SELECTED VERSE
Unmissed
And what exclusive parties you were bound
always to star in! where bright spoons are licked,
the parcel's passed, the mulberry-bush gone round,
and only sugared pouts and ringlets crowned
your enemies. Then, headier juices kicked,
yet what exclusive parties you were bound
to doff your frock at always stuck around,
solicitous, admiring -- till, unpicked,
the parcel passed, the mulberry-bush gone round,
it came to my turn. Late gatecrasher, drowned
in doubt, some restless sense of hours that ticked
and what exclusive parties you were bound
secretly for by those slow hands, unwound
more inner wrappings; tired balloons then pricked,
the parcel parsed, the mulberry-bush gone round,
I'm left to watch your scramble to new ground
rules that, once you're out the ring, restrict
to what exclusive party you are bound:
The parcel's past; the mulberry-bush, gone round.
The Plagiarist
No Socrates this doorstep! Un dentiste,
bicephalous, brusque, businesslike, d'estime
an assured succès, says Mirbeau: that last dream
of Fauns he musicked, pertly symboliste,
disarmed Mallarmé... well, I let the beast
plunk his horny way through what you'd deem
a version churchified to the extreme
of... but Georgette! ton oeuvre, si, j'insiste!
And then, I fell asleep -- had that same dream:
the teeming sheep of Allemonde, star-fleeced,
staring from trains. Nearby, the termite-stream
flowed out the mouth of a filthy naturaliste.--
This is, you know, what artists call l'abîme --.
On Monday, I've a new essay released.
An English Homunculus
Like maiden aunts in Twickenham, his feet
are rarely visited: such sheltered lives!
Their stencilled chintz on milky tea, effete
to a fault, a bath-salt offering contrives
to pacify each Christmas, to keep sweet,
sweet as the morning Kew they never kicked at.
He has legs, too, he found, one day in Crete
when they refused an unimportant diktat,
leaving him sprawling in Aghia Galini.
Notwithstanding (they did not), he shunned
cheap bribery: some hirsute native genii
are better left to hessian than the sun.
Arms and the man I sing about maintained
a formal correspondence over lustra:
those BFPO pungencies restrained
by soft soap, pumice stone, Simon and Schuster,
and the self-deprecation of the jellyfish.
His hands, about a 38C, inert
as wet, white hubs on a Pirelli dish,
murmur the new Guayasamin convert,
with airs of pianistic pedantry
carefully folded around those air quotations --
their grimy crannies, like his dentistry,
preserved as tribute to a postwar nation
of sloping shoulders, Brighton rock, and scabies.
The rest of him, a coy parboiled crustacean
with folds he still finds prescient as a baby's,
his unrolled abdomen a revelation
reserved for next weekend's inamorata --
who may perhaps be pardoned for not quite
grokking that vast conceptual harigata
that beetles over the keyboard as he writes;
still, if his topological map may sicken
exclusively inwards at the merest "Profile:",
that shy connecting glade inside yet quicken
with your surprising eyes, last Anglophile
to see through this chaotic Mandeville
of a fabulous monster, else "RP C2",
to unmade aren'ts. If you would like to fill
the form below (email required), please do.
Aunt Agatha's Blind Date
Darling, the gentleman definitely has worms.
If I did not know wiser, I'd say "plaice":
the size of some - like ties, and on his face -
well, really: one might hazard ugly germs.
Perhaps that's why the fellow moans and squirms
every four steps, and - claws his eyes, no grace
about it, none. That's why, dear, in this case
I thought it wise to keep to one-lump terms.
Of course we dined in just the pleasant place,
no waitress there caught pert or wearing perms -
aside one may take issue with their lace -
but really dear, his frothy hair confirms
my earlier reservations of his race:
they prize their females less than pachyderms.
Of a Tzantza
We draw our science from men with smaller skulls,
whose flickering quarry footnote every cave,
so painted, girls will not infect our mulls.
Lest we should sink, through internecine lulls
into the unplumbed swamp-gaze of the slave
we draw our science from, men with smaller skulls
and souls provide the hide for skintight hulls
that globe us in a sloth-festooned enclave --
so painted girls will not infect our mulls
of chicha-beer, but cheer the warrior-culls
and weep, as needed, for the shrivelled brave.
