Ultimate Thumbprint (your)

We watched them paint the wall white
obliterate all that was there



You might find yourself falling through multiple manifestations or incarnations on your way to find your Ultimate Thumbprint. 99% of you will long to identify these "mani-carnations" as "me" or "myself". There is no harm in these sorts of false identities as long as you understand them to be necessary errors on your way to discovering your UT. As long as you expect disappointment.



Who are you really? Many of you don't care any more and that is right.



But as one of our customers put it in the following letter:



"I am not the Coke commercial that rattles in my head from 1975 and I am not the stupid joke about cantaloupe that my father told every day of the summer months. I am not the bad information that is given about nutrition every week, in the papers. Well...maybe I am the cantaloupe joke. And some jump rope rhymes. I honestly don't know. If data covers me like moss or rust, do I have a right to insist on my original structure or condition?"

What structure or condition was that we ask? Our customer explains her plight eloquently, which is your plight too. But she misses the metaphor. It is not her fault and it isn't yours. Nobody asked you if you would like to become the vast meme storage house that you are. But you are.

Let's put it this way. Picture a perfectly white wall. Gorgeous, isn't it. Now picture sentence after sentence painted in tiny black script on that white wall. Picture a tiny sample about the size your open palm. It reads like this:

I'd like to teach the world to sing

Oh honey I cantaloupe

in perfect harmony

She sang, she sang, she sang so sweet

healthy foods that really aren't

I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner

Aiko Aiko Annee



And so on. It's not exactly Wordsworth I know but it has it's own little rhythm.



Now picture four immense walls all the painted the same and with tens of thousands of sentences. Four angels dance in the middle in a fit of epilepsy. That is your knowledge of yourself.



Now pull back until it all merges into a blurry, swirling pattern. This is your Thumbprint. Are you happy with this?



It's no use to be happy or unhappy. Sentences ate you while wild angels danced. Your Thumbprint is the story of your death that happened the minute you were born. So why do you care so much about being unique?



A listener is on the line saying:



"But I don't care about unique. Well maybe in this instance that a Blackbird chose my garden wall to build a nest. This makes me feel pretty special, pretty blessed. My lover painted the wall white while he whistled and the Blackbird chose there to build her nest."



Blackbird memes are among the most beloved of memes. You are right to be happy for your proximity to blackbirds. For only the Blackbird is not used by her own song in her brief and tuneful life.



But as for you, the writing is on the wall.





Summer’s ghostings. Stringed of stars. As they paint their wall they watch us in our
frenzy
what I am afraid of again
as they paint their wall they watch us & obliterate

Her smile, the scratch from the coarse grass & weed & bottle black dandelion upon her thigh (inner, right)
I’m alone on a bench in the terrible cold sun
I approach the wall & they watch me approach the wall & I avoid their gaze
white-out



numberless ghosts 1-100

The stars run golden as blood, silent as a riot

we ran from where the car was burning the river was close by
pissed
Down a "one-way-street"
Word on a wall. wall on a word.
she stretches out on the grass. Weirdness of the breeze that seems not to move is in her hair & across her eyelashes. Her lips have been chewed to bits



everything looks different. Différance. the room stinks of old white paint gone flabbily grey. she



bites me on the SHOULDER & the railway goes away out from the city out into the suburbs & crying children & someone hanging themself from the garage roof ...

... we watch them. They paint the wall white. With every coat of paint the words
beneath the paint upon the wall burn through the back of the wall & out into the

"World." Trillions of fish bicycle through the streets randomly shooting water pistols filled with napalm at passers by
hashish in marseilles
she bites me on the shoulder & i look at her closed eyes & kiss the lids. i go to sleep. they continue to paint the wall white as a blind man’s summer sun at noon. is this where we were headed? it’s nothing much of a place. near a small stream & rubbish. stop crying you’re making me sad



Excuse me. Why are you painting this wall white. My friends want to know. They wrote the words on this wall & did the pictures. The pictures represent the Garden of Eden. The words are their own invention, they represent nothing. Does the whiteness you are painting the wall with represent the Garden of Eden before or after or during The Fall. Or does it represent nothing. does it represent my friends’ words. are my friends’ words nothing. beyond representation, nothing. fucking ideal fucking nothing. We are Fulham super Fulham we are Fulham fuck Chelsea. They’ve got no fucking features. The people painting the fucking wall have got no fucking features. They say they are angels come to reclaim the earth for God. for good? i just want to kiss you once again. on the lips. taste your breath. feel your hair against my forehead. then i’ll kill myself. gladly.

