities, the cobalt </p><p class="P21">Of a gun eyeing his talk of sophistries,</p><p class="P21">Entertained passion, solitude,</p><p class="P21">A neat cushion to back me up, stinking fear.</p><p class="P21">I don’t register what’s there.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Unlike you: you have the gun, I think.</p><p class="P21">As an aspect of that script I haven’t grasped </p><p class="P21">You turn this B movie into something more:</p><p class="P21">Like Marriott in ‘Farewell, My Lovely’ </p><p class="P21">I’m the patsy, the limbo of certain guilts </p><p class="P21">Whose weaknesses ditch me in the end;</p><p class="P21">A clobbered beauty, corrupted by such </p><p class="P21">Expectation my body is forced beyond </p><p class="P21">What feeble reach I had into those other lives,</p><p class="P21">A sub plot that’s their harder climb.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P17"> .II.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Offended by the wrong words and never </p><p class="P21">Catching your welcome I retell mostly </p><p class="P21">A monologue of what could be done </p><p class="P21">Given conditions, appropriate sun,</p><p class="P21">Five mile wind, compliant interlocutors,</p><p class="P21">The usual list, verbatim anaesthesia </p><p class="P21">Of the irrepressible ego. Can’t be done.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Everyone expects, seconds before </p><p class="P21">The end, some kind of recognition:</p><p class="P21">Just the usual mechanics of the gun.</p><p class="P21">Except: I knew you before, before </p><p class="P21">The days of ‘hard drinking’ and searching out </p><p class="P21">Other people’s lives: a time when you were </p><p class="P21">Merely possible, not always there,</p><p class="P21">Treated as a friend of what was future.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P74"><a id="a__The_Flag_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__294_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__93_1915631257"/>The Flag.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P23"> .I.</p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23">Conceived, born and here, a place near the sea,</p><p class="P23">A path, bright but indistinct, where I walk,</p><p class="P23">Add a gesture, a sign to part and dissolve dawn’s early air.</p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23">You I met and have forgot,</p><p class="P23">Will remember, we shook briskly </p><p class="P23">Our forged request and let the here </p><p class="P23">Become the past without regret.</p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23">Then the eyes were precise and as ever </p><p class="P23">Misdirected, seeing beyond the hand</p><p class="P23">And the arm and the body two ghosts </p><p class="P23">Divert the dawn who both expected someone else.</p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23"> .II.</p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23">Left the added buts sogged in water</p><p class="P23">A common signature termed B movie</p><p class="P23">As the superfice of what’s been,</p><p class="P23">Illusion of memory.</p><p class="P23">At the bottom of the card the faded ink,</p><p class="P23">A nation’s stamp that’s released</p><p class="P23">From the pressure of representation</p><p class="P23">Behind us and gone. What the faded air </p><p class="P23">Illumed as flag is the flare a dawn </p><p class="P23">Now scatters as ash. Our hands are glass</p><p class="P23">Darker and darker in the dark, gesture of distance</p><p class="P23">Twisting its banner of intercession </p><p class="P23">An apparently losing hope.</p><p class="P23">Or, if a day has burned itself a universe,</p><p class="P23">It has burned a tapestry of spread</p><p class="P23">Perception. ‘We’ lies forlorn, a mark </p><p class="P23">On the cotton like a stain of blood</p><p class="P23">Fingers scratch there. Notes that puncture </p><p class="P23">Their own hours as a mesh of stitched time</p><p class="P23">And leave frozen the particular. I walk </p><p class="P23">And you walk a tango in the sordid street,</p><p class="P23">One more blown wrapper found parting on the horn.</p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23"> .III.</p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23">As a quest for something more exotic</p><p class="P23">It leans abandoned in the air, a patch</p><p class="P23">Of wall fluttered Rome’s Scottish border.</p><p class="P23">A Caesar will arise, reel some restless </p><p class="P23">Discontent to a march on an old idea.</p><p class="P23">Thus, broken upon flutings, faded</p><p class="P23">In a different age, it has assumed </p><p class="P23">Resurrection, hooked the grave with the bait </p><p class="P23">That’s a sword’s sanguine hope, the drums, pipes </p><p class="P23">And shouts blunted a dissonant song</p><p class="P23">Collected chance redemption.</p><p class="P23">If, when the marching’s stopped, the city</p><p class="P23">Returned to pub, board, and bedroom,</p><p class="P23">The back wave that is history </p><p class="P23">Knocks us out again, all we can mark</p><p class="P23">Are the lists of the dead, the captured,</p><p class="P23">The hoards, the rapes, the consequent </p><p class="P23">Retelling of adventure…</p><p class="P23">Cancel but revivify the ailing culture</p><p class="P23">And make true the absent as the present.</p><p class="P23">So, this thread rolled around as sky outlasts</p><p class="P23">The individual, does not touch the individual </p><p class="P23">Except as the burn of that alien one</p><p class="P23">Togetherness may pretend we enjoy.</p><p class="P23">To begin or find the origin </p><p class="P23">Which is nowhere, cannot be contained,</p><p class="P23">Is known only in and is known only as</p><p class="P23">Appearance: radial of no foci,</p><p class="P23">Hub of no turning, start of all</p><p class="P23">That’s not creation. Wave or somewhere the flag, </p><p class="P23">A signal that was individual.</p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23"> .IV.</p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23">We remedy history, its stretch of </p><p class="P23">The warp and the woof, its tear of the glimmer </p><p class="P23">By our rebellion against the lie</p><p class="P23">Of an impersonal intent, circumference</p><p class="P23">Of a revolving god, by a habit </p><p class="P23">Of seeing ourselves as limbed </p><p class="P23">In the tree, the bird, the dog, his howl</p><p class="P23">At the sky, a process that contains both</p><p class="P23">The general and the particular,</p><p class="P23">A word passed in the roll of cloth, appearing</p><p class="P23">Ramified essence, not common nor</p><p class="P23">A whisper termed misunderstanding.</p><p class="P23"> </p><p class="P23">‘Utopian’ – but history turns the conversation</p><p class="P23">Back from the dead, out of the present,</p><p class="P23">Into the present as a holla </p><p class="P23">That peaks the rumble of burnt forest </p><p class="P23">And factory, demos jumble thrown</p><p class="P23">A break in the ‘fix’ of an arm, rubble </p><p class="P23">Stimulus defined, mathematically,</p><p class="P23">‘Dead matter’. Azure not gravity spins </p><p class="P23">The words as tapestry, pageant, perhaps </p><p class="P23">‘Triumph of Life’, benign as golden faces </p><p class="P23">And as frightening. These ones return </p><p class="P23">Silent, the offered gesture a graceful start </p><p class="P23">To that being more than enervated.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P43"> </p><p class="P31"> </p><p class="P31"> </p><p class="P31"> </p><p class="P31"> </p><p class="P31"> </p><p class="P32"> </p><p class="P32"> </p><p class="P32"> </p><p class="P32"> </p><p class="P32"> </p><p class="P32">Part 2</p><p class="P29"> </p><p class="P44"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P61"><a id="a__Tested_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__296_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__95_1915631257"/>Tested.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">I’ve tested it then,</p><p class="P21">The hollow sound of a world </p><p class="P21">Like the end of a journey </p><p class="P21">Whose expectations proved true.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Or, discovered, the enormous futility </p><p class="P21">Of the scheme, workers slouch </p><p class="P21">In a grubby tavern, </p><p class="P21">Take their pay.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">It is the night, ponderous echo </p><p class="P21">Swelled in a worlds dizzy stream,</p><p class="P21">Large and warm, </p><p class="P21">Makes Jonah’s burning cry</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Or charred the soul </p><p class="P21">A twitch of wings </p><p class="P21">Pinned by your image </p><p class="P21">A great black butterfly.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P63"><a id="a__That_Dangerous_Road_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__298_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__97_1915631257"/>That Dangerous Road.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">We wandered on,</p><p class="P21">Not willing to say goodbye:</p><p class="P21">Our bodies turned to that road </p><p class="P21">You’d be lost upon.</p><p class="P21">We sat on the scruffy edge</p><p class="P21">Not knowing, unwilling to say</p><p class="P21">“When is the last parting?”</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">The grass like an old mans hair</p><p class="P21">And our eyes upon our feet</p><p class="P21">As our words, torn vagaries,</p><p class="P21">Fluttered at the boundless sky.</p><p class="P21">Caught in the echo of your smile</p><p class="P21">Czech sunshine</p><p class="P21">Dreaming of chances graciousness.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">And then a slow, then a weighted</p><p class="P21">Dwindling under cloud,</p><p class="P21">Walking the untested horizon,</p><p class="P21">That dangerous road.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P61"><a id="a__Hovel_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__300_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__99_1915631257"/>Hovel.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Not a night to be seen:</p><p class="P21">The curtain, what’s left,</p><p class="P21">The dwindling, seeming circuit </p><p class="P21">Of autumn’s coming cold:</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">As this page may testify </p><p class="P21">Bought at a lower rate </p><p class="P21">Peace from oblivion of love.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">That invented horizon </p><p class="P21">Aimed to or turned from </p><p class="P21">The test I failed at.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Scraped sense in the ditch of words </p><p class="P21">Till the line, a borrowed light,</p><p class="P21">Illumines what memory </p><p class="P21">Imagined as love.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">And yet the illusion real, </p><p class="P21">You the ghosted thought,</p><p class="P21">Muse of this hovel.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P63"><a id="a__Smile_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__302_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__101_1915631257"/>Smile.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">All that time a denial</p><p class="P21">Of your impossible smile</p><p class="P21">Declaring an only child's</p><p class="P21">Own private love</p><p class="P21">Indifferent to the beloved.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Most when least I knew</p><p class="P21">Affections covered eyes</p><p class="P21">Affirmed an open fever:</p><p class="P21">That hard, 'pathetic' effort</p><p class="P21">To create your image</p><p class="P21">After you and know</p><p class="P21">Our unwarranted words</p><p class="P21">More real than truth.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P57"><a id="a__Violence_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__304_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__103_1915631257"/>Violence.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Cascading from the dark</p><p class="P21">A streets brutal light </p><p class="P21">Hoofed as the devil </p><p class="P21">Pounding on you </p><p class="P21">My murderous need </p><p class="P21">To make it known </p><p class="P21">I can believe. Untrue.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">The encumbrance of the second </p><p class="P21">Bulged from the blank </p><p class="P21">Dictates my empty page:</p><p class="P21">It is you against whom I rage.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P75"><a id="a__Sometimes_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__306_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__105_1915631257"/>Sometimes.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Sometimes</p><p class="P21">In a pub’s borrowed chair </p><p class="P21">You sit there and smile:</p><p class="P21">Amused ghost of memory,</p><p class="P21">A lover’s tempting fantasy </p><p class="P21">Bidding that madness come.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">It is pain that keeps me sane.</p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P72"><a id="a__Horizons_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__308_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__107_1915631257"/>Horizons.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Blind, my love, to futures chance,</p><p class="P21">That path to absence</p><p class="P21">A ragged way has forced me home.</p><p class="P21">And back? No. We have seen</p><p class="P21">A brandished curve, the scythe</p><p class="P21">Exit has turned us from,</p><p class="P21">Spin the spiralled sky a dream:</p><p class="P21">Who knows the horizons line?</p><p class="P21">The limits of its distance?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P72"><a id="a__Voyeur_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__310_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__109_1915631257"/>Voyeur.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Lilting among the wilting trees</p><p class="P21">The figure in the garden is me:</p><p class="P21">Expectant before every window</p><p class="P21">The cinema of romance, voyeur</p><p class="P21">Of improbable happiness,</p><p class="P21">Safely distant from commitment.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P61"><a id="a__Morning_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__312_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__111_1915631257"/>Morning.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T5">Farcical rumour of not being</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P21">What I am intruded upon,</p><p class="P21">Dawn delivers the accidents </p><p class="P21">Of nature insistent upon </p><p class="P21">That note experience cannot alter,</p><p class="P21">Indifferent to place or time,</p><p class="P21">Of the first, almost painful </p><p class="P21">Darkening of age.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P57"><a id="a__Park_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__314_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__113_1915631257"/>Park.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T5">Parks the grace</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P21">Of a jaded place,</p><p class="P21">Rough wood seats </p><p class="P21">And winter mud </p><p class="P21">The kind of good </p><p class="P21">London understood.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P67"><a id="a__0povrženíhodný_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__316_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__115_1915631257"/>0povrženíhodný.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">I remember your bedroom window</p><p class="P21">Staring at the snow and I wondering,</p><p class="P21">With pen in hand, at this new distance,</p><p class="P21">A foreign land and you too perversely so.</p><p class="P21">When you appeared it was always only</p><p class="P21">That tumbling extension of a clumsiness</p><p class="P21">I had rediscovered, the broken door,</p><p class="P21">A two foot jump, you collapsed upon me.</p><p class="P21">Pregnant with a new thing I was merely</p><p class="P21">‘Opovrženíhodný’, motiveless</p><p class="P21">And subterranean, like, you might have said,</p><p class="P21">Some crushed crab barely crawling for escape.</p><p class="P21">I was just brooding, I saw no reason</p><p class="P21">To move, perhaps, I was slightly shocked.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P70"><a id="a__Gardens_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__318_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__117_1915631257"/>Gardens.</h3><p class="P15">‘In unsern Jugengarten führt strasse mehr.’</p><p class="P15"> H. Hesse</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T5">What amused in the gardens we treasured</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P21">But never had was the pretence that somehow </p><p class="P21">We could abandon with our clothes our fear,</p><p class="P21">On certain rare, indeed impossible nights,</p><p class="P21">Those saturnalias, vague, as imprecise </p><p class="P21">As antediluvian grass, caress </p><p class="P21">The warm, illusory dream of our being</p><p class="P21">Ourselves alone. Among asphalt,</p><p class="P21">Embedded stone, between the slabs of urban business </p><p class="P21">Our toy soldiers fought, finally lost,</p><p class="P21">Slain on the battlefield of the interstice. </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">We still live in those cracks the best of council </p><p class="P21">Maintenance cannot fill, disillusioned </p><p class="P21">As to security, the uniqueness </p><p class="P21">Of its fauna, even that ossified </p><p class="P21">And precious ego we watered and wept over, </p><p class="P21">Kept secret, was proud of, itself </p><p class="P21">But one common blade of grass: picked, plucked, gathered </p><p class="P21">In our cities, pressed to that green and bitter dew </p><p class="P21">Of being human somewhere in the subsoil </p><p class="P21">We pretend to maintain a true home:</p><p class="P21">Place of temporary, shabby rooms, </p><p class="P21">Of ‘secret gardens’ of ‘childish fantasy.’</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P65"><a id="a__What_Do_I_Know_Now?"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__320_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__119_1915631257"/>What Do I Know Now?</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">What do I know now</p><p class="P21">But the winds breath </p><p class="P21">Passing to say:</p><p class="P21">We are frozen?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Even in winter </p><p class="P21">There is spring </p><p class="P21">Thin and unwarm,</p><p class="P21">The long road, untried.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Of land and sea </p><p class="P21">Memory.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P70"><a id="a__Poison_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__322_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__121_1915631257"/>Poison.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> .I.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T5">“I am not dangerous.” Their new form</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P21">Of politeness. Outside the white, flat world </p><p class="P21">Of roads. And, of course, they are not: A picture </p><p class="P21">In the paper come vividly alive</p><p class="P21">With all its crude, blunt art, the reds, the blues,</p><p class="P21">Folded into the bed a wedge of desire</p><p class="P21">To be ecstatic standing out in the land.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> .II.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">“I am not...” a partial conclusion to their ecstasy: </p><p class="P21">The distance of these walls a private cosmos</p><p class="P21">Urgent, diffident, the cataract and the vein </p><p class="P21">Only half oblivion wholly pain lost in oblivion.</p><p class="P21">If to work then to home the expanding enclosure</p><p class="P21">Finally unravelled a ‘failed life’ which, at this turn, </p><p class="P21">Frightens a room. What is left but persists,</p><p class="P21">What is to come is nothing in a small poison.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P59"><a id="a__Bad_Verse_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__324_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__123_1915631257"/>Bad Verse.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Half a line of bad verse</p><p class="P21">Are the days of this house</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Or if you try to hear</p><p class="P21">Your own or an others voice</p><p class="P21">Listen carefully for the cars</p><p class="P21">In the nights silence</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Or in the roads</p><p class="P21">Whose feet may search</p><p class="P21">Stone and drain</p><p class="P21">For absence as certainty</p><p class="P21">Forgotten with last year’s ghost.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P76"><a id="a__Quiet"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__326_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__125_1915631257"/>Quiet</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Everything is so quiet and peaceful now:</p><p class="P21">How can there be an end, a beginning?</p><p class="P21">Yet slowly the darkness comes, voices fill </p><p class="P21">The streets and houses, the last light </p><p class="P21">Gathered by the children in their play </p><p class="P21">Hesitant among the cars filled with dad, mum,</p><p class="P21">The returning student wandering the last </p><p class="P21">Reluctance of once more returning home:</p><p class="P21">What was my hour has become a small town's </p><p class="P21">Suburbia where family and friends retrieve </p><p class="P21">All their efforts purpose – the work, the sorry </p><p class="P21">Climb of forced and futile destruction </p><p class="P21">Lost in the general folly of Being.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P70"><a id="a__Laugh_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__328_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__127_1915631257"/>Laugh.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Like the wanderer and his shadow,</p><p class="P21">As tall as failure, you sit </p><p class="P21">In this mythical age of functional living,</p><p class="P21">Equality and race, god and his double,</p><p class="P21">Exhaling words a match may allow </p><p class="P21">Between cigarette and pen,</p><p class="P21">Writing ‘arse’ for a cheap bit of realism.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Lend me, you say, a message to hand over:</p><p class="P21">So much is about yet you cannot see it –</p><p class="P21">The heavy statues worked for others glory </p><p class="P21">Will always fall, noticed only </p><p class="P21">When the crowd is permitted a sacrifice,</p><p class="P21">Exhibited, appendages missing.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">If all the flowers, herbs, trees of alien nature </p><p class="P21">Had that smile as their misjudgement </p><p class="P21">Could you still laugh at the folly of it all?