we left crumbs on Country
forgot to bring them inside our cushioned seats
the photo I took of you is blurry
I walked home to a spider on my bed
beneath the lamplight
the strangeness between us is glowing
I found a place in this home hip-width wide
with a thought to replace you
I won’t flood like I used to
my kidneys are ready for winter
it’s cold here
but I’m working
shut the door
I’m working
because the senses crave melody
it drips; a whistle caught in cotton vill i
sit. nothing—
this body is beyond capture. but is a simple
sound. whistle;
[elelelelelele] ululation.
it drips; heat exit graft; each twitch
splits—
the hairs on my spine. bird shit
red stone; or white paint or red
flows across tit. all i think
about is Beyonce.
chair tipped touch wood
did she mean to fly
or dive or die or maybe if i am
less boring each act will surrender into
performance. so i practice;
each evening accent regales reflection
neck; checks over shoulder
no ghosts around as audience.
& wonder how twenty women
emerge eyes filled with direction;
i picture each of their bodies turn to paper
& flint markings
on the surface;
pitch them to an ocean of carpet—
grow tired & begin to sing
a lullaby.
However it seems dictionarily,
in writing
five means 5.
And 5 means five.
See what I mean?
Pass along here.
Nothing more to see
except linguistic philosophy.
“Number words”–
those nouns-are
numbers
themselves, something more or
less than words.
They are the “veritable thing” itself, but
abstract. Items as signage, without shadow
without much connotation,
though some (like “three”)
have rich allusional resound,
but generally they’re indexical things,
just numbers making us mouth
sounds.
I think they should
be called nounds.
Four. Quatrain
s
make a ballad
Four. Veggie
s
make a salad
Four. Quart
s
make a gallon
Four. Quartet
s
are based on five.
The fourth dimension
‘s
time.
Fourth person pronoun
s
get to speak it-
s
posthumous futurial words.
Surds.
Zero and rr are linked in my mind.
Both are beyond “theoretical”
right straight into “odd.”
Plethora right straight into
cornucopias of unrepeating numbers
and the absolute empty, yet something.
Something that is
a total mystery of fullness
and of nothing-which is also something.
Meantime strabismus,
that quirky crick of sight,
connects to strophe, strobe and streamer.
Remember the crepe paper swirls,
fast, bright,
authoritative circles of color?
To make a circle or a “zero,”
you attached the crepe paper length
to an old key, and swung it round and round.
It was a key that no one knew from nothing,
a key you found in the junk drawer,
with rubber bands, blunted pencils,
wads of Green Stamps,
dusty tape–
the irrational keep,
and, key attached, you took the streamer,
you the center, circling a radiant diameter
with your radius-arm.
You can say this talks about nothing
all you want.
but “zero” is clearly and richly filled
with signs and signage.
Not to say meaning
and strangeness,
a whole semiotics–
signs of being which is nothing–
though how do we know?
Perhaps such concepts
have microscopic cellular
movements far beyond our senses?
Is zero the phase transition
between nothing as void,
as really blankly nought-
and number?
Are zero and number
like steam to water, water to ice
a single substance in many forms?
And what is that substance?
Or perhaps it is π that illustrates
phase transition even better
from a poly-polyphonic-hedron
to a “simple circle.”
So she says her book
Has no beginning and no ending
Unlike the architecture
Of many books.
She says, “because numbers
Are in order but can occur
Anywhere, anyhow, in any
Odd combination
Sometimes called physics,
Occasionally called time,
Sometimes calculation, chaotic
Order, though some are formulaic,
Therefore with no beginning
And no ending, one leaves a space
For recounting. Maybe rearranging.”
That’s what she says.
The tsunami of netting
holds numbers for a year, a particular one
that’s now past. Washed over. Old news.
Old news twice. Yet why so fervently deny
narrative? That was then. This is now.
Is there no order? No priority? No sense to be made?
No revelation at the end? The plot
is not to have one? Does this mean no quest?
