How could anything with the word ‘splendacious’ in possibly be bad. I love this poem.

thelasttraintoarcady:

This is a poem I wrote with performance in mind. For some reason (there have been a few different theories kicked about) rhyming poetry is not very fashionable in London at the moment, but I enjoy working in it’s rich tradition and will keep on doing so. This poem explains why:-

GASLIGHT AND…

I was reading ee cummings Sunday and Monday night. Then this shows up on my dash, which is pertinent and appropriate in more ways than one. Today’s a day for serendipitous things.

ee cummings - You Are Tired (I Think) - (fragment)

(via emotionalorphan)

The policeman’s eleventh monologue (he does not understand her)

Peace is not the same as truce.

The truce exists

between her Times New Roman shoulders

and the soft blankety-blank

drawn by the double bed

Elbows gouge like consonants,

their own harsh reality. I want her

to put her head on my chest

and burrow like a ringworm,

but she won’t.

Truce saps the will.

It formalises our raw hatreds.

It bears down on us

with a proficiency of Catholic fists.

It twists her up. She spends her day

in the public library, simmering.

At home she will not share,

her body hogs its paranoias.

She is nervy, in shorts, and says

that skinny-shanked horses

make her ashamed. She wasn’t built

for this sickly abundance,

this greedy, nutritional Golden Age.

At home she stretches and bends,

contorting in bare feet. She says

that the hungers of others

make her ashamed. Her history

is a narrative of famine. She has me

examine her for defects.

Truce, between the single-minded sun

and the deep-fried rust of her fritzed henna.

True between the body she despises

and the urban space that shrivels

like a drying well around us both.

Truce between her past

and whatever it is

 I think I can offer her:

You are not an ugly person…

… I will always love you…

That isn’t what I see when I look at you…

…Love….

Peace is only for the reaching,

something to clap hands for like a Jesus freak. She says

if I think I’ve never been at war, then I am crazy. She says

if I think that this is peace, then I’m a fool. She says

she’d like an ocean for the drowning-

oh, the conspicuous malevolence

of the all-ascending heart.

The poet’s thirty-second monologue (or ‘Amazing what you find in a library’)

They assign numbers

to books and to prisoners.

This is not a coincidence.

My body is statistically preoccupied,

a research facility

for the controversy of drawing breath.

My body studies the behavioural science

of a long, slow crack up.

In the library

the stacks steer nautical closures.

Where’s the fucking Mangan?

Until the spines split like packed gristle

and rolling densities of metal set a mediaeval precedent.

Fuck. Legitimate blasphemies

walk the water between the coffee-bar

and my inner ear. I remember

when libraries were ossuaries;

when libraries were knowledgeable gulags-

we murmured our work

with a liturgical discipline.

Now they disavow their silence

and people’s kids scream and mash

rusk into keyboards, drool on hard-

backed military history.

These afternoons swelter me,

extensions of Amish work-ethic.

And something inside

is mining my precious metals.

The girl at the opposite table-

You’re not white. You can’t be white.

-tells me my hair betrays me:

it turns to rust-coloured wire-wool

in the heat.

There are old people- mostly men-

in the section reserved for local history;

they collect there, business-like,

off-white, calcium deposits.

Their bodies have no scent; they crack like dry soap.

Far North, Kolyma, Mask of Sorrows, Sevvostlag…

Now what? I have learned something disturbing today.

Anti-social, Yenisei River, Useful Idiots…

There are more camps

than my genealogy has hungers.

They assign numbers

to books and to prisoners.

This is not a coincidence.

So that you will read and know and understand.

Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, p. 178. (via leonineantiheroine)

(via alunasa)

The poet and her dog’s thirty-first monologue (‘your Little England’ #2)

I

The poet

In beached resplendent evidence

her raw suet mass ventures

to the edge of the lounger.

Not a hearty German hausfrau.

An embattled and strategic bigness,

loveless as a hydro-electric dam.

The water will bleach

her blond hair green, she says,

jutting like an island in the purpose-

built pool.

I imagine her rising, dredged,

something with a hull like a sunken ship.

By the aluminium steps she is docking,

the size of Portsmouth harbour

and just as seedy with longing

despite the effort of designer glasses.

No more maiden voyages.

And Capel Celyn sleeps tonight.

II

Her dog

These studies of relevant bone.

These propositions of swelling flesh.

These illustrious chapels of fine-dining.

They feed their children

like French farmers gorging geese.

Their livers are as tender as Vermeer virgins.

Their hands are busy zodiacs of plenty.

I do not mind this.

Mother says so much surfeit makes her ill.

But I am a dog,

and nobody was intended to starve.

Fragrant reservoirs of dipped meat,

these humans in the heated pool.

Mother would practice the stringency

of pack-horses.

Her body is a gulag

for the disobedience of eating.

But I do not mind.

Even the English, I do not mind.

Even the woman who thought Patrice Lumumba was another dog, I do not mind.

Even in all their uppity ignorance, their mean medium-rareship, their undercooked clemency of table scraps, I do not mind.

