Artefact, The Toilet & Metamorphosis

Artefact

(read slowly)
And why is everything beautiful but me? -
Kunal’s music, and the girl with the huge flower
On her lapel, and silly lies told through enlarging lenses?
A half-relationship masquerades into obscurity.

She said “Work on yourself.” I’ve been doing
That for a century - translating verse, writing letters,
And essays that the academies will hail; with
First class honours, passing into failure.

Eyes meet mine, and books' spines, Woolf’s
‘To The Lighthouse’ she stared at, only on
Trains, she carries on to London, or some other
Real city with hipper urchins and fauna.

A place regards no one as belonging, only
Can conmen co-create a pretend habitation;
Only those that will flout a non-existing
Fecundity succeed in all life’s worthless goals.

I write with the pen I stole from
The hotel we slept in, before you left me.


The Toilet

Unbodied specimen of a consistent fear,
Now, of losing it completely: A real modern,
Perpetually shaking, like Ramshackle Mac’s fist;
Flirting with danger; in thoughts unbelonging to sense -
A masterpiece from Bolshevik landslides editing the
Sense out of recent opinion polls.

Lines confirming my unlucky ears when hearing
Such cries from rivers’ embedded, beheaded dreams -
Black eyes rising - dragging remains, lifting lifeless,
Out, deadweight. A synaesthesic cathode catches
My projection; crampt little allusions; your river
And your laser and my pulse’s rapid-fire.

BLAST! - A simple drip from my cup of hot chocolate
Explodes like an A-bomb on the paper - There
Is nothing left but garbled whispers, half-thoughts -
‘The remains of a Rembrandt torn into four and flushed down
The toilet.’ Art is wartime photographs with kitsch sofa-covers
Replacing faces in a roulette-dare of verisimilitude.

‘Lily, Lily’ it sounds like the child is shouting,
Though my window is closed and the curtain drawn -
In some sort of coma before school’s out across
The road, some sort of tumourous incapacitation
From a bloodied bodied belle-lettre of our
Blood-pact lozenge as I let your fingers relieve me.


Metamorphosis

I used to be a child of the fields
Until the great outdoors came knocking
Upon my heart, upon my heart;
Stealing my breath away with an asthma
In nettly ways; an awning of
Deadly Night Shade just beneath my
Oesophagus; thistles scratching the
Lining of my stomach and ribs of
Brambles, thorns piercing out of skin.
Alive to it before cow-parsley gates
In the old days, now their red
Rusty bars are my bones, creaking and
Peeling: hedgerow effigies spell epitaph
Ends. A locksmith in a barrel of gum,
Bold and unwilling to be born again.
A body of bark and sap.

Lunarium, Anne Eliot & Peaen to Codeine

Lunarium

Life is a compendium of sorts,
Unsorted in a miscellany of leitmotifs,
Each prefiguring the unimaginable next
Which we intrinsically fear because we cannot
Keep, in reach, on hold, atop, sustained -
The next part, the next act, the next album -
Photographs and tunes aromatic in our lunarium.

Eclipsed from a future self, or two
Selves entwined, or naught, selves
Misalign, or forgot, selves in time,
Or begot, selves of mine, and yours,
To rot, selves sublime; I love self-
Lessly, selfishly, our crimes, shelved.

A hue glowers crepuscular, our
Eyes enflamed with mirage coronas, our
Bellies filled with the sperm of Strindberg
And Nietzsche, Copernicus and Le Fanu, our
Contents making up some strange simulacrum as
We build our tower to the moon, or fish it
From the sky, to put it in a room.


Anne Eliot

Seems strange to own this book:
- T.S. Eliot’s poetry.
Cared for by another;
Anne Sutton, and one before her,
Name crossed out with a strike.

Bound by a fading spine
There’s a sad, old, musty odour
From cover to cover
And page eighteen is sellotaped
By Anne; other lover.


Paean to Codeine

I.

Codeine, holy codeine, excite my heroin glands,
Play sudden, beautiful, musical, into my open hands,
Codeine, holy codeine, help me read Ezra Pound,
Join synaptic ashes burned out years ago with sound.

Codify me, Kodeine, cod godhead,
Preen my feathers with thy beak;
Codeine keep me still, and focus my
Wavering mind, codeine keep me from
The temptatious kind.

II.

I look up at my woodchip
Ceiling and think: ‘O, but
Ten to fifteen, ten to fifteen.’
- The Grandiloquent Truth of Gestures

There’s woodchip on my ceiling,
There’s Rothko on my walls;
Rothko is shapes that moved
Before cinema.

Faults:

I’m not that clever, I put lit
Cigarettes in my pockets,
I can’t sing in tune, I wish
There was some method to my acting.
I have problems with love, belief and
Happiness as philosophic predicates;
Do I believe love makes us happy?
Can I see the man who looks
Like a square on stilts?