Language

Gone

My first word was gone,
you could say I’ve been
writing that poem ever since.

(Lapsarian sentiment
necessitates intellectual belief
existence was Eden once.)

The second before the fall
of fruit from my high chair
must have felt like
an inarticulate bliss.

Seven poems thinking about language.

How to invent a magic trick

Magicians, by which I mean
conjurors, are the glamour margin
of the logician field. They imagine
a reaction, a yielding of reality
in the supine mind of one resigned 
to the quotidian, and then design 
backwards. In action, a welding of stages,
each judicious, pragmatic, sagacious,
each almost preterite, no shenanigans,
no wielding of power, until, remarkably,
the prestige alights, by which I mean, 
the imperious impossible that slackens
the quotidian in an instant. Did I say
magician? I lack words. I meant politician. 

Lying

‘That’s the beginning of the end’
my grandmother said
after my mother had told her
they were moving her bed.

Taking it from her Baptist-neat room,
from its pale walls, lavendered drawers,
the box of rings, each with stories
no-one remembered anymore.

Taking it from the early sun
that warms her eiderdown,
the chair she folds her nightie on,
the hook to hang her dressing gown

and negotiating it downstairs
where she’d be woken
by post, if post still came
with a flutter of life each morning.

‘That’s the beginning of the end’
she said, but we replied 
‘no, don’t be silly, it’s not’.
She smiled and let us lie. 

Birds at the zoo

The furious music of birds at the zoo,
aviary echo, you’d think they were happy
in their echo of their old real world
set up in our real world as a prelude
to the bang glass gameshow of monkeys.

Hot constant. Half-listen. Reminded
of the space station’s static-thick chirrup and ring,
a Tibetan bowl tumbling in the terrible bleak.
As soon as sung sounds extinct as soon as sung.

They’re in there somewhere, dazzle dapper
and dressed down, filling the trees
behind mould-edged screens half-reflecting
a you, here, lost in wrong-continent foliage.

The internet-balloons float over Kenya,
far quieter than these incessant signallers,
as are geostationary satellites and deadmen
tapping telegrams from the Titanic.

Could be a recording. 
We would never know.
They would never know.

(I am nowhere
but in my serotonin
spiked by the oil-wet, black walnut
I have eaten.)

1, 2, 1, 2  … this one’s called
‘poetry’s more alive than maths’

The quality of oneness
the quality of twoness
cannever be found in 
granular mechanical mathematics.

His palms feel the freefall
before pushing the bridge
away         John
goes in unsteerable solitude
to the singular river racing meaningless
like concrete at that height
the addition of fear of living
broken, then OFF.

Oneness.

You made an 18 straight whiskys
jerk of yourself again Dylan,
Berryman’s-sobering refrains
down antiseptic corridor stiffness
by your muttering morphine room,
18 straight whiskys will bugger
up your stomach but luckily
friends wait for dying friends.

Twoness.

Ohweare notbadat
mathematics
mathematics
isvery            badatus.

The smoke and the question

Sitting on the sill, sharing
a cigarette, I still could keep
a kissing kissing kiss 
of rolling strawberry laziness
on my mouth. It had blown
time off and away, like time 
today was a driftdangled web.
‘Who will write our story’
she wondered, ‘you or I?’
But already the smoke
and the question
were a new history,
different for both of us. 

I am myth now

but when I was unfarmed
on nevertheless legs, a bee
stungmeinmymouth yes. I spat
it free, cold-boiled across my hand.

Later I found folk lore telling me
beingstunginthemouthbyabee
gave Plato and Pindar
sweet worlds of words,
rich tricks of persuasion.

So whentimes I went seducing
I pictured the pulpy posy
of jutting-net wings, yellow-honey 
insect-blood and body mistled 
thrill-wet with the terror of lips.