</p><p class="P21">The rabbits, the foxes, the salivating wolves </p><p class="P21">Slapped as one slaps stone with the metal brightness </p><p class="P21">Of a crowds disillusionment, spat upon,</p><p class="P21">Could you be then still quite so curt </p><p class="P21">With your honesty and as if the failure </p><p class="P21">Was merely ordinary like a broken home?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P76"><a id="a__Failure_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__330_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__129_1915631257"/>Failure.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">On the moment, they say, here and now:</p><p class="P21">All your expectations flattened to a bed </p><p class="P21">Not much smaller than the room, drifting </p><p class="P21">In and out of windows, bounced between </p><p class="P21">The rattle of cans, the dance of feet,</p><p class="P21">The bodiless discourse of being.</p><p class="P21">‘To be is to be present’: where once </p><p class="P21">Two might have seen there is the mirror,</p><p class="P21">Where once light the sound of this silly hour </p><p class="P21">Reflected stale betwixt failure and failure. </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P70"><a id="a__Home_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__332_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__131_1915631257"/>Home.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">What maltreatment made you beseech</p><p class="P21">A stranger of his word,</p><p class="P21">The second hand poets song</p><p class="P21">Destined, surely, this silent home?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Two extraordinary eyes, beautiful and young,</p><p class="P21">Always demanding a tale impossible to tell.</p><p class="P21">Yet for one smile even the stones had words.</p><p class="P21">I gave you room and board, I talked and talked</p><p class="P21">And talked till finally you loved me:</p><p class="P21">For one moment I knew a chance joy</p><p class="P21">Like a starved man fed poison.</p><p class="P21">In the morning you were gone.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Or was it I who fled the miles</p><p class="P21">Just for a coward’s home?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P70"><a id="a__Drink_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__334_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__133_1915631257"/>Drink.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">For three days I drank, certain of failure,</p><p class="P21">That you wouldn’t return… Without a penny,</p><p class="P21">Rich on the envy of others,</p><p class="P21">We boiled grass and smoked our emptiness…</p><p class="P21">Jumping up and down, shouting</p><p class="P21">“You love me! You love me!”</p><p class="P21">I knew I was without belief…</p><p class="P21">Behind you with a bottle that wouldn’t open</p><p class="P21">I spat my pain into your silence</p><p class="P21">Expecting, at least, the reaction of hate:</p><p class="P21">I gained that, broken on the stair</p><p class="P21">My test of unalterable love.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P70"><a id="a__“Never!”"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__336_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__135_1915631257"/>“Never!”</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T5">A gloomy summer’s rain so alien</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P21">To you with your hot, dry and lovely days,</p><p class="P21">Your unchangeable seasons, those certain </p><p class="P21">Winters of snow and a cold so cold it froze </p><p class="P21">The spirit. And I suppose that steady swing </p><p class="P21">Has pulled you more beautiful still than when,</p><p class="P21">Your eyes so blue, I knew heaven </p><p class="P21">Indifferent: A failure before </p><p class="P21">‘Possession’, knowing the end, having once </p><p class="P21">Gained from you the grace of that impossible </p><p class="P21">Answer of a smile, I fell, lost, at ‘home’.</p><p class="P21">The steady roll, stronger than generation,</p><p class="P21">A country bred you, twisted merely release.</p><p class="P21">The sharp urge of a road: “You’ve left me.”</p><p class="P21">How curt, stupid my answer: “Never!”</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P77"><a id="a__Moth_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__338_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__137_1915631257"/> Moth.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Do I have a relationship,</p><p class="P21">Then, with that dead moth?</p><p class="P21">Caught in a summers evening,</p><p class="P21">Dead in the morning </p><p class="P21">Of the first, the second day?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">What was allowed a nocturnal flight </p><p class="P21">Burnt by my impotent vision,</p><p class="P21">Defeated between the soured sugar,</p><p class="P21">The faded cotton,</p><p class="P21">The fantasy and boredom of gold?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Command and it will obey </p><p class="P21">Whacked by a newspaper,</p><p class="P21">Bursting upon the ceiling </p><p class="P21">The little generated warmth </p><p class="P21">Of his fossilised brethren:</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Civilised brothers that sublimate energies </p><p class="P21">A continuous constancy of flame,</p><p class="P21">A standard of intemperance </p><p class="P21">Worked towards but never achieved.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">The hours, with weight and measure,</p><p class="P21">Of day and night,</p><p class="P21">Finally turned their chaotic end </p><p class="P21">Broken in age.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Whose wings are, perhaps, </p><p class="P21">Prettier than I imagined,</p><p class="P21">A bulbous, pathetic fluff,</p><p class="P21">A clumsy angel </p><p class="P21">Scattered backwards,</p><p class="P21">The untragic, dying fly.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P78"><a id="a__Brno__1993_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__340_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__139_1915631257"/>Brno, 1993.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Up through dusty sunlight, hobbling over dried mud,</p><p class="P21">The discovery of a thousand allotments:</p><p class="P21">Age had finally learnt its Voltairian lesson:</p><p class="P21">“Make carrots, cabbages and flowers.”</p><p class="P21">Between tyranny and disaster, favour and exile,</p><p class="P21">The dubious loyalty of land.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Except this was limbo: the Russian slap still stung,</p><p class="P21">The tin slash of the west still vicarious,</p><p class="P21">Still unlimited: easy to forget, amidst beers,</p><p class="P21">Dumplings, countless songs, the ugly death </p><p class="P21">This world, too, must suffer: cranes, cement, foundations,</p><p class="P21">The path ending arbitrarily in a fence:</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Mere intoxication, in love and in love with people </p><p class="P21">Who seemed to continue a conversation </p><p class="P21">Only imagined, gleaned from books and fantasy,</p><p class="P21">Animated over alcohol, guitars,</p><p class="P21">Through alien tongues, intelligence, community,</p><p class="P21">A smile: all of us mad, drunk with illusion,</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Killing ourselves, our children,</p><p class="P21">Heading nowhere, blind.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P74"><a id="a__‘Culture_’"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__342_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__141_1915631257"/>‘Culture.’</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">A mess of cracked stone:</p><p class="P21">They call them flags, flagstone </p><p class="P21">Unnoticed as the awkward obtrusion </p><p class="P21">Of obstacles, the unsteady chair </p><p class="P21">At the barbecue, a flat rough for a butt,</p><p class="P21">Something one just wouldn’t lie on,</p><p class="P21">Sun or no sun: shoddy and inexact,</p><p class="P21">Badly paid labour, ‘spoilt’ by nature,</p><p class="P21">This rough, obvious ‘culture’.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P67"><a id="a__Summer_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__344_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__143_1915631257"/>Summer.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Summer is where you are.-</p><p class="P21">Is where we are?</p><p class="P21">And England’s ragged weather,</p><p class="P21">Its people blown from street to room,</p><p class="P21">Fix of the vicarious.</p><p class="P21">When can we be together?</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Just a photo, a momentary respite,</p><p class="P21">You turn from solitude your beautiful head:</p><p class="P21">Vistas of your own world beckon </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21">Yet your thoughts are mine </p><p class="P21">Bridging a thousand miles </p><p class="P21">The agony of love, surety </p><p class="P21">Of being and not being here.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P74"><a id="a__Family_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__346_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__145_1915631257"/>Family.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T5">Always again the wish to begin</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P21">Brilliantly new, once more to look clear </p><p class="P21">And innocent on what’s not clear and innocent,</p><p class="P21">To imagine these dirty rivulets </p><p class="P21">Spilling down the street as children imagine:</p><p class="P21">Surprising, delightful, infinite.</p><p class="P21">But the street is only a playground for louts,</p><p class="P21">The frustrated conduit of labour,</p><p class="P21">The town a particular of a history </p><p class="P21">Intensely, chronically self destructive.</p><p class="P21">We cannot unlearn contempt for the world,</p><p class="P21">The fragmentary spirit, the family </p><p class="P21">That fell apart even before it began.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P79"><a id="a__House_For_Sale_"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__348_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__147_1915631257"/>House For Sale.</h3><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P19"><span class="T5">Friends that were not and have already gone</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P21">Leave that glamorous emptiness, the void </p><p class="P21">Of an age that has forgotten the words </p><p class="P21">Of a conversation or why it meant </p><p class="P21">Anything: each day behind the curtain </p><p class="P21">Must be found the appalling but still </p><p class="P21">Discreetly vague urge of the animal,</p><p class="P21">Panic before the inarticulate weight </p><p class="P21">Of this negative about to be exposed. </p><p class="P21">Upon the stairs phantom ascending and </p><p class="P21">Descending whispers left merely to </p><p class="P21">Remind one, if not of departure,</p><p class="P21">Then of a past where opening a door </p><p class="P21">Was significant, where each room was </p><p class="P21">A place, where being in a house made sense.</p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><h3 class="P80"><a id="a__The_Way"><span/></a><a name="__RefHeading__350_201766011"/><a name="__RefHeading__149_1915631257"/>The Way</h3><p class="P8">‘The way out is via the door:</p><p class="P5">how come nobody knows this?’</p><p class="P10">Confucius, The Analects</p><p class="P6"> </p><p class="P18"><span class="T5">Neither to go far nor to come home</span><span class="T5"> </span></p><p class="P20">Is the point, they say:</p><p class="P20">To stay that distant fixation found</p><p class="P20">In their farmers fields </p><p class="P20">There to scare the crows. Others,</p><p class="P20">Across the years, from family </p><p class="P20">To friends, may beg benediction,</p><p class="P20">Proper words to confirm </p><p class="P20">What their presumptions will always presume,</p><p class="P20">But you that timid daring </p><p class="P20">Which says there is a way but I cannot find it </p><p class="P20">As the parameter of a town </p><p class="P20">Beyond which the road leads past the graveyard </p><p class="P20">But never past fear.</p><p class="P20"> </p><p class="P21"> </p><p class="P52"> </p><p class="P51"> </p></div></body></html>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">'I know that I know nothing'</div>Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04364287936968808344noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8781173037216089635.post-60338554063666907162013-11-14T21:39:00.001+00:002013-11-14T21:39:18.161+00:00Poems 1983 -2013<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Math/DTD/mathml2/xhtml-math11-f.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><!--This file was converted to xhtml by LibreOffice - see http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/filter/source/xslt for the code.--><head profile="http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8"/><title xml:lang="en-US">- no title specified</title><meta name="DCTERMS.title" content="" xml:lang="en-US"/><meta name="DCTERMS.language" content="en-US" scheme="DCTERMS.RFC4646"/><meta name="DCTERMS.source" content="http://xml.openoffice.org/odf2xhtml"/><meta name="DCTERMS.issued" content="2013-11-14T13:40:44.703000000" scheme="DCTERMS.W3CDTF"/><meta name="DCTERMS.modified" content="2013-11-14T16:33:16.171000000" scheme="DCTERMS.W3CDTF"/><meta name="DCTERMS.provenance" content="" xml:lang="en-US"/><meta name="DCTERMS.subject" content="," xml:lang="en-US"/><link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" hreflang="en"/><link rel="schema.DCTERMS" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" hreflang="en"/><link rel="schema.DCTYPE" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/" hreflang="en"/><link rel="schema.DCAM" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcam/" hreflang="en"/><style type="text/css">
@page { }
table { border-collapse:collapse; border-spacing:0; empty-cells:show }
td, th { vertical-align:top; font-size:12pt;}
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { clear:both }
ol, ul { margin:0; padding:0;}
li { list-style: none; margin:0; padding:0;}
<!-- "li span.odfLiEnd" - IE 7 issue-->
li span. { clear: both; line-height:0; width:0; height:0; margin:0; padding:0; }
span.footnodeNumber { padding-right:1em; }
span.annotation_style_by_filter { font-size:95%; font-family:Arial; background-color:#fff000; margin:0; border:0; padding:0; }
* { margin:0;}
.fr1 { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; text-align:center; vertical-align:top; writing-mode:lr-tb; margin-left:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-top:0in; margin-bottom:0in; padding:0in; border-style:none; }
.P1 { font-size:9pt; font-family:Arial; writing-mode:page; }
.P2 { font-size:9pt; font-family:Arial; writing-mode:page; }
.P3 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0835in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:page; line-height:115%; }
.P4 { font-size:12pt; margin-bottom:0.0835in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:page; line-height:115%; }
.P5 { font-size:9pt; font-family:Arial; writing-mode:page; color:#000000; }
.P6 { font-size:9pt; font-family:Arial; writing-mode:page; color:#000000; }
.P7 { font-size:9pt; font-family:Arial; writing-mode:page; color:#000000; background-color:#ffffff; }
.P8 { font-size:10.5pt; margin-bottom:0.0835in; margin-top:0in; font-family:Liberation Serif; writing-mode:page; line-height:115%; color:#000000; }
.Standard { font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman; writing-mode:page; }
.T1 { font-family:Arial; font-size:9.5pt; }
.T10 { color:#000000; }
.T11 { color:#000000; }
.T12 { color:#000000; }
.T13 { color:#000000; font-family:Arial; font-size:9pt; }
.T15 { font-family:Arial; font-size:9pt; }
.T16 { font-style:italic; }
.T18 { font-weight:bold; }
.T19 { font-style:italic; }
.T2 { font-family:Arial; font-size:9.5pt; }
.T20 { font-style:italic; font-weight:bold; }
.T3 { font-family:Arial; font-size:9.5pt; }
.T4 { font-family:Arial; font-size:9.5pt; }
.T5 { font-family:Arial; font-size:9.5pt; }
.T6 { font-family:Arial; font-size:9.5pt; }
.T7 { font-family:Arial; font-size:9.5pt; }
.T8 { color:#000000; }
.T9 { color:#000000; }
<!-- ODF styles with no properties representable as CSS -->
.T14 .T17 { }
</style></head><body dir="ltr" style="max-width:8.5in;margin-top:0.7874in; margin-bottom:0.7874in; margin-left:0.7874in; margin-right:0.7874in; writing-mode:lr-tb; "><p class="P4"><span class="T1">Poems<br/>1987 - 98<br/><br/><br/><br/>by<br/><br/><br/><br/>Lewis Deane<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>Poor, naked wretches, where so e’er you are,<br/><br/>That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,<br/><br/>How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides,<br/><br/>Your loop'd and window’d raggedness, defend you<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>From seasons such as these?<br/><br/>King Lear Act III, Scene IV, Lines 28-32.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>Contents<br/><br/>Road. 4<br/>This Place No Good. 5<br/>Tramp. 6<br/>Autumn. 7<br/>The Street I. 8<br/>Awaiting An Answer. 9<br/>Decisions Of A Life. 10<br/>After Hours 12<br/>First Love. 14<br/>London. 15<br/>The Apology. 17<br/>The street II. 21<br/>She. 22<br/>Absence. 25<br/>Child At The Window. 26<br/>Strange Meeting. 27<br/>Now different. 28<br/>Postcard. 29<br/>Tatters Of Fact. 30<br/>The City. 31<br/>Fumbled Epitaph. 32<br/>Belief. 33<br/>Dialectic. 34<br/>The Flag. 36<br/>Tested. 39<br/>That Dangerous Road. 40<br/>Hovel. 41<br/>Smile. 42<br/>Violence. 43<br/>Sometimes. 44<br/>Horizons. 45<br/>Voyeur. 46<br/>Morning. 47<br/>Park. 48<br/>0povženíhodný. 49<br/>Gardens. 50<br/></span><span class="T1">What Do I Know Now? 51<br/>Poison. 52<br/>Bad Verse. 53<br/>Quiet 54<br/>Laugh. 55<br/>Failure. 56<br/>Home. 57<br/>Drink. 58<br/>“Never!” 59<br/>Moth. 60<br/>Brno, 1993. 61<br/>‘Culture.’ 62<br/>Summer. 63<br/>Family. 64<br/>House For Sale. 65<br/>The Way 66<br/><br/><br/>Appendix I:<br/>Juvenile or discarded poems. 68<br/><br/>Bars. 70<br/>Rocks. 71<br/>The Lone-Ranger. 72<br/>Stepping On Winter. 73<br/>Perhaps. 74<br/>Field, Wood. 75<br/>Forsaken Ghost. 77<br/>‘Though The Winds May Stare’. 78<br/>The Saviour Of Painters. 79<br/>The Collection. 80<br/>Roots And Flowers. 81<br/>Offering. 82<br/>Garments. 83<br/>A Month Past. 84<br/>Not A Word. 85<br/>Illusion That Is Soul. 86<br/>She Was A Lady. 87<br/>Small</span> <span class="T1">Town</span> <span class="T1">Blues. 88<br/>Shadows Of A Life. 89<br/>R. M. Rilke. 93<br/>Some Cry Of A World. 95<br/>‘Strange Excess Of Trumpet Glare.’ 96<br/>European Dreams. 97<br/>Moment. 99<br/>Star. 100<br/>An Empty Lair. 101<br/>Sweet It Is To Die 102<br/>Poet. 103<br/>Hitchhikers monologue. 105<br/>Never Again. 109<br/>Brutalities. 110<br/>Bluebell Wood. 111<br/>Shadow Of Identity. 112<br/></span><span class="T1">Moments. 113<br/>Picture It. 114<br/>The Age Of Darkness. 115<br/>Labyrinth. 116<br/>Darkness. 117<br/>Odd Numbers. 118<br/>O Why Should I Care? 119<br/>Ambitions Of Twenty Nine. 120<br/><br/><br/>Appendix II:<br/>New Poems 122<br/><br/>Everything 124<br/>Where Are You? 125<br/>‘So That Everything Becomes Attenuated’ 126<br/>All We Have 127<br/>Her Smile 129<br/>Being There 130<br/>‘Nothing’ 132<br/>I will Never Be Gone 133<br/>Suit 134<br/>Trying To Listen 135<br/>Index Of First Lines 164<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>Road.<br/><br/>“Down that road I went.” He said, pointing somewhere.<br/><br/>I thought you were near, a companion of mine,<br/>The sun hot, softening a brittle floor,<br/>And I here dawdling, walking as if drunk:<br/><br/>White not exactly white, blue which stretched beyond blue.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>This Place No Good.<br/><br/>Restlessly wandering for a place<br/>Of silence and poise: is this life?<br/>Hot brush on a canvas of desert dust:<br/>In the beginning white paper, ashes swirl, mindless.<br/><br/>Here a cafe, time is nine, place Holborn: tea.<br/>An occasional diner shuffles an entrance.<br/></span><span class="T1">To quote: “This place no good.”<br/><br/><br/> Tramp.<br/><br/>Forgotten towers<br/>Broken in my presence.<br/>Or I’m a tramp<br/>Exhausted in travelling,<br/>Beaten by brooms.<br/><br/>Just as I was saying<br/>“Yes, I realise...”<br/>She kicked me from the stair,<br/>Emptied me like a bucket<br/>On the street,<br/>Spilling to the cat flaps,<br/>Simultaneous purr on each door,<br/>Preaching like Jesus<br/>“I’ll heal no one!"<br/><br/><br/>Autumn.<br/><br/>Below the cry of a bat<br/>Foots shadow on frozen faces:<br/><br/>Wan luxuries,<br/>Chilled notes of dawn.<br/><br/><br/><br/>The Street I.<br/><br/>Corners catching<br/>A broken moon:<br/>That and the tumble<br/>Of drunken feet,<br/>Splash of voices.<br/><br/>Thirst among the lamps pools,<br/>Cry from the slashed mouth,<br/>Flutter of lids and the street<br/>Like the stamped pieces<br/>Of a fractured vision.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Awaiting An Answer.<br/><br/><br/>.1.<br/><br/>Tempered, awkward key<br/></span><span class="T1">Of that pianos sound<br/>Disturbs sunlit dust,<br/>This corpse's epidermis.<br/>And on afternoons,<br/>It seemed long and desperate,<br/>Searches for that glimpse of woman<br/>Heard in sounds of Joan<br/>Or other musty romances.<br/><br/>Perhaps merely the hair<br/>Reminded of the dust<br/>Of those old school days<br/>Or a pure line expressed<br/>In the profile, catching<br/>A last evaporate fantasy;<br/>Maybe some dim sympathy,<br/>Merely the union of interest<br/>In one trajected plain,<br/>Slim yet a basis for partnership.<br/><br/><br/>.II.<br/><br/>If I’d found a place<br/>It was, as always, momentary,<br/>Caught in a second’s glance of sun:<br/>Blue, common bell chimed its noiseless scent<br/>More irritant to plans, more conducive<br/>To the forgotten, forgetful days of school.<br/><br/>But those other ones: rather a feeling<br/>Than tissue of incident where one hung<br/>At the most appropriate place<br/>As for a meal. Separate, I’d tempt<br/>A natural force to come swing my way.<br/><br/>Decisions Of A Life.<br/><br/><br/>.I.<br/><br/>She headed to the door<br/>Of some burnt out world<br/>Lost to the dried flare<br/>Of Apocalypse. With words<br/>Telling of that special place<br/>Her mind halved its voices<br/>Where one would call “Where?”<br/>To the others reassurance of<br/>“One foot more, one age less.”<br/><br/>And held by the endless tide<br/>Of works companions<br/>Some sense of proportion was lost.<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>At home a dear friend<br/>Had uttered the martyred cliché of<br/>“Be yourself!” A thousand victims -<br/>Were there more?<br/><br/><br/>.II.<br/><br/>Down the battle broken world<br/>Where the shadows left around:<br/>Corpses, corpses flew<br/>To glare their unholy cries.<br/><br/><br/>.III.<br/><br/>And among the luggage of travel<br/>A niche was found:<br/>Here a shadow shared a bottle<br/>With a friend or two,<br/>Words scattered among the unintended,<br/>Formed their partial puzzles.<br/><br/>.V.<br/><br/>One friendly companion,<br/>Whose ever forming grin disturbed,<br/>Pronounced, heartily,<br/>Some ending term,<br/>Some clause of binding.<br/><br/>Sealed by the wax of finality<br/>She considered her attention weak:<br/>It had stopped at the cover,<br/>Started at the completion of smiles,<br/>Had broken at the ribboned bow.<br/><br/>Twisted in a distracting knot<br/>These decisions had been made.