The Situation

She was born with a few curses on her head, or so it would seem, of the variety that make the next world very easy and this world very hard. If you are of a holy and patient bent then you can call such curses merely different varieties of awareness.

In the winter, her family wrapped up the caravan and found an apartment in town in a nearly empty hotel. Her mother found a job in the hotel as a telephone operator which drove her father even further into madness. The hotel apartment had a bathtub which was very pleasing to everyone. Her father spent most night sitting in it, without water and fully clothed, writing in his notebook.

Her parents slept in the living room in a bed that folded down from the wall. She had her own room with a glass door leading to a balcony. At night, she pressed her whole body against the glass until she was shivering with cold. Although they only lived on the sixth floor, she had never lived so high in the air. Later, under the covers, she would feel the night sky still chapping and burning on her skin. She liked it there and prayed that winter would last a long time.

One night she dreamed of the bubble fairy in the film, but she was an enormous face in the sky with teeth the size of billboards. In the dreams the midget people were busy whitewashing the bubble fairy’s teeth, working themselves slowly down on window washer’s platforms suspended by hooks towards the top of the fairy’s gums. The fairy seemed to grow impatient and so sent them twirling through space with one swoop of her tongue. Then she opened her mouth and exhaled a gust of snow before catching the little people into her mouth again.

When the girl woke from this dream, she went to the balcony door and opened it. When she stepped onto the freezing iron railing, it was as if she were stepping on burning coals. She looked all around for the bubble fairy and instead saw the Mrs. Almquist, the Pastor’s wife, cycling down the street as if on a mission. Mrs. Almquist looked up as if she expected to find the small girl on the balcony the whole time. The girl nodded and climbed back into her room. She wondered if she would be in trouble soon.

Why does everyone hate the cold and the dark when it gives you the nice illusion that you are home? I need to practically freeze to death outside before I can feel that a house is home, but even then I usually know I’m fooling myself. I’ve never understood the word home. I’ve never had a feeling for it. It’s not exactly a blessing. I’ve lived in dozens and dozens of places in my life and I torturously walk them all on many nights when I can’t sleep. And most nights are nights when I can’t sleep. I know every staircase, window and door of every place and the way my body adjusted to meet them. And yet for all that, what has been the point of their imprint on my body? Was it just to gradually malform my body into the interesting lump that it’s become? No, not even that. But what sort of gift is this sort of awareness to me? There’s no place like home because there is no such place as home.

Just one house maybe. The one across from the little Lutheran church that looked like it emerged from the pages of a pop up book. The snow piled up so deeply in the winter that there was no getting out of the front door for weeks without plunging straight into a snowbank. But I could watch the church. I loved the sound of the one pathetic church bell, mostly because I knew that the little chubby choirmaster made it ring by jumping on the rope. Oh but I lie already. I didn’t care about the church or the choirmaster or the bell. Half the time I didn’t notice it ringing. Maybe I loved the house for other reasons, like I had a lover there and fed him pancakes or that I made my own spells up in the garden at night. But not really. Maybe it was home because I didn't die there. Because I can travel those ghost passages, so awful in other houses, with ease. Because I didn't die there.



Anagogic: office-blocks take the shapes of our frozen bodies in the snow

in the snow.

The Little Match Girl climbed to the blazing roof, snowfall into fire.

All the time.

Caught in flame the snow flakes became snow-fire wings; the Little Match Girl took two of the flakes & carefully, studiously,

stitched them to her

bare

shoulder-blades. Up into the night sky she flew, until the night sky became invisible.

Lutheran chorale. The professor wrote instructions to the past, in the spaces under street names in a map of Uppsala. Urgently he instructed the past to uninvent music & to construct machines to “perfectly double & annihilate the human body such that it becomes a machine for the production of glass eyes for police horses & surplus value.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky, washing his throat in bloodied snow. The night sky had returned to itself, like a vast pincushion with the Little Match-girl hanging, impaled, from a star. Mayakovsky in a frenzy caresses her voice, hurls his body into the street. “Let’s say goodbye.” He says goodbye, it’s May time & no longer snowing

no longer snowing.*

Down on the street it’s dusk. The sky has a silky sheen, like a wrap slipping from my shoulders. I look good in this light. I smell like toast & marmalade & morphine. & weasel droppings. Yet the snow is spoiling my painted toes & the music from the Victrola infuriates me.

