You know, poems that are fucking huge and not appropriate for quickfire post-and-gad surfing, but which you regard as great achievements. Hopefully this'll go down a bit better than my callow "David Brent tries to write TS Eliot" nightmare of 5 years ago...
I wrote this poem during the last months of my undergraduacy, alongside a dissertation on Zukofsky's Modernist gathering of 1931 - the twin endeavour drew my finest application of thought and has yet to be bettered. I shan't post the dissertation, but this, then, is the online publication of my Great Work. Feel free to read, ignore, laugh or run screaming.
secondary source: I am taking my evidence from a source that interprets first-hand testimonial.
primary source: I am taking my evidence from that testimonial.
nullary source: I was there.
subnullary source: This is happening, right now, in front of you.‘All of a sudden, it is as if the collective body of the notary publics were advancing like Arabs or Indians, then regrouping and reorganising: a comic opera where you never know what is going to happen next (even the cry, “The police are with us!,” is sometimes heard).’ – Deleuze/Guattari, Nomadology
‘tamen est’ – Melanchthon, Encomium Eloquentiae
with fatal wounds sustained from a pencil-sharpener sharpener
and having expended his daily quotient of energy
on three hundred metres running
for a psychotic little train which he caught
from Lee, cold Lee Green
the lateral tenant collates information
a survey declares
married couples
in the 26 to 35 age range
incontestably content
he must now contain
for ten years
as far as the porch
of a converted (happy-clappy) Edwardian
tenement
face to face with pavement paper
the cement testament
maintains the injury
that will project his performance
when she turns him down
taken paces but not enough
he is crumbling with each droplet
rain that doesn’t fall
to help him slide down the road
why must it be clement at Lee
can only wince down Church Hill
not long left now
you’re a Marathon runner
he falls, heart percussion failure
then a benign jury of wagtails
espy that whom they may confuse
chirping “There’s no I in indivisibilities!”
hopping noxious
he half-knows he is an indivisibility
when the Rototrim which can after all be used by a child of four
has a human under its slender plastic guide
they are ecstatic
“We could have happened anywhere!”
‘tis
no iron
his
ties
shirts
all without disturb
for the condemned
somebody’s unfinished run
lying
bloody
birds
give him
ornithologorrhea
he sings like
a sparrow
in his last moments
next
verse
same as the first
a little bit louder
and a little bit worse
Soft headache
Masked by vegetation
Encodes a zebra
Lone patterned proof of beast
On infinite green plain graphic
Square across the blackest depthless
Suspension, that of
Belief,
With an equal sky
It becomes a striated cubature
Houses God in creation this stead horse
Still yet quicker than sight in its epidermal cartography
Moves legs but position affixed
Nomad zebra imprisoned by territory
Brainslam
Multiply into a numbering number
Trains approach with planned passengers
Overwhelm with all-stationary herd
The green expands beyond the State
Where each zebra cannot be defined
Beyond its cipher
This is our shrike against Platonic solidarity
This is our war-machine
We could have happened anywhere
in poison field
I kill the bird
I swing the body elliptic
It was not a good time to visit Piccadilly Circus, what with the falconers
It was not good to visit the Circus because the falconers had run out of meat
driver went through two signals at red
but the referee ordered a retake
Father Son Holy Ghost and fourth official
the good Lord is unhappy with your reckless two-footed slam on the dead man’s pedal
look at the gantries
green to amber & then russet fall to forest floor
scrunching through the wrong kind of snow
it is beautiful how they work
but you have plucked the forbidden fruit
and kicked it in the wrong goal
when talking television
I inadvertently create
a perfect elegy for subterranean dystopia
inflame this conversation
as two green woodpeckers
mating on the croquet lawn
steal from the collection
past his own goalkeeper
couldn’t fit both flashmobs in the same phone-box
with fatal wounds sustained from a librarian
his error had been the noises he made
while sharpening his pencils
because
even with a manual sharpener
he wanted to hear the buzz and screech of an electric
and so his larynx buzzed
and screeched
and so did the librarian excuse the fatal wounds
inflicted
with a pencil-sharpener sharpener
big headline “JESUS HOWLER GIVES MEPHISTOPHELES SNIFF IN 2ND LEG”
completely unrelated: “RHESUS NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH HOWLER”
the long dark safari of the bible
prenuptial drinks for jamsellers union
scotch anti-histamine chaser
inverted bastards ply their parents apart
with health’s good cheer
the fewer balls on the table
the more I win
these are only a few words
tending towards an insult
where did I put my scarf
hockey is an impossibility
let’s get a food
nothing, however, is in the can
the band’s 27th
continually punished for anticipating it
the police are not with us
they are all on shrike
Let verse reveal sports and trains
The organised movement of birds
In 0-6-0, 4-4-2, numbered skeins,
Unpoliced parades, migratory herds.