<br/><br/><br/><br/>After Hours<br/><br/>.I.<br/><br/>Those noises in the blank hour<br/>Between twelve and one,<br/>The ingenuous girl singing a song<br/>Perhaps borne from the late closed pub,<br/>The car alarm that mischievously sputters<br/>Its unfrightening sound off and on,<br/>Drinkers warming themselves<br/></span><span class="T1">Over the hollow sound<br/>Of their chanted slogans<br/>Ready to beat, in the unifying desire<br/>Of oblivion, any fellow man;<br/>And, in between, quiet and quiet,<br/>This slow, singing, melancholy hour.<br/><br/>And, to distract, the thought of you asleep<br/>Comes and goes like that crying alarm:<br/>Dog barking desires of my frightful cellar.<br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/>If, in this sphere of solitude,<br/>Egocentric and sentimental,<br/>You could somehow intrude,<br/>Could arrive with bags and face turned<br/>To that obscure, private life we somehow share<br/>What, in the broken paces of private habit,<br/>What movement outside it and therefore hope,<br/>Could bloom, stare its tired stare,<br/>Bare from beaten limb (yes, that fellow)<br/>The one, doubled, solitary flower?<br/><br/><br/><br/> .III.<br/><br/>Among the insomniac cars<br/>My shattered face stares whitely<br/>At the moon. The blown flowers<br/>Of our common school die quietly<br/>Aged gestures of a beaten face.<br/>Conversation, left<br/>In my struggling, conceiving days,<br/>Bouncing back from that rough, gauged place,<br/>Poses the question of our death.<br/><br/>Am I then, in this absurd posture,<br/>Abstracted by the flying blue lights<br/>Making those correct, forewarned waves?<br/><br/>Death is a sordid thing<br/>Done by sordid men<br/>Use to a sordid world:<br/><br/>This our modern way<br/>We love but cannot have<br/>The once promised life?<br/><br/><br/>.IV.<br/><br/></span><span class="T1">My mind has not the peace that’s promised<br/>But a rage, a rage at a limb and joints<br/>Incomplete, broken desire,<br/>The unforewarned abstraction of our death.<br/><br/>And yet if you were here like the nurse<br/>You would find only words of blood<br/>And the absurd indignity of this mans fall.<br/>Death crying (sentimental) among<br/>The blotted whiteness of a ward,<br/>Silhouettes of urgent shadow<br/>And the dark faces beaten beyond<br/><br/><br/><br/> First Love.<br/><br/>A naked figurine in a green shrub<br/>Or adorning the neglected lawn<br/>The one comical illusion of one mind - mine.<br/>And the great barn hall, stacked with dust,<br/>Echoing the straw<br/>Upon which we might have lain.<br/>And, as your fingers curled the keys,<br/>I was there in courtly guise,<br/>Attendant, dancing upon your cast tunes,<br/>Counterfeit of your desires.<br/>Did you see?<br/><br/><br/><br/>London.<br/><br/><br/>.I.<br/><br/>It was a comic sight:<br/>His earnest face forward<br/>In the fury of impotence,<br/>Awkward and shyly expressed,<br/>And she agile in her agreements<br/>Reassurance with a “Yes, yes, yes.”<br/><br/>Had muddy eloquence enchained her<br/>Or the force of that will<br/>Desperation implies<br/>Perhaps afraid of turning keys<br/>Of murderous desire:<br/><br/>Who knows the end of these things?<br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/></span><span class="T1">In the street and in the rain<br/>He let her dwindle like his voice<br/>That, lost and inept,<br/>Had weakly made a pledge<br/>Diverted by the beer<br/>She ordered at the bar:<br/>Words stopped in a shock stare,<br/>He and she were released<br/>From the embarrassment of proposal:<br/>“You must avoid awkward promise of intent<br/>Striving for a perfect civic form<br/>Impossible and blind.”<br/><br/><br/><br/> .III.<br/><br/>That was the last time he saw her:<br/>The idea afloat for a while<br/>Till stress and ulcer and the starving age<br/>Each had slashed its way<br/>Through to his cognisance.<br/>All the point was gone:<br/>What had been a mirage<br/>Of tempting possibility<br/>Was a joke a city smiled at<br/>In its busy search for gold.<br/><br/> The Apology.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/>The heat folded in an airless layer.<br/>So you see my seeming arctic heart<br/>How foolish this tearful child and babbling eye<br/>Which is drunk and staggers,<br/>Broken below your stairs.<br/><br/>We never could lift up our waxen wings<br/>Or lifted did not the hateful, burning accident<br/>Dissolve then drown its flesh? You and I<br/>Adrift among the pillared trees,<br/>Charred in our two dreams wary sleep.<br/>We float on the lazy but then unstoppable streams.<br/><br/>So, to be left in the Arctic land,<br/>Here, where the bell broods hollow.<br/>Among the clattering ice<br/>Of your eyes dream<br/>Never where we so formed<br/>Nor oned like our lips seal.<br/><br/>Then darling (you permit me thus?)<br/></span><span class="T1">I have fought the darker things<br/>That instant light extinguished,<br/>That here with fortune rise.<br/>And age but the second tide.<br/>Oh, perhaps sensed beneath the skin<br/>Youths wild but aesthetic bone.<br/><br/>Then how we might laugh, how dream<br/>As the tedium formed stalagmites<br/>Count our mortality.<br/>Blushes for the flesh<br/>And a pointed limestone world.<br/><br/><br/>Yes. But love? Words that patter on the floor:<br/>It will not utter, it will not speak, disclose.<br/>Our memory will blow like dust in the common wind,<br/>Absorbed in a million pores it will forget itself.<br/><br/>.II.<br/><br/>I have fought this long hard day to contain you<br/>But you where ever braver than I:<br/>Will I always, thus, fall under your hammer<br/>Auctioned at the obscurest price?<br/><br/>And how, then, do the ages tell<br/>You from your dalliance,<br/>Those ages that could never tell<br/>Old bones from new dust.<br/><br/>And how then, pray, will you find<br/>A companionable skeleton<br/>There for me to commune<br/>Through it’s blown skin ribs?<br/><br/><br/><br/> .III.<br/><br/>Our talk has a fungal form<br/>Or metaphysic and directed down<br/>From some ill hell it wiry swells<br/>Like creeping ivy through the gloom.<br/>Sad and distempered a fiery rage<br/>Infects its veins and illuminates<br/>A wistful steam that pales the face.<br/><br/>And, how, across this space,<br/>That when I look stretches dizzy,<br/>As if with ambition coils the Earth,<br/>Can we again drown the cold<br/>In ignorant passion?<br/>Our desires recoil and wrap<br/></span><span class="T1">In frigid, spiritful fire<br/>Till love is all but a little,<br/>Indistinguishable, sanctuary flame<br/>For how long burning?<br/><br/>If the branches here do touch<br/>Can the steal there then melt?<br/>And, if inflamed, would you despise<br/>The uncontrolled, fast beating heart<br/>Or, then, mourn ices wavering<br/>Or unwished loss of our loved<br/>Stone, statuesque, seeming godhead?<br/><br/><br/><br/> .IV.<br/><br/>Caught in the webbed distraction of a gaze<br/>Buzzed impossibilities, Utopic dreams.<br/>Your breath dragged at a thousand coattails<br/>Saying seeming unity. I was aware of slurs<br/>Genetic tales drowned in its inaction.<br/><br/>And you said: ”Then this sole point I put there?”<br/>“Our land marks, thus devised in the conscience,<br/>Display an open world, inessential.<br/>Such mortality and such the way its tunes<br/>Out echo as the corpse the body.” So thus I.<br/><br/><br/><br/>The street II.<br/><br/>Now and then a curtain flits and a stare<br/>At second or third floor windows opposite,<br/>Half inquisitive of hotel happenings,<br/>Half irritated by mock grandeur,<br/>Brute noise this particular Victorian,<br/>Part empty site displays. It’s the habit<br/>Of some drawn up to face, across the nightly peace<br/>Of no mans land, the street, dull combatants<br/>On each side: Perhaps poverty separates you<br/>From the pub downstairs, a certain angst<br/>About the pull of popular haunts,<br/>Getting more than your fair share of inarticulate friends.<br/>A chance modern law decides<br/>Dividing speech and the neighbourhood,<br/>Forming false battles, situating<br/>Between you and it a televisual screen,<br/>Your thought on some Heaven<br/>Where face to face we met,<br/>Your eyes on some dark glass of a window.<br/>You’re seen, the curtains drawn.<br/><br/></span><span class="T1">It’s something to be remarked upon,<br/>Odd how every night it is done<br/>Not only by you but repeated<br/>Down the street, each side a sentinel,<br/>If not throwing sticks in a fire, then<br/>Looking out to see who’s watching who,<br/>Catching the nightly skirmishes that,<br/>With not uncommon frequency, continue<br/>To punctuate a phoney war. Now and then<br/>That irregular exchange of cigarettes<br/>Or your side strikes the light, mine offers the fag.<br/>Usually, though, askers are causalities<br/>Rejected by us both, mostly ignored,<br/>Often sleeping somewhere out of sight,<br/>Under a bridge or whatever bomb shelter<br/>Accident has devised, they roll in slumber<br/>Tight into a plastic bag or the damp,<br/>Soggy cardboard once used to wrap our guns,<br/>Tanks, communications, surveillance units.<br/><br/>It is to be remarked upon how little<br/>I see of you, how quickly you disappear,<br/>How suspicious of you and I this neutral,<br/>Unneutral status makes us: Together<br/>Manufactured means of war – now we test them out.<br/><br/>But I’m bored of killing, it’s become such a<br/>Common exercise – I wish you’d sign a truce.<br/><br/><br/><br/>She.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/>It is not for this that I waited alone,<br/>Listless afore a feeble fire,<br/>The sun impatient to have done.<br/>All the lighting bad no matter its source,<br/>The coarse street shoppers shouting excitement<br/>In fears oblivion: I was patient,<br/>Reading</span> <span class="T1">horrid Milton, sipping cheap tea,<br/>Smoking a haze of desire in troubled Pandamonia.<br/>And those ‘after thoughts’ circling a vortex<br/>In the blackened hole of incurable want.<br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/>To long and a chair to comfortable<br/>Excusing the silence of passive desistance:<br/>I claimed ignorance, then corruption,<br/>Then the impossible greatness of the task<br/></span><span class="T1">And so destiny: fated thus<br/>To the eternal Ovidian whine,<br/>Claiming sanctuary in exile.<br/>The dark obliged, the nocturnal vigil,<br/>The lack of vitamin D:<br/>Cold, an empty gullet, the night.<br/><br/><br/><br/> .III.<br/><br/>One Sunday I ventured out:<br/>The street was the same shabby bin<br/>Of flowering tin and copulent flies.<br/>I discovered the polluted sea<br/>As I had discovered her before:<br/>From the strand and at a distance,<br/>Reflecting a sapien backside,<br/>Resigned, as passive as a slave,<br/>To complexions blare. And so,<br/>Seeing the mutual indifference<br/>Of man and water, I did not protest,<br/>I certainly was not shocked,<br/>I retreated back to my door:<br/>Another forty days vigil<br/>In the barrel of my bed,<br/>Expecting Alexander<br/>With a preprepared, laconic tongue<br/>So to list instructions<br/>Confused but tolerable.<br/><br/><br/> .IV.<br/><br/>Next the eye saw around<br/>The hostility of the times,<br/>The self sacrifice requisite to repair<br/>Deep holes in the fabric<br/>Torn in an uncaring glance.<br/>This was She who held the power to maim,<br/>Taking what accident had gathered<br/>In a forceful hands fine brutality.<br/>Pain of a posterior enervation<br/>Left the relics of charred anatomy<br/>Scattered as an after burn<br/>Whether the death, the caput mortuum<br/>Of an alchemical change<br/>Or the autograph of a miracle –<br/>Who knows?<br/><br/> .v.<br/><br/>Who dances in the Elysian fields<br/>Or laughs in the alley of posterity?<br/></span><span class="T1">No songs past memories rest: all, all a ball<br/>Of billowing winds wrapping chaos<br/>In the cries of vulgar sentience;<br/>Or the mechanics of bombardment<br/>And the assorted atom contending<br/>For upper air in feverish necessities,<br/>Scratched epitaphs of void.<br/>Death is a place past illusion<br/>Where permanents and eternity<br/>Are finally confounded<br/>As dust across a plain<br/>When a plain has gone.<br/><br/><br/>Absence.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/>Caught in a translunar spot<br/>A dying butterfly in a pool,<br/>A thousand old visions lost<br/>Mortal in it’s metal lids:<br/><br/>A note pinned upon a door<br/>Through which a friend had made<br/>Her exit: it was nearly missed,<br/>A faltering rope, suspended, clue giving.<br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/>Breaking the fingers<br/>Faulty in ice<br/>Thoughts push along the floor,<br/>Screech up a wet tank.<br/><br/>“I’ll rise next morning,<br/>I’ll set the day.”<br/><br/><br/> .III.<br/><br/>Arm on the butter stain<br/>That’s now between the cornflakes:<br/>“She should have been here to enjoy.”<br/><br/><br/><br/>Child At The Window.<br/><br/>Raining again among the ash pots<br/>And hardened flies of a garden.<br/><br/></span><span class="T1">And the expected face at the window<br/>Seemingly wet, staring at the one broken tree<br/>Toppled on the late roots of a burning.<br/><br/>Eyes amongst clogged weeds<br/>Tossed through the sly greys of morn<br/>The reception he demanded:<br/><br/>Blank and called at dawn<br/>To witness the first vision<br/>Of a broken, scattered soul<br/>Ever to stay hidden<br/>In destined torment<br/>Of childish pains.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Strange Meeting.<br/><br/>Not many years after that we realigned,<br/>Catching eye to eye a second sight:<br/>With age had come the clearer thought that sees<br/>And does not like, the in become the out.<br/>Lining the brow with an ignorant script<br/>Intervening chance and all those things not done<br/>As two. And this chance that’s worst of all.<br/><br/>She seemed to say through move of eye and mouth<br/>(Though she asked the usual things one asks)<br/>That, where ever once we’d met, those people<br/>Then had ceased to plague a time unfortunate<br/>And dead: who were these gathered on a chance<br/>It did not matter, an inconsequence<br/>Set up to sting a faded photograph.<br/><br/>Faded, yes, but not gone: we both had kept<br/>The odds and ends of our separate lives<br/>And, this one conjunction amongst them all<br/>Illusion, like the rest: one recovered,<br/>The other not: “The lies that we call soul<br/>I see and yet I cannot dispense with soul<br/>But have kept that wound festeringly bad.”<br/><br/>And so her to I had not forgot. But,<br/>As usual, I blindly circumscribed<br/>My image there on cast. And though her face<br/>Discouraged all it had not changed for me<br/>But grew inside till it at last cracked out.<br/>Shocked and battered and in retreat she said:<br/>“Well, must be off. Another day, perhaps?”<br/><br/><br/><br/>Now different.<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>I see you different, now, flattened by age<br/>Till every feature lines the white of your skin<br/>Like contours on a map. Pale, you luminess<br/>A past of hopes, loves and lands seasons<br/>Have obscured, a moon through thin cloud you show<br/>Nothing I can recognise.<br/><br/>A loss and a feeling<br/>Of a power that was important,<br/>Whose tug still irritates, whose decline<br/>Still saddens, I stare over the walls<br/>Of Europe, see you in this town or that,<br/>Ask meaningless questions, gain meaningless<br/>Replies, each letter ending “Love –“,<br/>The expected lie.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Postcard.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/>That postcard, whipped with the wind off the Hudson,<br/>Monosyllabic and exasperated,<br/>Words sped to a staccato breath like a wave bye, bye.<br/>And I lying still, only by chance, tilted to catch<br/>These paper words tumbling through the air.<br/>How much attenuated, the spoken thought,<br/>Its time crushed, instantaneous arrival<br/>Expected and found on an American train<br/>Saying, “Distance does not matter.”<br/>And I believing the lie.<br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/>Ill eyes abed smoke the sour jaundice<br/>Of an English room. And that picture<br/>Of New York an agony of ground glass<br/>Stabbing each window the fragmented<br/>Possibility of an absent wave.<br/>The sky the same drab, abstract balm<br/>Its saving, enhanced, artificial grace<br/>I can stare at here. Only you, turning<br/>North or south the Hudson</span> <span class="T1">way,<br/>Were missed in person, a shadow cast,<br/>Edging an American infinite.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Tatters Of Fact.<br/><br/></span><span class="T1">All the body’s turnings merely serve<br/>To enshroud the certain loss of departure,<br/>Once gratitude. A time measured by absence,<br/>Forced forgettings, I stare up indeterminate<br/>Distance, find only the severance<br/>Of memory, a murder performed in a week.<br/><br/>We have resurrections as comedies<br/>Their buffoons and twice now we have toured<br/>The shifted bargain of lies we told<br/>Our two nights. Hills of Utopian flesh<br/>Made a nightmare of a need to be<br/>Always central to a two oned self.<br/>Illusion of integrity our line<br/>And bait, echo and echo of enquiry<br/>Till, shattered all light, tungsten snapped, we fall away.<br/><br/>Gathered such half real, remembered imagery<br/>A perfect pastoral in the dark.<br/>Sleep pierces; I wake to the tatters of fact.<br/><br/><br/><br/>The City.<br/><br/>A Sundays gentle cycle through seas of empty streets<br/>Shadowing the shadow of Paul. We are expecting death,<br/>September’s enervation as yet unyellowed,<br/>A stilled silence at the grieving bed.<br/><br/>Or the hidden poor that scuttle out of view, the boxed porter,<br/>Trader, shopmen with wives babed, again gestating.<br/>The desperation of pubs bellowed by tongues of swollen want,<br/>The dissipation of drunks, sickened<br/><br/>By that tumbled sense of all in one oned on Saturday,<br/>Now stirred to listless cry of child, distorted hand of care.<br/>On the makeshift carpet of grass men and women quiesced<br/>By capital poison of fat and food.<br/><br/>An empty hall of towered streets, sepulchre of feet’s<br/>Ghostly echo, the solitary essence of crowd, work, money,<br/>The staccato knock of question and frigid stone.<br/>Lost the prepared confusion of route,<br/><br/>The lanes that rebelled to be straightened, Wrens<br/>Imperfect gloom twisted to a bridge and Thames.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Fumbled Epitaph.<br/><br/>That stilled, ineffable frown,<br/>A photograph of faded shock<br/></span><span class="T1">Where had leaned impotence<br/>On query, cold rejection…<br/>Or, frozen in a concrete angst,<br/>This fumbled epitaph…<br/><br/>Lines straightened, surveyed<br/>The taut geometry of a choice<br/>Your absence has defined:<br/>A last hour when fear fought<br/>The swollen lip, the offered cheek,<br/>I faced that end of you and me<br/>Snatched in a flinching hand.<br/><br/>What final count you have made,<br/>I find burdens in its silence:<br/>Pressure of reluctant flesh,<br/>That ending, lie of an easy stroll.<br/>I booze till cash is gone.<br/>The delayed hours of listless grief<br/>Stretched on the wrack of damp England,<br/>Surveyed the possibilities,<br/>You on that Wien restaurant tour,<br/>Me, the room, the DT’s.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Belief.<br/><br/>That hug, epitaph to a tube stop,<br/>Was too much full of the response I’d wished for.<br/>And more? A compassion? Or the lame<br/>Departure of the ‘brother’ and the ‘lover’,<br/>Our two desires dislocation? Of course,<br/>I returned to the party, already over,<br/>Deciding to recall a blindness<br/>That disappearance broke and not succeeding.<br/>Ending in the decline of the unwritten and the postponed.<br/><br/>I have watched the many dawns since<br/>Only with those ‘inane’ and fond regrets<br/>A youth’s ‘first love’ is supposed to be designed for.<br/>We don’t believe or, if we do,<br/>What should all these visions amount to<br/>But the superintended echo<br/>Of passion itself. Like insomnia<br/>Or a living out of sorts.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Dialectic.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/></span><span class="T1">You deal only with the hard present,<br/>Something I envy: your record’s written<br/>By another, no one cares at the time<br/>To stop you, drink doesn’t kill you or,<br/>If it does, it’s at the end, a full stop<br/>To who you are. We die, some of us,<br/>Still incomplete and some whose life is nothing<br/>But the presence of failure. I write this<br/>Like a man who sits in the comfort<br/>Of possibilities, the cobalt<br/>Of a gun eyeing his talk of sophistries,<br/>Entertained passion, solitude,<br/>A neat cushion to back me up, stinking fear.<br/>I don’t register what’s there.<br/><br/>Unlike you: you have the gun, I think.<br/>As an aspect of that script I haven’t grasped<br/>You turn this B movie into something more:<br/>Like Marriott in ‘Farewell, My Lovely’<br/>I’m the patsy, the limbo of certain guilts<br/>Whose weaknesses ditch me in the end;<br/>A clobbered beauty, corrupted by such<br/>Expectation my body is forced beyond<br/>What feeble reach I had into those other lives,<br/>A sub plot that’s their harder climb.<br/><br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/>Offended by the wrong words and never<br/>Catching your welcome I retell mostly<br/>A monologue of what could be done<br/>Given conditions, appropriate sun,<br/>Five mile wind, compliant interlocutors,<br/>The usual list, verbatim anaesthesia<br/>Of the irrepressible ego. Can’t be done.<br/><br/>Everyone expects, seconds before<br/>The end, some kind of recognition:<br/>Just the usual mechanics of the gun.<br/>Except: I knew you before, before<br/>The days of ‘hard drinking’ and searching out<br/>Other people’s lives: a time when you were<br/>Merely possible, not always there,<br/>Treated as a friend of what was future.<br/><br/><br/><br/></span></p><p class="P4"><span class="T1"><br/><br/><br/></span><span class="T1">Tested.<br/><br/>I’ve tested it then,<br/>The hollow sound of a world<br/>Like the end of a journey<br/>Whose expectations proved true.<br/><br/>Or, discovered, the enormous futility<br/>Of the scheme, workers slouch<br/>In a grubby tavern,<br/>Take their pay.<br/><br/>It is the night, ponderous echo<br/>Swelled in a worlds dizzy stream,<br/>Large and warm,<br/>Makes Jonah’s burning cry<br/><br/>Or charred the soul<br/>A twitch of wings<br/>Pinned by your image<br/>A great black butterfly.<br/><br/><br/><br/>That Dangerous Road.<br/><br/>We wandered on,<br/>Not willing to say goodbye:<br/>Our bodies turned to that road<br/>You’d be lost upon.<br/>We sat on the scruffy edge<br/>Not knowing, unwilling to say<br/>“When is the last parting?”<br/><br/>The grass like an old mans hair<br/>And our eyes upon our feet<br/>As our words, torn vagaries,<br/>Fluttered at the boundless sky.<br/>Caught in the echo of your smile<br/>Czech sunshine<br/>Dreaming of chances graciousness.<br/><br/>And then a slow, then a weighted<br/>Dwindling under cloud,<br/>Walking the untested horizon,<br/>That dangerous road.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Hovel.<br/><br/>Not a night to be seen:<br/>The curtain, what’s left,<br/>The dwindling, seeming circuit<br/></span><span class="T1">Of autumn’s coming cold:<br/><br/>As this page may testify<br/>Bought at a lower rate<br/>Peace from oblivion of love.<br/><br/>That invented horizon<br/>Aimed to or turned from<br/>The test I failed at.<br/><br/>Scraped sense in the ditch of words<br/>Till the line, a borrowed light,<br/>Illumines what memory<br/>Imagined as love.<br/><br/>And yet the illusion real,<br/>You the ghosted thought,<br/>Muse of this hovel.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Smile.