Who needs Lutheran chorales at a time like this?

Now the police horses race into the River Thames, whinnying & throwing their cyborg riders.

The boat set us ashore beside the great warehouses, among mud & snow & wrack. I had one thousand silver shillings & a bottle of whiskey in my overcoat pockets. She took my hands & let them go & said “you’d better follow me.” We made our way up the shivering slope, detritus caught in the wind crossing our path or blowing directly into our countenances. That was the strangest thing. The wind seemed to come from everywhere & nowhere. We paid for a night in a flophouse. A bare blanket on a narrow bed. All night we could hear a bell, clanging, & a small bell, trilling. Sometime towards dawn I must have slept. When I woke I was alone. I wiped my face with my handkerchief & drank three mouthfuls of whiskey. Then I curled up on the bed & watched the stars slowly pop, one after another, until there was nothing left to watch.



great circles

mercator projection

window change

car ploughs into nightclub crowd
couple dead after motorcycle crash
CCTV may identify double rapist
motorist kills as car overturns
bridge repair closes part of M56

all the arms
of the wind farm
turn around
but not together

we drove for miles
to find this place in 1976

I've a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore

scarecrows don't talk

I didn't usually wear ties
but that night I did. the situation demanded it
I was afraid not to.


visiting London makes my nose bleed
I drip drops in the shape of seas
the atlantic here, the pacific there,
the Baltic in my newspaper.

The roads aren't nice
or well behaved


I have saxons in the backgarden

Romans in the front.

You say
don't worry it will turn out right.


I sat back and painted the buildings change in watercolour

it rained and was such fun.

I couldn't stop.

*After Vladimir Mayakovsky, ‘Lilichka – May 26 1916, Petrograd'

First Sleep

The first sleep of her life was in a milk crate. She was born to nomads who only ever travelled the same twenty miles up and down the path way left by the defunct railway line. Her family had a wooden caravan, something akin to Professor Marvel’s caravan in the Wizard of Oz. Her father was a professor, mad with schizophrenia which he claimed was the result of living in a totalitarian country. Her mother said “Don’t be stupid, this is Sweden” and her father said “Exactly”. Her mother had given up on the idea of medicine for him and dutifully copied his rants at night in a spiral notebook.

The first time she saw the Wizard of Oz was in a basement of a church that was showing old movies. If her family presented a sight, no Lutheran eye betrayed it. They were served coffee and sweets. She liked the hymns before the movie very much. At the part when the witch entered, she was seized by such a fright that she climbed under her chair and watched the rest of the movie with her head poking out, as if from bars of a prison. She discovered that she liked prison.

After the movie, she spent many days in a row turning the radio dial, trying to find the theme music of the witch somewhere between all the admonishing news reports and the tired sounding pop songs. Her mother threatened her with a wooden spoon if she kept it up, so she put the radio to her ear with the volume almost inaudible. She heard a lady singing like a bird and it thrilled her. Later she sang it while doing dishes with the next to last jug of water. Her father told her it was the song of a mechanical doll. Shortly after that she found an old Victrola and half a corset in the woods near the stagnant pool. She didn’t bring them home because she didn’t want her parents to try to sell them. She instead visited the spot daily on the pretense of looking for firewood. She slipped the corset on and cranked the broken handle of the Victrola while singing the doll song.

If you are out walking, notice the rubbish. It often arranges itself artfully in the environment so that you would almost think that it was a rubbish offering left by a rubbish tribe, which actually it often is. A green milk crate floats in a stagnant pool, made by rancid rainwater, and becomes an accidental shrine in the Shinto tradition. Or consider some iron bars lying on a hillside in a handsome formation that some idiot might spend months of time rearranging in a gallery under the auspices of a government grant and rename “Revolution by Iron Horse” Think about cars sunk deeply and criminally into swamp land that immerge later magnificently covered in barnacles. There will come a time when this is all you have, just as it was all you had when young when other people had all the possessions. You possessed rubbish and floating voices and you seized onto them fiercely for a day or two as they took a looming importance in your childhood prison. Then, you forgot them or rather they became part of your memory compost from which grew nothing in particular, if you are to be honest. In the beginning, there is always the end and the end isn't up to much. Or at least that's according to you.



