1.
COMPACTED, BUT STILL POROUS. Hard
loaves and fishes, an unrealised
polity milling about on the shore.
Your choice of two horizons, one
of painful and inflicted death.
Place-holders aloft: cruciform take-off
casts Central Office in shadow. Banner
of many coloured stripes to perform
multiple declensions in midday sun.
2.
REVISION SYSTEMS place eyes on stalks,
egg-yolks on stilts, narrowing to
slits for arrows, apertures
for beams of eros. Pitchers of warm milk
slop out their patois, overlooking wan
patios, lopsided terraces
where satyriasis cools its vulcan hooves;
gaze out of hovels gladly overhung
with starry praxis, giddily essayed.
3.
NICE THREADS. A stormcloud looms
over the story. Pith helmets
dissolve in tropical downpour.
Her skin is paisleyed with dye. His
is blotted by leaky biro. Pheromonal
markers seep through boiled sheets.
Clothing himself before dawn, whatever
he dons has crumpled in shadow. Its mild
stink dogs him to dusk.
4.
THE COMPLETE BALLAD gathers in
its variants, garnering
wreaths and gurnings from opposing corners;
crooners at variance overlay their richness,
glitches, each tenor/timbre a hiccup
in wound-forward time; "best of" recoups
aberrant spools ejected from the back
of skidding lorry, spoor of lost contralto
frittered across relentless carriageways.
5.
FANCY-PANTS PHANTOM UNMASKED, drops trousers
to collective relief of scammed fandom.
Sex masque unseasonal, says unicycle expert.
Hanta virus in pints causes antsy
abreaction, but headlines are gnawed
by West Nile contender -
headlice were carrier for pharyngeal
front-runner with fresh pluck and racy
attitude, as bulletin touchingly affirms.
6.
GHASTLY INIQUITIES exhumed, uplifted
on ten-foot poles; but quiddities are six-
feet-under still, ringed round with bombshells
that may never go off. Your question,
yes? Hands up if you heard GEISTLICH.
Five points deducted for INEQUITIES.
Spirit's spirit spirits spirit; quine's
quines quine quines.
Yadda yadda yadda yadda.
7.
SANE BACKENDS are an asset as, sans
bookends, slim volumes run
to clutter. A telling-off is on
its way - that balled-up frosty
charge presages tedium pressed home
at needle-point. Slowly
the embolism. Stop that mumbling
in public and attend to your disgrace
in corpore, cack-handed letterer.
8.
FOR VALIDATION look no further: the words
and tune sub rosa, as ever, as always.
My joys and sorrows bore you
to tears almost. There is a god
of thresholds, and another
of incontinent weeping; their mutual
contempt maintains, by mutual consent,
the order of sublunary affairs
in its disorder.
9.
WEARY LEGS BUSSED through rural effulgence.
His personal stereo leaks
canned libido into her personal space.
Resentment narrows down to mono-
mania. Insistently monocular glaring
receives without a blink the brand
of omen. Here is new intelligence -
failure snaking from the smoking pit,
shaking its rattle, vaunting its crushed head.
10.
TAKE PROMISES TO MARKET, come back
perforated with sales-talk, high-velocity
expectorations. This is all
about oil, or more precisely lubricant:
in olive groves, in greasy gloves,
how triggers slip, how things go off
half-cocked. Be careful out there,
sheathed in patchy righteousness, poor
irony of bloody ironies.
11.
SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE links lovers'
broken token, heartstrings plinking
in awesome threnody, as if a million.
As a family, ironized but still
deeply untrendy, stirred by poltergeist
activity - readings off the scale -
so globally, as governance goes
walkabout in labyrinth of gnosis,
triangulates its fabled grove of ghosts.
12.
VISUAL BASIC DESIGN PATTERNS - tilings,
glitter-and-glue productions, daubs
of poster-paint signed in ham-fisted pencil -
formed as the self forms, as along
the way comes trouble, the surmountable
and insurmountable confused
into an opaque marble. A confessed
bawd and slattern, his oleaginous
hand-prints masquerade as evidence.
13.
MORAL NONCONFORMIST, widely considered
idiot, now capers in variously smutched
cloth beside defunct palladium-
cum-butcher's shop. This is not
a triumphalist gesture. My feet
are literally on fire.
Shelved in the gatehouse are genuine how-to
guides to defilement: reading for the small
hours, the colossal flight of years.
14.
POWERS OF HORROR, exponentiations -
see how they stack up. Congress
of men with beasts in archetypal hazing.
This is zaniness -
I mean how wacko, I mean wow -
who ever dreamed of this?