<br/><br/>All that time a denial<br/>Of your impossible smile<br/>Declaring an only child's<br/>Own private love<br/>Indifferent to the beloved.<br/><br/>Most when least I knew<br/>Affections covered eyes<br/>Affirmed an open fever:<br/>That hard, 'pathetic' effort<br/>To create your image<br/>After you and know<br/>Our unwarranted words<br/>More real than truth.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Violence.<br/><br/>Cascading from the dark<br/>A streets brutal light<br/>Hoofed as the devil<br/>Pounding on you<br/>My murderous need<br/>To make it known<br/>I can believe. Untrue.<br/><br/>The encumbrance of the second<br/>Bulged from the blank<br/>Dictates my empty page:<br/>It is you against whom I rage.<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/><br/><br/>Sometimes.<br/><br/>Sometimes<br/>In a pub’s borrowed chair<br/>You sit there and smile:<br/>Amused ghost of memory,<br/>A lover’s tempting fantasy<br/>Bidding that madness come.<br/><br/>It is pain that keeps me sane.<br/><br/><br/>Horizons.<br/><br/>Blind, my love, to futures chance,<br/>That path to absence<br/>A ragged way has forced me home.<br/>And back? No. We have seen<br/>A brandished curve, the scythe<br/>Exit has turned us from,<br/>Spin the spiralled sky a dream:<br/>Who knows the horizons line?<br/>The limits of its distance?<br/><br/><br/><br/>Voyeur.<br/><br/>Lilting among the wilting trees<br/>The figure in the garden is me:<br/>Expectant before every window<br/>The cinema of romance, voyeur<br/>Of improbable happiness,<br/>Safely distant from commitment.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Morning.<br/><br/>Farcical rumour of not being<br/>What I am intruded upon,<br/>Dawn delivers the accidents<br/>Of nature insistent upon<br/>That note experience cannot alter,<br/>Indifferent to place or time,<br/>Of the first, almost painful<br/>Darkening of age.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Park.<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>Parks the grace<br/>Of a jaded place,<br/>Rough wood seats<br/>And winter mud<br/>The kind of good<br/>London</span> <span class="T1">understood.<br/><br/><br/><br/>0povženíhodný.<br/><br/>I remember your bedroom window<br/>Staring at the snow and I wondering,<br/>With pen in hand, at this new distance,<br/>A foreign land and you too perversely so.<br/>When you appeared it was always only<br/>That tumbling extension of a clumsiness<br/>I had rediscovered, the broken door,<br/>A two foot jump, you collapsed upon me.<br/>Pregnant with a new thing I was merely<br/>‘Opovrženíhodný’, motiveless<br/>And subterranean, like, you might have said,<br/>Some crushed crab barely crawling for escape.<br/>I was just brooding, I saw no reason<br/>To move, perhaps, I was slightly shocked.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>Gardens.<br/>‘In unsern Jugengarten führt strasse mehr.’<br/> H. Hesse<br/><br/>What amused in the gardens we treasured<br/>But never had was the pretence that somehow<br/>We could abandon with our clothes our fear,<br/>On certain rare, indeed impossible nights,<br/>Those saturnalias, vague, as imprecise<br/>As antediluvian grass, caress<br/>The warm, illusory dream of our being<br/>Ourselves alone. Among asphalt,<br/>Embedded stone, between the slabs of urban business<br/>Our toy soldiers fought, finally lost,<br/>Slain on the battlefield of the interstice.<br/><br/>We still live in those cracks the best of council<br/>Maintenance cannot fill, disillusioned<br/>As to security, the uniqueness<br/>Of its fauna, even that ossified<br/>And precious ego we watered and wept over,<br/>Kept secret, was proud of, itself<br/>But one common blade of grass: picked, plucked, gathered<br/>In our cities, pressed to that green and bitter dew<br/></span><span class="T1">Of being human somewhere in the subsoil<br/>We pretend to maintain a true home:<br/>Place of temporary, shabby rooms,<br/>Of ‘secret gardens of ‘childish fantasy’.<br/><br/><br/><br/>What Do I Know Now?<br/><br/>What do I know now<br/>But the winds breath<br/>Passing to say:<br/>We are frozen?<br/><br/>Even in winter<br/>There is spring<br/>Thin and unwarm,<br/>The long road, untried.<br/><br/>Of land and sea<br/>Memory.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Poison.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/>“I am not dangerous.” Their new form<br/>Of politeness. Outside the white, flat world<br/>Of roads. And, of course, they are not: A picture<br/>In the paper come vividly alive<br/>With all its crude, blunt art, the reds, the blues,<br/>Folded into the bed a wedge of desire<br/>To be ecstatic standing out in the land.<br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/>“I am not...” a partial conclusion to their ecstasy:<br/>The distance of these walls a private cosmos<br/>Urgent, diffident, the cataract and the vein<br/>Only half oblivion wholly pain lost in oblivion.<br/>If to work then to home the expanding enclosure<br/>Finally unravelled a ‘failed life’ which, at this turn,<br/>Frightens a room. What is left but persists,<br/>What is to come is nothing in a small poison.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Bad Verse.<br/><br/>Half a line of bad verse<br/>Are the days of this house<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>Or if you try to hear<br/>Your own or an others voice<br/>Listen carefully for the cars<br/>In the nights silence<br/><br/>Or in the roads<br/>Whose feet may search<br/>Stone and drain<br/>For absence as certainty<br/>Forgotten with last year’s ghost.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Quiet<br/><br/>Everything is so quiet and peaceful now:<br/>How can there be an end, a beginning?<br/>Yet slowly the darkness comes, voices fill<br/>The streets and houses, the last light<br/>Gathered by the children in their play<br/>Hesitant among the cars filled with dad, mum,<br/>The returning student wandering the last<br/>Reluctance of once more returning home:<br/>What was my hour has become a small town's<br/>Suburbia where family and friends retrieve<br/>All their efforts purpose – the work, the sorry<br/>Climb of forced and futile destruction<br/>Lost in the general folly of Being.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Laugh.<br/><br/>Like the wanderer and his shadow,<br/>As tall as failure, you sit<br/>In this mythical age of functional living,<br/>Equality and race, god and his double,<br/>Exhaling words a match may allow<br/>Between cigarette and pen,<br/>Writing ‘arse’ for a cheap bit of realism.<br/><br/>Lend me, you say, a message to hand over:<br/>So much is about yet you cannot see it –<br/>The heavy statues worked for others glory<br/>Will always fall, noticed only<br/>When the crowd is permitted a sacrifice,<br/>Exhibited, appendages missing.<br/><br/>If all the flowers, herbs, trees of alien nature<br/>Had that smile as their misjudgement<br/>Could you still laugh at the folly of it all?<br/>The rabbits, the foxes, the salivating wolves<br/>Slapped as one slaps stone with the metal brightness<br/></span><span class="T1">Of a crowds disillusionment, spat upon,<br/>Could you be then still quite so curt<br/>With your honesty and as if the failure<br/>Was merely ordinary like a broken home?<br/><br/><br/><br/>Failure.<br/><br/>On the moment, they say, here and now:<br/>All your expectations flattened to a bed<br/>Not much smaller than the room, drifting<br/>In and out of windows, bounced between<br/>The rattle of cans, the dance of feet,<br/>The bodiless discourse of being.<br/>‘To be is to be present’: where once<br/>Two might have seen there is the mirror,<br/>Where once light the sound of this silly hour<br/>Reflected stale betwixt failure and failure.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Home.<br/><br/>What maltreatment made you beseech<br/>A stranger of his word,<br/>The second hand poets song<br/>Destined, surely, this silent home?<br/><br/>Two extraordinary eyes, beautiful and young,<br/>Always demanding a tale impossible to tell.<br/>Yet for one smile even the stones had words.<br/>I gave you room and board, I talked and talked<br/>And talked till finally you loved me:<br/>For one moment I knew a chance joy<br/>Like a starved man fed poison.<br/>In the morning you were gone.<br/><br/>Or was it I who fled the miles<br/>Just for a coward’s home?<br/><br/><br/><br/>Drink.<br/><br/>For three days I drank, certain of failure,<br/>That you wouldn’t return... Without a penny,<br/>Rich on the envy of others,<br/>We boiled grass and smoked our emptiness...<br/>Jumping up and down, shouting<br/>“You love me! You love me!”<br/>I knew I was without belief...<br/>Behind you with a bottle that wouldn’t open<br/>I spat my pain into your silence<br/></span><span class="T1">Expecting, at least, the reaction of hate:<br/>I gained that, broken on the stair<br/>My test of unalterable love.<br/><br/><br/><br/>“Never!”<br/><br/>A gloomy summer’s rain so alien<br/>To you with your hot, dry and lovely days,<br/>Your unchangeable seasons, those certain<br/>Winters of snow and a cold so cold it froze<br/>The spirit. And I suppose that steady swing<br/>Has pulled you more beautiful still than when,<br/>Your eyes so blue, I knew heaven<br/>Indifferent: A failure before<br/>‘Possession’, knowing the end, having once<br/>Gained from you the grace of that impossible<br/>Answer of a smile, I fell, lost, at ‘home’.<br/>The steady roll, stronger than generation,<br/>A country bred you, twisted merely release.<br/>The sharp urge of a road: “You’ve left me.”<br/>How curt, stupid my answer: “Never!”<br/><br/><br/><br/> Moth.<br/><br/><br/>Do I have a relationship,<br/>Then, with that dead moth?<br/>Caught in a summers evening,<br/>Dead in the morning<br/>Of the first, the second day?<br/><br/>What was allowed a nocturnal flight<br/>Burnt by my impotent vision,<br/>Defeated between the soured sugar,<br/>The faded cotton,<br/>The fantasy and boredom of gold?<br/><br/>Command and it will obey<br/>Whacked by a newspaper,<br/>Bursting upon the ceiling<br/>The little generated warmth<br/>Of his fossilised brethren:<br/><br/>Civilised brothers that sublimate energies<br/>A continuous constancy of flame,<br/>A standard of intemperance<br/>Worked towards but never achieved.<br/><br/>The hours, with weight and measure,<br/>Of day and night,<br/></span><span class="T1">Finally turned their chaotic end<br/>Broken in age.<br/><br/>Whose wings are, perhaps,<br/>Prettier than I imagined,<br/>A bulbous, pathetic fluff,<br/>A clumsy angel<br/>Scattered backwards,<br/>The untragic, dying fly.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Brno, 1993.<br/><br/>Up through dusty sunlight, hobbling over dried mud,<br/>The discovery of a thousand allotments:<br/>Age had finally learnt its Voltairian lesson:<br/>“Make carrots, cabbages and flowers.”<br/>Between tyranny and disaster, favour and exile,<br/>The dubious loyalty of land.<br/><br/>Except this was limbo: the Russian slap still stung,<br/>The tin slash of the west still vicarious,<br/>Still unlimited: easy to forget, amidst vodka,<br/>Dumplings, countless songs, the ugly death<br/>This world, too, must suffer: cranes, cement, foundations,<br/>The path ending arbitrarily in a fence:<br/><br/>Mere intoxication, in love and in love with people<br/>Who seemed to continue a conversation<br/>Only imagined, gleaned from books and fantasy,<br/>Animated over alcohol, guitars,<br/>Through alien tongues, intelligence, community,<br/>A smile: all of us mad, drunk with illusion,<br/><br/>Killing ourselves, our children,<br/>Heading nowhere, blind.<br/><br/><br/><br/>‘Culture.’<br/><br/>A mess of cracked stone:<br/>They call them flags, flagstone<br/>Unnoticed as the awkward obtrusion<br/>Of obstacles, the unsteady chair<br/>At the barbecue, a flat rough for a butt,<br/>Something one just wouldn’t lie on,<br/>Sun or no sun: shoddy and inexact,<br/>Badly paid labour, ‘spoilt’ by nature,<br/>This rough, obvious ‘culture’.<br/><br/><br/><br/></span><span class="T1">Summer.<br/><br/>Summer is where you are.-<br/>Is where we are?<br/>And England</span>’<span class="T1">s ragged weather,<br/>Its people blown from street to room,<br/>Fix of the vicarious.<br/>When can we be together?<br/><br/>Just a photo, a momentary respite,<br/>You turn from solitude your beautiful head:<br/>Vistas of your own world beckon<br/><br/>Yet your thoughts are mine<br/>Bridging a thousand miles<br/>The agony of love, surety<br/>Of being and not being here.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Family.<br/><br/>Always again the wish to begin<br/>Brilliantly new, once more to look clear<br/>And innocent on what’s not clear and innocent,<br/>To imagine these dirty rivulets<br/>Spilling down the street as children imagine:<br/>Surprising, delightful, infinite.<br/>But the street is only a playground for louts,<br/>The frustrated conduit of labour,<br/>The town a particular of a history<br/>Intensely, chronically self destructive.<br/>We cannot unlearn contempt for the world,<br/>The fragmentary spirit, the family<br/>That fell apart even before it began.<br/><br/><br/><br/>House For Sale.<br/><br/>Friends that were not and have already gone<br/>Leave that glamorous emptiness, the void<br/>Of an age that has forgotten the words<br/>Of a conversation or why it meant<br/>Anything: each day behind the curtain<br/>Must be found the appalling but still<br/>Discreetly vague urge of the animal,<br/>Panic before the inarticulate weight<br/>Of this negative about to be exposed.<br/>Upon the stairs phantom ascending and<br/>Descending whispers left merely to<br/>Remind one, if not of departure,<br/>Then of a past where opening a door<br/>Was significant, where each room was<br/></span><span class="T1">A place, where being in a house made sense.<br/><br/><br/><br/> The Way<br/>‘The way out is vior the door:<br/>how come nobody knows this?’<br/>Confucius, The Analects<br/><br/>Neither to go far nor to come home<br/>Is the point, they say:<br/>To stay that distant fixation found<br/>In their farmers fields<br/>There to scare the crows. Others,<br/>Across the years, from family<br/>To friends, may beg benediction,<br/>Proper words to confirm<br/>What their presumptions will always presume,<br/>But you that timid daring<br/>Which says there is a way but I cannot find it<br/>As the parameter of a town<br/>Beyond which the road leads past the graveyard<br/>But never past fear.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>Appendix I:<br/>Juvenile or discarded poems.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Bars.<br/><br/>One moves through the corridors, through the soul<br/></span><span class="T1">Of this hot and humid city<br/>With only the antenna of desire<br/>Which, with misted glass for eyes,<br/>Is ones only sense, one instead of five.<br/>It is the nose, it directs us like the blind<br/>And deaf to the women and drugs<br/>Of this great, smoky and odorous bar.<br/><br/>And then one leaves, exasperated,<br/>Desperate and athirst, leaving the saloon door<br/>Open slightly, a shaft of sun and its odour<br/>Stabbing the gloom within, ripping the smoke,<br/>Leaving that bright light, the space and memory<br/>Always left in place of the departed.<br/><br/>One moves along, perhaps, with the independence<br/>And relief of the traveller and in between<br/>One bar and another one feels freedom,<br/>A man again, in between one hell and another.<br/><br/>But, alas, one falls back and down<br/>Into another night, the loud music<br/>Which thumps from within and without<br/>Throws you up and throws you down<br/>Devastated upon a ladies lap.<br/>One falls into the reverie and fever<br/>Of past passion, past women and past hopes.<br/><br/>Afterwards one walks past the meanness<br/>Of those mice in ‘Tudor’ houses<br/>With their dumb and virginal<br/>Daughters, virginal as idiots.<br/><br/>And one never loved their daughters so much.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Rocks.<br/><br/>Riding along the dark rivers<br/>Of my soul we came to a sea<br/>Of gold and green, of yellow and<br/>Rugged brown. We sat, dreamily,<br/>In the ship of my eye, which,<br/>With beauty, reflected in your pools.<br/>We sat and I told you, clumsily,<br/>With the shyness of youth, of<br/>The darkness, the sweet succulents<br/>Of your limbs that opened to me<br/>As dates. And you asked, knowing<br/>My crimson heart, what I saw<br/>In the future? What wholesome visions<br/>My dark eyes had rested on?<br/><br/></span><span class="T1">“My love, you are perfect<br/>As the sweet succulents<br/>Of dark Mediterranean fruit.”<br/><br/>Thus I dived into you<br/>And crashed on the grey rocks<br/>Of your stunned indifference.<br/><br/><br/><br/>The Lone-Ranger.<br/><br/>Leaving pressured prints,<br/>They shall be friendly to no one:<br/>Rolled in the mud of dark conscience<br/>He has travelled far, he has sung<br/>Sweetly, importunately sometimes,<br/>Others with the eye, hot and dark,<br/>Handling love lost debauch:<br/>He shall be friendly to no one.<br/><br/>Limbs taken, torn by crimson hands<br/>Daintily varnished,<br/>The Lone-Ranger is he:<br/>Having followed his wandering path<br/>Through the red sea, having seen<br/>The colours of the bright eye<br/>That is ceaseless in its path<br/>And having seen the bright night,<br/>One of his deaths in a sense:<br/>The Lone-Ranger is he.<br/><br/>I have searched myself and have seen him coming<br/>Across the biting, unnourished desert<br/>With his steal weapon over consciously handled<br/>And his eye that knows too much<br/>Having pierced me in sharp sparks:<br/>I have seen him coming<br/>But he was faster than I,<br/>Laid me down and went off, hollowly,<br/>Across the biting, unnourished desert.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Stepping On Winter.<br/><br/>I have not stepped<br/>Into that river twice<br/>Nor once, my love. I have<br/>But drunk of its liquid, here,<br/>Sunken in its darkened bed,<br/>Sand lining my mouth,<br/>Lovers creaking,<br/>The picture of you<br/></span><span class="T1">Rippling within<br/>The waves of autumn<br/>Stepping on winter.<br/><br/>I have not stepped twice<br/>Nor have I seen the gods.<br/>My love, things ripple<br/>But they do not reflect,<br/>Diamond cut, the crystal<br/>Shape of your bones.<br/>I have lived and<br/>I have waited to live<br/>Stepping on winter.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Perhaps.<br/><br/>Perhaps they shall say<br/>His face is unredeemable<br/>From the past of many,<br/>A shade but for the knotted<br/>Bent of hoary vision.<br/><br/>To wither in the raging storm<br/>Was a perverse delight of his:<br/>Out there upon that hill he stood<br/>A monument of obstinacy<br/>Till the craggy tree had rooted<br/>In an ageless rock.<br/><br/> And<br/>Perhaps they shall say<br/>For counting over much<br/>On a calm world<br/>He died in this chaos.<br/><br/><br/>Field, Wood.<br/><br/><br/>.I.<br/><br/>On that day we went down to the field<br/>By the woods and I lingered in the heat,<br/>With face to the grass, examining<br/>The exertions of creatures in their wavering<br/>Minuteness: I called them the spirits<br/>Of a more delicate vision, the lower order<br/>That had reached from the heights, with<br/>A peculiar nakedness, with delicate movements<br/>And others encrusted in corruption:<br/>I had called them Vermin of Heaven,<br/>How goodness might be made visible<br/></span><span class="T1">Only here and how corruption began:<br/>The moths become bats, wavering flight<br/>That brushed mud on the clearer elements.<br/>And I thought to extract the moth from its skin.<br/><br/><br/><br/>.II.<br/><br/>Then we were in the woods:<br/>Shade like hands that bathe,<br/>Caress the tension and heat,<br/>Moisten the roots, clean us,<br/>As if we were entering some sanctuary<br/>Where purity is a compulsory fervour<br/>Of bodily disposition.<br/><br/>Were your hands in that, too,<br/>Bathing in some delicate pond<br/>Caught in the upturn of a leaf<br/>As if begging for righteousness?<br/>Yet there were myriad hands<br/>Like shredded winds,<br/>Orphaned hands that supplicate<br/>And shades like a thousand souls.<br/><br/>Love grew there, too,<br/>Her hair stretched among the roots,<br/>Some rare orchid flower,<br/>To be picked but once,<br/>That folded in the matted layer<br/>Of those thousand souls,<br/>Laughed in silent breeze<br/>That turned and was gone.<br/><br/><br/>Forsaken Ghost.<br/><br/>In the bruised sleep of a few unpunctured hours<br/>Pearled in the dark a body of pained experience,<br/>Voice of the wind's synthesis that sings:<br/>“I was she fainter than the dream where now I lie.<br/>You coveted a dull, pale wicker frame from the corpse’s breath<br/>Of the only unretarded woman known to you.<br/>You built her beauty so she sang not what she knew<br/>Till, tossed on the shell broken shore,<br/>The wind blew my disturbances.<br/><br/>I, unmemoried, haunt the stilled conscience<br/>Of your despair.<br/>Band: please remember.”<br/><br/><br/><br/></span><span class="T1">‘Though The Winds May Stare’.<br/><br/>Though the winds may stare<br/>A thought or two, may blow<br/>Some forgotten scene of some forgotten show<br/>And some forgotten book its leaves may flare<br/>In an old embered flame,<br/>We’ll not mind, we’ll not know,<br/>We’ll not see our two minds so<br/>Distracted by a distant name<br/>And word upon our whitened lips:<br/>You’ll not fret my mind to see<br/>Of what I thought might be,<br/>We’ll count the years upon our finger tips<br/>And blunt our affected passion with a sigh,<br/>Then look back and hope we die.<br/><br/><br/><br/>The Saviour Of Painters.<br/><br/>“Who rules, who serves?<br/>See in my new land<br/>The blankness of paper,<br/>The white, almost<br/>Halcyon expression<br/>Of the clean,<br/>Empty canvass.”<br/><br/>The jewelled profusion<br/>Of sense and nonsense<br/>Whose hundred centuries have<br/>Their each and own argument<br/>Cakes his walls and floor<br/>Like ditched cargo.<br/>An infinite sea<br/>He tells me<br/>Of his plans for more.<br/><br/>“I reward rich,<br/>Deserved talent<br/>It is true<br/>But I assure you<br/>My fiscal policy<br/>Is tighter<br/>Than your belt.<br/>And my name:<br/>The Saviour of Painters.”<br/><br/><br/><br/>The Collection.<br/><br/>Ditched or broken the tourist ruins<br/></span><span class="T1">Swell their mad excuse of coated veins –<br/>Their refrain age and the dampness of the season –<br/>And the service of a rats evisceration,<br/>Sound of the extolling, maddened,<br/>Loosened voice and echo.<br/><br/>These bones will pass – prodded and poked,<br/>Dressed, set with imaginary challenge<br/>And brought to perform ‘The Tragical Tale’<br/>Of Messrs the Actor – listed among<br/>The painted lipstick stains of public subservience.<br/><br/>Loose orchid petals are lost<br/>In the richness of this new collection –<br/>Toned down the broken, lacquered stems, the barbed posts,<br/>The carved land – sinking slowly, unconsciously,<br/>The canvass of age wails with each bubbles burst.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Roots And Flowers.<br/><br/>Let not the burst thunder<br/>Or the licked light caress<br/>Of the breast of the wave<br/>Or slouching sea<br/>Laid low in humble cry<br/>Disturb you, prove you<br/>Blind, glitter upon the ice<br/>You made<br/><br/> Slow fate<br/>Wind you in ascending stairs<br/>To the stars; and the bell tower<br/>Runed with light sings, rings<br/>Time, moments of sonic<br/>Blessing – they bless you<br/>And your eyes ecstatic distend<br/>This world of ice,<br/>A world of blackened depths:<br/>Roots and flowers.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Offering.<br/><br/>In each place I’d broken circles, the figured<br/>Spotlight world of eyes, a question to each<br/>Children’s mouth emanating complications<br/>Of webs torn and tattered.