What do you travel with a sentence like it gets dark at unusual times. This is an old notebook from the day you were in love with nature. A short woman from Győr with trendy glasses. No one answers the telephone. Sublime flares of heavenly light from burning luxury cars. A tall man with a scar above his right eye visits the moon with money he stole from his father. Unreal life.

The short woman from Győr with trendy glasses kissed the tall man visiting the moon with money stolen from his father above the left eye. She squinted at the scar above his right eye & danced to the alarms of the burning luxury cars. He says I wanted to give you all my money I wanted to abuse prescription drugs. It was getting dark at unusual times he says she puts her clothes on the weather in London is windy & cold with further showers.

Literature is inexperience mediated & unsung. A short woman from Győr with trendy glasses stands in a small room with creased & dusty curtains & presses her pale blue cotton blouse. A CD player in a cage plays a recording of a linnet singing in a small room with creased & dusty curtains. Real unlife. Economically inactive. Clouds

blew the wind across the moon, an empty wardrobe floated on the water swam across the meadow to the slaughterhouse & the dance academy.

Do you remember how to say goodbye. A short man with a scar above his left eye tries on a tall woman from Győr’s trendy glasses for fun. The moon swims on the water floats across the motorway to the opera house & the slaughter academy. Experience is economic activity for the dead. The short woman from Győr buttons up her crisply pressed blue blouse. She puts on a grey skirt & carpet slippers she wears a coat of brightest night she walks out on to the moon. The song of a linnet the song of police sirens the smell of burning luxury cars. She’s happy. She takes illegal drugs. The weather in London is windy & cold with unrelenting rain.

Do you remember the room where we slept together 1 afternoon. You’d found a rug in a skip & had put it in the middle of the room to cover the bare boards. I could hear the railway but you said you were so used to it all you heard was birdsong & your radio. I said that’s beautiful but was lying. I was always telling lies. You said I’m always telling lies. But that’s true about the railway & birdsong & my radio. I want you to go now. I said it’s getting dark. You said that’s usual it’s the usual time. The streets aren’t safe you must go now. So I said goodbye. When I went you weren’t listening to your radio. I might as well have been dead but wasn’t. We must remain the party of extreme revolutionary opposition.



Echo.



thousands flee across the borders of your crossed legs.

we converse by sticky notes.

there it is an hour gone. between us.

It has returned. we recognise it at once as being exactly the same. well not quite exact

but as a fake town
signs and wonders
the desert at night.

when the party was left we stopped at the crossroads

quando quando quando.



voices as if
a radio was still turned on
something hadn't been turned off
in the distance
the light still on in the study



you licked your lips

you are driving us crazy.

and we don't worry about the elms
and the leaking roof staining
the ceiling coffee coloured blood

and we are getting better someways

I read about Hadrian's wall
in the foyer of your hotel
at the foot of your tower block
surrounded by birdsong
the like I have
never heard before.

The earth is in a state of alarm



everywhere is a tourist destination

and so we wait in the motel
for our phones to alert us
to getting up time.

Pause

Plus-que-Parfait will now pause for a while.

Part II - Kaddish - will soon be available as an e-book from Red Ceilings Press.

Plus-que-Parfait III: due to begin sometime around October. With exciting guest contributions.

Watch this space!

Creation Spins Again

there was only emptiness
the sad absence
that stopped us.

forgive me

my town in Mexico

by the fountain.

I really wish you were here with me
watching movies on the sofa.


before/after
cold generates more cold
as energy does energy
seemingly
heat makes heat
a transition period between wakefulness and sleep.


things I remember happening
lasts only a brief time
counterpoint. Body temperature starts to decrease and heart rate begins to slow.

I am lost. there is a fine mist. very fine mist

climbing limes.


If you awaken someone in this stage, they might report that they weren't really asleep.

I think I saw this film before. certain bits are the same as
between light sleep and a very deep sleep

five stages of grief
five stages of death

in the small things

like russian doll.


Salt marsh and mud flat.
A black car still rusts by the red broken down barn.

Electric eel shock. grabbing out at the rope.


we drank in the bar together after work
the one by the crossroads
under the beeches
by the zebra crossing.

when I walk past the iron railings by the park I remember

the birds sing without urging

in the scholar's garden.


Where they chopped down the trees new trees grow now.

I think I saw this film before red as rowan berry.

Like bamboo.

Lasts only a brief time in the small of things.

