London p. 9

London pt. 9

Yesterday you were collected from this city;

   All constitutive and material bearings retrieved

By Lindsey, for storage aloft, and lost, from sight,

   But from mind never far removed; alike to London,

Always embroidered as stitched insignia in our skins, always

   A beginning, to limn our manuscript future together,

Bearing more than we can lose, as you trek, miraculously,

   From NYC to Mexico, for your sixty-nine days…

Of static, or moneyless motion? You have an address to

   Go to. Godspeed you black champion! – Today, I walked

Kingston – pale legs, sunlit, ‘eased into pain,’ faint smiles

   Playing on luscious lips, M.A. Eng. Lit., gathering; white wine and

Shy; Pantha du Prince: tuned Stickle Bricks – impressions, fleeted

   And flanked for burgeoning memory: my Belle, ma belle;

Sons des mots qui vont trés bien ensemble; oui, je t’aime; l’amour

   On the Old London Road, telephoned – toppled red dominoes.

Waterloo’s deserted European route plays thespian host to its

   Heritage’s childermass, as St. Pancras bolsters international,

With its great train shed brocading its finery, before the Western

   World appears yonder – dawn, horizon, vista. – A handshake

Undersea; French-Anglais, – London-Paris, Dover-Calais.

   Sometimes, of this city; all I see is trains, with their hypnotic rhythms

            Listing

                        Stations:

Through Bakerloo: Paddington, Edgware Road,

   Marylebone, Regent’s Park, Oxford Circus;

Pic’dilly Circus, Charing Cross –’ve flown:

   Embankment, Waterloo – delivers us.

Southwest – Vauxhall, Queenstown Road, Clapham-

   Junction, Wandsworth, Putney, Barnes and Mortake,

North Sheen, Richmond, St. Marg’rets, Twickenham,

   Strawberry Hill, Teddington, Hampton… wake!

Kingston-Upon-Thames – The Royal Borough:

   A home (where the heart is!) from home, far-fond,

Your home, your warmth, your life, and mine occur,

   There, - here, - between: and together tie bond.

‘Why isn’t there a train from Thames Ditton

To a green lane t’other end of Britain?’

London, you are so big. – Adam said. Big, hypnotic, endless,

   Self-referential and insular – on escalator ads, London, London,

London cathodes. On a South West commuter an old couple sit

   Perusing the Metro and Evening Standard respectively; the gentleman

Leans over pointing to a little column: “Even the French say that London

   Is better than Paris.” “Mmhmm.” Smiles. Later, the lady leans, points,

“Nine suicides on the Tube today…” “London.” The word is spoken in 55

   Living languages, at least, in all directions, in every earshot; perpetuating.

Now you’ve left where do you live? Cellular or agoraphobically?

   Texas, you’ve told me, hauled up in some joint… For what crime

Or misdemeanour? Are ‘friends’ electric? Do best ones go awry? London

   Misses you, surely, even if you were sometimes at loggerheads, sometimes

Incongruous, sometimes detrimental to one another’s mentality. (Sub)cultured

   Conduits of life, lines, lanes, veins, pulsing, pulsating, part of the very fabric

Of these times; making them – historicising us, all: a tremendous pressure. Fled,

   From, us, all. Understandable. All I want is a simple day, sometimes.

Like that return to the countryside, to the ‘good life;’ though when the

   Provincials invade the City, Houses are broken into, unlike our peace-

Ful demonstration over only a matter of life and death, two million strong. We

   See those times approach again, of riot and uproar, students demolished by

Thatching straw set alight on streets of quashed freedom of speech; a truncheon

   Reads us our rights, a kettle quarantines our hopes and dreams – left, without

A leg to stand on; the blood-sucking cleg betrays another sector – a ‘public’ become

   Endangered when a member of it speaks – they’re excised and side-lined as other.

A category, statistically, always alien, always threatening, through their inverted politics -

    Of which, London vibrantly vibrates and fibrillates, from suburb to centre, wharf to

Periphery. On which, I find you, I live you, more than anything, my life, my future;

   I’m trying, and fighting, and keeping, and pushing, and moving, and negotiating,

Through crowds of crowded crowd, all of whom have chosen to choose their choicest

   Choices, and raise their vocalist voices; over whom, for you, I cry. My love. London.

My love, is London, is in London, but she is to share woods/forests and branch out anon,

   And on we’ll keep, as that, our city, to us, falls sleep, but revolves on and on deeper,

In deep.

Sign, What is I? & To Kitty Pryde

Sign

A corner of air

A banjo of time

The smell of a death-rattle

The mind of insomnia

Running through my sleep

A calotte of nape

Cut off at the neck

An isle of wonder

Reaching seven skies

Hacked down in terra

A stem of shedded skin

A tamp on my pipe

A skull in the works

The majority fool

In a matchbox kiss

A breath of hair

The width of breadth

Cuts out a stop

On pizzicato openers

Signalling wind

Dew of drops

Drizzle a placemat

On an abandoned sane

Of musk-eyed winkles

Beckoning see, saw

To syringe the limbs

Of rotting meat

What is I?