<br/><br/>Wordsworth would commend me –<br/>Finding muttered sounds, where it echoed right,<br/>Where the soft tunnelled lair would provide<br/></span><span class="T1">Its protection, these I avoided: where mouths<br/>Would swallow my fear, cushion the bristle<br/>Of back, take on tongue temerity’s<br/>And, also, courage.<br/><br/>Digging holes I’d provide the pupil,<br/>Paint the appropriate colour, mixing<br/>Its iris hue with the mud and experiment<br/>Of this ‘wee’ flesh.<br/><br/>Thus clothed the buried head of some bird<br/>Or rotten rat did as an offering.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Garments.<br/><br/>List the bright heat as one change of garment<br/>Discarded like a skin or gossamer eye<br/>Quickly blown from view,<br/>Finding in the mind<br/>A momentary flicker of fire.<br/><br/>And each age has blown brief its ringed vacuity,<br/>So glad in found oblivion – whispered<br/>In dark and but marked with the moons lines<br/>Present and gone.<br/><br/>List each sun as the spiders<br/>Sticky strivings to web a world: what but layers?<br/>Lace or silk stacked in a draw open for view.<br/><br/><br/>A Month Past.<br/><br/>Winter sky but lately dawned<br/>White and grey –<br/>And on the horizon<br/>Other colours.<br/><br/>A month past<br/>And with it something else.<br/><br/>Little succulent meats<br/>Rest on the tongue –<br/>Nauseated I spit them out.<br/><br/>This chameleon age<br/>Seems so solid,<br/>Grand dowager<br/>And eternal aether.<br/><br/>A skylark blown<br/>Through nothingness<br/></span><span class="T1">On a cold wind –<br/>Gravity has eluded,<br/>Broken rubble<br/>Burning the stars.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Not A Word.<br/><br/><br/>Not a word - silence.<br/><br/>So, did I go beyond that point<br/>Where the minds cherubim blaze<br/>Guarding its hidden, unseen world?<br/>And was I in her bed<br/>And clawing at her hair,<br/>Sinking these cruel teeth in her brain?<br/>And does she hear me now<br/>Burning at her ear?<br/>Or is love but a dirty joke<br/>Or just dumb, primitive and absurd?<br/><br/>Not a word: silence hides our pain<br/>As the killing cold chatters again<br/>To say - not a word.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>Illusion That Is Soul.<br/><br/><br/>Trek round the mirror pole<br/>To stare at the vain, unwanted face<br/>That stares back its lie of desire:<br/>So we have discovered our over stretched romance<br/>One walk in the figurative hell of circular devising.<br/><br/>So that we end where we began:<br/>A neutral place, a neutral face<br/>Staring with neutral eyes:<br/>A kind of knowledge whose ignorance<br/>Is our higher desire and our higher reward.<br/><br/>But still the mirrored brilliance deceives<br/>To drink the false drink in this our false lagoon.<br/>Mirage on the rebound, separation,<br/>Illusion of godhead from hearts desert rising,<br/>The illusion that is soul.<br/><br/><br/><br/>She Was A Lady.<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>She was a lady of unfolding passion<br/>Drowned in dark, unfolding passion;<br/>Whether battered by bottles or men<br/>She could not be fitted into maturity.<br/><br/>Somehow those brutal arms had barred her<br/>From pains of youth, overriding reach<br/>Of missed paternal sway:<br/>Sometimes she’d laugh<br/>The suckled bottled held<br/>Whilst dancing on her grave.<br/><br/>She was a desperate sort<br/>Yearning for some new time<br/>And we were never quite sure<br/>Whether death or drink would take her mind…<br/><br/>(Now with such pain and gloom it is<br/>A physiological extension of the soul<br/>Fluttering in a hollow heaven.)<br/><br/><br/><br/>Small Town Blues.<br/><br/>The trees so sharp they promise nothing<br/>But the black monument of delicate<br/>Torture, so still and stubborn in the strained<br/>Whisper of wind that their frosted twigs,<br/>Minute in detail, feel foolishly proud.<br/>To die as you are, a portrait stilled<br/>In corporeal corruption, to stand and have<br/>The hot air escape with the common words<br/>Of conversation, a last opening<br/>Of mouth and bland mind, must be painful, as sleep<br/>Sometimes is painful, with that dissatisfaction<br/>Of being present in your absence,<br/>Anonymous in the lie of the undone<br/>And not being as a small towns disunity<br/>And dispersal. Such is death:<br/>To see your words grow dark and your eyes go blind,<br/>Racked to emptiness, turning, like an hour glass,<br/>In the cold, bland April of birth,<br/>The uncollected piled a new collection,<br/>Hollow and grave.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Shadows Of A Life.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/></span><span class="T1">And down those corridors<br/>He’d half croon his inclinations<br/>Among chatter of abstraction<br/>Or when a passion raised him<br/>To exclamations of ‘cosmic praise’.<br/><br/>Till around concrete insignificances<br/>We had drawn ourselves<br/>Full circle to renew, as if in echo<br/>Of the larger seasons, our crawl.<br/><br/>Happy those times<br/>Brought to exhaustion.<br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/>I would find him on the stair:<br/>Confined within the confusion<br/>Of intentions he’d grow<br/>His forests of words.<br/><br/>He’d laugh, perhaps intending to cry.<br/>The ending nous of disinclination<br/>Later to be found stopped altogether<br/><br/><br/><br/> . III.<br/><br/>On that last day he had come<br/>To a point he had long prepared.<br/>Meticulous in his assault,<br/>Gratifying in his politeness.<br/><br/>His passion was obtuse,<br/>That is not acute.<br/>His decline not at all<br/>Unexpected<br/><br/>Or so he said in the chance<br/>Of a later glance.<br/><br/> . IV.<br/><br/>In invitation to his later lair<br/>I noticed the quiver of memory<br/>Hidden on the lips.<br/><br/>“But, ah, mere memory,”<br/>I later expressed<br/>“Where does it get you?”<br/><br/>“In the glare of the bulb<br/></span><span class="T1">The written word.”<br/><br/>It’s true, I was surprised,<br/>He had cared.<br/><br/><br/><br/> .V.<br/><br/>Scared, as if at the chance<br/>Of a dear photos loss,<br/>Memory of gathered acquaintance,<br/>I insisted on the written word.<br/><br/>The thinned line of the past<br/>Made us dear. From there<br/>The blossom of balloons<br/><br/>Or let us say<br/>The new creation<br/>Of the new world.<br/><br/><br/> .VI.<br/><br/>Ingenious, gratifyingly proud to know,<br/>His obscurity pleased me.<br/><br/>As if saying something<br/>Not quite commandable<br/>He would display<br/>Volubility<br/><br/>Expanded to the creation<br/>Of an old inclination.<br/><br/><br/><br/> .VII.<br/><br/>And yet I was somehow detained.<br/><br/>Only later I found his grave.<br/><br/>On it was written<br/>Someone’s stupidity:<br/><br/>“Hard to remember the past<br/>Now frozen at last.”<br/><br/><br/><br/>R. M. Rilke.<br/>‘Exposed on the hearts mountains.’<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/>A soul flavoured in the neutral tones<br/>That builds a granite world<br/>He climbs the rocks<br/>With shocking ease<br/><br/>One would have thought<br/>That coldness would bemuse<br/>To finally benumb – not<br/>That a strange affinity<br/>Would be built across<br/>Those stones jagged ways.<br/><br/>But his testing call echoed<br/>Their metaphoric sound<br/>Reminding of the history<br/>Of those carved teeth of fire<br/>That cut this world:<br/><br/>And now but merely roots.<br/>Not a divine thing<br/>That would gently shake<br/>Ones hand. And yet he<br/>Maintained so, had strength to.<br/><br/>‘Exposed’? If so, alone,<br/>Building destiny.<br/><br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/>The world is gentle to the strong –<br/>Of them even the Gods have fear<br/>Rivalled in their imprinting power<br/>That pounds an age.<br/><br/>Through them all origin’s disappeared,<br/>Is consumed in a single fire<br/>That must burn before it builds.<br/><br/><br/> .III.<br/><br/>So this sounding form<br/>That’s now form entire<br/>Speaks in stony words<br/>Elemental love:<br/><br/>Only it is gravity<br/>Or quantum force<br/></span><span class="T1">Bringing worlds<br/>To bind or explode.<br/><br/>Or silence at the centre<br/>Of a whirling world,<br/>Soundless humming<br/>Of the stilled frozen bee.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Some Cry Of A World.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/>Among the whispered wind and wet<br/>Of an old shore town<br/>Some cry of a world?<br/><br/>How from this ungathered spot<br/>Could detection tell?<br/><br/>Where voice of death<br/>In a second room<br/>Forms but futility?<br/>Where laughter’s bell<br/>In a second room<br/>Rings lost in me?<br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/>Report of a war and I think<br/>“We’ve had many of those.”<br/>Hitting the cold stone I nod<br/>Lost in perpetual prose.<br/><br/><br/> .III.<br/><br/>Last night –<br/>And a moon beams,<br/>Leering an epitaph.<br/><br/>I…I was<br/>Precluded too soon.<br/><br/>My constitutional noon.<br/><br/><br/> ‘Strange Excess Of Trumpet Glare.’<br/><br/>Strange excess of trumpet glare<br/>Wound down the broken rocks:<br/></span><span class="T1">Upon the spiralled stair<br/>The bones of a coffin box.<br/><br/><br/><br/>European Dreams.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/>Patterned shadows on the floor<br/>Project the hundred complications<br/>Of face and form, the stretching mire<br/>Of bottles and discarded scraps<br/>Scratching pavement and road.<br/><br/>And in this mud and rain<br/>You cut an edge, draught a line,<br/>Form a lip, perform the wiry, blond<br/>Distinctions of your regular stroll.<br/><br/>Thrown with the wind of the unpredictable<br/>British weather I find myself, for a moment,<br/>Stretched before your feet, lying tossed<br/>In one of the many anxious ridden gestures<br/>That I seem incapable of preventing.<br/><br/>And this one time kiss drives us by force<br/>Once more to part where, half grateful,<br/>Half unexpectant, we are, each in distinctive pose,<br/>Lost in our two of the Earth’s corners.<br/><br/>“So,” we harmonise, “Let these partings be blessed.”<br/>Tortuous, painful, caring,<br/>That is how others see us<br/>Were as this indifference is,<br/>To put it mildly, surprising….<br/><br/><br/><br/>.II.<br/><br/>A mixture of mud and leaves paints again<br/>The years transpired canvass – this for me:<br/>For you a European port of call<br/>And another half empty theatre –<br/>Wishes, phobias, fantasies –<br/>Once more a sleepless dream.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Moment.<br/><br/><br/></span><span class="T1">Times revolution rings round, for a second<br/>Scans this ‘I’ and for one fatal stare sees<br/>The deformity of line, the bulbous,<br/>Irrepressible pseudopodias<br/>Of being, the confession of confused want,<br/>The lie of desire, unable to keep<br/>In form or follow the plan set ages hence<br/>In a bogus Eden.<br/><br/>Face to face, time to time,<br/>The restricted circle of bullied light<br/>Catches accidental acts where you and I<br/>Seemingly move as one. Ah, but a special affect:<br/>“The centre does not hold.”<br/>Time cracks in fractured forms,<br/>The chaos of discarded tries.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Star.<br/><br/>How did that star break<br/>Against this O to dark a dust<br/>Lit for a moment<br/>Of accidental end,<br/>Swallowed among<br/>A million furnaces?<br/><br/>We’d watched last flicker<br/>Of evening sun and<br/>Were surprised by a dawn<br/>Blazing the south side<br/>In evaporate glare,<br/><br/>Lost among the irate<br/>Fools of panic<br/>Running to the west,<br/>To the east, to any<br/>Sure concept of sense.<br/><br/><br/><br/>An Empty Lair.<br/><br/>Now the days all ended and the years past<br/>When I could tempt your sexual self away<br/>From future other dreams of another day.<br/>And, in the end, the Platonic self divides, at last.<br/>To confess, to my surprise, I feel relief<br/>And strain and growth: then I was beneath<br/>Whatever I can be now. Simple, this seems,<br/>The fateful, innocuous diversion of dreams<br/>And how upon that broken day<br/>I set my mind to my mind delay.<br/></span><span class="T1">Doom is new and an altered child<br/>And, though the throng, around me wild,<br/>Stares bleak and blank, I have my air,<br/>The cushioning blanket of an empty lair.<br/><br/><br/>Sweet It Is To Die<br/><br/>Sweet it is to die without cause or reason,<br/>Having no undone for a conspicuous tail:<br/>No defeat in memory, no love in mourning –<br/>Sweet and also just: For these heavy deaths<br/>And unaccomplished frauds, the farcical offbeat<br/>Of the drum, the untuned pipes, the illusory,<br/>Marauding gang of hearse musicians, these are<br/>Only the pompous accidents the Master Actor finds<br/>Useful in his conjuration’s ‘for the unruly crowd.<br/>Let Death come when he has talked with friends<br/>Who wait to bewail us first: It is charity<br/>To deprive us of those who will be deprived the most.<br/>Or better one turns ones head, modest in silence,<br/>Patient of the scythes decapitations.<br/><br/>I served Proserpina with a distant awe<br/>Nor did I batter the tympanum of Dis<br/>With deprecations: I expect the shade<br/>Of fruit and wine, insubstantial but better taste,<br/>On that table where I have reserved my place.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>Poet.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/>That poet could not know<br/>A time like this<br/>And yet he cursed his day<br/>Better than this.<br/><br/>Is time then a falling slide,<br/>Poet and knave bruised<br/>On a dumb rocky mountain side?<br/>Then what we have we lose.<br/><br/>Still, what has been has been:<br/>That from beauties flesh was born<br/>Some marvellous, flesh tearing form<br/>Still finds its somewhere reflective dream.<br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>Or do we but count the corn,<br/>Watch the rats’ numberless dawn,<br/>Hear the room tying rain,<br/>See ragged faces painless pain?<br/><br/>We always do that,<br/>The prisoner and the rat<br/>Eyeing their despair;<br/>Or in the day<br/>Where in we might say<br/>“Here is the wrong, stupid lair.”<br/><br/>It’s hard to keep eye fixed ahead<br/>When there’s but counting of the dead.<br/><br/><br/><br/> .III.<br/><br/>“Enough fools for us all!” Democrats say:<br/>Thus they have built their day –<br/>To confound the strong and the good<br/>Idiots for a guard they’ve stood<br/>Sweating, breaking out loud.<br/><br/>What poet can pierce that crowd?<br/> .IV.<br/><br/>Over the hill more might be seen:<br/>You watch the Tower beaten in dream<br/>You who see the living die.<br/><br/>Over that crowd beaten eye<br/>There’s but the canopy of lead:<br/>Let the dead bury the dead.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Hitchhikers monologue.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/>A thin, weeping mist squeaks along the grass<br/>Shrouding the bulbous shadows of mice<br/>Again busy building a new home:<br/>The aching legs, tired of their twenty four hour fit,<br/>Throw the gauntlet of choice to the brain,<br/>The tired arm annoyingly nags to be parted:<br/>On the aged bench, wet and dulled in the rain,<br/>When the years have marked me,<br/>Will pleasure replace this pain?<br/>Could I say: “Here I have lived.”?<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>Scuttling like some odd, savage animal<br/>Through the unbrushed matting of motorway grass<br/>I am already sick of my naturalness,<br/>Of my cowardice, my stopping<br/>Before the butt beating guards<br/>And my inability to come down to mortality.<br/>Somehow the sweated fever of my youth<br/>May seem peculiar to one, a shameful perversion,<br/>An indescribable immorality, that which is not done.<br/>Always that which is not done, always the odd sharpness.<br/><br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/>Crying like a baby among friends<br/>At the dullness of their desire<br/>I’m the odd one here I feel.<br/>So much hope, so much happiness<br/>In its failure: why this contentment?<br/>Contentment breeds inaction,<br/>Contemplation, love of the lines,<br/>An artist eye and moribund stare.<br/><br/>Sometimes, a rabbit among stalks,<br/>I wallow in the dough<br/>Of unfulfillable desire:<br/>I admit it and this is a sloth.<br/><br/>But one face of benediction was turned<br/>And then I was happy?<br/>Involved in oblivious activity,<br/>Is this without blindness?<br/><br/><br/><br/> .III.<br/><br/>Her benediction was not<br/>Always so bright:<br/>Not the polish of the mirror<br/>Or intenseness of light<br/>But a sense in which<br/>I was too inattentive to stare.<br/><br/>Crawling from the womb<br/>I was shut in its sack,<br/>Carried, it seems, through<br/>A few hundred years,<br/>I was always tempted<br/>To crawl right back<br/>Dulled in parties with<br/>Talk and whisky and beers.<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>I was so wrong<br/>From the beginning<br/>It makes me laugh.<br/><br/>But triumph in defeat<br/>I am no Christ.<br/><br/><br/> .IV.<br/><br/>Everything seems beautiful:<br/>Should I not be more radical?<br/>Should I not spit and curse<br/>Like a saint? Call for the end<br/>Of everything that’s not vital<br/>Or not coloured most vividly?<br/><br/>Things are ugly, too,<br/>But what is ugly will<br/>Dully reflect the whole,<br/>Is, somehow, a more tempered beauty.<br/><br/>Even in the blackest pit<br/>I carried my mirror,<br/>Dashing with light<br/>The groaning of its roots.<br/><br/><br/> .V.<br/><br/>Sick of my love of the game<br/>I smack him round the chops…<br/><br/>Too much akin, too much revealed,<br/>Perhaps my ambition<br/>Will take the Devils part:<br/><br/>Who will be my parricide?<br/>Who wants to peer in the bone?<br/><br/>Let’s dig at the pate<br/>Of this smug fellow’s devil<br/>To find if the old sixes are there.<br/><br/>Funny the Devil without draws<br/>Being dragged down the stare.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Never Again.<br/><br/>That night we were cold,<br/>Flame licking frosted endeavours,<br/></span><span class="T1">Borrowing the warmth of strangers,<br/>Songs whipped among frailty<br/>Almost with rhythm of heart,<br/>A few frozen sparrows twittered,<br/>You smiled politeness, I said:<br/>“How do you do? How do you do?”<br/><br/>Then:<br/>Sudden catch of a fevered glance,<br/>I panicked, spilled the tea,<br/>Scolded the mutterings,<br/>Eched an awkward pleasure.<br/>Late, I took my leave,<br/>Came never again.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Brutalities.<br/><br/>How many times have we heard her say<br/>“Bring him back! Bring him back!”<br/>Or the constant calling of a name<br/>(Spring bird without mate);<br/>And we,<br/>Helpless before the incomprehensible tragedy,<br/>Singing (duet)<br/>“What’s wrong?” and “What can we do?”<br/>The ache and impotence of rage<br/>Thus then became the first limit of age.<br/><br/>And now,<br/>When we have spiralled<br/>To the wider (maybe limiting) view<br/>It comes to seem that that ‘great tragedy’<br/>Was the farce that broke the cow.<br/><br/>And all that ache and strain and pain<br/>(Burning in a bottle)<br/>Was it (in our wide, wild children’s eyes)<br/>The last ditched nobility of a twitched body<br/>Singing: “John, John, John, John!”<br/><br/>And now:<br/>“Mother, mother, mother, mother!”<br/><br/><br/><br/>Bluebell Wood.<br/><br/>Rambling in the mirror of leaves<br/>Perhaps in those scarce caught visions<br/>Shallow fire. As if bone, tissue,<br/>Tendon, ripped on the bloody thorns,<br/>Their flesh outspread. Young, dallied,<br/></span><span class="T1">Uncaring of the blood, the injury,<br/>I left to that wood (who knows?)<br/>The better part, the strength of leg,<br/>Limb, thigh arm, eye,<br/>Things hours here demand.<br/>Later, the captured, midday nocturne,<br/>The dust, the half tuned piano<br/>Where ‘I saw my Ladies play’<br/></span></p><p class="P4"><span class="T7">Simple </span><span class="T1">tunes broken on the black keys,<br/>Dripping from the snapped, impudent wire<br/>And who cared and who knew?<br/>Ripped curtain, collapsing seats,<br/>The unbeaten, bug ridden sofas<br/>And our ‘protestations’ and our ‘strikes’<br/>And I through my youth’s dark wood.<br/><br/>Lying in the trampled corn, alone,<br/>My ecstasy of solitude,<br/>My youth and meditation,<br/>My battle with all creatures<br/>Turning on that round:<br/>And, beyond, on the thorns,<br/>In the mirror of leaves,<br/>In the carcass of an allusive dream,<br/>That first, bluebell eaten wood.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Shadow Of Identity.<br/><br/>Sentence of mine<br/>With its long vowel,<br/>Soft, affluent memory<br/>Whose candle contrast<br/>Of bright, irrepressive years<br/>Sings a weakened song<br/>Of identity, fatal lure:<br/><br/>A mind's green rock fading grandly;<br/>And, here, irreversible masts of straw,<br/>The spewed tatter tossed on endless,<br/>Flat foot, trampled beaches:<br/><br/>Young, who laughed merely,<br/>Was silent, dumb:<br/>The extra, added shadow<br/>Of a summer or autumn day<br/>Lingering like memory.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Moments.<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>Set in the lingered<br/>Pivot of preparation<br/>Each moment passes<br/>With a senseless silence,<br/>Detained, expectant,<br/>‘Whose vast countenance is’<br/>A ragged roof of stars.<br/><br/>This tramp life deserts me:<br/>Now and then glazed moments,<br/>Unmeasured penetration, forgetful<br/>Of certain disgusts, tastes:<br/>Habit formed flickers<br/>Washed on impatient pools<br/>Of misplaced want.<br/><br/>Deserted, sense of self<br/>Is packed in the film flamed<br/>Bubble of eye, is lost<br/>In the washed refuge of sea:<br/><br/>Space of vortexed cartons<br/>And cans, place of whispers,<br/>Centre of blown, discarded lies:<br/>At moments indifferent, absorbed.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Picture It.<br/><br/>The farce of a young man playing the prodigal son –<br/>It’s a tired act to follow: a self proclaimed wordsmith<br/>Weaving a web to catch a fly: it took six years<br/>“But she just walked right through.” “It was thin air to her.”<br/>Now, the last act, he works to a proper sentiment<br/>And dies. Tragedy. Move on to the next case.<br/><br/>A girl, tenuous grab of life, she tries hard not to slip,<br/>Forces ignore her – it is to hard to find foot space.<br/>What could she do without all those clothes?<br/>Keep the characters strict and few and so pass through life<br/>Singing the two songs. Edge between with lyrical politeness,<br/>Last , ‘but a presence in the air’, stubbornly,<br/>Till on her ninetieth birthday she falls into her soup.<br/>And the words so well prepared. Tragedy two.<br/><br/>Let the final picture form: world where everywhere<br/>There are mirrors, each face but a looking glass<br/>And each endearingly peering in the others face.<br/>Picture the ‘empathy’, the moments of ‘shared passion’,<br/>The ‘care of the self’, see the ‘theatrical’ parents,<br/>Feel the ‘ambition'. Each one circling<br/>A dedicate task stuck in the centre<br/></span><span class="T1">Of their ‘selves’ and called ‘soul’: picture it.<br/><br/><br/>The Age Of Darkness.<br/><br/>The chatter on the wind is the irritation<br/>Of the street: drunks or illiterate poor<br/>Claiming back bitter heritage of dark<br/>Or barbaric recompense of pillage.<br/>The habited Romans on their destined sword<br/>Of solitary circlings; burnt books,<br/>Artefacts in whose flames is seen the death<br/>Of some peculiar, personal march<br/>To some incongruous goal. Not sacrificed<br/>But burnt with the words and flaming tongue<br/>Taking all in a lying confession<br/>Of confounded biographies.<br/>The time heralded on an ox skin drum<br/>And thus brought to a passive, anonymous march,<br/>A prayer of strangers.