There is no air in this room. it's blinds are down.


Things I remember happening.

They love beginnings. Can't get enough.

Apples bruised. Fruits decay. Wire rusts. Forgive loss. There is a fine mist. It breaks into pixels. The scene becomes cubist. We are all depicted by little squares Yours are blue, mine are red, a transition between. Between the room. A curtain of gold. We are in the Guggenheim. It becomes automatic New York. New York Public Library.


An article on the 5 stages of grief. We take the slip road. Heading North. Something is playing on the radio.

That security guard has a photographic memory.

On 5th avenue.

In the shop windows a triptych

jewels

the blueprint of the songbird genome


So be it.

I love the way you say that.

Say it again please.


*****


By midday it had stopped not raining. Then the animal impersonators emerged from the crowd & climbed a few steps to the stage. There was warmth to the sea & a smell of frying meat. A few police lounged near the abattoir, their tongues flickering in & out to catch passing dragonflies. Becky’s bare arms were white as oil. The animal impersonators began their act. Becky began to massage her face with nude fingers. The animal impersonators, slyly, began to terrorise the crowd. A few police smiled, hypnotising. I’d borrowed Michelangelo’s coat. Becky was slumped in the doorway, listening to the wristwatches of passers by. Nothing could distract her, not even the soft singing of her mother becoming wilder & wilder as night came on. We were at the location described in that silenced film.

It was difficult to get sufficiently clean for the animals to agree to feed us.

I asked Becky for sex. Michelangelo’s coat was punctuated by cigarette burns corresponding to the disposition of corpses expected for tomorrow’s riot. The king showed us around his palace. In each magnificent chamber dozens of humming birds fanned the air, cooling the ripped bodies of the king’s soldiers – victims of the animal impersonators. The king ordered Sarah to read from a book of jokes, & this she did in the queen's silvery voice. The queen took Michelangelo’s coat from me & lay down beneath it to die. & the animals set up a moaning which intensified becoming wilder & wilder as night turned to day.

becky said we must do sex. we left the train at vauxhall & walked a few streets to a terrace house backing on to the railway line.
i said where’s the sky gone she said under the earth, that’s where the sky has gone.
we lay on the bed & she threw a sheet over us & she said this is what you do.
i was younger than becky who was older than me.
when we were finished i said i’ll go now becky.
i don’t remember her name.
she got up from the bed, pulled on her dress & some blue woollen knee socks & left the house.
i heard the door shut then 0thing.
it was very cold in the room & then i heard tomorrow’s riot.
it was frighteningly alone.
i love you, but i’ll never see you again

The king said now you must leave my palace. But 1st you must help me bury the queen. A solemn music, darkglister with viols & sackbuts. The animals stood at the graveside, laughing & playing hopscotch. Now I am at peace said the king. Ask the citizens to hang me from a tree


*****


In the Call Center, people are calling in droves wishing to be enrolled in the Death Stories program. This is a program in which the newly dead are given special stones in which they may record the story of the moment of their dying. The stones are then flown in by special Masonry Angels who place them in chinks of old stone walls and pathways along the countryside. I suppose there is a nice symmetry to this, a story of leaving the earth put back into the earth, but it also seems like a slight waste of time to me. There is also an issue of exactly who is handling this program. The Archives Dept says that we should send callers to the Lives Accountable Dept but Lives Accountable says that they don’t really handle moments of death. So, we end up bouncing the callers back and forth between departments as the callers grow increasingly more desperate sounding. I suppose I understand. There is only so long before they will forget the moment of death in the same way that the living soon forget the moment of birth. There is only so much time until their entire stories will be no more than a plucking of a string. But they don’t understand the importance of this either.

P’tach lanu-the gates are closing on a former life. We hear them closing through a key of many sharps and further beyond a long forgotten key of no particular name. It is the key of the songs that our mothers sang to themselves while hanging sheets on the clothes line. When we pray, we can see a glimpse of them disappearing and reappearing between the billowing white, through the black crisscross of the back garden gate.

A film flickers by. It is something about Jews dancing; a mass of black hats swirling in a green garden where a white tent flaps in the wind. Or it is something about Jews walking; women with head scarves pushing prams carefully though ghettos. Or it is Jews lifting their arms to conduct orchestras or play violins. Or it is not Jews. Or it is everybody, for everybody has at least one lifetime as a Jew.

