Liar (Chippenham), Oui?, The Muzzle, The Chisel, The Rope & a bonus musing

Liar (Chippenham)

I sometimes feel like a liar,
Cutting those yellow strips of paper;
The amalgam of my knowledge
Numbered by markers; a step taken
Toward ambush reimbursement.

What’s your handle? Are you
Packing a piece? William Burroughs
Fucked me up, and those other
Disgusting masquerades that tallied
High. A Richter scale downsize -

Smoking Dunhills, and lost the plot;
No one returns to this here spot,
Because there’s nothing to it; but
We make it what we make it, and
I’ve made it the end of the earth.

Will you
believe me?

14/07/08


Oui?

Gouge my eyes out bloody Mary,
It’s a brain of thoughts,
Black plus white is grey,
One and one is naught;
Ought the slaughter of not carrot cake.

A villainy in trepidation; hiding
A prohibition spake sleazy
Sonumbitch; the austere stumble,
Stunted, scorching loss of heedlessness
With words. A magic thwarted.

Gargantuan perambulation; thumbing
Pages of catalogues, listing
Cheap tack for the plebeianite dregs of
Swollen eyes. An easy existence
In a moss of thoughts. Don’t sugar-coat shit.

Scrubby toes for bunions on the end of phone:
Expiring customers, expiry date and card no.’s,
Toile de Jouy jour après jour, jar,
Of Long Island Iced Tea, with
Crème de menthe? Clash like chicken and banana.

Different dioptres in each of their eyes;
Fourteen to twenty-eight days; long enough
To pass away. Poor little withered men
With skin-wrapped racks of ribs;
Spindly women dying of cancer, holding to Beethoven.

Feet a different shoe size each too;
My dad said “You may have won the contest:
Do you want the prize?” I called him a Seventeenth-
Century Chauvinist… I keep waking up believing I’ve
Swallowed books in the night, and trying to puke out staples.

Working at a call centre screens my sleep.
Pushing for approvals and deliberating over liability
In non-fault accidents at weekends’ night,
Sludging through the sewer in the weak
And pale light of you lost to an
Abyss of cleaved-to meaningless histories.
- Abscond, insist, elope, card number, chronotope,
Will we be?


The Muzzle, The Chisel, The Rope

The Muzzle: sweltering scissors sawn through the gauze of hot muzzle,
Warm, boiled muzzle, pressed against face, of leather
This muzzle, quashing snarl, dampening beak, and day
Mirage like gauze; gaunt day, emaciating face, muzzled, sewn up.
Shawn facial hair, around muzzle, glaring with grin, inside mouth;
Your mouth, my muzzle, kiss me.

The Chisel: hammered to flinch and sever the flitch; the chisel
Makes a hole, a carving, a craving of ruination, attacking, when
Bashing with hammer, the chiselled grizzle of your look as are hammered;
Deconstructing and chipping shard as hammer, as chisel, cracking and filling
As chisel pummels, pneumatic drilling, tearing concrete limb from limb,
Chiselling in, is sex.

The Rope: your tongue, so loose, is ropey, stringy and furred-up, cotton-like,
Talk to me tongue, noose, the rope, is hung, in words, tied, tightened,
Roped, together, into doing, things, in the world, unseen, with pulley,
With winch, tug of war the platonic side of sucked-together is
Rope, grope me, tie up my brain and rape me inside-out
With wound manipulative rope.


MAKE MEANING

- Sense is the unfathomable hierarchy of fallacious states, humanly devised for the purpose of order.

- Taste, the separation of equation, to distinguish classes of persons, with the objective of rule.

- Morality and aesthetics are the offspring of sense and taste.

- Or vice versa.

- Either way control is the forefather.

- ‘Meaning’ is as transgressive a term as it is transcendental and transient.

- It does not serve the purpose of control; its signification is individual; it is salvation.

- In a post-ideologically-unified epoch such as ours, it is (once again) the individual’s responsibility to make meaning.


- There is no salvation for the truly modern reader.

- As scholars we must wear gloves and approach the canon with neutrality; be clinical in our excavation; like archaeologists, leave no marks.

- Reverence and distaste are no longer at our command.

- John Ruskin is dead.