<br/><br/><br/>The Flag.<br/><br/><br/> .I.<br/><br/>Conceived, born and here, a place near the sea,<br/>A path, bright but indistinct, where I walk,<br/>Add a gesture, a sign to part and dissolve dawn’s early air.<br/><br/>You I met and have forgot,<br/>Will remember, we shook briskly<br/>Our forged request and let the here<br/>Become the past without regret.<br/><br/>Then the eyes were precise and as ever<br/>Misdirected, seeing beyond the hand<br/>And the arm and the body two ghosts<br/>Divert the dawn who both expected someone else.<br/><br/><br/> .II.<br/><br/>Left the added butts sogged in water<br/>A common signature termed B movie<br/>As the superfice of what’s been,<br/>Illusion of memory.<br/>At the bottom of the card the faded ink,<br/>A nation’s stamp that’s released<br/>From the pressure of representation<br/>Behind us and gone. What the faded air<br/>Illumed as flag is the flare a dawn<br/>Now scatters as ash. Our hands are glass<br/></span><span class="T1">Darker and darker in the dark, gesture of distance<br/>Twisting its banner of intercession<br/>An apparently losing hope.<br/>Or, if a day has burned itself a universe,<br/>It has burned a tapestry of spread<br/>Perception. ‘We’ lies forlorn, a mark<br/>On the cotton like a stain of blood<br/>Fingers scratch there. Notes that puncture<br/>Their own hours as a mesh of stitched time<br/>And leave frozen the particular. I walk<br/>And you walk a tango in the sordid street,<br/>One more blown wrapper found parting on the horn.<br/><br/><br/> .III.<br/><br/>As a quest for something more exotic<br/>It leans abandoned in the air, a patch<br/>Of wall fluttered Rome’s Scottish border.<br/>A Caesar will arise, reel some restless<br/>Discontent to a march on an old idea.<br/>Thus, broken upon flutings, faded<br/>In a different age, it has assumed<br/>Resurrection, hooked the grave with the bait<br/>That’s a sword’s sanguine hope, the drums, pipes<br/>And shouts blunted a dissonant song<br/>Collected chance redemption.<br/>If, when the marching’s stopped, the city<br/>Returned to board, pub and bedroom,<br/>The back wave that is history<br/>Knocks us out again, all we can mark<br/>Are the lists of the dead, the captured,<br/>The hoards, the rapes, the consequent<br/>Retelling of adventure…<br/>Cancel but revivify the ailing culture<br/>And make true the absent as the present.<br/>So, this thread rolled around as sky outlasts<br/>The individual, does not touch the individual<br/>Except as the burn of that alien one<br/>Togetherness may pretend we enjoy.<br/>To begin or find the origin<br/>Which is nowhere, cannot be contained,<br/>Is known only in and is known only as<br/>Appearance: radial of no foci,<br/>Hub of no turning, start of all<br/>That’s not creation. Wave or somewhere the flag,<br/>A signal that was individual.<br/><br/><br/> .IV.<br/><br/>We remedy history, its stretch of<br/>The warp and the woof, its tear of the glimmer<br/>By our rebellion against the lie<br/></span><span class="T1">Of an impersonal intent, circumference<br/>Of a revolving god, by a habit<br/>Of seeing ourselves as limbed<br/>In the tree, the bird, the dog, his howl<br/>At the sky, a process that contains both<br/>The general and the particular,<br/>A word passed in the roll of cloth, appearing<br/>Ramified essence, not common nor<br/>A whisper termed misunderstanding.<br/><br/>‘Utopian’ – but history turns the conversation<br/>Back from the dead, out of the present,<br/>Into the present as a holla<br/>That peaks the rumble of burnt forest<br/>And factory, demos jumble thrown<br/>A break in the ‘fix’ of an arm, rubble<br/>Stimulus defined, mathematically,<br/>‘Dead matter’. Azure not gravity spins<br/>The words as tapestry, pageant, perhaps<br/>‘Triumph of Life’, benign as golden faces<br/>And as frightening. These ones return<br/>Silent, the offered gesture a graceful start<br/>To that being more than enervated.<br/><br/><br/>Labyrinth.<br/><br/>The street is a thought<br/>Redeemed by its being empty.<br/>And though I expect you<br/>It is only now as sleep<br/>Its knowledge of forgetfulness:<br/>Soft on the pavement, a bruise<br/>Before the blows of emptied halls,<br/>Uncertain cries, the poverty of clubs –<br/>I expect you like you your drugs<br/>A pleasure more in keeping<br/>With wished for happiness than<br/>The reality of a wide awake buzz.<br/>Or, you a child, one of the many,<br/>Lost in a Minoan fold,<br/>A labyrinthine fantasy,<br/>A Minotaur expecting<br/>Your Perseus, your Ariadne?<br/><br/><br/><br/>Darkness.<br/><br/>There is a darkness in the street<br/>Like a pall, a shadowed fissure<br/>Entered as the mythology<br/>Of our own fear, intimate<br/>But civic, private, also public,<br/></span><span class="T1">The town criers, the officials,<br/>The citizenry, covenant arteries,<br/>A lonely Hell. There your son,<br/>My mother, wife or child<br/>So difficult to hear or left unheard<br/>All that was not, will not, cannot be said.<br/>Folded as comfort and disillusion<br/>An hour dawn will unroll.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Odd Numbers.<br/><br/>Odd numbers on a scrap of paper<br/>Found in my library Blake, seeming so familiar:<br/>Did whoever wrote that read this or underline<br/>And spoil, gather like a hoarder scattered words<br/>That confirmed his or her own boredom,<br/>Were these accessed digits loves, vague catches<br/>Of possible friends, the desperate last<br/>Samaritan to a falling despair<br/>Or the casual overflow of the overly social:<br/>What did Blake say except how we are born<br/>Bludgeoned by our imaginings, sweating<br/>An infernal magic, ignored and burdened<br/>With needed, wrong acquaintance: dictums<br/>Of law and friendship, a private room,<br/>The fantastic visions of candlelight,<br/>Silence of before the telephone?<br/><br/>Is he or she a friend, this Blake ‘scholar’,<br/>This desecrator, this egotist,<br/>This humanity? Probably not.<br/><br/><br/>O Why Should I Care?<br/><br/>Gold and silver<br/>Honey of your hair<br/>O why should I care?<br/>Long since your departing<br/>Beauty stayed<br/>O why should I care?<br/>Could I waylay fate,<br/>Take once more (O heart)<br/>The listening part,<br/>Catch in the air<br/>Songs that fade<br/>And a voice, a face, a form<br/>That now, long since warm,<br/>Holds me distant and in scorn?<br/>O face, O beauties dawn,<br/>O honey of hair<br/>But one more dance,<br/></span><span class="T1">One more glance<br/>Or why should I care?<br/><br/><br/><br/>Ambitions Of Twenty Nine.<br/><br/>Ambitions of twenty nine: to be content,<br/>Have a wife, children, home is not enough;<br/>To gather the discarded, smooth out the written,<br/>Turn the passive into the active,<br/>A monument or epitaph for failure,<br/>To have made, like the carpenter, one good table,<br/>One perfect chair, one absolute poem<br/>The ambition of the male, of man,<br/>Of human kind, to turn the flattened<br/>Presence into the beyond of all time?<br/>Ambitions of the individual,<br/>The urge of the mortal to make but<br/>One moment essential and eternal?<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>Appendix II:<br/><br/>New Poems<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>Everything<br/><br/>Wandering in the woods<br/>It might all be over, be ended –<br/>Yet here it is:<br/>Without words, everything.<br/><br/></span><span class="T1"><br/><br/>Where Are You?<br/><br/>“Where are you?” Then the smile,<br/>The simple entrance, as if survival<br/>Was just an accident, one fell off<br/>The bicycle, one bruised ones head.<br/>And yet I was beginning to die<br/>And perhaps I wanted to.<br/>Do I feel joy? I might do.<br/>With you, for you, I survived too.<br/><br/><br/><br/>‘So That Everything Becomes Attenuated’<br/><br/>So that everything becomes attenuated.<br/>I do not allow the silence necessary<br/>To take on that silence. The art of the fugue<br/>I have learnt the best and to unlearn it I need<br/>More than a figurative closeness. I am not<br/>Strong enough merely to function on sympathy.<br/>Without the juvenescence and expecting<br/>The unexpectable I have to long and to well<br/>Tortured myself with the impossible.<br/>‘Ješt</span><span class="T2">e</span><span class="T1"> nevyslovené’ - a future that may not exist.<br/>Some things may never be said, some poems (the best)<br/>Are rightly never written: Is that it, the silent place<br/>Towards which we are going, the sacred place,<br/>The place for only the silent? And all these words, then,<br/>The barbarism of an era, the superficial,<br/>The </span><span class="T2">over loud</span><span class="T1"> chatter as the frightened anticipation<br/>Of dreaded departure? Like the abandonment<br/>Of this house, the security that it offered,<br/>The mother that it was. A silence that exists,<br/>O fearfully exists, now, if only I would listen,<br/>If only I was to refuse the usual and continuous<br/>Distractive absorptions of the temporary.<br/>Sometimes. Never once truly.<br/><br/><br/>All We Have<br/><br/><br/>.I.<br/><br/>What was given was not what was expected:<br/>The hour in the dust, the snow melted,<br/>And the streams dry: something more intelligent:<br/>Wild meadow, a thousand flowers,<br/>The overbearing noise of birds,<br/>The useless, therefore, unsaid words,<br/>Our bodies searching into silence<br/></span><span class="T1">An attempt to forget, your smile<br/>At a weight the world had pressed upon you<br/>Wondering if you were dead.<br/>I wondered if I was dead.<br/>We asked whether we could live<br/>After such insult, such injury.<br/>An answer, tentative, to desperately sought,<br/>Demanded of but there if we allow.<br/>We are reluctant to live once more<br/>Yet it is no longer our decision.<br/>We can only die again.<br/><br/><br/>.II.<br/><br/>The vague questions that bore us forward<br/>They are still there. If words no longer answer<br/>Then our hands continue to.<br/>Over what does the world have power?<br/>Not us, my love, not us.<br/>We always walk beyond, together.<br/><br/><br/><br/>.III.<br/><br/>Come forward where there is light, let me see:<br/>For I could not see but had a feeling<br/>Of dread, as if a ghost might ask me<br/>If this were not death, as if you could<br/>No longer answer, were gone, had gone.<br/>Amidst the woods the darkness terrifies.<br/><br/>Hold my hand, come into the light.<br/>Yet still I cannot see you and all I grasp<br/>Is your hand. If the stars are not enough<br/>They are all we have. Do you not see?<br/><br/>Her Smile<br/><br/>I have you, therefore, above my desk,<br/>A smile which distinguishes nobody,<br/>The tasted, tasteless essence<br/>‘Of that forbidden tree’<br/>The heart is not willing to forsake:<br/>For what is knowledge but love<br/>Repelled by the Other,<br/>Broken back, angular,<br/>Reflecting merely surface.<br/>And yet strangely, somewhere beneath<br/>Being does speak to being.<br/>That uncounted kernel of one.<br/><br/>I have you, therefore, always within reach:<br/></span><span class="T1">No, I would say ‘inside’ if to perceive<br/>Brought the soul from the body<br/>Reduced to viscera, lung and bone.<br/>And that smile always a dawn<br/>Barely perceptible<br/>(Or is it the twilight of the east,<br/>A star which leads<br/>To the seemingly humble<br/></span><span class="T2">Center</span><span class="T1"> of things?)<br/>Self secluding, occluding<br/>Almost everyone, perhaps everyone.<br/><br/>It is the silence that focuses everything:<br/>From where, two, one, alone, being calls for Being.<br/><br/><br/> Being There<br/><br/>The malady of being there.<br/>That particular faltering step<br/>Towards what? A covert neon<br/>Or the moon, eclipse of the night.<br/>Like those long roads of understanding<br/>At the end of which only a fields<br/>Grubby grass, the twitch of a tree,<br/>Broken and misplaced alien nature.<br/><br/>Rather, on the obdurate pavement,<br/>Ones feet grooved to a steady tread,<br/>Here in the town is one truly alone:<br/>Anonymous with the anonymous,<br/>Destructive with the destructive -<br/>Out there another world, ejected ghost<br/>Of a field that haunts our want<br/>Of substance, useless to intrude upon.<br/><br/><br/>Merely A Poem<br/><br/>Alone but for the involuntary<br/>Company of tinnitus,<br/>the ghost of wall, floor, ceiling,<br/>Once again a silence dividing<br/>The drowned and the stranded.<br/>behind only brutal hope, The thousand humiliations<br/>Of a world expected, taken for granted:<br/>A love that’s merely a poem?<br/><br/><br/>‘Nothing’<br/><br/>Yes, you may say: “I am nothing.”<br/>That ‘Now’ is all I will ever be.”<br/>Yet the earth wills otherwise:<br/></span><span class="T1">There is death and though you fill<br/>Your days with faithless action,<br/>The endless mantra of a common ‘No!’,<br/>Such wanted dis-appearance<br/>Is only edge, a crescent glimmer<br/>Of what is always dark,<br/>Innocent, tragic, affirmed.<br/>Life, which needs no knowing,<br/>Lives you without you.<br/><br/><br/>I will Never Be Gone<br/><br/>A wintry airlessness, a tundra between us,<br/>A white impossibility, your belief your nobody,<br/>The dissolution of a thinning ghost.<br/>You would like to dissolve, become nothing -<br/>I will not let you</span><span class="T2"> – </span><span class="T1">I’m a stubborn man!<br/>With this faith I can breathe a vacuum,<br/>With this love I can live even death.<br/>And, should you finally force me,<br/>Though I might be gone, I will never</span><span class="T2"> – </span><span class="T1">be gone!<br/><br/><br/>Suit<br/><br/>The jacket of some dead, left handed chap -<br/>And, now, soiled, unlaundered, wet with the rain,<br/>A fantastic imposition on the neat<br/>Courtesies of these reserved Durham streets -<br/>Neither with the safe and unassumed<br/>(Because there!) reassured flow of learning<br/>Nor with the native anger - ‘a tramp,<br/>Beaten by brooms’. Unsure because unrefered.<br/><br/><br/>Trying To Listen<br/><br/>“Take the opportunity to listen”<br/>And, though all the chords<br/>Had forced their disgust,<br/>I tried: but there was merely<br/>A laziness, a fallacy of sound<br/>Which toured that mid-ear<br/>Of safe distrust, of distance kept<br/>Because no distance could be understood.<br/>So it was presumed we began<br/>With only an undisciplined cry<br/>And, searching for that word,<br/>The ‘honest genuine’, the strict<br/>Discipline was ‘do not try’.<br/>Those ‘triers’ who where impotent<br/>And strange and finally excluded.<br/><br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>Collapse<br/><br/>“Hell, the floor collapsed: there we were,<br/>Dust and plaster, our arses that had<br/>Bumped some bottom of a world. And, so,<br/>A frightened laughter, as if laughing<br/>Might be a ladder lifting us above ourselves:<br/>The shattered bed, the cracked chair, there was I<br/>Thinking “Well, I must rise.” And, thus, broken<br/>Upon it, holding a useless head,<br/>I had to try a door. But, first, the stair,<br/>But, first, all that was above and, now,<br/>Below us, but, first, the joke “Do we care?”<br/>I must go home, without wish, without will.”<br/><br/><br/>Joke<br/><br/>The sadness in a joke<br/>Is the surprise it cannot give:<br/>You look, then, in that face<br/>With a question that is wrong<br/>Asking “Are you real?”<br/>The reply always “Yes!” meaning “No.”<br/><br/><br/>To Hannah Arrant<br/><br/>O, Hannah, there is always this:<br/>Between the past and the future<br/>There is this: dead? No, but<br/>Wanting this ‘past’, always hoping<br/>(‘Killed by hope’) for merely a summer:<br/>A field, a forest, the wilder, wilder flowers.<br/><br/><br/><br/> The Whale And Parrot<br/>For Anna<br/>(194O-1994)<br/>“All the cod is gone! “<br/>B.B.C. World Service.<br/><br/><br/>I<br/><br/>A big fish eat me<br/>But there are no fish in the sea<br/>And God will tell you who is right and who is wrong.<br/>A big fish eat me but there are no fish in the sea<br/>And the world will tell you who is right and who is wrong.<br/>Jonah died, was born again, lived back to tell<br/>Who was right and who was wrong.<br/></span><span class="T1">And the world, did it end, did it begin?<br/>A big fish eat me but there are no fish in the sea.<br/><br/><br/>II<br/><br/>What, in the schematic muddle of it all,<br/>The stars, the broken galaxies, the effluent<br/>Of no-thing, what began or ended at<br/>This point and at this point, the fallacy<br/>Of forgetting or of being here or there,<br/>Something which said “I love…” and forgot what<br/>It was it loved: and to love!, to begin and<br/>Again! A wish, perhaps, a child’s<br/>Broken Sunday, thinking “Here, alone,<br/>There will be someone that sees.”<br/>Expecting that gladness of recognition<br/>Which, of course, fails</span><span class="T2"> – </span><span class="T1">here to there<br/>And only the indecision, the amused surprise<br/>Of a face you’d wish you’d remember.<br/>.<br/>The earth, the taste played by the mouth<br/>Of a child alone and wanting, wanting<br/>I know not what. Though he fights away<br/>The blasphemy of being ‘one’, it can only<br/>Be fear, the ‘fiery blush’, the desire<br/>Not to be only Other.<br/>..<br/><br/> III<br/><br/>What begins, the force before it begins,<br/>Grunt, inhuman human folly<br/>Of taking a moment (and you forget which)<br/>As sacred: and, yes, it belongs (but it will not)<br/>To this Now of nows: beyond that<br/>The clear space, the land seen free,<br/>The ‘wanton abandon’ and the exhaustion:<br/>Only wishing something was or I was or,<br/>Finally, ‘this was’: it’s not, mother.<br/><br/><br/> IV<br/><br/>Once, there was a thought, beginning with –<br/>So, a summer rescue, coming along<br/>In the car, the fiat 500,<br/>And saying, this way (take a drink)<br/>To what you always wanted:<br/>From a distance, I must see<br/>All the untruth that 'should', for a child,<br/>Be hidden: the joke of inconstancy,<br/>The fallacy of ever wanting a mother –<br/>I saw it all</span><span class="T2"> – </span><span class="T1">you forget, loins<br/></span><span class="T1">That bore, that professed to bare me,<br/>That said I was born: I was not.<br/>But then, even earlier, from the day I exited<br/>Your prison, your device, your despair<br/>I knew it was wrong: that you lied, always<br/>Forgetting (or knowing) I was watching,<br/>Why I was silent? For a hand that caressed,<br/>A thought towards me, a sense of saying<br/>“You’re O.K.” But you’re not.<br/>So, dumb, unheard,<br/>‘Beautiful eyes’, there was only the redemption<br/>Of pathetic resistance: did you see?<br/>Could you see? Could you want to see?<br/>And if you did, what would you have done,<br/>Only have beaten the more?<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/> V<br/>“An angel!" My hair dresser .<br/><br/>It’s merely individual, the four wings cramped,<br/>A slight burn of candlelight<br/>And we say “He’s </span><span class="T2">OK.</span><span class="T1">” A</span><span class="T2">n</span><span class="T1">d so he is,<br/>Broken not by any peculiar expulsion,<br/>Cracked, rather, by a room.<br/>And endless, endless those scribbled<br/>Petitions back to God. You say<br/>“Land on your feet!” which, of course,<br/>Were broken before, even, the saints<br/>Began their song. Because this age<br/>Is so new, so endlessly new<br/>And he, ancient, has forgotten, again,<br/>How to say ‘Yes! - to God.<br/><br/>So, ‘across the water’, he will drown,<br/>And, yet, ‘the attempt is worthy’,<br/>Or, merely, vanity.<br/> How endless the call!<br/>And below him and above him the stair<br/>That could never fail to climb, to descend<br/><br/> -------------------------------------------<br/><br/>For, see, the precipitate stone: up,<br/>Just the barred impossible: a roof,<br/>Those walls, the handle of a door,<br/>Window that cannot open: grubby, entirely?<br/>His closed wings, vicious in a room.<br/>Yes, this is useless. “There is no god.”<br/><br/><br/> VI<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>It’s hard, hideous and wrong,<br/>Probably, a vicious joke, a fellow<br/>Who cannot remember (nor right </span><span class="T3">H</span><span class="T1">is name)<br/>Beginning, perhaps, to listen, ears forced, to God.<br/>“There is no God’ “, and, as Nietzsche<br/>So eloquently put it, ‘God is dead.’<br/>God dead, dead God, I rebel against<br/>All that lies. All lies are strong,<br/>Stronger than truth. I wish I was stronger than lies.<br/><br/> VII<br/><br/>Every hotel from which I was expunged<br/>(But, of course, I did not stay)<br/>Every face that glances backwards<br/>Some kind of lie, all those that lie<br/>Into their (or others) pants,<br/>The slight, coarse affair of me even looking,<br/>(Oh, I assure you, a random glance)<br/>Begins and ends with what is least important:<br/>I said (louder still) begins and ends<br/>With what is least important: a dead parrot<br/>Which still will continue to say<br/>The words “I love...” or, thus, “I love God.”<br/><br/><br/> VIII<br/><br/>And think (think again!) it was beyond us,<br/>It was always (why? you should ask) from this-afar.<br/>We began with those hopes (they last to long),<br/>Taking what were mere words<br/>As just God could have said them:<br/>If we were older we would have said:<br/>“These are lies!” but they weren’t.<br/>An attempt to bring us forward that failed.<br/><br/>And then, you said, “I am that I am.”<br/>Blasphemy that must almost be true:<br/>I thought I’d found some word, some devil<br/>Saying, quietly, “Here is a man: Bring him close, bring him home,<br/>Make him speak the word this God demands."<br/>God demands nothing and nor do you.<br/><br/><br/> IX<br/><br/>But the death of unhappiness? That peculiar death<br/>Happening only with happiness? No.<br/>And do I mourn it, desire it, bring it<br/>Back, for it, the resurrection<br/>Of a ghost that one has to know must die?<br/>And we all have to, wish to, want to<br/></span><span class="T1">When, having seen death, we know the broken face,<br/>The quiet breath (was she breathing?)<br/>The still dust of this</span><span class="T3"> – </span><span class="T1">a life<br/>“Well, you know, was really so superb!”<br/>Yes, we know death, we want it or how else<br/>Say “Yes!” to an end that cannot, forget<br/>The equanimity of her leaving,<br/>Be just. Can one be just? Justice?<br/>Where is justice in this death?<br/><br/><br/> X<br/><br/>That the truth were told<br/>The balance would hold?<br/>Broken beam, fallen satellite,<br/>Star that burnt or began to burn<br/>(We are too old to with stay the fire)<br/>Forget us: there are other planets, other wheres!<br/>They say, too, life exists there. So, do miss us,<br/>But don’t miss us, destroy us<br/>But don’t merely warm us:<br/>Living is d</span><span class="T4">y</span><span class="T1">ing</span><span class="T3"> – </span><span class="T1">say thus:<br/>“You are, I don’t know who you are.”<br/><br/><br/> XI<br/><br/>And to begin</span><span class="T3"> – </span><span class="T1">from nothing, again? And why?<br/>There is no beginning, there is no end,<br/>The pity in it, in that century,<br/>The hundred million dead arid the torture<br/>And the murder and the women, the poor men:<br/>Yes, we failed, perhaps, ultimately?<br/>What did we want, ‘only’ to be ‘happy’-?<br/>The worst sin. Or history<br/>Cracked beneath the corps, broken.<br/>Spirit that cannot ask any more questions.<br/><br/><br/><br/> XII<br/><br/>The hooves are running backwards<br/>Over a broken head and “that’s history.”<br/>We have grown smaller and, thus, our guilt grows great:<br/>Magnificent, this pygmy size,<br/>This laughing below our sleeves,<br/>This to large coat turned up at the cuffs.<br/><br/>So, there we were, laughing on the ramparts,<br/>Broken, of course, a castle whose name,<br/>Even, is unrecallable (could we pronounce it?)