The film burns to the edges of the frame. It is a dark tear expanding to white, then nothing. Then after this we see the ghetto empty of people and filled instead with hundreds of birds; hundreds of magpies, blackbirds and sparrows settling on the ledges of gutters and windows and making a din. Hundreds of robins, nightingales, and songbirds singing impartially and yet urgently the start of yet another creation. Hundreds of birds in the empty ghetto and along the walls are the imprints of mysterious graffiti that the Angels whispered into the brick. Here are the subtitles, right to left in a language we can’t read. Creation spins again, the film reel goes round and round, le dor va dor. A tired old man sits by the projector , dozing and dribbling into his beard. He is neither slumbering or sleeping, just dozing. As long he dozes, he will not reach out his hand and turn off the projector. May we live through at least another matinee. V’imru Amein.

sparrow

I live in sorrow. I live in sparrow. I wish to lie down among bells until this grief passes. The problem is that I live in sorrow. The problem is that I live in sparrow. I live in sorrow. I live as a sparrow in a sparse spire. Everything I like is black and white. At night, I watch films while playing the piano. I watch a film about a nun on a windy hill. In the film there are great bells swinging. I am breathless with the anticipation of her inevitable madness.

The music on the page has many sharps. They sit in curlicues like gates to many previous keys. Even in sound, they sound like the past. It is a French song about war and it is sad cabaret. It is a feminine song. I nearly feel as if I should be well dressed to play it.

The nun is ready to jump. Her madness was never tampered down by gates and sharps. All wind is microtonal and wind will get through anything. I love a windy day myself. She takes to it and we don’t see if it takes her back. Mad women identify as birds. They begin to see themselves as augurs; as things that might crash into castle windows after scrying too long in the mossy well.

My voice trails out like smoke and fringe. The tone of it is all shawls, stockings and smoke in split glass. The restraint required is killing me. The sharps are gates that offer a glimpse into something like bars in a window of a downstairs restaurant. This is a glimpse into previous life; one lived in tableau of excess that had seemed romantic at the time. It is so lonely to look through the sharps into another life.



The languages of night.
Languages of the night.
The night of language.
S.

Pornopanoply.
Colonisation.
A walk in the rain, while spiders scuttle through her hair.
Poor visibility.
Motorcar in the dark, an orange cat on a shed roof attending.
Winter speak.
Do you love me? Haaaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa>zïol.
Shirt hanging out of his trousers.
Lips slideslither
: mind my lipstick!

Another night.
Unlanguaged.
Eerily still, only the whispering of spiders in the ivy.
1 orange cat enters the room.
Switch on the TV.
Invisible poor.
A walk beside the river.
Grey trees, matt cloudscape.
Do you recognise the handwriting?
Do you hate me?
Lips dry as poetry. (As).

Photo-spread of a prison cell.
In white & black
(yes).
Disturbingly, the lower left corner appears to ooze disturbed.
Spreaslitherding.
No sun here.
A gasp of sun.
Bare back & the trees spitting rags.
Down among the blades.
Spying their feet.
Erotic cars motor away.
Central London.

Took shelter.
The world ominously fragile.
Where are these whimpering their origin?
From my own throat they come, touching your breast bone, beating at the window with sensationless fingertip.
Turns the last photo over.
The river vanishes for a while.
Endlessness of world.

Uniform fetish.
Good clean food.
Sleep here for unintended consequence.
How longing is an elastic bound?
Deliriously navigable church.
A lacy rabbit hutch in the sky & the river besides.
All living things are quiet, all dead things attend.
She tells him “closer.”

In close focus mist.
Strange colours, the prison walls fold in.
Shooting dots out of the sky, making necklaces of beaks & hard eyes.
Anxiety, desuetude.
Backed into a corner.
Jeans & lace up boots.
Scary motor cars now.
Taxi with smashed windscreen.
Stinking mouth.



Karl & Erica had lived in Stockholm for 9 yearsThey loved how you could buy pastries at midnight, how when it snowed all the church bells rang outThey spoke Japanese beautifully, they grew pineapples up among the owls, high in their rooftop gardenWeekends they would sail away, to a quiet place & vanish9 years later Stockholm seemed so changed, but so did Erica; &, as if implicated in last century’s thoughts, lace making no longer calmed herKarl played cards every Wednesday evening, as in the past, but often found himself thinking of George W Bush Snr. + getting an erection when he should have been concentrating on the game.