He bought a fountain pen that night
Aspiring to its thick dark lineation
Indelible continuous may write
A work of God as an equation
Cubatured rather than cubic
Whose solving is of secondary source,
Magic from the hands of Rubik,
Thirteen seconds evangelist force
Rotating favelas and mansions;
All the colours on their own face
Blind to others’ planned expansions:
Birds of a feather, skins of a race,
Crayola multiculturalism,
No sharpeners or refills required:
Arts and Crufts Britain in schism
Breeds distinguished, sired
By a pedigree nostalgenic;
The cities have mixed our bloods
With mercury and arsenic
Nullary poisons, hybridised buds:
An army of children, a Rototrim,
A selfish gene dot matrix printer
Whose whirring action sound so prim
Is sound of autumn into winter,
Seasons changing line by line,
Little atoms white or black –
Earth is made by their combine,
Bibles written. The attack
In Year Two, racist, cruel,
Was the sound of the round blade
Subnullary slicing the rule
Of universally played
Sports and trains and trends.
Let these reveal rhyming verse
The product of dull depends;
In stately pentameter, epigram terse,
Law One is the coupling of ends.
Yellow wagtails, flavissima sprinkle
Elmley Marshes in sunshine past
All her Sheppeyside undertow
Bathing in premature infancy
Grasses flitter, wild chirp fast
Walkers disturb unfinished slow
Process of nomadic pastoral
Efficacy inside her prison sea wall
Majesty’s still-life citrus feather
Exercise reserve, yet even RSPB
Can’t prevent the clement weather
Coupling yellow lights and citrine calls
Eruptive and instant, songbirding
Body synaptic, brighter shrikes
The insect cargo of the salty air
Suddenly divisible, confused by death
Frolic in our vista, beaky spikes
On a life-graph, cuddavhappendanywhere
On the Swale, blood nostalgia
Sends me back along the pipit’s dive
Realms of courtship’s careless fun
Can’t foresee their joy abating,
Nor mine. It’s all in front of me, the sun,
The life I only lead while presently alive,
The yellow wagtails, happening right now.
Urban habitats can be characterised by pied territory
Or grey smooth space. The pied as printed paper, the grey
Rarer in sight. You know it to be grey, but this smoothness
Of knowledge is secondary. Primary knowledge derives
From seeing a grey majority, a unison of mostly grey
In handbooks and photographs. The nullary member
Showed itself to be greyer than the pied. Yet only subnullary
Tells you how you know it to be grey: the yellow underlay
Beneath the grey and the white and the myriad shades,
The iridescent bladed mesh described ‘grey’ in field guides
Momentarily submits to the fruit flash, the whisked display
Yellow in grey, an abruptness, voltage, a kingfisher in flight,
A simple Youtube search for ‘superb bird of paradise’ may
Render this whole poem unnecessary with the mating play
Blue-face radar-dish spontaneity of utter transformation
When drab conceals visual violence, grey is not grey until
You see the yellow, pied is pied whichever goddamn way
It sources. Bobs, pecks, cries ‘tissip…tissip…tissip…’
Longer still is the train, the longest line verse can organise and aim,
Forever left to right, along the platform, bearing non-specific freight,
Fitting prey for sport: in a long black overcoat I stand beyond, apart
Reading poems to crows, bracing in the wind, forgetful of laws
I dramatically uncloak a heavy-purpose machine gun, tetra-pak
Passengers approach in stable array, all fast through my nest, each
Tied to their regime, indivisible amounts of work-striated time
Entreat interruption; with filmic import I survey the empty station
Sniff the swirling dust and prepare myself for the gift of holocaust.