I have a strategy for abundance.

Mother, is a Philby.

The stripped assets of her soul

stagger on skinny spindle-shanks.

But I have a strategy for abundance.

My back drips Vatican tears: crocodile gold,

at exquisite swim.

The whole world deserves beauty and food, Mother.

You know that too, in your secret heart.

NB: solidarity fun.

…

His green spaces are not victims.

They accommodate the charred car,

the rusted BMX, the knackered washer-dryer.

There is a nest, there is a trellis,

there’s a plateau for a basking cat;

there is a snug treasury of red-furred foxes

and cool larders of shade for insect life.

In the yellow cultured honey

of a sagging Anglian dusk,

bees buzz like bar-tenders

in summer’s endless happy hour.

The grass is long and the pollen plentiful.

Tipsy birds regale the rotten apples

with their war stories;

sleeves of sheltering polyvinyl

couch a continuum of sleepy familiars.

The empty paint cans are biological loci-

teeming toad and spawning stickle.

Field mice browse the debris,

owls dither over hunting;

horses crop and dogs hump

and old men puff out their chests in the sun-

as is the privilege of pasture.

And you say that this offends you?

You’d take nature mooning at an unrequited distance.

You’d give the parks and greens the regulation haircuts of raw recruits.

You’d sooner have orderly picnic portions than bees and worms and birds

to eat them.

You’d tear it down,

junk-endowed and briar- besieged,

the rose-besotted palaces

the of six-year old Sleeping Beauties.

You’d tear it down, the Rapunzelling ivy,

the yarning, yearning passion flower-

their hardy hearts exposed to scrutiny.

When you want rare it is isolated

like a laboratory disease, a specimen

for mincing exhibition.

When you want wild

it is stranded at instructive margins

in spaces allotted like hospital beds.

I have an inkling, my fussy dears,

that you like people this way too;

that our mixed blood is a legitimate distress,

a miscegenated eyesore, riotous ethnic bedlam spree.

When you say respect you mean castration.

But his green spaces are not victims. This is our land

we will live as we please.

NB: ‘cause on the 25th it was Flatrock’s ‘birthday’. I didn’t feel too good about it but couldn’t articulate why. The depression has loosened its hold a little now, so I wanted to have another bash at it. For what it’s worth, here it is.

 I

If a book could gestate like a baby

in a library’s cordial womb.

If I had more maternal instinct,

maybe foamed at the mouth less,

didn’t know that my time was short-

I would feel differently, perhaps.

II

These words are solid objects. Immovable, but conscious. They vegetate. They bloat and tow. They do not philosophise, travel or traverse. They are not made of light. They weigh and they drag. They have an inhospitable stillness. They are constitutionally incapable of dreaming. They stagnate and they knot. They are rhizome. They nestle like wishbones. They are more obstruction than a Heimlich can remove. They corpse like algae. They obliterate and are humourless. They are analogue. They are as warm to the touch as a dead television. They are as warm to touch an idle engine. The inanimate world has its processes too. They are incessant, inclement and English. They are race-hate and rain. They boom like economies and slump like bodies in business-class seats. They are bored and boring, geological and utterly unsurprised.

So you see, what I said before couldn’t possibly be true: no radiance to collect like cobwebs in corners of rooms. No, this has mass. These words build like calcium deposits. These words fur the filaments in kettles and washing-machines. I see them caulked, in clumps, to the brain. Nodes of proverbial limescale. The rings around an enamel bath. Words are for carbon-dating. Words have their own sentimental geology. Words demand a fossil record, the sterility of preservation. It couldn’t possibly be true. You shouldn’t valorise your activism, she says, you’ve had a book published; who knows if autonomous interaction might not be more important.

Books, crucibles for flatulent alchemy. I am incapable of patience. I am incapable of touching the world at one-remove. The museums must harvest their artefacts. Books must allow themselves to be stacked. Books are the hardware of human gibberish. Books must be packed like cartilage. Words are what cram the sinuses. Words are what give us repetitive strain and deep-tissue damage. These words are solid objects, they chew dirt like Soviet-era tanks. They cannot cast, reflect or burn. They convert no energy. They metabolise no wishful thinking. These words are not data. They sink and sound the fathoms. They give back to me only an intelligence of recorded time, a silence. I have given nothing away. Nobody told me, you cannot let go. I have made a horrible mistake. I am still very much alone.

III

Here I stand, then,

with my flood subjects and my marketable grief.

Come and have a go if you think you’re ‘ard enough.

More menace in me than Millwall today. I grind their bones

to make my bread.

If you think it’s anonymity that scares me

then you have missed the point. It bothers me, yes

but I am no more afraid of obscurity

than I am of handguns, snakes

and rape.

It isn’t not mattering. It is not meaning. It is having nothing to measure the meaning.

Middle-class people will not understand this. Good-looking women will not understand this.

The well-fed Western world will not understand this. Only you may understand this. Only you,

my only living friend.

Because passing for white and well-

spoken isn’t enough. It isn’t enough

to affect an air of confidence, to smile

and pass exams.