The bank robbers screamed at Erica to get down on the floorBut those days she moved too slowly for crime: the bank robbers knew their chance had goneScents of drug overdoses & frying beef & wild honeysuckle drifted through the windows of the bankStockholm forgot them.

& lace up bootsOn one side, the river; at his back some empty boxes, rubbish binsNo stars along the wallA scuttling soundKarl awkwardly brushes Erica’s lips with his lipsThe songbird in its cage starts upErica calls out to Karl in JapaneseHe listens, but understands nothingIs she saying goodbye?



They eat their pastries sat in front of the TV.
A beautiful human is explaining: the crisis will pass.
Sacrifices will be made.
Democratic values will prevail.
That makes Karl glad.
& Erica ...



she cries herself asleep, curled up in a ball on the floor of the bankThe robbers have a new set of demandsThey want the Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele to be flown out to Stockholm & to perform the Prelude & Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, right there in the zoo“You will sing Isolde’s part,” they tell Erica“But I cannot sing,” Erica answers them“You can sing,” they say“Trust us”



hues of

we made choices there

I love the sound
of the wind in the trees

in the trees in the hills now the blood
has left your body and your heart beat
stills by the side of this muddy river.

payne's grey
cerulean blue raw sienna
yellow ochre
cadmium yellow
permanent mauve
no black
ivory black
wax black


the finger on your hand
the fingernail on your finger

the ring on your finger
your fingers in the trees.

ars moriendi

absence that stopped us

Unter den linden

with a name like a bird or a river

will it ever stop raining.


The winds come together then go separate ways on this coast

the snow on the branch

and dressed in blue you turned and walked away

reservoir half empty

ferns

opposite of white and grey

when does night arrive. we are hungry

nobody dies

afterimage of night

cobbled path

through the windscreen wipers we can barely see the road

you never wear sunglasses. cool isn't cool.


30 things I noticed


filled with angels

what is left behind?

your free eye test

relics in boxes

Herefordshire and orchard

a needle through calico

the black death of village

a boil under the armpit

you are in my contacts

i love my iphone

and the red bush. the bush that seemed to speak.

she had not stood there long

he had not stood there long

they'll sleep only when there's a need

how ridiculous is money

i dream of the rood.

SIX

Sometimes, all the time, I like to curl up in the past. Or rather, I find it unavoidable. Because, if I don’t take an idle doze in it, it comes screaming in my dreams. It is a mistake to think this is psychological. It is the workings of time, which works as irrationally and effectively as the body. It’s akin to circulation problems and the way that flow of blood can collect and pool anywhere when a vein goes weak. The body does not always intuit other pathways that might keep the blood in motion. So it is with the passage of time as it collects and pools in the atmosphere. It’s almost as if one has to create the phantom limb that will provide the means of circulation; that is to say re-member. Sometimes the limb is a collective limb; in fact they may always be collective limbs for all I know. Maybe this is always how time is circulated.

I miss you. Limb, limbic, limbo-the body needs touch. If I can’t touch you, then you are not here. In this way, I am limited. I have to return all these books to the library. I think this may help matters a great deal if these things I have been touching return to their place on the proper shelves. I love libraries and the feel of them. I love the cool and spongy spined books waiting there patiently in arrangements that turn mysterious even in the face of a simple organizational system. It is such that if you turn the corner of a bay of shelving you might encounter anyone you’ve ever known dead or alive. I think this is true; then again I haven’t been to the library in years. I am too busy searching for angels in light boxes. I must return the books to the land of the tactile circulation.

I dream of books making their way across the bedroom, going slowly down the stairs and out the door, moving as things that are surfacing from the bottom of a long stagnant pool.





it is in the barcode black

and white in the photograph some angles some lean slight to the left

others to right

considered, arranged, taken



so in between I remember you

your face in the right hand mirror

the ipod your open mouth singing into the wind

then I thought. this is it. this is that
which my father told me of

I am about to die. not now but soon. time flies. tempus fugits

and all the helping in the garden didn't help

the apples shook down form the trees

I would kill for a cup of coffee.

I can't get a connection. no



black and white the light scans

the rice pudding

her lines
microfilm the photograph when

stood at the front of the cottage by

the new electric lamp post.

see. It comes back

the pond is still

and green

and the bubbles in the ice move.