<br/>Spouting a name that we’d also forgotten:<br/></span><span class="T1">Is that possible? Come (but, please, don’t)<br/>Meet my contemporaries: the list of casualties<br/>Is endless, the reason (we are to small) unknown.<br/>That’s us, liars, and not the guts to say<br/>The size of this life no longer suits.<br/>Faded the cotton, the colour, the moment.<br/>Don’t stop to see, my dead ones. I’m small, too.<br/><br/><br/> XIII<br/><br/>But we still live: this dead breath, this whisper<br/>Of Godlessness, this violence to our name,<br/>This dishonour, the cynical wanting<br/>Of a nothing that will, O I promise, come.<br/>O yes, you dare to live? You live,<br/>You don’t live, you desecrate my dead.<br/>Think of it! Think of it. O God, think.<br/><br/><br/> XIV<br/><br/>I ask, and only I ask “Do I deserve to live?”<br/>No, not only my mother, that vast, broken candle,<br/>Because I asked at birth, ‘a stilled, stunned thing’,<br/>Being born, not only not knowing why the silence,<br/>But who, behind the silence, who, not person,<br/>Could not speak. Could not speak! I could not speak. A poet.<br/>Here was, not, was, not. Nothing. Nothing?<br/><br/><br/> XV<br/><br/>She began: again and again, she began:<br/>Yes, she died, curse her, but she began,<br/>Again and again. And where the strength?<br/>And I a coward</span><span class="T4"> – </span><span class="T1">listen to me!<br/>Angels that lie and mock me,<br/>God that smiles in His cruelty,<br/>Shits that bathe in oblivion, listen!<br/>Is it a lie, this end, this mortuary,<br/>This charnel, this final breath:<br/>God, my God, help me to know (‘to know’?)<br/>To know a grave. You (I hate you, God) please bring me<br/>The peace that’s promised. No? No.<br/><br/>Yet</span><span class="T4"> – </span><span class="T1">it is my only duty</span><span class="T4"> – </span><span class="T1">I the only last?<br/>Only my duty?<br/>Yet these trees still stand<br/>Green and silver and oblivious.<br/><br/> XVI<br/><br/>Want, then, the smile, thinking beyond,<br/></span><span class="T1">Merely, the possibility: guide<br/>Yourself towards the quite legendary path<br/>That, ‘as yet’, does not exist:<br/>The mantrap, the green, the profuse flowers,<br/>The red, the blue, the joke<br/>And, yes, a parrot, the parrot<br/>Speaking those words<br/>You thought would come from God.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Morning Happiness<br/><br/>Oh, in the heart of Hell</span><span class="T4"> – </span><span class="T1">or, a voyeur<br/>Staring at what is impossible – happiness.<br/>Somewhat numb, glad for an unfeeling,<br/>Hoping to make this just a dream – then<br/>I’ll wake up, open the curtains, stare at what was<br/>Once my life. I’ll be tortured by hope,<br/>Begin, again, to say the words “I love you.”<br/><br/><br/>Ask Not<br/><br/>Falling down – and, last night, probably<br/>Bashed about – to deserve happiness<br/>Or be punished. Please don’t ask.<br/><br/>A Chance Of Blue I<br/><br/>What will happen will happen: The crowd<br/>Of millions that, perhaps, have their own<br/>Destiny: Accident jostled an understanding<br/>That 'did not exist'. To look, completely,<br/>In your eyes and smile. Something<br/>O so innocent: to forget fear.<br/><br/>We both see, we hope, the same chance of blue.<br/>The sky above just the destiny that destroys.<br/>To wander beyond what is possible:<br/>Men hope it will follow. Wanting<br/>What our cowardice has denied us.<br/><br/><br/>Justice<br/><br/>The words are gone – the impotence of the poet.<br/>I am no Jonah – do not wish to declare<br/>A dead humanity – do not wish to declare<br/>Apocalypse, Armageddon, holocaust.<br/>Merely to weak to declare another’s wrong<br/>My own so harsh, so bitter, so just.<br/><br/>Return Home<br/></span><span class="T1"><br/>I was hoping for a punishment<br/>With grace – to be somewhere<br/>So terrible that the Angel must appear<br/>Before me, here, now, listening.<br/><br/><br/>Blue Eyes<br/><br/><br/>I<br/><br/>I will not tell how I tried<br/>To sing her into my arms.<br/>Neither bending forward nor backward will do.<br/>A murderous humiliation.<br/>And what was bright has been lost now.<br/><br/>A poet is a wretched man. As if<br/></span><span class="T4">W</span><span class="T1">e were stepped on and began to sing.<br/>But death must make even<br/>The most perverse silent. </span><span class="T4">B</span><span class="T1">ored<br/>With all this glamour and prose.<br/>I merely want what is true.<br/><br/><br/>II<br/><br/>A smile, two eyes so beautiful<br/>I could only die. The burnt, racial<br/>Stain of the brown, leaves of autumn.<br/>And, in winter, dirty beneath the snow.<br/>You found I was not all white,<br/></span><span class="T4">J</span><span class="T1">ust on</span><span class="T4">e</span><span class="T1"> of those slaves. </span><span class="T4">N</span><span class="T1">ot an Angel.<br/>So you went. I love you.<br/><br/><br/>Never Pretty<br/><br/>Poets are never pretty<br/></span><span class="T4">A</span><span class="T1">fter thirty-five. </span><span class="T4">L</span><span class="T1">ook at Auden<br/>Who might have said, like Socrates,<br/>“I have mastered all the worst things<br/>I am full of.” Disingenuously, of course.<br/><br/><br/>Chance Of Blue II<br/><br/>I suppose, to confess, I always wanted<br/>My sky to be blue. With some cloud,<br/>To prefer us to change. A chance<br/>Beautiful. Somewhere in the rocks<br/>Looking towards the shore and knowing there<br/>That family had a picnic and those, at a late hour,<br/></span><span class="T1">Were rescued from a summer shower.<br/>And because the sun must shine (it must)<br/>There was someone, the children that picked seashells<br/>And wondered and compared and forever were told<br/>“The sea is a dangerous monster,”<br/>And were happy, there were some people, old perhaps,<br/>Sharing their unflasked, metallic tea,<br/>Trying to gather the sun, who said<br/>“I love you.” “I, too, my dear.”<br/>“Isn’t it beautiful?” “My love, it is beautiful.”<br/>“Aren’t we happy?” “Happiness is what we are.”<br/><br/><br/>Nativity<br/>“Notre crime est del’homme” Lamartine. ‘L’homme.’<br/><br/>Everything stained: The tea stains the cup,<br/>The cup stains the counter, the foot stains the snow,<br/>The moon stains the air. Everything said.<br/>I am told this is not an original thought.<br/>Below, what was forgotten and cold,<br/>As if it were not merely, actually true,<br/>There was a birth, the unthinking was done<br/>And this messy mix of snow and blood<br/>Produced a word that meant ‘goodbye’ or ‘hello’,<br/>Unsorting a chaos into ‘this one and that’<br/>And saying “Insofar as I am here, that is there.”<br/><br/>Or if they are ‘mad’, we are ‘mad’, since<br/>Neither they nor we can prove the obvious:<br/>That Johnson kicked a stone but Berkeley<br/>Was already dead, that the delusion suffices<br/>To make a few words bring a cup of tea<br/>And that, without God, preserving the hollow<br/>Takes so long to say, </span><span class="T5">every man</span><span class="T1"><br/>Could seek to find<br/>Putrefaction of his mother,<br/>Of his brother, of his kind.<br/><br/><br/>Lewis And Martina<br/><br/>L: A broken nose more expresses health<br/>Than your ridiculous screams and cries.<br/>I keep, at least, some human cowardice<br/>At home. Making tea in the grubby room<br/></span><span class="T5">B</span><span class="T1">ut acknowledging this Angel. </span><span class="T5">H</span><span class="T1">e will not,<br/>For the moment, destroy me. That you wished<br/>To deliver yourself to man was what disappointed.<br/><br/>M: There was no sense, speaking in the wrong language,<br/>In any action. Neither theirs nor mine.<br/>If I felt or smelt destruction don’t think of it<br/>As intended. I have told people as, perhaps,<br/></span><span class="T1">A piece of vanity, that I saw things.<br/>Nothing was so crude. Only those who wished to love me.<br/>They could not. Hate becomes, sometime, stronger than love.<br/><br/>L: And yet, for me, nothing was more ‘subtle’ than mine.<br/>To you it was merely looks, a means of accommodating<br/>Body to body and the dysfunction I must finally feel<br/>When doubt had to sleep with both of us. I ached<br/>And I ache everyday for what, well, I never wanted.<br/>For I tried for merely a word that would say<br/>You know me.<br/><br/>M: </span><span class="T5"> </span><span class="T1">I know you but<br/>You were not enough. Or never could be.<br/>Listen, Lewis, I joy in those few months<br/>When we really were discovering what it was<br/>that always is so strange about each other:<br/>Our mortality, our distant death, our always otherness.<br/>Don’t you see – I have gone there,<br/>I have lost you,<br/>I have lost myself. And your child<br/>Is the only human word I can now discover.<br/>I hate you. You were not an Angel. I hate myself<br/>For saying this. How could I demand this impossible?<br/><br/>L: No, you could not. And yet you, O beautiful you,<br/></span><span class="T5">H</span><span class="T1">ad a right to. You had a claim on an Angel.<br/>But he did not come. Only me. I love you.<br/><br/>M: But you, my fool, my once-was-guest, remember:<br/>Love cannot be there merely to please you.<br/>We women are accused of eating hearts –<br/></span><span class="T5">I</span><span class="T1">t is not us but God that burns your soul,<br/></span><span class="T5">I</span><span class="T1">t is not I, it is never I, but these fragments,<br/>These joys and sorrows, this ecstasy you refuse<br/>To forget. Don’t forget. I may be mad<br/>But I do not miss the compliment.<br/>For in a glass I joy greatly at what memory can produce.<br/>The happiness of a boy who cried “I love you!”<br/>Because he had never loved before nor has since.<br/><br/>L: I had never loved before nor have since.<br/><br/>Beauty<br/><br/>Yes, she would walk the streets, sometimes to solve<br/>A problem, sometimes because she loved the darkness<br/>She would always find between the houses.<br/>We tried to stop her – we talked to her,<br/>Told her that this was being childish or<br/>Stupid or romantic – it was foolish<br/>To walk in the all innocence of nature<br/>And say: “This is true.” Only, lunging forward,<br/>We happened on the chance of history<br/></span><span class="T1">And, hey presto, dead bodies. Still, we told her<br/>“</span><span class="T5">W</span><span class="T1">e love you” but your ‘schizophrenic’,<br/>We said “Open your mouth”, without saying<br/>“Speak!” – but she wouldn’t – a merely<br/>Beautiful idiosyncrasy:<br/>Which we crushed, destroyed, crushed as a bug<br/>And then said “Crawl back.”<br/>She couldn’t. Why<br/>Couldn’t she be beautiful again?<br/>Only because the mirror will kill us.<br/>We have no conscience. No love. No honour.<br/><br/><br/>Epithalamium<br/>(For Oliver and Barbara)<br/><br/>The rails of fate which run assuredly on<br/>You think mechanical until, rusty turns<br/>Of metal, they suddenly end, the grass<br/>Stands tall, the flowers are indifferent<br/>And what’s left of a forest creeps up:<br/>But, no, you’re not alone, the main station<br/>Ushered you to a seat and a stranger<br/>Who became a friend. And now, as the driver<br/>Has nothing to do and cannot turn back,<br/>Beneath all your discomfort, you find<br/><br/>You’re holding her hand. A miracle!<br/>Was it you who unconsciously fumbled for safety,<br/>Unsure of direction and afraid of derailment<br/>(</span><span class="T5">Y</span><span class="T1">et you knew you would end here, were happy<br/>And loved it) or was it an accident of grace,<br/>Perhaps that bit of sunlight deifying<br/>An ugly day, suddenly some word (which you later<br/>Realise you misunderstood) made the Other not so far<br/>Or you were just thinking of your mother?<br/>Never mind how or why, it became<br/><br/>And now lasting for ever – and who knows whether<br/>She be that especially designed one or is it<br/>Only the forced meeting that makes us dear,<br/>That all of us (not being lunatic or bad)<br/>Could love all of us of which marriage is a token?<br/>Such questions we leave to philosophers,<br/>Analysts and other buffoons – for us the effort<br/>And the pleasure of a good deed done, of a<br/>Love and a fidelity that makes us happy,<br/>Of that constant light we can steer by,<br/>Turn to and call a home. And if scoffers<br/><br/>Insolently shout that fidelity and all good things<br/>Are dead, that childhood is hell, that mother<br/>Is always beating us and daddy always<br/>Turning away, that the one you love always<br/></span><span class="T1">Loves another and will leave you for him and that,<br/>Anyway, life ‘ain’t perfect’, it would be silly<br/>To disturb them by a reply. A happy smile,<br/>Maybe, and, long after one has stopped listening,<br/>The thought recurring of the love and the marriage,<br/>Wholesome, good, that’s Barbara and Oliver.<br/><br/>Morecambe<br/><br/>Precise terms, correctly said<br/>Might point a moral to be had:<br/>The eviscerate beast will be fed<br/>With the inane, the hapless or the sad,<br/><br/>The little joke become universal<br/>Till cosmic gizzards grin,<br/>A gods fading, pathetic appal<br/>Irking some tummy ache of sin,<br/><br/>But we, who ‘know’ exactly when<br/>The anti-Christ and Christ shall meet,<br/>Bitterly say ‘I love’, again,<br/>Hanker for the canker of defeat,<br/><br/>Leathery, inept, miss h</span><span class="T5">ewe</span><span class="T1">d,<br/>Burnt, blathered but staring at the sun<br/>Our being brave merely crude,<br/>Our families broken before they’ve begun:<br/><br/>A wino whine like Ovid-On-The-Sea,<br/>We must be exiles, perpetually.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>A Winter Poem<br/><br/><br/>i<br/><br/>My right hand in her left hand – so they say.<br/>Those best word</span><span class="T6">s</span><span class="T1"> we had and yet neither<br/>God nor man could join us. But this<br/>Is pointless, to see one smile and break and be angry<br/>Because you could never tell what it meant.<br/>To want the resurrection, now – why disturb<br/>The dead? We only joked because we enjoyed<br/>The others pain. Or guilt.<br/><br/><br/>ii<br/><br/>If I see you again and every night<br/></span><span class="T1">Am I then better? Will I become good?<br/>Will I love their souls, even broken?<br/>Or laugh in a new birth? I am a bitter, bitter man,<br/>A hollow world that falls away, a sun<br/>That has left me in darkness, the vision<br/>Of even others happiness I must decry.<br/>O god, O world, O woman – if one smile<br/>Could disturb these stone</span><span class="T6">s</span><span class="T1"> why not<br/>Again and again and again?<br/><br/><br/>iii<br/><br/>Ten thousand cuts, ten thousand blows, a beating<br/>And then to stand all night, to stare at a corner,<br/>To joke, maybe, with your friendly betrayers<br/>And then watch them march into death, your left<br/>With a word, like a photograph, which says “This face is harmless.”<br/>I don’t wish to be in this world. You wish to be<br/>Unhappy, don’t you? You have no right to that.<br/><br/><br/>iv<br/><br/>Dirty and unshared and in a miserable room<br/>Winter has written our desire upon this wall<br/>Because I am what you, perhaps, must want,<br/>This writer. A liar, true, a thief, also, a pornographer,<br/>A self-hater, a wanter of </span><span class="T6">man’s</span><span class="T1"> destruction,<br/>All these things and more.<br/>Love which bringeth understanding.<br/><br/><br/>v<br/><br/>The eloquence a persuasion of God –<br/>To ‘believe’, I suppose, was what I meant.<br/>Or not to believe but to know. Because an Angel<br/>Pressed against me. I felt his lips.<br/><br/><br/>vi<br/><br/>No joy talking to oneself, being alone,<br/>No joy, again, in sex, no joy in delight<br/>Over a face seen again, no morning<br/>Waking because you had kissed me,<br/>No love in tears or smiles or that said “I love you.”<br/>No love for me or you or this morning,<br/>Just damnation, the coldest fire that could ever burn.<br/><br/><br/>vii<br/><br/></span><span class="T1">If the streets were colder, only colder,<br/>I could force back a time when hand in hand<br/>I caught something of your smile.<br/>Extremes, they say, can produce illusion<br/>Which I could grasp, never let go<br/>Of your presence, however mad.<br/><br/><br/>viii<br/><br/>Chalk on the pavement<br/>Water is a sore destroyer<br/>Whatever trace people leave<br/>The city will illuminate<br/>The very same world<br/>Even on the last day<br/>The pavement will be laid<br/>Sorrow or joy do not counter<br/>What is permanent<br/>This the same rain<br/>That rained before<br/><br/>Choose merely now, then,<br/>Forget our yesterday,<br/>The darling face, the nay<br/>Against belief, remember<br/>The street must return<br/>Shouts that defy or plead<br/>And you, before you sleep,<br/>Must try to make room<br/>For tomorrow<br/>By listening to this rain,<br/>Today.<br/></span></p><p class="P8"><span> </span></p><p class="Standard"><span class="T8"> </span><span class="T13">Something strange</span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5">Something strange. The chipped value of buildings<br/>That are always odd because they're historical.<br/>A vague memory of my grandmother saying ' Hello'<br/>And her 'permanent' counsel house being taken away<br/>As soon as she died. Or my mother,<br/>Seeing faces In the stonework of an obscure yard<br/><br/>And me having to rescue her and no gratitude<br/>And I didn't expect it. Madness is it's own reward.<br/>For once bowing to the inevitable and bleedingly obvious.<br/><br/>Just like buildings that bow at your command:<br/>Are somewhat obvious, chipped and broken. </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8"> Happiness <br/><br/>Happiness is like a very good morning. <br/>Waking up in laundered sheets, knowing the birds <br/></span><span class="T8">sing in those pretty trees you saw yesterday, <br/>knowing a cooked breakfast is on the table <br/>and, no matter what you've done (within reason!) <br/>they'll still smile and say "Hi" and what a fool. <br/>After breakfast and if it's not raining, <br/>you'll walk into the garden and laugh at the sky. </span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8"> The sun shines</span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5">The sun shines on even the terribly ugly.<br/>The violence perfectly real. The shabby Inns<br/>I have collected. Walking the other side of a sea wall<br/>I am protected from a bay that is tame and beautiful. </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8"> </span><span class="T9">The if smile</span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8">Broken, the if smile and tomorrow you will know<br/>Who loves you</span><span class="T9"> – </span><span class="T8">no one. Everyone smiles in Morecambe.<br/>To die a kind of 'get-in'. Like smiling at the bottom <br/>Of our world. You cannot smile upwards, can you? </span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"><span> Eyeless in Gaza</span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1">Eyeless in Gaza, I squint and grasp blindly<br/>For this mornings coffee. The noise and rumble.<br/>A newspaper boy running past. My French friend<br/>Comes in to tell me his office is packing up and going back<br/>To Paris. How cowardly. And I’ve been here before.<br/>In Alexandria, for instance. </p><p class="P6"> </p><p class="P6"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T9"> I broke my smile waiting for yesterday</span></p><p class="P6"> </p><p class="P6">I broke my smile waiting for yesterday.<br/>Martina, you think it easy, making this sun shine?<br/>Were as thunder and clouds come every day.<br/>Everything I can do except hold your hand. </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8"> </span><span class="T10">West End</span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8">It was easy to be at the edge of the world,<br/>See the sun slide in with the blue and gold tip of a wing<br/>Like the Angels that must have visited me in my prison<br/>Of heretofore</span><span class="T10"> – </span><span class="T8">a former Morecambe whose Streets were called<br/>Clarendon, Westminster, Balmoral and this was the "West End"<br/>A different exile. All exiles are equal. But that one bullied forward<br/>And this, self imposed. The cries are equally as barren and threatening.<br/>The hope equally as meaningless. I got out last time by a kind of<br/>Alacrity, a jumping into the barrel which others began to roll.<br/>This time, there are no others. The same barren hope, though. </span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"><span> London was so vast you could meander</span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8">London was so vast you could meander<br/>Through it's soul and it wouldn't know:<br/>Going up to the Contemporary Poets Library<br/>And coming down with a big red book and no-one knowing<br/>What you had</span><span class="T10"> – </span><span class="T8">until, you were so drunk, you talked<br/>To the girl in the peep show, studying law, and<br/>She quoted you Pound. So ashamed and knowing<br/>No drink would help you, your feet twisted and turned.<br/>Back to the ugliness of Catford and Lewisham.<br/></span><span class="T8">This was the way, the toa which you disrupted, my love.<br/>For a moment, for a couple of months, but not for ever. </span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8"> The nights are coming in and close, like a black storm</span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8">The nights are coming in and close, like a black storm:<br/>To stand high and old and curl up and fall</span><span class="T10"> – </span><span class="T8">like paper burning:<br/>The words that had meant so much, the honesty</span><span class="T10"> – </span><span class="T8">and the lies.<br/>Guilt shredded through the afternoon and, in the evening, just rest,<br/>Exhaustion, overwhelmed by everything that is wrong. </span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"><span> Who are you?</span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5">The violence outside is always a beating postponed:<br/>The gimp mask just falls away from your face<br/>And you wear the usual garb and just walk out into the sunlight:<br/>Blinding and bleaching and a judgement you can't take<br/>You have begun to smile at the alleged children <br/>That other people have. Tomorrow, but today, <br/>You will gather those judgements and cans and bottles and yourself, <br/>As if you were trash. How to live? The kind of joke I began with. <br/>Asking questions. Who are you? </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"><span> Hope Is A Bully </span><br/><br/>How does hope get us there?<br/>No cars run on hope - is it carbon free? - <br/>My boiler buggers on hope and if I ask my feet<br/>Their twisted but somewhat sensible way is<br/>"Out of the door!" and as quick as is legal.<br/>Hope is a bully. </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8"> Happiness is what happiness does. It seems to appear</span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5">Happiness is what happiness does. It seems to appear<br/>In other people. They smile a lot and have children.<br/>A smile is a grimace like the grave. I wish to see<br/>Certain smiles, I've hunted them out. I have an APB on smiles.<br/>We should not appear in the same room, because my 'appearance'<br/>Embarrasses you. Peering into the dark corners of my room<br/>You assume this is me. Well it is. The coach is waiting for you<br/>And our sadness, too. After you have gone, will I not follow?</p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8"> The assumptions we have followed are rather strange?</span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5">The assumptions we have followed are rather strange?