fröhliche wissenschaft





words mean nothing



or nothing means words were



the sun stands still for a day or two



the opposite of black



the colour of milk or fresh snow



a sheet of white paper

due to the reflection of most wavelengths of visible light

approaching such a colour; very pale

pure; innocent and untainted having white

flowers or pale-colored fruit

having light-colored bark



made

from white grapes

or dark grapes with the skins removed

served with milk or cream

transparent; colourless



from a light-coloured, sifted, or bleached flour



wash whites separately



pieces in chess

white ball

the outer part (white when cooked) that surrounds the yolk of an egg; the albumen



the visible pale part of the eyeball around the iris



a white or cream butterfly that has dark veins or spots on the wings. It can be a serious crop pest



white out



white something out

obliterate a mistake with white correction fluid. • cover one's face or facial blemishes completely with makeup

impair someone's vision with a sudden bright light.



this cannot be taught or understood ever again



the typewriter is now dead



the genetic bit is



you were taken by it



skint



we were



on that day.

... linguistically fluent in Targoviste

I hate it when you get angry with me.

they always missed the sales.

the television set wasn't bought from argos.

they bought the best for christmas.

when the brick fell they didn't notice.

they saved.

when they were young they used to walk past the pigsty.

they climbed the apple tree to shake the fruit down.

he thought rabbit hunting was fun.

there was nothing much in the ward that sometimes served as a cinema.

he used to love watch the nurse, Hilda, wrap the bandages around my leg.

such a brave paratrooper she said.

we often played backgammon and drank cotes de rhône.

always after we turned the gas low.

there were no rabbits.

the cars had stopped crashing.

hidden by curtains we washed each other.

it was a bit like Spain.

well sort of. if you blinked. If you stared at the lights.

yesterday. I recalled a train journey.

I remember we wrote to someone in spanish.

sometimes I miss the pizza we enjoyed at grimaldi's

they have missed breakfast twice now.

I guessed it had being snowing yesterday.

going by your shoes.

my father and mother are not my real parents.

my dear aunt has gone out.

I hate fishing.

I think I am deaf.

I care not for topiary.

at night when I put my shoes on.

they walk around the house slamming doors.

all the time they hum hymns.

when you hide behind the newspaper.

he was awake by a half dead campfire.

Andrew often think how exciting it would be to be a cowboy.

I am.

no, I don't speak German.





Also sprach Otto: What good are your angels dancing on pins? Or your ruminations on timeless time? Every generation breed the same consortium of halfwit hippies. Happies. About what are you happy? Woe unto them who bind vanity with cords of inanity. Hear ye! Rome isn’t going to burn neatly this time in a merry bonfire around which you may dance. Stockholm isn’t going to burn like a pretty Yule log. All will disappear in a fiery instant including you. And all will be sucked into the twinkling Cyclops eye of He who watches and neither slumbers nor sleeps. Swedish Idol shall pass away. Howl ye terrible poets and songwriters! Ein festering Bugger is our Gott. And an angry Bugger he is too.

The church secretary looked up wearily though the netting in her little Film Noir hat. “That’s not quite it, is it Reverend?” she said in her Ingrid Bergman purr.

“I hate folk masses” the Reverend said by way of explanation.

“That little solemn gypsy who lives at the hotel is here again”, the secretary sighed.

“Good, good-we’ll have some pastry then”

She enters carrying her small Bible. She has come to ask him how it she might go to prison without committing a crime and therefore a sin. Her desire for confinement has grown immense. Sometimes she begs the hotel maids to leave her in the cleaning closet while they go about their cleaning rounds. Most of them, except Alexandra, tell her to suit herself and not to touch the cleaning fluids. She never does but looks amazed at the blue coloring of the liquid and the menace of the spray nozzles. She counts and recounts the folded sheets. She passes the mop back and forth between her palms while she scryes the inside of the mop bucket. One time she saw Mrs. Almquist’s face at the bottom and became so frightened that she banged helplessly at the door until Alexandra finally heard her. “You see, I told you not to stay in there”, Alexandra said patting her head.

The Reverend is amused at her request. He thinks it psychological, something to do with a need to be settled in a place. He is wrong. She doesn’t desire to be settled, she desires to be efficient. She desires a sort of spiritual mechanization process that will allow her to watch the world from outside of herself. She thinks the routine of confinement might speed this process by years. She does not tell him this however because she does not possess the words. She pictures her soul as silver; a bubble fairy singing only the highest and most impervious notes laid out in rows of gleaming teeth. She does not tell him this either but merely rearticulates her request to be somehow sentenced to a prison term.

The Reverend leans forward in his chair and offers her a pastry.

“I can’t send you to prison but I can send you to school. There is a choir there, you will like it”

The girls nods and understands herself to be further sentenced to childhood .





Professor Aurélia Blight & Otto awoke by a .5 dead campfire. In the distance a giant department store appeared to float free of the plateau, like an embalmed yet living grasshopper. Aurélia kissed Otto. He signed to her, do the birds sing? They walked beside the river Elbe, admiring its medieval mermaids.