I love the noise of moving ice.

I love pink
I love love



This is our land

our garden of dahlias.



And the wood
I would love to climb those trees again.

my arms are those of a teenagers.

I would climb and climb and climb.





The ground got steeper, & we climbed with our knees until the sun, naked & ill coordinated, rests upon our shoulder blades.

She slouched in the hotel lobby, her bag on her knees, & he creeps at her from behind to rest his hands upon her shoulder blades.

It got dark, & we could not move or cry out. The sun is unmoving, weighing like a sleepy wren upon our shoulder blades.

She got to her feet, shrugging his hands from her shoulder blades & says: I waited an hour for you, now I’ll wait no longer.

On the worn carpet a vase of plastic flowers, spill of grey & pink, + a penknife blade.

She asked him, how did this scar come by you, & he was learning to speak in the Dutch language & he answers saying someone cut me with a knife the blade was dull.

We had to bump the car from behind, to escape from the parking space, David can see the scar on Lisa’s naked arm as she works the steering wheel dull in the pink & grey streetlight.

We skipped downhill, no one laughed, the fat old dogs on the dump growl at us, Lisa displays her scarred arm they fall silently.

In the library I was blind; the police said now you have handled the knife your fingerprints are upon it. Amsterdam resembles a wristwatch wrapped in cabbage leaves.

She walked from the hotel out on to the street, he followed her they don’t say more than two words the entire day, the knife is where he left it in the library.

I followed her all day, & the ground got steeper & she floated up into the clouds & I prised my eyes out on a knife point & make a balloon of my tears & float up to join her.

Lisa swings the car into a suburb, zigzagging between 1. parked car & 2. dreaming horse.

They buried dead words in the library garden, a wren wakes from its slumbers & flutters down to rest upon Magda’s shoulder blades.

The sun was cold upon the blade of the gun.

It lay there, stretched in fine wire, & the fat old dogs laughed.

David took some drugs, lay down to attend to the future, a police car swung through the hotel corridor into his room right up close to the bed.

The clouds were disappeared & rain fell fizzing from our shoulder blades.

They walked around on the TV, helicopters buzzing them.

Lisa jumps through the mirror. The TV floods with tears.

Kaddish 5 "all those poets who died for the love of sound"

the standardised cries close cropped & woven catch at the mattress in lovelessly two wire pigs a riverbank of gunmetal turned the dark bread to its headline foaming a shimmer postponed landscape 2 wire pigs a riverbank of moleskin the car turns over afternoon evaporates hey Veronika is that the cinema two wire pigs shimmer the evaporating mattress flesh eating post-dated land-flow redacted flowers shoot up saviour & bottled apricot shivery silks as beautiful as nowhere

stopping

to kiss a bridge bending its back 1000s of missiles

tumbling

the lake little dog chasing its stomach so gho street eyes clicking out & in smoky rain unimagine the flap of skin along bottle groove & grove halo minstrelsy xzarpxzarp, the standardised cries cropped & mattressed lovelessly to the slum to wired pigs turning the woven bread whispers from abandonedbuildings

mutated, veron’ka is that the Cinema:1000s

o’butterwasps

the blade soft.
shake out o’white sleevecuff
nail wrist. littlelittle dog
chasing its stomach,another surveillance curse
old&alone.

spectres rare vectors

mbrace for Time then let goe

hot of hair in’s mouth. in absolute

voicelessness

stuffing clothes into flowerfire
a breakfast was on table a long time.
dog being
a cat
beseach a rat

next time they visited the seaside with
capitalist they had executed.
& the shakes, fierce & upon us all.
walked towards the sea. the sea in a park in a city.
chased its stomach

type words on a screen.
on the wrong side of the screen.
throw windows at bricks
let’s have a milkshake & vodka

the human equivalent is
effect of several bright discs darkening the hills start to writhe

