movement in motion

but language is silent
on the joint matters of desire and vertigo.
It is the position, or the movement
that gets closest. It is the sitting down,
the this is serious take to it.
The motion forms a form. And now
we see there is too much matter,
not enough shape. When things echo,
we come back to all those things,
a mirror-image in a mirror,
a story within a story,
film within a film. word within a word.
forward worlds push on again though.
we look a set of twins in the eyes
and say you’re tim (for example)
and you’re eric. we don’t like this
anymore than we like the thought
of the end of desire. but we have one word
for park and another for sky.
and even that may not be true, but
the shape is better than the sound,
the motion better than the arc it describes.
my foot is pressed to the floor, yet
the car keeps on sliding lethargic, inexorable.

 

half life

I count everything out and wonder if others do the same.
Heat beneath saucepans, panting as the water becomes syrup.
A froth comes to the surface or the liquid thickens.
All of this will be embarrassing within a week. Halved
lives are replicated eternally, and there is no limit
to diminishment. We know that speaking is like this.
Whether or not there is a point
at which water boils is beside the point.
The deep sleep of lobsters is on a par with our own.
Let the thing rest a minute, and the blood will
redistribute throughout the greater mass. On cooling,
we feel that we are closer than ever to getting it out.

 

a week or so late to comment

for a while there, things were getting really good. the ones in skivvies were upset, and had to go home. luckily there was wine there too, and many have children of their own now. the cops were sending emails between themselves and going through the back rooms of galleries. we were calling them stupid and they were calling us sick. which is fair enough, because we are sick. the ones with the money slowly and demurely became disappointed, realising that populism is not all it’s cracked up to be, unless you’re just talking about the cinema. we were all warned off using words like crack. even words like larynx were advised against, until we figured out what they meant. the word titillate fell under a blanket ban and restaurant reviewers went on strike. next thing you won’t be able to say senses or sensual! the following day both words were banned. the following day delicious, seductive and sauce were canned, and Good Living went out of print. the great butternut pumpkin came out in defence, but once that soup had reduced to a simmer. he won himself a vote, but only on a day by day basis.

suddenly reputations both counted for everything and were worthless. we called them idiots while they vomited in their children’s cornflakes. the children were not impressed and asked for more honey. the search was on and spencer got a little hot under the tunic. someone called him a dick and was arrested. i got caught up in it all. police shot at me when i took off my jumper. they threw up all over their guns until i explained that i am merely slim and whatever the opposite of the word hirsute is. not knowing what to make of those simmerings, they went home and told their children to go their rooms, and to cover up on the way to and from the shower. you are disgusting! they yelled. go to bed. (though they had already thrown out their beds days ago, as a precautionary measure). he threw up all over his wife and her suit was ruined. meanwhile, galleries continued to report increased visits and increased theft. things were walking out the door with people on either side like wheels. the cops, without so much as raising their batons, remembered what it was to smile. closing their eyes before art, they fell into each others arms and kissed a little, before straightening their caps and moving their eyes to the side. catching a glimpse of art they straightened their glances and saw each other, all in view of a woman in angular glasses or a man in a turtleneck, who were probably, they reasoned, getting off on all of this. having always thought of myself as a ‘writer’, it seemed strange to know that art was now ‘art’. porn enthusiasts, on the other hand, were disappointed with the turn their industry was taking, which they found to be overly high-brow, uncompelling, and plainly lacking in popcorn erotics. back at the station, on the toilet, a cop was annoyed to realise that he was reading an old catalogue for the venice biennale and not a copy of zoo weekly. he was ten pages in and hadn’t noticed a thing. out in the hall, his colleagues were listen in, giggling.

 

the next time

I am so cold that i think of warm words:
apple, fold, melon. Already
there are those who dispute this.
Pieces of us slide off our skin, yet
some poor kid can’t scrape the flesh
of an avocado from its casing. There is
a sourness to faces that makes me uneasy,
yet sadness I’m ok with. We have no control anymore.

People order food on your behalf and
you think that this is the feeling of an arranged marriage,
or being dispatched in war. Losing track
of your composure, you think of the darkness
of a park at nighttime which is usually lit. I try
to walk even closer to you now, to let them know.
This is what flirting is, deliberate proximity.
In this light though, fight could well
be flight, or bag could be sack. Calling a name
is like rolling a stone halfway over.

 

twin peaks

Seeing seeing in a mirror.
That is, to watch another move
looking away from yourself
with intent. With your glowing skull
in my hands, you open and close
lightly like a deep-sea creature. Sitting
on a chair though, you are drawn out
like a thing which can inflate but is breathless.
Breathless is not the word though. There is one word
for the thing, but you wouldn’t say that
to the thing, would you. For example:
A flower folds like a sack, but
then a sack folds the same way
as does a body, so go figure. We light up
in a kind of negative, our depressions
glow in unnatural colours, yet our euphoria
finds its place well enough.

Every day I receive bulletins I will never read.
Looking up, I see twin peaks. Which makes me think
that all things are twinned things. You only
have to listen to a line of speech to hear that.
I have a breathtaking desire to say
in the end, even though i know that
it misses the point. In a car, we can approach
only one mountain, while another car, from
a different point, approaches another.
Were you the first to go? Is this a race?
You ask questions to fill the time.
Other people ask to find out what it is,
and I realise that I can’t say. Not knowing
is like the embarrassment of mispronouncing
a foreign word. A blind bud fails to open
at the specified time.

 

the undead

all the unread things rise up once more
before us, there was me and you, it’s as if
there was more left, we were left out,
so to speak is a good thing. I fell before it
fell down good and under, I found you.
Coiled like a worm clinging to a pink finger,
I could never bring myself to say it.
Dusting off the soil, I saw more of myself.
Flannel, denim, these on-again off-again beaten
things, these are the things by which we live.
Drawing patterns in milk, I wrote your name
next to my name in the sand. Like in a dream,
I couldn’t focus enough to make out the letters.
I stop breathing in sleep. There are all of these
things unwritten.

 

a return?

It’s so careful, yet
here I am, throwing up.
A column of ice or blood,
not protruding, not hanging, but
elongation. I’m so careful, but
how hard can it be? Speaking of ice
Of course I know where it comes from.
at least it would seem that is the case, wouldn’t
it. In fact, it would seem irresponsible to suggest otherwise.
The shape is nevertheless unimportant. Everything becomes
uniform in code. Ode to a friend.
From here, I can see it. Holding itself.
Inside of its own abdomen. Like saying:
I’m not writing about you. Then smiling.

 

the main communist feast

filling our caps with seawater, knowing
we could never take it all in, it was
the dead sea, or was it the red?
blue, the water, green, left us retching
for more, at the tips of our fingers
we felt everything that we had worked for.

Over and over again, they ignore
our faces, hear not our voices, but they
do note, with the sour grimaces of grandmothers
each one of our endless mistakes.

Will they ever hear us? we pile
our bodies - dead? - atop them.
We cannot eat  more, yet they
they who are set aside by distinction
that occurs when their eye falls over us.

it is time to let go of these old
us, them, you, me, rod through the
chest kind of things. but that is clearly
the voice of a person without hands,
without fingers, without heads.

 

concession

write down your history.
write down the hours that you are available.
write down what you are and are not willing to do.
what are you happy to eat and off what surfaces?
how far will you go?
what will you say?
what will you wear?
limits are tested out only with the hands and in darkness.
from this forms are recreated.
vases, workers.
where. wear. were. wary. weary.

 

HAI AGAIN

I´M IN TEH STUDY

POSTIN ON UR BLAG

AGAIN