When everything seems changed

Hills are white,  earth is blue

Crimson trees interlace the green sky

Their twisted limbs straining

For some incarnation of release.

The black sun

Absorbs all tenderness

Tides flow without gravity

And my mind finds only shadows

In the dance of light

And maybe music

Gives cadence to the fall of leaves

Mingled with tears

 

 

The word house

Have you seen

The inside of words

With their secret movements

Spiralling down

Swelling in the dreaming

Spending days in the dream cellar

 

Here there is

A flicker of desire

To fashion something

Beyond the pettiness of myself

 

Follow the money

As it rages in the bloodstream

Takes those sensations to the fingertips

And exhales its spattered breaths

Clickety click Lickety spit

 

To wish is

To make of this world

Enough of another world

World enough

To again experience

For the first time

Your world

 

Two worlds and the world in between

 

That’s where to

HIDE LOVE

 

Don’t give me false hope

Make it different or I’ll Die

 

Hello

Such an optimistic word

So many possibilities

HELL 0 Gell0

 

You are my day and night

You are the intrusion

On my stability

You have broken in,

demolished the walls

and still I can’t get out

 

the GUIL TREE

Bench This

I sit

 

You have to choose words carefully

They should sit a while

Maybe for months

While they ferment

The rotten and the ripe –

Then there are the alcoholic words

The ones that roll and give you headaches and make you do things you normally wouldn’t

Words like

Hang, Boot and skin and earth.

Pick and pierce.

Ink

Asylum.

Art….

 

On Film

 

The picture house

Filled with incandescent shadows

Flickering with memory

Excitement, laughter,

sex and death

In my picture house

My dream screen

I wander from room to room

Closing doors

Looking in corners

Climbing creaking stairs

Flicking switches and

Turning off taps

 

The survive is a strange word.  (Can I even do that to a sentence.)

The event.

The surreal

(Memory lies in ruin and ruins lie in heaps)

 

SURVIVAL

Riddle & rhyme

So welcome to this churned up thrown together trying to make sense of ..

Someone said it does you goof – to survive

The survive      is an interesting thought – like the sur real

The survive

is to be and to keep on being.

I will be come

To become. to go on becoming.

It talks of only the present

Finger painting stuff

No selecting the brush – just plunge your hand in straight in and slap it on.

Inventing the moment

Building the pattern

Getting into the rhythm.

 

 

Hello – such an optimistic word don’t you think.

Full of promise and expectation as an introduction.

Hmm

HELL o Hell o Gell o yellow

There’s always the getting to know you part,

the shaking and making

this acquaintance.

The bit where insecurities on either side try to be pushed aside.

The confidence

hiding hiding .

I read  – and was told – to drop a post modern name in ( Jean Michel Lyotard no less – bow thankyou)

“That he who knows not how to hide, knows not how to love. “

Sounds shady.

Yet if there is truth, then there may be some truth in it.

 

I will hide from you the things I think will spoil this and future moments.

As Abraham hid the truth about Isaac from Sarah and eleazor

There was something bigger going on

 

As Bacon said

Art has to leave a mystery.

 

Hello – such an optimistic word

No piercings or tears

Rueing and running

Hands in pockets

A hand bag clutched

A wandering eye

Drifting into an anticipation

A pause

Before the event

Sip of caffeine

A scratch of the nose

Then turn

away

 

So I came to trial

Under the guil tree

 

Desire

Desire has no brakes

It takes the ground

And digs the ditch

In which you will

Run

And scramble

And

Claw

Incessantly towards

….(insert obsession)..(Art)

unstoppable

insatiable

Desire

 

(on painting)

 

But time’s ditch

It’s curve ball

To an outer centre

Doesn’t allow a stop

An arête

Flung like paint spatters

From an overloaded brush

Colour, drips and runs

Smeared records and scratches

With no canvas

History’s Ditch

 

(on) photography

 

Lightning strike

The one chance

To see

This moment

In one thousandth of a second

This moment

This place

The slice of this universe.

Click

 

So I begin to get it

Heady steady life

 

Hello – I say in an optimistic fashion

Hoping beyond hope that I will be able to follow up the conversation, that I will be listening , but so often I miss the name and then spend the next part of the sentence trying to think what it was. Hello  – by that time I’ve gone into the HELL part and am thinking how I can construct some meaning from – I find it difficult to stop .. and listen I mean.  So I’m sorry – o there goes the guil tree feeling again. That’s how I get away… I look to the trees

 

He talked

and then cried

to a stranger

On the train

He apologised for becoming emotional

HE had just lost his wife last year

And in the two seats in front

2 laptops clicked and chattered

in unison

A thought

Then taps and clicks

 

Her thumb slides across

the glass

to the wires

in her head

a scratchy sound with a beat

Then the birds

The thrum of the engine

And fields of steel boxes

 

Did I intrude by noticing all this? Magic

 

Noticing the magic

 

And then I move on

 

I will remove your eyes

So that you can see

I will become your only thought

 

I would turn from

these stones and see

their layers and fragments

Turn from their settlement

By rough hands

Birthed in the

Plough and

Fire

 

I’m sorry the number you have dialled is not available please try again later

 

This tree in fungal form

Cells aged

Water borne

Fed on decay

By the seeming path

Moving step by step

Its substance evolved from ancestral woods

to future spring

 

 

Fuck it.

That thought

It came

and then went.

 

There’s a yellow train hiding in the bushes

And I found my credit card on the platform

and that black sun I’d written about

suddenly appeared on the bookshelf in the library

 

And here I try to repair the spider’s web

To move in time

And feel the warmth of darkness

In the cool night air

Opening a snag to fill

The slightest space with shadows

Who possess only their thin bodies.

 

 

I was curious enough to look for this

Thank the dead gods

It opened up a world where shadows came to life

where the risk was to not stop doing this

 

In this place – not through platitudes and feeding egos

 

– but through a savage call –

 

dare to know – dare to poetry – dare to be.

 

Some forms of repression – through that all grammar schoolboy education, the upwardly mobile desires of parenting, the thought that there is a right way of doing things, a well-meaning father saying no.

 

Always something underneath – in that compacted ground, where it appears that only mosses can grow on the surface – some rhizome root eked its pathways. still growing, searching , meeting .

 

Are you my kind?

You

For whom I would risk it all.

Have we found the place

Where sights and smells

Become sound

Can you let me in

Where the blood runs hot and fresh?

Someone would know

They would take these words

And change the present

There would be honest talk

And I would begin walking.

 

 

an indescribable something

in between.

turgid mosses
 release a flow 
of the clean and pure. 
grasses of the marsh 
hide a secret or two 
unseen and uncared for.
 but some day I came in out of the rain
 and laid down my head
 in this new space.
as the hand trembles,
 do words fall
 and
 blow this way?

set your chatters to hum.
break it.
fuck it.

hanging boots all laid aside.

I’m still looking

can the body enter ?

too high. 
too much noise 
in the thickness of shadows.
 are you my kind?
 break and bleed for it  .
hot and wet 
a mind without image.
 these cards won’t turn. 
shut up .
at the last
 I see the moon in daylight waters
 at the last.
 thought and speed rip.
shadows fall at night.
 their presence and absence 
introduce the book man .
 how did you?

 

 

And it goes on

Story after story

Layer upon layer

In these hidden faces

in this hidden,

tombola town

These words will become the history like the photograph and the stones