Yet as this is sport there is opposition, and there is a falling-apart
Of all my surmises – it happens that everyone’s off to kill their bosses
Or has another complaint; lovers bound in hatred, contracts in print –
Plainly speak to lesser stun: everybody’s got a gun.
Scarcely have I leased a shot, age and gender matters not:
First the driver lays me flat, 20 from a vintage Gat,
Then my corpse is blasted mince, never to be buried since
All man jack and woman too defend their right to sail on through
Windows burst and bullets fly as though they think I still won’t die
The train is quick, their aim is true, sight as rail their object to
Impose themselves as notary regrouped commuters mercenary
A war machine grew necessary when I defined as military
The terms by which they’d guarantee their progress through the town of Lee
Signal turns red silently, platform too in sympathy
Platform One in fact, you see; London-bound the train to be
Beneath the flashing gantry, beneath the iron Christmas-tree
Will be pleased in Piccadilly, not to mention in the City
Practicers of falconry: meat is ready, meat is me
whose conversation has become a flame of blood
passport check for blame for body flood
shoot the photo from the page
sport nomadic telephage
now live off course
is golf resource
is putting ham
enrich momentum travel plan
as war a tourist now as peace a mess
en-ger-land colted crowd sport of man
she ate a hundred thousand halfway lines
en route to the ticking office
a cuckoo pops out
in a white surplice
and cracks a cookie
signifying the about
that has ceremony
now live of course
is often televised
but whichever way it sources
your vote is paramount
a great sight
great amount
now live the course
your vote is parasite
your vote is colonised
she stepped over the ticking office
her name was unsupplied
she was recorded as a secondary source
your vote is colon is editorialised
however it is
only live
subnullary
this is happening, right now, in front of you:
source it
to the sent meat
being reduced
before your eyes
to buddy-food
they say he was a goalkeeper once
she watched the falcons dip over Eros
and the goshawks thrive along Shaftesbury Avenue
What was going on in the ticking office?
Lo! High Priest Quetzalcoatl, representing Archaeopterism
Solves the Cube in twelve point seven three seconds
With his bare wings! Some spectator wagtails
Flock to the bird-god, others hop away incognito,
Most stay and wait for the fastest fingatures,
A competition of fossils for crowd support, pass
En-ger-land warm aching train-driver trilobite aim, shoot
The face and name from the page, compile a running score
As religion effects itself only by live agency, the belief agency
Enshrouded in striations and a six-colour fix, this new god is sport-
Stamped into the book but I might support France or Italy,
Saudi Arabia or India, advanced unthreateningly like
Geysers or Canadians, and here’s me hoping I
Keep well until consumption;
Couldn’t stop a single one of their shots, only
Took the pace out of them;
They pass, and then
At terminus mark down their score;
Nomadology is a religion like any other result.