One is I. Alone is one. Obtuse. Selfish

As a pronoun, I. The me of this

Peculiar consideration. In connection:

Individual; stratified. Am. Therefore,

When commenting upon my... Inspiration

Eyes shrug lidlessly. Where? We know where:

The eighteenth brumaire, strikes dumb, blows

Apart; but when the latter don’t-they-know-its

Impart that that’s what they needed emotionally,

One but thinks, but who are they? The Is of this

World, which cross the dots; tease the eyes

Til all is not lost; jump-started, through

Time. I founded my sanction in Kurt Cobain,

Perhaps; this burial of the dead already living.

It is of course Tom that teaches this I. The T, the I,

The T again. Amongst them, amongst them. I’m not.

To be sure. The question begging: what is I?

To Kitty Pryde

Murmeyed,

Beckst thing since, and

I’d

Poeteyes about this,

Pouties – innies and

Outies – indies,

In these: pop

Music’s

Heart

Still beats,

Really. In genie,

Of eeny,

Meeny,

Miny mo,

No,

Mojo,

Tryst

Tress

An idol

I dun-

no.

Paris, Deuxième temps…, On Travelling Back from Manchester, via Oxford & The Shard

Paris, Deuxième temps…

Sur un billet de Metro: ‘You taught me

To memorise.’ – To Marcel Proust, under a

Stone, atop his stone; I left a cigarette

For Beckett, this time, in Montparnasse.

And Sartre and de Beauvoir, together, forever,

After Serge Gainsbourg, lipstick-kissed, like Wilde,

Of whom I photo-ed, for Linz, back at home;

To where I don’t want to go, after another

Bit of Paris, il peu de Paris, avec Belle,

Aussi; l’étranger am I, ami, maintenant, dans

le maison (home?) où le coeur est. Le travail de travail,

To come, on the bus – I hope she’ll be alright, unwell,

After a night, by tour Eiffel, again; a

Veritable feast, with Callum, and blue-lipped,

Red-haired Taylor; nothing on our romantic

First trip down there, for phallic sparkle-spotting:

A magic retour après 69 année erotique;

And my irrational hatred of my salubrious hands,

Or my irrational crush on William F. Buckley, Jr.

Of Paris’s poetesses, all, and England’s, and Ireland’s,

Dead (or have I killed…?). Neck and shoulders

Soldered by a cramp that’s crumpled my back, my back

My back! And now we go to Victoria; a

Holiday in rewind, from Pernety, après confit de

Canard et un Stella Artois à Porte Maillot, now,

Strange stairway memory of… years ago, now,

With Adam; un monde différant, perdu. Inside

The Palais des Congrès swathes of sound as if

‘In The Flowers’ by Animal Collective had slowed down,

Via Paul; entering out that door, into a different,

Sober, professional, commercial, driven, world: âmes mort.

Cranes. Haggard people – English-speaking; sing to me in

Bro-ken Eng-li-sh… How to say ‘broken’ in French?

Kaput’s so easy because it’s an onomatopoeia.

Excerption. Of world. Removal. To rain. On Window-

Lessness. Full stop. On Champs-Élysées sous la pluie!

A tropical storm with slatted rain slanted towards us:

And a tumult overtook the seas: on land. Land us,

Ashore.

On Travelling Back from Manchester, via Oxford

I leave Tristan (he to Tokyo, I to Paris) after now perhaps

Having told him the same story twice, and wondering

Whether he thinks I drink too many pints, but not

Wondering whether I drink too many pints, at 19:42;

He platform 2, I platform 5, from Piccadilly.

To New Street; Marvell still minding my own busyness, after

Having had a stearn resurrection, but no time for Shakespeare;

I mean to have a pint at New Street, what with delays here and there.

Platform 1A, indistinguishable from Platform 1B (to 12B).

Ah, a sit down. Next X-country to Oxford; delayed.

Leamington Spa. No. Banbury. No. Marvell. No. Two

Girls talk, solely of themselves, almost without pronouns; shod

Is shoe. I get to Oxford, where the cloistered wellinbred

Face of the hooray Henry sits there staring at me,

In the manner of a disused shallot. This town owes me £50.

The risk of the next train (headache almost insurmountable;

What is it if you drill a hole in your temple?): 5 mins

Turnaround at Didcot Prkwy. (I sneeze so much, at

Peculiar times, I wonder if it’s… from reading too much

Freud I wonder?) I make it. “Could have shut the door

Behind you, buddy.” “I thought there was someone else…”

Train to Cardiff Central, platform 3, is delayed…

“Police are on it at Reading”… indefinitely. I take

A field recording of the creaks of freighters.

And I wonder what there is to drink…

John Smith’s. But we never have John Smith’s;

I’ve wondered thrice if they’re for a special occasion,

And will wonder a fourth time, pulling ring.

00:42, the train is here. Two stops, and a 45 mins

Walk, to beer. Arrive, fourteen hours, for four, after having left.