Red trap with an orange streak.
2 “x” 1000 “+” 10 “=” deux mille dix.
Two zero one zero. Twenty-ten. Twenty-eleven.
Who knows how this ardor will play out?
You take me to see the seals
spinning sleek and fast
like windchimes.
Tell me the myth of the selkie,
the women who pour out of the sea
like molten lava.
Dragging their skins behind them,
staying on shore only long enough
to leave a mark
that the surf will wash away.
My mother the ocean,
the rock, the hurricane.
The flame hair a beacon,
a lighthouse sighing –
‘do not forget me’.
Our bodies are weapons
that have been used against us.
But find your way back to the sea,
and you can learn to own
your own moorings.
There’s a man walking through my poem,
and suddenly, he is surrounded by brown women’s
bodies that make no space for him. Their breasts are as full
as their hearts, the dark hairs on their stomach thrive
and grow in the presence of his discomfort.
You cannot blame a poet for what the people in her poem
do and these voices are haunted by the things
they have never said. They have been feeding
fear for years rather than their own need for
language and now they cannot stop
speaking and truths will not stop
thundering. Why don’t you try to feel something with us?
They screech at him rolling their hips to a music he
cannot keep up with. No, there is no way I can write
enough about these brown women that walk through his city
which can never grow big enough to satisfy. And I won’t lie it is
delightful to see how much they petrify, how comically
he tries to pacify. You see you cannot blame a poet
for what the people in her poem do, and these women,
they are chanting a fevered realisation, they are going to
eat him alive.
whenever you are alone and in the dark spiders fuck on your face
on the lesser horizons of eyesight the giants loom to half a millimeter
whenever you are alone and scared consider
the demodex who born with six legs wakes up having
genestatised overnight another pair consider
living his divot existence digging out
at sunset to wade oases of nose-oil and breed
consider mrs vermicula who makes her nests inside your pores
from webs of your dead skin and packs twenty odd ova
per follicle consider the lack of anus
and the faecal fireworks that celebrate the end of night
and existence whenever in the dark a breeze touches your cheek
know child that it’s just i god watching wormy spiders fuck
across your face and nudging my atoms together like eggs
What if I said the earth had been
flattened back in to history? Galileo is
forgotten and no one accedes to the horizon.
The line is not circular. The face is not
as you remember. What if I said the insect
had fallen from its sting, taken from the buzz
of irritation and grounded by merely
waving a hand. This is not what I intended.
I meant it to have some Buddhist reprieve as
the ant that is side-stepped or the bee
congratulated. What if I said “The moon is
flattened overhead” if you reached for its rough
surface you might graze the sky of its
singularity? The ancient stones pile around
me in witness. The temples return, column and
atrium to receive the lasting sacrifice.
What if I said it will all devolve to a final
Pandemonium? Then and now concurrent and
the inclusion of every name ever spoken
revived in a single word. The word was the
beginning, before the horizon was drawn on,
before rain made its mark on the sand.
With the word came the dividing, where
the infinite broke from the finite, where the first
ache of language arced from the first
tongue. The empirical silence was broken.
The moon rang like a bell in response to the
sound and the flat earth stretched to
be discovered by those who had learned
to shape and offer meaning, to offer it a name.
for Melvin Way
I box the forms, the parade of carbon rings to which hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen cling. The organic seems solid but lies, nothing more than protons and electrons vibrating mute attraction. I corral the molecular herd. I hem it in. Arc and cosine pick up megaphones. They shout over me. I tape them down, tape the tape, lock them into equations. I demand obedience to principle. Scornfully, they redistribute, associating with whichever one they please. They refuse binaries, squaring and negating. I put my hands over my ears. I put my head in a vise. I tighten the clamps until it threatens to split, a melon rind, a cervix crowning. I pocket each scrap. They writhe beneath my fingers in darkness, escape when I remove my hands. I sew them in. Still they riot. You tell me—where do I go from here?