she saw the barn owls perching on the old theatres
the ravens tower in the Trocadero
as in the ticking office
bloodsucking arthropods are dealt with
an unexpected outbreak for those
tending astride zeal’s hotness –
converted tens mate;
sex before nesting
spreads the beasties
as mother goose told us
so ticking with beak tweezers
ticking no chances
off lice from beneaf the fevvers
your sauces can mingle
when you’ve found a ledge
she the heron astral among Zavvi Megastore
a bunting exfoliate from neon corps
sand martin subterranean Tubetopia
burrows into wall and pays no fare
Wal-Mart in subterranean Paytopia
burrows into sand-tube and no fair
Crevasse abandoned by mine closure
Occupies itself with nullary purchase potential;
Bawl for the employees
Wail for the market
But this is happened
And that is the only justice
Our war-machine sees
nullary rendered meaningless
subnullary not yet having the chance to be rendered meaningless
she soars ripe above the fountains
sings about Sky dishes
houses God in equation
the formula from her tail-feathers
ever readjusting to curlicues, airborne
this dead horse
the coupling of ends
you’ll end up
in the
ticking-office
the loud Gourd is unhappy beneath your careless courtship display
“This is the only justice
We have to offer you
Be grateful
The police are with us”
She is given a bite of the forbidden fruit
It is her punishment
for coupling out of the rhythm
method
...enough oppressive signalry
no iron
IRON
Xmas-tree
since taking office
we have been trapped in a selfreferential curlicue of bullshit
Solitaire I gently conned in a wicker mesh,
Padded and young, my faults as sawdust
On the litter tray. Above me I perceived
A cow, predatory on the playschool roof,
Learnt a place that was Leighton Buzzard,
Fashioned these fingers from birthmarks.
Motor-skills which turned out to be ‘poor’
Haphazarded an estimate of enjoyment
Which itself proved faulty in time. White dye
In my own washing-machine. Luminous
Baby snowball crushing a crane fly.
Later I found a swollen realism.
I set off at 2:54 pm and reached home 4 hrs 57 mins later at 7:51. I went past among other things a dreadlocked man standing motionless in the street gazing up at a house covered in scaffolding, Latimer Road Tube station, the laconically boiling sunshine felt through yielding leaves, Holland Park Tube Station, a wide, tree-lined avenue with huge houses blocking the light, the merest glimpse of a doctor's surgery's dreamlike multi-level front garden through a narrow wooden gate, several tennis courts, a road cut from suspended dusty Cypriot idyll, many inviting pubs, some intriguing architecture, some revolting architecture, Kensington Gardens, a wide gravelly path that seemed to get wider the further away it got before eventually merging with the sky, a statue erected by London Ukrainians in 1988 to commemorate the millennial anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to the Ukraine, the Natural History Museum, South Kensington Tube Station, the twisty comfort of Brompton, street signs obscured by ivy, the King's Road for all of thirty seconds, a big house with burglar alarm on full tilt and no signs of life visible within the surrounding 50 metres, two women who said 'If there's one part of a car you don't expect to fail, it's the brakes' during an especially roasting episode of the sun's cycle, my old Classics teacher suddenly and fleetingly on a bike, Royal Chelsea Hospital, a new riverside development, a cormorant that took an age to land on the Thames (I'm not sure if it even did in the end), a petrol station where I bought refreshments, Powerade and Irn Bru, then a successful Big Issue salesman, Vauxhall Station, Elephant And Castle, beautiful women, tanned, freckled, disintegrating older women with low-cut tops and eight-year-old kids, a Union Jack-emblazoned pen that didn't really work when I tried it before flinging it away, dilapidated grocers with hawkish owners perched out front among the fruit, cars with anagrams for registration numbers, New Cross Gate Station, Goldsmith's College, Lewisham College, the thrill of the detour, the reluctant rediscovery of the beaten trail, a man yelling in an American accent, a young couple who I overtook by briefly jumping into the road, two steep hills, one up, one down, Ladywell Station, housing estates with fathers leading football-shirted sons sternly yet caringly to unknown locations, women sitting on walls with mobile phones in hand, a very little boy who ran from far behind me to catch up with his attractive young mother well ahead of me, a large lock of frizzy ginger hair clasped in his hand, exclaiming his surprised delight at this gruesome discovery before trying to stuff it down his mum's back, that same lock, discarded on the floor, looking like the last remains of a torture victim, a secluded passage over a railway, Wisteria Road, a scrap between three boys ("Allow! Allow!!"), my local park, my primary school, and my home.
It had been the hottest day of the year;
Evening, throne-view despot of adventure,
Traced my salt lick with a pencil, spun
Loops on a map, the list of moves:
Check at Kennington, mate at Hither
Green, Knight to SE12, Bishop of
Lambeth, unreversed, a capture, vales,
Process, taken vales, a strong direction,
Counter-attacking the open choices.