The Shard

I saw it, at some terrible o’clock, apocalyptic;

Sharding the sky, if I can put it that way. It

Was a wet smog in which its spine was buried;

Did it see, above, a blue? I wouldn’t want to have

Knew. I am on its top, somehow, precariously,

Clinging on, in dreams, of anxiety; awful, inspiring

Total recoil, from that Babelonion knife; the Shard’s

Sharpness of Renzo Piano’s magniloquence. I fear it!

Unholy, tremulous, translucent, skinless thunder, lightning

Strike, upwards. Disconnected, perpetually unfinished

Looking at, I wonder. As have, in stages, as we, have built

Our stages, when it, was our height, on our, first night.

Icepicked of iceblink luck, as we await our Southbank

Away from its terrible glare, awith a

Silkier glace. 

A Year Unsettled (In Memoriam David Emmanuel)

A Year Unsettled (In Memoriam David Emmanuel)

I

Like Rimbaud; such illustriousness followed

By a silence, but ended now in fatality; in – at least,

If not at – the hands of officers; custodians

Without due care and attention, if – that is –

Not in on it; an unlikely opposite. Handcuffed after

The fact, the sad fact of Smiley Culture’s death.

Teacher, poet, translator; Rimbaudian importer,

Miner, of diamonds and gold, from Ghana and Liberia.

As Merlin, a nephew, said in Tottenham, of an ‘internal

Covers-up commission’, a presiding-over a robbed life,

A stoned grave, an entertainer, entertainer, lost. We had not

’Nuff personality of the original ragamuffin MC. Speaking

Quickly, translating Cockney, slanging Maggie, bridging

Discrepancies: abridged now, too early, too early. And a

Year unsettled followed in that wake – a wake among many –

Seeing cut-and-shut, riot, excess, disruption, corruption, occupation,

Unemployment, racism, Powell starkly reawoken, regression

In this recession, to a point history can’t even re-evoke,

Disenfranchised as it is, by the rubbly coverings of subsequences.

If Clegg predicted it, as YouTube’d show you, so what? A cleg to

Stand on’s what they got. And us… we’re left with a single-word oxymoron,

Right, a scandalous might of shady figures with shadier friends,

Embezzled in the networks that purport to report the truth of the world,

An empire of own ends, gratifying itself in miraculous light, as

Plain as day, light, interrogatory, light, shining in their faces, light

That still somehow can be hidden in, cold suns, hoarse gates, no

Rest, no peace. No justice. No peace. Cities, which are now known

As financial districts, and’s how now they operate, became occupied

By a percentage not seen by the BBC, peppered with tears, Maced faces,

Another discrepancy: what makes broadcast news? Two sides, at least;

Thousands of stories. Prompted by austerity, which is what? A cull.

History repeats, not through destiny, but through this discrepancy.

For David Emmanuel.

II

Lacan may have been right, in sixty-eight,

However unfortunately. In Derridean

Terms – as far as I’m able to interpret them –

An instance of ‘reinscription’. A master’s

Mastery remastered. What makes sense,

In this day and age, as they say, is

The topology of the Möebius strip:

Its inescapability.

Don’t get me wrong: revolution

Is necessary, as necessity… as impossible

As it, nevertheless, may be. We must keep

Placarding the bastion. ‘Perpetual’ means,

Precisely, ‘unrelenting’, and unrelenting

Means that we don’t leave any wo/man down;

As proletariat, we’ll tarry at no stations

Of the Big Other’s sacrificial crossings.

What we perceive is, precisely, an answer begging

Questioning. Cutting deeper into open wounds

Tends to prevent healing. Education is a right, not a

Privilege, and if education is about the spreading of

Knowledge, and not the guarding and withholding

Of it whilst pointing and laughing at those disinvested,

It would appear that a great portion of today’s ‘educated’

Have greatly miscalculated their imperative worth.

But indeed, if we should meet with courteousness

The uselessness of our souls,

In the most Žižekian way, with Jones on our

Side; and in an analytic situationing of

Fetishistic disavowals, communistically,

With conditions, etc. and etc., paying with

Attention, through the nose; this is only a

New dawn seen through the slats of a blinded door.

Diagonally striping our floor.

III

So, what is this; some Shellian thesis, antithesis and synthesis?

Perhaps. A say, interpellated in canonical disarray, as I

May have put it. But blared out, what does ‘outside of

Canons’ mean? Precisely what this corporationism breeds.

Going to London on the fifteenth of August, over to the Hale,

Where friends reside now, as well as in Peckham, and Salford,

In my two university cities of that time, and listening to Paul

Gilroy and Merlin Emmanuel, as well as a brave scared mum,

Thinking about the children, our youth mans, our youth womens,

Wanting to stand and to say, from the Westcountry, need to spread

This awareness afield, but overwhelmed; next to smoulders of debris

Still smelling in epicentric catastrophe: moved so, going straight from

Work on a train and tube, reading Kant’s groundwork on board, and

Cracking up nearly, with nervousness when a mile away, having

Never seen this country in such a reality, and yet here a community,

Knowing, knowing what that word means. Trying, uniting, fighting.

For what it can bring.