“hushclicl. k. format, bleak. stunned, at risk.mystery of the animal.lastwords. 1st ecstatic
for,matnaked. brink of misery. indefinite animal screaming
allday&night.going blindnessed

~~~

i.

nothing of importance
is happening here.

the woods are getting closer
clouds take away the stars
the parts of your feelings
that count


ii.

the unkind things that were said at the gate

rain grey rain

cold hood tree

long types of cloud

and some tied into the shapes of animals

the fence how it followed the curve of the hill towards the wood

the wood we don't speak of

the wood where the children wont play

the wood where the bracken whispers

lords and ladies
fungi big as umbrellas
puff balls
grasping bramble


blue overcoat.


red glossy glistening shiny berries. red lipped berry
big cup fruits

sunset mist coming. bent hawthorn. a damp wet wood

silent really
really silent.


iii.

we always avoid
forever dodge
never count

at all times

cracks in the pavement
ladders
magpies.

we skated across the frozen lake

big red sun falling behind the hill
black rooks rising in a squall

quite wild geese
simple silent
snowing

trees.


iiii.

we have stopped talking
we are full of word

in winter
the hill is shrouded in fog
for weeks.

i miss you
when you are gone.

~~~

?!)
+ closed, + confrontation, + fast-food, + Sweat, + the ingredients, + the thought that + those
-ing so bought, -ity of the guilt, - satisfactorily
33
About time, Absolutely not, A layer behind, A necessarily drawn, A settlement
Behind privets, beginning), By questions
Can only try, Ceaseless, Childish (at 10 though, Closed, Closest, Coming Consequently, Continuation
Difficult talk, Disclosure (at least, Dissemble
Either, Endpoint, Energy, Expenditure, Experienced as
Fashions, First thought being, Fresh as yesterday, For the day, For too long
Greater hopes
Her balled tights, Here + going, He should, Him to, How outmoded
Impossible to imagine, Irrational
Linda, Line
Maintained until, Memory, Mid-row terrace, Miserable mainly, Misunderstood Money can be saved
Necessary, Nose full, Not him, Now, Now being a parent
Of cat, Of eye contact, Of hers, Otherwise
Passing, Past, Pieced together un, Problem even, Protect the boy -
Re-boot now though, Rested, Round the floor
Sense, Shouldn't have, Shouldn't see, Sleep, So can't chew over, social fall. A, Strange how, Such things
Tan is, Thankfully but, That aroma, That smell, The corollary of, The opposite way The perhaps natural, There, The tired couch, Third person, Those unpractised, To contrast, To then spit out, Too much +
Understand, Unforgettable, Unplannable, Unpleasant though, Unreliable Unthinkable, Unused
Was silent about, Wasted, Well, What he, Will stay, Worst
Year of the Undergraduate, You were fat –

~~~

pples-A for.
When we are driving we see wooden signs with painted apples along the way, one per hour. By this, we surmise we are yet alive. Your breath is on my neck. It is May. We are in love and driving once more to Berlin.
Yesterday, we climbed the hills after a long breakfast. We had heard something about Alphabet Angels landing on Kinder. You were laughing at the thought of them landing here. We did not see them but did see well dressings along the way. They were pictures of musicians and apples. You could not read the Aramaic along the bottom but I could. It was Kaddish.

Question-are we still questing? Resting? We are restless, that is true, missing our friends the way we do; Otto, Veronica, even hateful Rennecke. But they belong to another time, to Biological Time.

Some have protested about the way in which Judeo Christian concepts still dominate the Way Stations. For example, this emphasis on language, on sacred alphabets; some rightfully feel that this is an obsolete distraction. I'm inclined to agree about the seeming meaningless of it all. It's more than just language has been rendered such by overuse. I think that anyone can recognize this phenomenon and after all the Alphabets were created to address this. It very well could be that certain vowels and sounds can indeed restore order if perfectly intoned. One of the reasons they are made blind is so that they can resist the temptation to describe. Still I don't know if this is all ultimately a foolish exercise.

Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya seh aleinu. Ve'a kol y'Israel. Ve'imeru Amen.

Has a ring, I must admit.

German has always been our favourite language despite the fact that we barely speak it. I love all those poets who died for the love of sound. No harm as my darling frequently has said. There was no need to describe nature really. When we walk we merely fall silent and that is as it should be. But somehow, it's never enough. I write a letter to Mother, gushing about wildflowers and lush green hills. I suppose I want her to experience it too but it's more a desperation to add my voice to it. It comes as tinny and incomplete. I don't struggle until I am pale and feverish the way that they did. But neither do I pin the world to a board, words fluttering to their deaths like sad butterflies. Now we are driving to Berlin, wunderschoenen.

the voice of richard barrett can be heard therein