<br/>Just to assume you are good, a man, just and beautiful,<br/>As you did assume, must make you pretty ridiculous,<br/>A laughing stock, a freak. To assume anything means<br/>To assume to much. To assume everything or nothing. </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P5"><span> Kensington</span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P5">I walk down my street and my courage fails,</p><p class="P5">Has failed. It isn't that the key in my hand</p><p class="P1"><span class="T8">Will no longer work</span><span class="T11"> – </span><span class="T8">the police and the other </span></p><p class="P5">Officious guardians of our fate will have </p><p class="P5">'Permission' to slot in the key and turn the key </p><p class="P5">And open that garden of butterfly's and June days</p><p class="P5">But also muddy winters and alone London - </p><p class="P5">But I am now excluded and know that,</p><p class="P5">Whatever I do, as a human being, is suspicious.</p><p class="P5">So cowardly, I divert to the local pub and smoke</p><p class="P5">My death giving fag outside.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P5"><span> </span><span> </span><span> Drive</span></p><p class="P5"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T8">Everything said forgets it's bon</span><span class="T12">ne</span><span class="T8"> chance</span></p><p class="P5">Of an accident that broke my screen as I was </p><p class="P5">Driving through the dead skirts of Paris:</p><p class="P5">Where the car must turn but doesn't to the heart of</p><p class="P5">Those streets smiling and forgetting. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P5"> Broken</p><p class="P5">Beneath that bridge and our youth on its hands and knees</p><p class="P5">Or back there, the half green lawn, and where jokes</p><p class="P5">Where a plenty and didn't need to be remembered.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P5">I thought, something strange, like hope might brew</p><p class="P1"><span class="T8">As when</span><span class="T12"> – I</span><span class="T8"> bought a house, I sawed the wood, </span></p><p class="P1"><span class="T12">A</span><span class="T8">nd the place </span><span class="T12">disappeared</span><span class="T8"> beneath me.</span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"><span> To go home is a good choice<span class="T14"> – </span>to ignore</span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">To go home is a good choice<span class="T14"> – </span>to ignore<br/>What is obvious: The woman you love distressed<br/>And, obviously, needing your help. You smile<br/>In the corners of your couch and cry sometimes<br/>Very hot, sentimental tears. Hatred in your own room<br/>Feels better than hatred in theirs. An illusion<br/>Only oblivion will cover. Like snow, like ice. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"><span> The minimal that is required is to love</span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">The minimal that is required is to love.<br/>But only one without love could make such a statement,<br/>Be conscious of such a requirement. Innocent of heart<br/>But dead. I am Lazarus come back to tell you all<br/>Or Jonah, spewed upon a beach, refusing still<br/>Those words that came from God. Or being<br/>In the belly of the whale, drumming his indigestion,<br/>With the oil cans, the plastic bags, the half eaten fish,<br/>The etc detritus of being human, I, inhuman,<br/>Wallow in this strange, submarine defeat.<br/>I like it down here. Hows it up there? </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"><span> </span></p><p class="P1"><span> Everything you thought was wrong was wrong</span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">Everything you thought was wrong was wrong. <br/>Your awkward smile that misremembered me,<br/>Your false laugh at remembering. Kicking the frost<br/>From our feet and fearing to look at each other<br/>We boiled with a kind of love. Soured in a bag<br/>The homeless that asked us to look at them.<br/>It's not pretty, poverty. It's not pretty, your smile. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"/><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T16">For Martina</span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> I</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">The canker in my eye is not so great I can't see the cancer in yours.</p><p class="P1">Being an amateur 'doctor' with my quack remedies</p><p class="P1">I'm going deaf, but I hear you through this lonely night,</p><p class="P1">From how far away? O to far, in time, in space, in hope</p><p class="P1">And yet, you are there, in hospital, with your neighbors (I imagine)</p><p class="P1">Screaming at the wall and you, trying to sleep, trying to hope</p><p class="P1">That I or someone still thinks of you. (And me thinking all the time).</p><p class="P1">And me, impotent to help you, to be there, to love you, as I do.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> II</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">Nothing smells worse than death - </p><p class="P1">The stinking soul hanging between my shoulders </p><p class="P1">Like a sweaty and unwashed shirt - resurrected every 'perfect' </p><p class="P1">Dinner I wear it like a shield or a sign - </p><p class="P1">‘Here are fools!’ - and no one notices - they continue </p><p class="P1">Cutting their food and saying their say. </p><p class="P1">Loneliness is terrible.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">My nose broken, I walked along the street</p><p class="P1">Looking for someone who would break it back. </p><p class="P1">I found that, the rain and the gutter </p><p class="P1">And my desperate cowardice. For down here </p><p class="P1">I want to say 'Hi' to you but I'm too ugly </p><p class="P1">To do so. I think, if I sent a message through </p><p class="P1">A 'friend' and he sent a message to you, </p><p class="P1">You might receive it. You might understand why </p><p class="P1">I have punished myself, for so long?</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P7"> III</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">An Angel came down to me and said </p><p class="P1">"These ascending and descending stairs </p><p class="P1">Are for you. Come up." "No", I said "For I hate man, </p><p class="P1">I hate the world and I hate everything that has</p><p class="P1">And will exist." "Every word you say </p><p class="P1">Could be turned to love and your words </p><p class="P1">Roses among the thorns" "But I want to be the thorn, </p><p class="P1">The sharp spear that cuts God and salves him </p><p class="P1">With vinegar!?" "Boy, you will never be that, </p><p class="P1">You are gentle of heart. Come and follow me" </p><p class="P1">"No, I will stay here and die." "So be it"</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">How I hung, above the abyss, </p><p class="P1">Smiling at you. And I mistook </p><p class="P1">Your upside down smile as a smile </p><p class="P1">When it was a grimace, a wince of pain. </p><p class="P1">I feel so wrong for not understanding </p><p class="P1">When I should have. And, now, your mind and your will </p><p class="P1">Have both disintegrated. A wall </p><p class="P1">Against which I wail and will do so forever.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">That Angel, from God, a long long time ago </p><p class="P1">(Well, at least, ten years), told me </p><p class="P1">The meaning of love. When, one winter morning, </p><p class="P1">Waiting for a train that never came, </p><p class="P1">Dark and crepuscular morning, the sky </p><p class="P1">Began to fall, at first like little bells </p><p class="P1">Chiming on the concrete and the rails - ting, ting - </p><p class="P1">And I knew it was a call from God - knock, knock - </p><p class="P1">Whose there? No one, no one at home. </p><p class="P1">Of course, God doesn't exist but nor do I.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">That morning when the stars were so bright </p><p class="P1">I could grasp them, when I knew I had lost </p><p class="P1">Everything and nothing would return, </p><p class="P1">That my love, which was destroying me, was for 'nothing', </p><p class="P1">That I had 'taken the wrong turn', as usual </p><p class="P1">(But fatally this time), God sat beside me and told me </p><p class="P1">To be of good cheer. "These temporary things" He said </p><p class="P1">"Are of no matter. For what is in your heart, my son? </p><p class="P1">Your heart is of me. Say something beautiful." </p><p class="P1">I could not. I can not.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> IV</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">Everyone I look at</p><p class="P1">Pats me on the head, feeds me a bone,</p><p class="P1">Chucks me outside or leaves me on my own.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">I am a dog and alone.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">My stupid 'masters'</p><p class="P1">Who can't master themselves</p><p class="P1">Are not my masters. I dream</p><p class="P1">Of running with my brothers.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">I am a dog and alone.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">Everyday my ‘owner’ dumps me outside</p><p class="P1">And I bark because</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">I am a dog and alone.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T20">Thoughts out of Season.</span> </p><p class="P1">(For Martina, bride of my soul, mother of my child)</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T18">I </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">1 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">Sadness like those streams you sat next to </p><p class="P1">As a child. The smell of wild garlic, </p><p class="P1">The whooping flutter of birds, and, crowded </p><p class="P1">Above you, a bully of trees and their greenness, </p><p class="P1">Alien, except for that stream and the tears that fell in it. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">2 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">'I' </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">An imagined mumbo-jumbo of words. A haitiesque </p><p class="P1">Raising of the dead. The streets kind of empty </p><p class="P1">And sullen. A bruised foot that had kicked the face </p><p class="P1">That had seen the moon. How does one wake up </p><p class="P1">Or go to sleep? Both are impossible.. </p><p class="P1">A tin can kind of reflection. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">3 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">Love is a monstrous story. I can't help sweating </p><p class="P1">In a kind of fear of loss. My bed is soaked with this sadness. </p><p class="P1">The smell of being human - which I presume, is an attempt </p><p class="P1">To keep clean. The arrogance of myself. A pointless thought. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">4</span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">A pattern that only foreshadows gloom</p><p class="P1">The wind and the rain somehow upset you</p><p class="P1">Assuming you where inside and silent</p><p class="P1">Brokering a bargain, smashing a plate,</p><p class="P1">Marrying an idea of a roof above you and the four walls.</p><p class="P1">There is nothing nice about being human.</p><p class="P1">Pandora’s box allowed all evils to escape - </p><p class="P1">Disease, old age, ambition and, finally, hope - </p><p class="P1">That which has always bullied us forward.</p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">5 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">Where the wonders of the world merely </p><p class="P1">A mockery, then? A shining through thick </p><p class="P1">And sullen cloud? A glint on the stab </p><p class="P1">Of a broken can in a shabby alleyway? </p><p class="P1">No, on the contrary, they where </p><p class="P1">The beginning, preparatory to something other... </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T18">II </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">1 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T19">For Lou Reed</span> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">My Dead Book is getting full of names: </p><p class="P1">People who I can call only up from Hell </p><p class="P1">For those who go to heaven I never knew. </p><p class="P1">Sweet smile as we turn the soil, like turnips, </p><p class="P1">Like potatoes, the rooted soul, like disease, </p><p class="P1">Like fungus between my toes, like an awkwardness </p><p class="P1">Of gait, a 'funny walking', like sadness and grief </p><p class="P1">And the guilt in forgetting, like Anna and </p><p class="P1">My never seeing her or if I did it was only </p><p class="P1">Her corpse. I didn't know what to do so I went </p><p class="P1">Into the toilet and grinned at my reflection. </p><p class="P1">A scowls grin for a grin. The first name in my Book. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">2 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">The happiness of an hour spent listening to a guitar </p><p class="P1">And songs of another man, so fugitive, and now </p><p class="P1">What? A grimace before this weather. I'd forgotten </p><p class="P1">Or meant to remember how hearing someone else meant. </p><p class="P1">Like sitting at the front and seeing the sea </p><p class="P1">Threaten to drown you. One wave upon another </p><p class="P1">And each knowing the borrowed light of a moon </p><p class="P1">Is merely lent to them. Each song singing </p><p class="P1">It's mermaid song and beckoning forward. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T18">III</span> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T19">Bully</span> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">1 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">The head was broken - split asunder - </p><p class="P1">The poring out of blood and soul - gargling </p><p class="P1">What was left of my spirits - down there, </p><p class="P1">In a Lancs gutter - I cried out to you, </p><p class="P1">I asked do I deserve to exist, </p><p class="P1">Can I, must I, should I? </p><p class="P1">The echo of an emptiness is my answer. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">2 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">A broken soul, like the Jew and his belongings, </p><p class="P1">His pictures, his Picasso, his Pizaro - we have distinguished them, </p><p class="P1">We have decided between the twain, we have put on one side </p><p class="P1">This person and on the other this thing - almost a cleverness, </p><p class="P1">An articulacy, as if to alienate was to be. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">3 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">For I have stepped upon bones and heard them crack </p><p class="P1">And slime as they attempted to grasp and plead. </p><p class="P1">I stood upon them and had no guilt. </p><p class="P1">I stabbed down, only to quieten them. </p><p class="P1">For I have stood upon bones and known there suffering. </p><p class="P1">I have seen eyes outside of context </p><p class="P1">And hands without history. I have been </p><p class="P1">Haunted by souls that do not exist. </p><p class="P1">Or smiled at smiles that have no history. </p><p class="P1">I am dead and yet am I arisen. </p><p class="P1">I have been stamping upon a world </p><p class="P1">Yet I live. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">4 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">The cracked smile I smile is not a joke. </p><p class="P1">An askance, a lie or a slyness. A semblance of a smile. </p><p class="P1">No. Not the pretence to seem, not this, a talking </p><p class="P1">Into nothingness. A carpet mouth and a joke. </p><p class="P1">Those two eyes a befuddled constellation </p><p class="P1"><span class="T17">Beckoning this kind of death. In the middle of Europe</span> </p><p class="P1">Some kind of sand. Which you realise </p><p class="P1">Is a man hair. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">5 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">Down on the ground, then, a bully above you </p><p class="P1">And you turn your face to the left or the right - </p><p class="P1">For which way is best? Not to love is best </p><p class="P1">Not to be loved, second, but better still </p><p class="P1">Never to have been born. Hatred is gallant </p><p class="P1">In the glad old days. Sorrow, too. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T18">IV </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">1 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"><span class="T19">After Ivan Blatny, from memory</span> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">To live alone is a crime. What does Lamartinine say: </p><p class="P1">Man is the criminal, l'homme est criminile. </p><p class="P1">Get a wife and child. If you can't have a child </p><p class="P1">Have a wife. If you can't have a wife </p><p class="P1">Get a dog, a dog only. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">2 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">The beauty of an embrace: How does it happen? </p><p class="P1">That extraordinary love you feel </p><p class="P1">At the touch of a hand: </p><p class="P1">Now, then, do you remember this? </p><p class="P1">Walking those old streets </p><p class="P1">And staring in other peoples windows - </p><p class="P1">You seem to have forgotten what it is to smile? </p><p class="P1">When she stroked your hair and it was like fire, </p><p class="P1">You were aflame, you were burning </p><p class="P1">So that every touch afterwards was like </p><p class="P1">A new sun had been born? Memory was actual, </p><p class="P1">Was alive. Delight in the morning </p><p class="P1">And to forget the only crime I know. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">3 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">Belly full of bags and old rules </p><p class="P1">I feel a connection with everyone. </p><p class="P1">How did you know? A ghost that tracked me. </p><p class="P1">Like a brother. Like a mother. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">I've stayed clear of eclipses, they pick out </p><p class="P1">My bottles. The sun gleaming </p><p class="P1">On what might have been but isn't. </p><p class="P1">I can't see the sky. It's a fuzzy mess to me. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">You 'smoke' in the back yard of your dreams </p><p class="P1">And, down every ally, is that blaze </p><p class="P1">That entered your head, cut from a tin can, </p><p class="P1">A piece of glass, spiking the light </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">And, that others, might never see. Suddenly </p><p class="P1">That Angel of theft and vagabondage </p><p class="P1">And I hate myself. A smallness in my soul </p><p class="P1">Destroyed what was good in me. Cowardice. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">'What is seen is what is known'. So you say. </p><p class="P1">I see nothing. Therefore nothing is known. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T18">V </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">1 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">Oh, one of those days! When I must struggle </p><p class="P1">From beneath the covers to find clean socks, </p><p class="P1">Clean my teeth and post a letter? Why? </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> <span class="T17">2 </span></p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">What this Saturday morning means? What have I </p><p class="P1">Done with my life? How old am I? How much </p><p class="P1">Could I have done? Should I have done more? </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1">Lewis Deane, Sept-Nov 2013. </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P1"> </p><p class="P2"> </p><!--Next 'div' was a 'text:p'.--><div class="P3"><span class="T15"><br/></span><span class="T1"><br/><br/>Index Of First Lines<br/><br/><br/>“Down that road I went.” He said, pointing somewhere. 4<br/>“Hell, the floor collapsed: there we were, 136<br/>“I am not dangerous.” Their new form 52<br/>“Take the opportunity to listen” 135<br/>“Where are you?” Then the smile, 125<br/>“Who rules, who serves? 79<br/>A big fish eat me but there are no fish in the sea. 139<br/>A broken nose more expresses health 155<br/>A gloomy summer’s rain so alien 59<br/>A mess of cracked stone: 62<br/>A naked figurine in a green shrub 14<br/>A soul flavoured in the neutral tones 93<br/>A Sundays gentle cycle through seas of empty streets 31<br/>A thin, weeping mist squeaks along the grass 105<br/>A wintry airlessness, a tundra between us, 133<br/>All that time a denial 42<br/>All the body’s turnings merely serve 30<br/>Alone but for the involuntary 131<br/>Always again the wish to begin 64<br/>Ambitions of twenty nine: to be content, 120<br/>Among the whispered wind and wet 95<br/>And down those corridors 89<br/>Below the cry of a bat 7<br/>Blind, my love, to futures chance, 45<br/>Cascading from the dark 43<br/>Caught in a translunar spot 25<br/>Conceived, born and here, a place near the sea, 36<br/>Corners catching 8<br/></span><span class="T1">Ditched or broken the tourist ruins 80<br/>Do I have a relationship, 60<br/>Everything is so quiet and peaceful now: 54<br/>Everything stained: The tea stains the cup, 154<br/>Falling down – and, last night, probably 147<br/>Farcical rumour of not being 47<br/>For three days I drank, certain of failure, 58<br/>Forgotten towers 6<br/>Friends that were not and have already gone 65<br/>Gold and silver 119<br/>Half a line of bad verse 53<br/>How did that star break 100<br/>How many times have we heard her say 110<br/>I have not stepped 73<br/>I have you, therefore, above my desk, 129<br/>I remember your bedroom window 49<br/>I see you different, now, flattened by age 28<br/>I suppose, to confess, I always wanted 153<br/>I was hoping for a punishment 150<br/>I will not tell how I tried 151<br/>I’ve tested it then, 39<br/>In each place I’d broken circles, the figured 82<br/>In the bruised sleep of a few unpunctured hours 77<br/>It is not for this that I waited alone, 22<br/>It was a comic sight: 15<br/>Leaving pressured prints, 72<br/>Let not the burst thunder 81<br/>Like the wanderer and his shadow, 55<br/>Lilting among the wilting trees 46<br/>List the bright heat as one change of garment 83<br/>My right hand in her left hand – so they say. 160<br/>Neither to go far nor to come home 66<br/>Not a night to be seen: 41<br/></span><!--Next '
span' is a draw:frame.
--><span style="height:0.1563in;width:0.2083in; padding:0; " class="fr1" id="graphics1"><img style="height:0.397cm;width:0.5291cm;" alt="" src="../../../../C:%5CDOCUME~1%5Cuser%5CLOCALS~1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_image002.gif"/></span></div><div style="clear:both; line-height:0; width:0; height:0; margin:0; padding:0;"> </div></body></html>
<div class="blogger-post-footer">'I know that I know nothing'</div>Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04364287936968808344noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8781173037216089635.post-49533622045614518052009-01-25T08:11:00.000+00:002009-01-25T08:12:03.131+00:00I'm sorry for you, Myslet (czech 'to think') that, since I set you up, I so long neglect you. What can I say - no love, no poetry, no thought. But, just to keep you company, and if it's possible with a phone, I'll upload some songs. See how we go, my friend.<div class="blogger-post-footer">'I know that I know nothing'</div>Lewishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04364287936968808344noreply@blogger.com0