It was not written that I homed under a
Sun-swing watch-spin chronosphere,
Rejected vales were not gazed down
By descending graphite bargepoles.
What strong direction would vale me
Horsham, Nantwich or St. Aulaye?
Many paths are praised; they are icons,
Route is prayer. Route controls air-
Traffic from flight-logs. In route we
Derive our mission, arrange for death.
That day I held no route, that day
Everything I passed or sensed
Lay outside my trail. Evening, remote,
Throne-view despot of adventure,
Led my hand to a glossy fiction.
We eloped in a stolen Apache, the pilot
Shivering through straps, stunningly aggressive,
Head-steady, lip-skiddle, hypodermic, Captain Beauty,
Suffering cramp, I the gunner,
Counterbalancing dizzy blood with a well-ballasted hipflask,
Hedgehog-horror, bristling the North Sea with unburdened armaments,
Murmured through radar-screens on path to open terrain. Into the pond
Of our fate wriggled the twin tadpoles from RAF Lakenheath,
Threats to our blissful wedlock filtered in through the radio thing,
A drunken ditz,
And as we found ourselves jumped by jets in a vortex of love and laughter
We settled with power
On our marriage-bed.
Waveless and unsown the shaven crust scraps our aluminium
Beneath the grave salute of a wing
Redding in the low-plough sunbeam of evening, consummator,
Throne-view despot of her failing vertebrae,
Perseverer with my unshattered seams.
She slips out, seatbelt severing through flesh, dolly-headed,
Apocryphal as I raft back to Blighty on a rotor-blade;
Hughes M230 chain-gun sawn-off at impact, inexhausted,
Cradles beneath my coat. Euphoric mission informs my route;
The act shall translate beyond many tongues
Who, seeking town, diffuse bodily into London soil, much
As my dear, digest in the chasm of Lady Green Amoeba.
Our love endured and catapult-shotted. Gainmade. Slitted. A
Woodblock romance now repaid in manifold ‘x’
By a ‘diffuse bodily’ of agents who, unexpected,
Sten at me
whose autobiography is a striation
in the manner of gunshots
or poems
whose escape vectors
are encoded into every edition
If there was an afterlife
taken pieces
to populate the analogy
I could meet Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari
ask them how literature
can tend towards the truly nomadic
they would mutter incomprehensibilities
of failed Romance
omniscient and mindful of my French exam
and I would only take the piss out of them
before going back to my tent so I could play the one game of pure unfettered thought
bullshit solitaire
She the spirit ornithocarnate
SHE THE REDWING SUPERSONIC
DUTY DONE TO ENGLAND ROOST
sees the city
distantly concrete
married
to the sky
she soars
heavenward
strongest direction
above
downfacing crumpled
boy
crawling back
from Lee
cold Lee Gr...no, Mottingham
missed his stop
and all the fun
eventually they tired of reading him news
walked to Lee themselves
and what was once
a carnal
breath-staggered
cataclysm of youth
poorly inoculated against his own plague
dying
iam est me
whose blossom befouls the invention of football by ants
as elsewhere that young man deliberates over his end
blooding in the lee of the bird’s flight
a partnership in cataphasia
his arms flap
like semaphore
but he stays on the ground
then everyone announced they too had a photographic memory
searching for the raisin bag
a flycatcher found
the greens to expand her colour
with subsistence farming and solar power
council-funded legumes
and fertile brownfield estate
yes then no
“you could have given me one more day of walking on air
before turning off the hover-shoes”
the letter ‘s’ represents a mistress
whirling her dress in a clandestine apartment
slinking a dance for the private lover,
secretly seductive, the special lady
...there is one behind every statesman
the letter ‘t’ represents a wife
signal gantry for the bull train, trusted horse,
marriage-pylon, crosspiece,
ticking-off, trouble-and-strife, taker-of-semen
...certificates, statements, contracts in print
Hang on, where did the traffic-lights go?
