Brighton


bloated red faced once a boy
white corpuscles exploding
friendless good timer plastic leather
on the train alone packs hunt at night

tudor gift shop

carrier bag overflowing churned over crap
expanding garbage delta swim lane
sucked down for optimistic  fun
retro oblivion victorian relics

flung down an old funk shute

street chip hunters greased up bingo wings
temples of rot growing daily
shingle crunch impact wounds
scarred for life by retro carrion

crows prosper gulls too

all is stink and waste bad taste abounds
cantata of grey uniformed servants
broach the back passages of a mildewed bookseller
ants raid a chocolate box grim faced academic on platform

recipe for incipient paper swamp

dime store hierophant rebranded as tantric sage
wounded by too much coffee and cake
juggling responsibilities as junk recycler plunged ready
fresh brewed without god sunk on a coastal fault line

in all this over baked potato wit

shimmering listless strata of white stucco years
encroaching crenelated wisdom booth through money
accept encode wisdom street prophets haunting
hopeless alleyways punching trees camped out in graveyards

all this and more whisper the willows

perplexing thoughts engulf the heat haze
pockets of burley sweat glands results on a horse
careless croissant skewers the gull
its as if were tumbling into the sea

ah well the guesthouse hopes it loves us back.

Thoughts on the similarities between the poems of Mina Loy and the photographs of Francesca Woodman

A wild Magik of distracted moments

 The fearless void seer

                        The formless Unfurled Everything

Uprooted exposed

Bold moon lovers

Summer sealed them, loosed from storage jars of night fevered essence

Imaginings screel up glowing

To break the frame to expose new visions from fronds that stretch to touch the hand

To give so dusty and breathless that holding it was never possible.

Lichens, lagoons and mangrove swamps 

Alligator’s eye the midnight owls’ wing flips the switch

To you looking up from inside ghostly waters 

The Shrunken Art 

Hard flung across the floor

The windows casement loosened  strange

Swooning red faces just waking in a dislocated trance

Of the Anthropocene, what can be seen that’s not a bus ride, snap all ties crumple place in the waste

With the soaking shrewd old lanes, bridleways ley ways, lay waste

The promise of some wine cowering in the corner

Air sucked out how so?

Will lurk and linger long after this tragic history is just a distant memory

Images of space and time provide help understanding smaller notebooks

The marquee glows purple at night and throbs with Talmudic proclamations

We drive around through spectral forests

The car weaves through ghost ways of aquatic drapery

It’s fun to laugh at death across rain soaked boulevards

To run the car into rubble canyons

We drive around past the abandoned library

Its low level architecture ensconced in bougainvillea roughly cobwebbed you can just make out the

Abandoned carousel.

Let us sing of land and dirt

Of generous days and nights of solid sleep

Of thoughts untangled from the weeds like exploding lakes

Quivering 

Staples of our Urban Existence

Million Year Spree

Celebrate Everything

Keep One Eye On The Reaper

Technical One-upmanship

Exude Charm

Go Back To Charm School

Talk Way Too Much

Express Interest in Limpid Tracery

Aw Shucks

Talk About Morton Feldman All The Time

Dream About Connecticut

‘Expressions’ by John Coltrane

Also

‘Miles Smiles’ with Borbetomagus on the Backburner

American Anglophobe

Yes to Purple Parakeets

Yes to Woodpeckers

Unexpurgated editions please

Lotus blossom

Vegetative States

Poet Scum

Visceral Vicissitudes

Etudes

Bare Faced Lone Bore

Morning songs Upstart Vagabond

Uncommon Weather

One bee fell into my lap

One I found on the floor on by the door

Creatures simply dropping

Yearning

For a cool breeze

Now it

Rushes in from the Atlantic

Onwards with a

Grind of gears a

Tightness of limb

They say you won’t be the greatest footballer

I wouldn’t worry too much

It’s an overrated game

Meanwhile birds flop out of trees

Exhausted by the heat

Outside the British Museum a large thuggish herring gull

Who is a long way from home

Pecks viciously at the lifeless body of a Jay

Sad to see this most colourful of birds

End its life this way.

Today At The Splash Park

Voted most notable notary by his peers

Hands extending tendril like offering a gift

Tumbrils of mist at the mouth of the portal

It is time the mugshot beckoned

Take seagull’s flight to the coast road

It leads to nowhere but that is ok

I guess

You guess?

A baked ham sits baking on the promenade very near the Splash Park

It’s all so perfectly designed in its dismal symmetry

Rotary Club

Very white make up

Very clay brown crackling

Very dense air with smell of cooking flesh human or otherwise

And all the while splash zone

We could search this town turn out all the houses build a pyre and still find nothing of worth

We could ride roughshod over these dreamers

Wheel spins in the darkness fumes from the spinning wheels of utility buggies, dumped lodes, clod busted wagons, incinerated dust carts, old boats held up by bricks.

The only worthwhile thing here is solitude if that’s what you want you’re on the wrong side of the river. 

The phone won’t charge (or why it’s not poetic to use ETC)

Car starts

And time

The spookiness of an octopus

Moving slowly backwards the way they do

Like penitents

They slither out of the Proterozoic

Layered onion eye eclipsed over pizza

This time in the summer bird’s song begins at 4:15 am

It was just the longest day

Writing up these notes

Listening to La Monte

Guzzling coffee thinking about the future worrying about the past

Running down new corridors and avenues of the same maze

They just look different I have two new companions I need to guide

Not just take them to the foot of the mountain and leave them there like us

See it’s there again snatching out of the past dragging backwards like that infernal writhing squid creature

Gauzy mollusc eye unpredictable twilight beast

The childcare life the refrigerated bliss of the frozen section

Morning bird song slowly unfolds into chaotic dissonance but strangely harmonious

Helicopters buzz band saw rock drill sirens kids wail cheer scream talk a guttural debased Hebraic mind sore

A rough Zen beast slithers down Nevsky Prospect or the Seven Sisters road you decide

Roughly shod hooves clopped across borders once now I need five passwords to make it work

A triangle a star a brilliant sparks some energy please!!!!

Fear of God held men in place for hundreds of years, fear of God and the fear of men that wielded Gods authority on Earth

Now fear death or poverty, dying in poverty etc. sleeping souls bleeding rough in a bus shelter having cold coffee poured over your head like a living hell better off inside why then commit a crime the greater the magnitude the longer your stay at her majesty’s pleasure what a ridiculous phrase to take pleasure from all the men locked up

Bindweed with its hurrah white trumpet flowers creeps around new rose bush have no fear

Floating enormous dragonfly cargo cruiser metallic purple and gold and humming low frequency

Dominions?

It’s a fantastic word, nature’s wild dominions

Escarpment?

Also a fantastic word. He broached her rocky escarpment and handed her the flaming batton of his heart.

Five hours of piano minimalism to what end to carry home a bag of beers.

To understand where and why to undo the seasons rain or block out the moon thoughts howling into the night like a pack of wolves inside your head tearing at the thought that got separated from the pack ripping it to shreds

In the beginning monks controlled the words just like those other men of God we mentioned earlier

Once the words are liberated history of mankind changes, now the codex has been thrown from its horse walls of ideas replaced the novel a singularly painstaking undertaking.

TODAY I ATE MY SALAD WITH A SPOON

For Wallace Stevens.

A small cruel stain on

The word spreading like port wine

Brushed over thick black bristles

These vicissitudes feel medieval

As we hunt boar through the urban lanes

Soon to taste a proposal sweet

In the knowledge that a chastening or a cooling off period

Could ecstatically revise

This new found sense of being alive

To chew up the words again and spit them out

With renewed vigour

Amen