afterwards
there will have been no
justification for silence
you will only have had
its circumstantial axiom
to pass through:
history’s hot sum pulse
softened to oily lead
sweet for soldering instants
time’s tendency to atrophy
when flung to the cutting floor
buckling in brown lengths
now retreat to parietal eye
quietness as waiting
(as your dark continents’ coiling-waiting)
a muscular totem when
apprehended in full sun
mute skin sheds eventually
body rearing
poised on nothing but
sprung centre thickened patience
at times silence was worse
than no words appalled more
since lard-pale & avascular
shunting now rejoined
neither bitten nor shy
the trajectories we fling
are curved while also tessellated
do not read inflammation
as precursor to speech
Disassemble. See the unpixelated sky as fathomable, just
not with ideas and unequivocally not with words. Allow night to
alight on skin, flinch but don’t
turn from its harder truths. Be constant as moons are, radiant
even when absent. Embrace fallow seasons, especially when your earth
is at its most dead – one less
of you means none of you. Greet the deep-down pain as
a friend. Benefactor and muse. Remember the therapeutic value
of torment.
Lie in bed and watch rain fall undistracted. Lie directly beneath
stars and clouds. Lie supine upon the earth in such a way that it pulses
through your metaphysics.
Uncoil but remain curved. Give to her body. Remember the law
of attraction and invite her body in. Placate that which would tear your
mind’s silence.
Search for the hurt in all evil. Spend more time with innocence.
Become imbued with its native hope. Be unguarded, in safer moments. Don’t
hunger into screens.
a few Worcestershire excommunications
melancholy perturbations mind produce
slaughterhouses remote transported to
enticing Philostratus cries Charybdis
(Capo d’Orlando, Sicily)
The song of the nearby jackhammer,
removing cancerous concrete – the salt
the sea – is lackadaisical but I prefer it
to the relentless disco beat at this cafe
just outside the sweltering Thursday market.
Am I interested to see how many delights can
be confected from sugar? My waistline speaks
volume. And there’s air-con and espresso.
Maria awoke inspired, recalling her vision
of a desired rug as if, overnight, rugs
mysteriously became revelatory,
like those cornetti con nutella.
Just as a Sicilian man would know how
to renew concrete, a Sicilian woman knows
how to get the best price on a market rug
that already is incredibly cheap because
slaves attached to machines on a continent
she’ll never visit, even if she wins Lotto,
make temptingly cheap imitation Persian rugs.
Sicilians, hardened by successive invasions
before the current retail one, have weathered
bullying from every direction. The curse
of being geographically well-endowed.
Everybody wants to screw you but that’s
just history, today is market day and merchants
crave cash before siesta. Jackhammer’s lament
peters out and now there’s a rug that must be
shouldered to our foreign car with peeling paint –
the salt the sea.
many international visitors came
to the mathematics department on study
leave the secretary told me of one
who couldn’t start each morning without
a fresh pad and new pencil ever obliging
she recycled his little-used pads and
pencils to others married to an astronomer
she appreciated the way so many things
from love to the universe arise from nothing
Birthday, hometown address,
Indivisible prime, thirteen
Cowards avoid: hived and released
Are the firefly chorus line
That dizzily seduced the random
To hatch a prodigy. Tanned
Supermodels and showroom
Wide-boys be warned:
Here’s an unexpected collaborator
Shot of the thick, tight knot
Civilisation kept lowering over
His head, well out of it
Now in a place of his own.
No relatives, no rental –
A pool, double-glazing and lawn;
Gypsum-white scroll and finial
And famous poets’ benedictions
Brass-plating the entrance hall.
Friends, colleagues, your attention!
I leave this in-tray full
Where it lies for greater minds
To trawl; to ride a limousine
Into limitless Saturday sunshine,
Debts annulled, the day won…
To grope, untimely rolled
From sleep; to take the phone
Half-excited, half in dread
(Let it not be shared, but mine alone!) –
Madam, are you sitting down?