We draw our science from men with smaller skulls
whose canopy of superordinates dulls
the darted, bristling thisness manhood gave:
So painted, girls will not infect our mulls
with mother-food that, yearning-deep, annulls
the dyed ancestral cresting which we crave.
We draw our science from men with smaller skulls,
so painted girls will not infect our mulls.
Us and Them
Like porpoises, they take the kids to school.
Like fools, we curry spuds in lonely dumps,
pumping what doesn’t matter, as a rule.
Our days gunpowder up the throat, which clumps
drool to a cruel cud as we remark,
judge and prioritize departing rumps.
Lips red as highway sunsets nark the dark,
hump-back our bridges, rust wild urges stalled
mid-turn, a country mile from Bosco’s Park;
downwind forever of shrill cries, enthralled
by less than wind, by echoes, we let go,
not knowing who or what has us blackballed,
or why, with all those careless wares on show,
our sovereign wishes won’t so much as rent
jostling-room at a penny seraglio –
or where that snow-blind “yes” the years sent went.
We gaze with basement eyes at all our powers
indentured in an unpeeled skirt’s descent,
and scent the petulance of bee-lorn flowers
long stalked by ground frost, evening-mulched, with such
a murmured discontent of place (theirs, ours) –
do we, in asking nothing, ask too much?
The schoolyard lane’s trip-wired: stones of old goals,
crunched by motherly SUVs, still clutch
(polvo enamorado) burning coals,
and bowing predator-trees across each face
predate the shining of the morning shoals.
Life’s purpose hurts and lurks around this place.
Like eyes, we linger in its vestibule
hopelessly out of season with the race.
Rubbler
Sheol walls you in, is what you walk
be-Mosesed, squinting. Therefore begin to smirk,
day-bwganbrain: go bug the throng, whose work
is cut out, where yours, rybelwr, all talk,
dodges the clenched hand, like the buzzing fly
at buttermilk. No bargain-man, you balk
at these wet chains: will preach to us New York?
Hold chisel, boy: tonight we'll finger pie!
Ships is it? This rock hull-high, yet you'd run
the rubble mile and mount for Sinai?
"Pizarro's cleaner slate"? Such I've heard done:
honey and milk, yes, past Porthmadog sky,
where righteousness, etcetera. Look you, son:
who went were water-charmers. See you try.
Gallinazos (Black Vultures)
At dusk, these gorging prelates may fold flat,
becoming branch-growths, jams of frozen nodes
gaunt against the sky; daytime, hot roads
have them gavotting to where the carrion's at --
flushed first from a tree's outrageous hat,
shooed by breezes to where the air unloads
into your wing mirror, circumflexed like toads,
a surpliced lumpenproletariat.
What god takes care that roadkill come out pat
every twelve miles -- that kitty's head implodes?
Some jaunty jesus is there, fixes that?
Had I that faith, you'd see me in the roads,
screeching epiphanies there among the gnats,
barefoot, scavenging kitchen-scraps and odes.
Sepia
Still, we were golden then, a Tendency
among the crowded tables. Our caught pose
of forelocked surliness you might suppose
a trine of spine-bound names, some destiny
cloaked by a turncoat camera cunningly
(the martyr wistful, the fascist poet lustlos),
our wine-stained glasses winking through the throes
of ink-beclouded hagiography;
A lifetime on, again I’m served this plate,
its garbled light still dappled in old wine
from saturnine surroundings; crawling things
they seem now, in this gloom that falls of late
past fields of garlic ancestrally mine,
campfired to brown, diet of stricken kings.
To Fernando de Rojas
"Love is the New Black!" Hearing which conversed,
his nouveau brains burst out on old white flag -
Calixtus' comet, comically accursed,
plunging unladdered, unshriven as the hag
whose hissing stars were hoist on our New World.
Alone, an old man, noting no lights changed
(an Old Profession, lachrymarum), hurled
descendance to the dogs and the deranged.
And you and he were right, true to that Law
that makes our faiths and brains repast of snake
and it, of stars; yet knowing that your whore
still tribbeth, flagon full, we choose to take
our comforts, now as then, where we can find
a shack for drink and love, the aspiring blind.