See what they dreamed up, beasts with men
of Congress, exponents of shock tactics
appalled by recrudescent verité.
15.
MORNING HAS BROKEN all previous records
for rosy effulgence, casts rays
across a broad spectrum, warming
cockles and muscles alike.
Picture brave boys in soviet
realist poses, caught on the yellow
spokes of the sun. It's warm
too where he has gone, into eccentric
orbit around another, self-swallowing, star.
16.
COYNESS IS QUIETUDE, a study
in itself. The apparition
advances with raised palms, smoke
pouring from its mouth. To do
an intervention - to coax, coerce
acceptance speech from dyed-in-the-wool denier -
is that not also to impose "our
values"? (Discuss, one-sidedly).
For sturdy enough rebuttal, see reverse -
17.
NO HURT NO HARM in nocturnal
remission of disappointment - bunking off,
the art you make of it
a life-skill, although non-transferrable.
You shut your mouth, maintain your quietus
against rubric failure, earn again nil points.
The body drifts into aloof
and punishable ecstasies.
Who is this dazzling creature?
18.
DON'T ASK DON'T TELL too coyly
accommodating, if by accommodation you can mean
immurement in a privy. Nobody
expects the inquisition to recant, authority's
self-anointing proxies with their staves
of polished brass. Doxologies
are songs of praise, stirrings of noble
cocks: a violent and loud
ullulation that dismembers sleep.
19.
SOME LANGUAGE, SOME COMMUNICATION. Even
enough is not enough. It
is the forest that speaks, that trails
off, skirting silence. Two hands clenched
about their secret punch above your weight,
below the belt. Land one
anywhere you can. Be lissom
in waking dreams, mellifluous and deadly,
whetted by unappealing appetites.
20.
NOTES LIKE RAIN outpouring from overwhelmed
guttering during a deluge - "transcendental
technique", now taught in magazines.
Numberless books on lepidoptery
an evening's study. The mind's uncageable
papillon, fluttering through the fingers.
"Some kind of spirit" as convected warmth,
as sonic youth, as torrents remotely
seeded, propagating to the last breath.
21.
FACE-TO-FACE with the averted,
obfuscated visage, the lineamented palm
projected into the lens. Tell me what makes
self-exile unsustainable - even
unsettled moon-dust can be conjured,
cajoled into belonging, remitting
miraculous sustenance. Morphisms between regimes
absolve the differends, re-record irregular
hearth-throb of the common good.
22.
IF I HAD A HAMMER you were pegged
deeper into the permafrost, your head
still ringing with redemption, crooked one:
not correspondant to command, aetherial
bombardment, or the proliferated
worm-in-the-gut of guilt
displayed as worm-in-a-jar,
resume your forlorn murmuring; discurse,
rejuvenated by sloughed biomass.
23.
OK, NOW GO: recurse through records
counter-clockwise, gripped by asymptomatic
mal d'archive, unfinishable business.
Ten years is nothing; stand by for second
childhood, fuzzed remonstration squawling
through cochlear-implant, bending the mind's ear
towards its asymptote. Don't turn
around now - what survives
in us is barely recognised as love.
24.
BEHIND THE CURVE of waking, the cascade
that rolls up, rolls up for alertness, they
remain, unreachable and reaching out
to pull you back. The future's bleak,
arranged. Clammed in sleep's bathysphere, you seek
conciliation amid disarray.
Reorder pronouns - give yourself away.
Say scoriae
; say sorry, wantonly,
exhilaratingly. Exhale. Retreat.
25.
REFERRING IN SOME WAY to the body -
your body, mine - the field
of reference in no way a meadow
to lie down in, body-
to-body in the light of fresh
discoveries. Your field
is far-afield, neither enfolding
nor overlapping my unkempt corner,
my dream of you for now.
26.
COLD AND CLEAR at this time, as one
country fades into another, settles
for a denuded thriving.
To tide us over, these: tuft-
ripple of cirrocumulus; the sketchy
treeline; birds along the rooftops
holding their place; all
that is not banished or in deep
hibernation, alert even as twilight comes.
27.
PREPARED RESPONSE to being taken
and not returned, naked but for mittens;
laid in the frost and under it.
Small blip in population graph:
result for raptors, sons
of Ares, widely-sown bad seeds.
Yours now the dark behind the one-
way mirror; yours the unlovely
but not unloved remains.
28.
WELL THAT'S JUST GREAT, on target
for great justice, infinite
justice even. Jubilation turns
endlessly on a spindle, exultation's voice
becoming more wan with every pass
under the reading head. Extracting
stricken whisperings from background noise
is an occult pursuit, and frowned upon. Consult
court entrail-sifters for approved prognosis.