These things do not make life happen.

And if I am no longer druggy hunger,

scummy social-housing, sexual abuse-

then what am I?

Because I have to earn what they are entitled to.

This book became a kind of citizenship test.

This book was meant to assimilate, rehabilitate,

render me acceptable to the chattering, sipping world.

And it did not. They said that it would. I thought that it would. But it did not.

My proper place still scoops the shit and scrubs the floors. Nobody wants me

more than once. Not in that world, not in that way. Stack their shelves. Suck their cock.

Stand there getting gawped at like a bearded lady at a freak circus. Listen to their fatuous anecdotes

about venues, tattoos, sexual exploits, and  aren’t you doing the festivals, blah-blah-blah…?

They mistrust my seriousness.

I’m supposed to be jaunty, salt

of the earth. But I’m salt

in the wound. More aggravating

than a slammed tequila’s lemon

on a raw mouth ulcer.

Do you understand?

I thought I would be done with justifying myself.

I thought I would be able

to be me, without explanation or apology or

can I ask you a personal question?

I thought I would be allowed. I thought that I

would be entitled too. Not too much, just the space

I need to breathe, to read, to be a fucking person. But no.

Flatrock is like a false passport, forged papers, doesn’t give me anything.

It doesn’t help. And I don’t suppose it ever will. I could have one book

or sixty-fucking-six and I still wouldn’t belong. That’s the difference between me and Larkin.

That’s why it hurts with an itch like malaria.

26.05.2012

…

http://littleepisodes.org/products-page/books/flatrock-by-fran-lock/

In case new readers didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.

Once again, I owe the following to the talented Steev Burgess (thelasttraintoarcady), and to his fabulous picture, ‘The 5th of November’ at:

http://thelasttraintoarcady.tumblr.com/post/23789759929/the-5th-of-november-on-two-occasions-when-i

Although the picture gave me the prompt, its really not ‘about’ the picture in the sense that some of my ‘inspired’ pieces are, hence my giving it a different title. I think the picture is something unique and personal to Steev; my own take is coloured by different experiences, but I think there’s something we share, and I hope he won’t mind my unsolicited response to his work.

…

This sky is a state of mind. And this is a child’s inventory of all the night noises to come like solid objects from the cramped, assailing dark. This is more than a memory. This is the synaesthesia of urgent grunting colour that rushed us like Pamplona in the tossed Taurian moonlight. These are the shipwrecks that surprised us in the stormy mourning country; the world more widow than a watch had names for, but suddenly spitting merry fury, or testing her hot tongs on a smithied sheet of smelted silver.

This is also for camp-fires crammed with flame, and for a pyre’s bright underside kindling the broom. It is for bedsits backlit like blacksmith’s forges, London licking its chops below, flickering with fork-tongued gossip.

This is for the journeys, more Blackpool than a seaside strip; Vesuvian fusion in the stir-crazy firmament. The fens forgetting themselves; the shrouded houses putting on their peacock graces, gearing up to test their tread on hot coals like a dervish. Yes, this is for those giddy gaudy nights that the train sprayed responsorial sparks, and yolks of golden-yellow light cracked and hatched and flew in phoenix fettle above the rattling track.

This is for Molotovs smoking like magic lamps, more flinch and hiss than wishes can be granted. It is for the colloquial crackling of cars, for the serial arson that ‘freedom’ sends. This is for rig-fires belching, a binge of black smoke; for the boiling sea and the perishable red, amber, green, grey, ecology of colour.

This is most of all, though, for those smoky English wonderments. Those bright five-pointed pop-gun pops, localised brightliness carried like a dandelion’s God-speed across the sky. It is for that conversation with the universe, when we spoke, and the stars spoke back. Fizzing and exclaiming in our own astonished language.   

NB:Steev Burgess (thelasttraintoarcady) has once again created a picture that sent my mind in strange directions.

The original link to the work is here: http://thelasttraintoarcady.tumblr.com/post/23736297768/inventing-a-solar-system-ive-kind-of-forgotten

the poem below is my slightly odd take.

…

Her loose hair designates

a downward spiral.

This is the reckless motion

of disorderly thought.

You cannot boycott

her buttered momentum,

smoothly accelerant,

attuned to stars.

She is all the dreaming that you do,

an accomplished coyote

from nervy peyote plains.

She moves mammalian ninja.

Hers is a cunning to conjure with.

Sit then, among sniggering spindrift,

degenerating camomile, coshed dandelion,

spinal fox-glove, fond and folding.

She is Titania. This garden

is an involuntary universe,

in miniature.

This is the process, ecstatic cosmosis,

transformative orgies from berry to star.

These breeding, brooding

hospitable spheres

hold their own ecological gravity.

She spins her minor deities in

millennial creaturely lullaby.

She is Titania,

a swooning relation

in a pause of pale skin;

a life-long lady friend

with her store of lush adjectives

and contemplative symmetries.

More or less Vitruvian,

she branches more hour hands

than decadent clocks;

choreographs numerical indiscretions,

arranges her planets like poems.