Sunday formed a crust on their kisses. Otto climbed aboard the dodgem cars, & machine-gunned the crowd of 1000 year old children. Where a child fell a football stadium sprang up, & the birds flew over the shadow-children excitedly to watch the games.

Sally & Simon patched the roof with snow. The zoo was very close now; in the stillness of the longest day they could hear it rolling towards them, the animals laughing for pure joy & the exhilaration of non-existence. Sally’s throat smelt of peppermint & coal dust. The snow blackened until they could paint by it. Sally painted many beautiful pictures of the fish in the sky & the birds in the sea. Simon fell over & broke his lips into maps. Sally combed her long yellow hair & smoked a cigarette. She sat in the window, her feet dangling above the street. She sang a few songs to herself & the clouds reached up to carry her away.

Professor Blight was teaching Logic to her orphaned students. When she had finished she joined Sally on a cloud & they drove the car away into winter before summer could end. Otto huddled in a doorway of the giant department store, which was now rooted to the plateau. In the terrible cold he sang songs for coins, songs which had been popular when Sally was young & Simon was asleep. People took photographs of him to forget they had ever been there. Then some police took him & kissed him all over his body which had ceased to be flesh & bone & skin & had become a map of rags. This was how the world ended.

They examine the bird carefully. It will break in their minds. They pull back a carpet & suck in cool mud. The oldest books are at the storm’s centre; windows rattle, eels rush hissingly across the sandy floor & bite their heels. In the next room the motel blinks & sleeps in sleepless blue popular symphonies. Jess keeps shooting at the TV screen; Pavel is too busy writing love letters to Patricia to care. The motel annex is the kind of place terrorists favour. They drive in & out of the carpark, all day long, & similar to the recurrence of the seasons they know no sequence.

Simon spent the next day cataloguing Mrs Johnson’s collection of whips & fetish wear. The oldest examples in the collection dated from next century. Suddenly he realised that the train had pulled into a station & was waiting for the signal to move on. Leaving Mrs Johnson’s collection to the mice & their infants he leapt from the train & ran down a grassy bank towards a small & brilliant river. The air was thick with butterflies & tremulous with birdsong. Sally sat by the river, her feet in the warm salty water. They embraced & night wrapped them around like the furry tongue of a great beast of prey.