Ah, we don’t have those any more;
At least not for pedestrians. You’ll need to
Report to the crossing office for your permit.
The what? The crossing office. In that low building
With all the birds perched on the roof.
Huh? Well, do you want to cross the road
Or not? Yeah, but...Good, so you’ll be wanting
A crossing permit. I complied with this directive,
Not wishing to delay my journey any longer.
Inside the crossing office, however, what sights,
What foul arrangements pizzle-whipped my mind!
A long line of manacled policemen stood before the Loud Gourd
Heads bowed as each in turn was stripped of his badge,
Divested of his helmet, relieved of his walkie-talkie,
Then chased out of the building by skuas!
Sorry, Your Grace, but what the devil’s going on here?
Young fellow, we are ridding this town of policemen!
Why should these venal, accident-prone corsairs of crapulence
Patrol our maidenly avenues with government subsidy?
Besides, I hardly know whose side they’re on these days.
Witness the birth of a new dawn in domestic lawgiving!
He is rotund and rattlesome, puffed with his own wind,
Occasionally given to song. I blink ineffectually, and reply.
OK, I need to cross the road. Have I come to the right place?
Most certainly, my boy. Welcome to the crossing-office!
We shall review your case when present affairs are concluded.
I gaze along the sombre queue, dead-chested men of shame
Crumbling forward to their dissolution. There are hundreds.
I turn around, blink, and flee. Away from the Loud Gourd,
Away from that –ing office. Into the road. Across the road.
Halfway across the road, whereat I am run down by a gang of
Four year-olds, joyriding an abandoned Fiat Panda.
It is at this point that I decide to elope.
you, the reader,
are a gangrenous, distended gout pustule
watching you fester in the sump of your fatty crevice
is like going all the way to Scotland
then realising too late
the invite
is for a mass compote merchant wedding
being stung by a wasp
then plied with their appalling produce in order to quell the agony
before your children call
to reveal
they’ve signed your own divorce papers
way out of interest
is everyone coming to the second flashmob?
that zebra can forget it
he’s too busy playing pool
when we are driven troglodyte
by syndicated media outlets
it will be imperative to hold strong
“the real reason we don’t have sky, I suspect,
is that we’d never stop watching it”
it’s not so unthinkable
a 16 year-old man married to a 27 year-old woman
discretely content
somewhere in south-east London
a derelict machine-gun
is colonised by a species of wagtail
that has yellow feathers
tame nest
a weapon
armatured
rather than armed
one fine day in the middle of the night
two straight men met up to fuck
two goalkeepers
mating on the croquet pitch
the semen estament
misses
t
a t
(my kingdom for)
at the middle
“there’s no I in intelligibilities!”
this is a name test
and you have blasphemed
the pied paper of Hamley’s
woke up in the same tent
I was conning like a toddler
because it was heaven
playing with my willy
not expecting nor wanting fruition
erection
or even expansion
he looked at me
ripped himself apart in disgust
leaving my eternal present
conning
in a tent
marching in cadence
the State men
t
a t
a female t
waiting for the State men
at
the settlement
with a cup of
boiling
see the seagull scavenging for scraps
floating with bright grace above the shore
preening on the low wall, sear-eyed
she perches at the edge of the couch
and one by one
briefcase following brolly
settles men
While waiting for the
Fall
You begin to wonder whether it will be different this time
Well the personnel will be
But it won’t
And your wasted thought
Drips with a fatuous oil
marching in cadence the statesmen meet ants
and interrupt their game
but the team nets
and it is disallowed
stem Etna
boiled in a formic broth
One final rotation unveiled:
Black to North Sea
lost rook down
TENANT INFORMATION
(this one goes out
to the late collaterals:)
bind your glances fast
to the creaking teen mast
and pump your bilge of what were his screams
as he was fed
feet first
into an electric pencil-sharpener sharpener
L. Jagger, Jan-May '08
― acoleuthic, Tuesday, 12 October 2010 16:27 (thirteen years ago) link
one month passes...
three months pass...
two years pass...