Saturday 9 August 2014

Raveling

Saint's eyes were scratched out
or smashed

Alabaster concepts shone

There is work there is
work to be done

old gunpowder energies

They like to retouch the scene

Somebody has to get fucked I suppose

her blistered kisser smiling in the corridor

Work it out without remainders

as clean as

Raw liver sits
on a plate and seeps

Here there's a clock angled to next

not victors

maggoty footstool hunched unkeeping secrets

Dress shirts hang
about the room like persons

photographs

Obama smiling and fading
over hairline paint cracks

bags full of
person in shaky hands

You and me were speaking at coffee speed
with living teeth

What were we wondering at?

A see saw creaks

Wild plum ripens

making a map of wrong turns

past the place
of the friend who went yampified

She holds a
finicky breath

patterning

doxa coats on

a glut of tidy cheer

wheat ears between fingers

blood smudged semolina cake

unfeeling brightness

He picks the red thread from
my lapel

rubbed between finger and thumb till gone





6 comments:

  1. Vital poem... colored/contoured, too, by shadows. Again: the Fecund Minimum!

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  2. Going through an awful phase in which I read few poems (for sanity's sake), then, when I do, I exhaustingly demand to know what they are on about.

    The answer is almost always nothing.

    That's never the case here, however.

    Following the thread of the poem induces me to conclude it's about the lapel thread.

    Fashion statement, one would not want to settle for that.

    That fading smile reminds that history is always slipping away under the door even while the paint over the cracks is not yet dry.

    Introducing history opens the door to that grand historical myth the story of the bible.

    I first thought of Rahab, she of the wondrous humanitarian red thread.

    Then considered Leviticus 1:6:

    And he shall flay the burnt offering, and cut it into his pieces

    All that blood, for what? Just to weave an anorak for Eve?

    It's like all those chinchillas who had to die to assuage Joan Rivers.

    But the Legion of Honour, Streisand, Wiesel, Sarkozy and John Ashbery keep rushing in through the unpapered cracks in the associative consciousness to complicate matters wonderfully.

    It isn't lint, it's a distinction, officer.

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  3. That's the longest time my mind has turned over the wonder that is Babs Streisand.

    There's some disparate fragments here; I'll have to come back to this in time. The material's always from the world about me. Communication matters too.

    Though Rahab didn't figure for me at the time of writing you've got me thinking.

    Joan Rivers is an implacable god.

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  5. Shadows show things up and make them someway graspable. Thank you, Red.

    I may give this one a second run on the site in a few months time, given revisions.

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  6. "The material's always from the world about me. Communication matters too."

    Understood, and appreciated, Duncan.

    I don't mind a bit thinking about Rahab, even if it's on my own bat.

    Being made to think is living.

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