the names of animal royalty

roberto duran eating a royal fish

screaming peach

drip jibbling his chin

beard black as bluebeard

awful fucking fights

he pushes familiars

to the brink of their walking station

owl ore and carrot diet

he eat two eggs, grits, two steaks

five glasses of orange juice, malt

drink, milk, peas, and then he got

punched in the stomach

naturally he’d had enough



sacred rye rub cracks

friend of Syria

never felt lonely on board

a sacred deck, home

guadalcanal, seeds

fasts speaking mud

my epic work – lumbii

celebration of the male

grope witch, my man ribbon

the earth is molten

everything is moving

spit & come swapping

you can have it out of me

with your mouth

like gummy hybrid migration

thankful chips



Hepsibah, queen of bees

I killed a French in a poem

stillbird in vietnam

shouting in wetdreamt

veeette-namme

some must be everyone + no one

incest was no explanation

bush crack hair wire

against caribou in ghana

boys playing tennis

black boys

I am a black poet

shifty and angry



hood that smells rancid

guess the animal dot

fix eager in Algeria

I am Mohammed Choukri

and driss ben hamed charidi

mixed up with Isabelle Eberhardt’s

church going relatives

dans Geneve

city of parks

and dry lakes with Ciara

sooting the tooth out of my arse

instead of an animal

like a dog – a pug

we got a covered band

and fuck all use that was



I knew Mog

I knew a closet cat

who would leper

coffee and mint tea

feet and socks

of Mohammed Khair Eddine

I have deliberately left out the double dot

Cecil in Vicenza

spying on a brush boat

of tourists

is at the edge of fervour

choosing his paint on a swatch

emulsifying a pigwash pink

for his daughter’s

tiny room



Coral Brancho is eating my toenails

and turning down

awards

the friend of people and animals

let me see you at the dawn of everyday

the calver with clean heads

cleaver Jane scribe

who drives anon

away civil evil

who writers trut

arsenic sulphide sunwipe

I’ve not done any evil in this land



all life and companions

just as I was on the call

the earth

black bone breaker

threatening the Jean Pascal

of Londonderry

not told lies lightly

there is a bomb on the milkfloat

I am a crock

crocq mersed in terror

and linguistically fluent in Targoviste

I dream shells

I am a crocodile

sponsored

who takes by violence

Spell 88



Reformatists

Transformatists

Phrasal

Repatristist

Disjunctivist

Reanimatist

Marktist

Satisirists

Hommerists

Politicists

Motelarists

Recidivists

Linguists

battery low



bring nothing new to the dinner table

yet toy

are the first to reap the upward guff of medicine

burn the school of gentlemanly conduct

burns

wipe in women’s hair

puree of the tomato

fud to the form of the novel

two directions of the novel

by some cunt

enter in peace

and leave because it got too hot

in there and someone died in the last

bacon competition in Finland

Sauna dirt fill the form of the novel



Enter in peace

technology that serves a purpose

while molesting a lamb scandal

with mint and veterans

cunning crossed with prison

priest of poison

hex on whiny jews

hiss hoss

stepoutwardforemost

last leg

the turning cog

upper leg is right leg

full mobility for army Billy

the bloody bandage is loose



slack vagina

omnivorous dance crasher

slack anus

turn is turned

backbent in a spinal memory

the legs x’d in a flourish

two thousands criminal prosecutions

no heart for defence

just give me a five pound note

I’m so poor and you own a car mate

you owe me a cigarette

just asking for directions

stupid cripple with spinabifada

on the Holborn ducket

eating chips

selling gymbox leaflets

fell into a bus



no internal organs of any kind

no lungs, liver or duodenum

no mouth even

no blood

no fear of water

no wife

no jacket

no winter

no crank

no cogs of the judicial

no crank

no whatever is within block

no crimps

no smile for me



hymen dragonface

complaining is the central interest of millenial American poetry

we watch the road

the dung beetle

to battle with a shitball

the carrot’s groin

touch the brow

of eyelashes

sweat black like a robbery

the one walking amongst them

folded

fucking quitter

from a rough area

he wasn’t given a chance to suceed

television warble catwipe



die blaue wheelbarrow

full of newly rescued human excrement

beetle frown

untrimmed bush

appear smile

vice versa sleek

intimidating shape bouncer

soldier condition for Easter

turned my life around

parsimonious

kip hemp & barley ween

shouting “hard work a mean business”

daft swift slip



our general is Gobbles

art with a spade

nibless fountain pen

prize living winnings

poorly tendered taxidermied tits

no wit

dig for bones

saliva smell around an untrimmed bush

barrage of mutes

low water quality

Ben Morris has dignity

bilett homosexual deepcut rape

mother-in-law or something

another pigeon unearthed concerned

encased in weed & bronze

dinner finally ready



Hanuman massage

monkey Elvis cancer of the bowels

iron tire does nothing to halt the snow

peace treaty

the siege of Copenhagen

bloodshed precum

O kindnesses!

thoughts of you & grime music pussyole

apparently useless

bus driver report

warm & smiling while peacefully asleep

courage for the hardest yard

pink & furry in the most charming of places

siege cannot fail

acoustic guitar is a dead instrument



robbed an old person

to pay for a reading of international

shot with a crossbow

ready loded beneath the mattress

machete beneath the pillow

and samurai sword, filipino fighting sticks

penknife, pepper spray

I have brooked this river once before

it ended well

far west superiority

winning ways



false memory

entreaty

horse march

run home

ihooves paint black holes

desert mud

blacker

emblem chest

red
steakbreast

blood mark disease

Angola prison harsh sentence

AIDS

should not eat bushmeat

the cross’d crusader



trouble with Tuesday double-vision

I eat fists & girl farts online

as though they were peaches

strange profession to choose to be a schoolteacher

the shout of the average

Sadness

my mother

moans

arrested

once more

once too often

for beating a muslin body roll

dyed blue

bound and torn in three



warfare limits to ten minutes per engagement

storm the chair

the ergonomic backache warbler

a life and legend in a bathtub

a walk from Exmouth to Topsham

a consensual

a mutual organism

rhizome junior locked up for fifteen

life spent with barely two come at the same time

schooling sandbag bayonett fust

stab that bastard in the face

I stabbed that bastard in the face

cut him Chris

I am ready to die for my country

are you?

complete turnaround

in a pub

somewhere

off the A30



russiancriminaltattoo.com

hot tits

polar obsession

pliers and other tools of dentistry

best to tell the prisoners we don’t money for dentures

permission to record the guest speaker

crash car in a zoo parking arena

baby bambi offering its rear to the wind

pink

pirelli calender by terry richardson

she won an award she was so good at it

but converted soon to that mumbo catholic

gund & snund

death & fire

whee bear churns butter

for the funeral



staged photograph

carnival in the mountains

first exhibition in Romanian church is poorly attended

but sounds great posthumously

Sunday Monday Tuesday

nazi whore search

knee to knee bent to the left

flag day

trip and skewered scrotum

dead in a car crash anyhow



S.J.Fowler is here

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.