The Eggbird
Search me! for the Eggbird
Is never seen, is only heard
We beat the jungle night by night,
Converted natives to The Word;
Except one little tribe so trite
Left clinging to the Eggbird.
"Search them!" for the Eggbird
Is never seen, is only heard
The Eggbird, they explained, when dead,
Doth turn the sky to ash and rain;
But later crawls out from its bed
Gets dressed, and takes the train.
Blow me! for the Eggbird
Is never seen, is only heard
"It has no eyes, is made of choc.
It is the creamy Egg, in fact:
The centre of the monocoque
Inside which people act."
Praise Him! for the Eggbird
Is never seen, is only heard
The rain belabours giant leaves:
A tall prat meddles with your hen.
'Tis then the cry comes on the breeze -
The Eggbird dies again.
'Swipe me! for the Eggbird
Is never seen, is only heard.
If you would with a hundred sleep
And swive, and jive, and stuff like that
Be bountiful, but sure to keep
An Eggbird in your hat.
Search me! for the Eggbird
Is never seen, is only heard
Letter to an Ex
The hills here “crawl with crime”: this, you’d not like
(There always was so much you dared not lose) –
Yet, from a distance, huddled wines and blues
On quake-forgiven housefronts only dyke
The eyes from too much dawn, which here’s so light-
Fingered you scarce notice what’s not there:
The gecko on the wall takes in its stare
Houses, people, governments, and each night
Winks something out - the hill’s mosaic of lives
Sighs and shifts; but who or what is missed
Next morning, next week’s learned not to exist.
New losses evict the old, and what survives
Has to prove useful in the heat and flies:
Rice, shoes; a young girl's bike; another’s lies.
Whatever
Why write? Why waste whole weekends waging wars
with wayward words which, white-whale-wise, will whet
wild wants, while whaler’s weapons whistle wet?
What word’s worth waiving warmth with waving whores?
What welcoming whoops – what wisdom – will we wrench
when, wearily, we watch while what we write
wilts, waterless – wan windfalls waxing white –
without what wads would woo what winsome wench?
Will words which westward wrestle what was weedier
withstand world’s witlessness, when welterweights’
(Walt Whitman, Wordsworth, with worse wankers) waits
win wondrous Web write-ups with Wikipedia?
While wondering, we would wiser wordsmiths warn:
What’s weakly written won’t wash white when worn.
Giving up Giving up
A flinching salmon-thrust from night to day
or sinking back slowly down into the silt?
Muddle we little choices while we may,
we all would rather what we built stayed built --
or, sinking back slowly down into the silt,
could find its level: a swamped, polluted mere.
We all would rather what we built stayed built,
and that our still unrealised belvedere
could find its level -- a swamped, polluted, mere
netherland being so easily risen above;
and that -- our still unrealised belvedere,
implausible only in distance -- lets us love
netherland being, so easily risen above,
and find the frogs that croak in our own mere
implausible only in distance. "Let us love," --
so simpering morning whispers -- "what is near,
"and find the frogs that croak in our own mere,
and smoke this dog-end night's sweet lips have glossed."
So simpering, morning whispers: what is near
at least is real, though belvederes be lost --
and smoke, this dog-end night, sweet lips have glossed
to a becoming red, suffused. A stubbed-out past
at least is real; though belvederes are lost,
they may be drawn from ashes -- while these last --
to a becoming red suffused. A stubbed-out past,
two empty glasses, the little they let us feel --
they may be drawn from ashes; while these last
I flick, obliviously, wound back to the real,
to empty glasses. The little they let us feel --
muddle we little choices while we may! --
I flick obliviously, wound back to the reel:
a flinching salmon, thrust from night to day.
Wistful
These eyes still ply your body’s winding route,
half-hoping hands, afraid to follow, suit.
Your young knave’s sword’s a mere adjunct to steel;
a breastplate bravado, made of hollow suit.
The knot's well tied, though he is in his cups:
the posy's tossed, and maid will follow suit.
To clubs repairing, he knocks back the question --
why shouldn’t she up spade and follow suit?
Our coin’s all gone to counsellors and judges,
and friends and neighbours paid to follow suit.
Dead leaves, in obverse, fall across the table:
an old hand left, unplayed, to follow suit.
