Hospital Blues 08/01/2021

At parade the whole are evidence
for motherlands, of rightness
no broken thoughts for men like these
displayed at church
ordered with no thought
in buildings they do not understand.

In distant rooms the fractured sleep
the phantom limbs made real in dreams
of love and Saturdays in spring
the screams of their arrival still echoing
and the edge of war in wounds
that weep as mothers weep.

At watch, the VADs keep station,
no more than girls, pressed with rhetoric
by agencies they cannot translate
to play or to ambition
and old men have entrenched this mode
of feigning truth with children

since talk was talk and war became a toy
the pressing of one's truth
outside survival, beyond shelter
beyond food and love and need
into imagined height and power
marked with tin and iron stars.

The old men mapped the mud of Europe
with blood and treasure
the ragged entrails of a generation
burned to ash or brought home mad
pegging out the gold fields
for the pickings of the victors.

A Corona of Sonnets

We Have Emptied the Skies - 1 27/03/2020

So all the world is natural again,
When negatives have silenced the machines,
No love among the animals for men,
Until bluer skies meet land, and night seems,

Colder than the dots of code that blight us,
All through the substrates humans cannot touch,
What we believed was true was always dust,
Upon the jet streams and the dreams of putsch,

This is a whimpering catastrophe,
The end of something which we can't define,
Which reeks of planet-wide stupidity,
Taint that forever shows up down the line,

We are dust and to dust we must return,
Always repeating what we never learn,

Airlane - 2 02/04/2020

Always repeating what we never learn,
We make objections to the history,
That's cruelly taken from us while we burn,
Or starve idly in our complicity,

And so we hoard resentments deeply-held,
Pass pious loathing down through our own caste,
Clans differing in nothing but compelled
to pacify and hate, rewrite the past,

For our reward, and so we fear the shades,
Of humankind not kind or qualified,
To own this world and all its palisades,
Its covert bunkers and the lies implied,

That justify themselves in brevity,
Where hides the guild of our complexity,


Shadowlands — 3 05/04/2020

Where hides the guild of our complexity?
They're always with us in plain black and white,
Uncoded living, as children crave security,
Ignoring those not born to sweet delight,

Forever hoping for the dead to pay,
Benevolence to make but never do,
What saves, but revel in the disarray,
Of history and faith, and so accrue,

All that's meant for building better states,
For saving life, but theirs is not to save,
Unless it's via a banker's draft and surrogates,
Those listless shadows circling our graves,

And so I stir from passive middle grounds,
This world filled with quiet and angry sounds,


Sleeping Priests — 4 07/04/2020

This world filled with quiet and angry sounds,
That hint at murder in the ears of men,
Has breathed and raised the usual battle grounds,
This country fell and so must rise again,

The murmuring in endless summer feasts
is rage, a sour acid on the breath,
That nears the fuse and stirs once sleeping priests,
To organise and preach on righteous death,

They'd pull the lever if they had the strength,
They'd drown the bastards in the stream,
Then run home knocking sticks along the fence,
And back to mother in some fifties dream,

Of economics and the rise of light,
But nations fall again in endless night,


The Collective - 5 08/04/2020

But nations fall again in endless night,
A people drowning in their false beliefs,
Which even children question, leukocytes
arrayed in neural nets and sickly reefs

acidified with rain, know more than us,
This ray that worms its way in through the door,
That flyspeck bug that comes in with the dust,
Together in the mind must herald war,

A long haul, endocrine apocalypse,
Fragmenting truth with all those backward tapes,
And in our minds we're making up our lists,
An intellectual voodoo of distorted shapes,

Behind the frosted glass that hides the pain,
Between the rattled lines is our domain,


Isolation — 6 12/04/2020

Between the rattled lines is our domain,
A smaller world than all the worlds before,
The future stalls, a slowly flowing vein,
A burning frame of film, a dead-eyed store

of our insistent small-hours reckoning,
Pulsating in the brain like insects beat
in solid ground that seemed unquestioning,
Until the scars of earth, the very plates,

On which our overflowing cities rest,
Shake down the ordered plans of engineers,
Leave open wounds and fault lines coalesced,
But show us ways to change and new frontiers,

To break and turn us to the unaligned,
A newer world with no one left behind,


Keystone — 7 20/04/2020

A newer world with no one left behind,
We will decry the growth which made us strong,
And so move outwards with the non-aligned,
Into the gaps where humans scratch along

the bottom, with the pits and traps and dust,
The snares of systems set complacently,
By those who climb and welter in distrust,
Of those they push or press into the sea,

Of those who make and form the stairs they climb,
But now were all detached, at one alone,
And all intoning blues in common time,
The world resetting, made of monotone,

Which scrapes the satellites and frees the brain
So all the world is natural again.

 The Blind and Haloed

There must be unsensed ecstasy
in faith, a thrill I cannot see
but you have both seeing eyes
held out delicately as proof
of martyrdom unsung and undone

and sightless eyes restored
to you by good and piety
that make new sight
of old sense and feeling
touching the delicate string

of remembered history
suspended forever dangerously
over the rolling oceans
of forgotten truth and war
and all the unseen meek

lacking alms and voices
for whom your eyes are payment
taken and not taken
in violence, unjust
as it was then and is now.

But Saints are so much mist
a feather of vapour on the wind
Wild Thyme in the river's walk
they stand for the dead they saved
and for the opposite pole.

These days they have armed you
against the assault which made you
but the sword they have you
steal from your executioner
is like wishing away Judas

and now all that remains to worship
falls like a leaf to earth
or like water over cataracts
unfeeling of all physics
pulling it to earth

so all that is left is goodness

the perfect glow of ascent

through incense and woodsmoke

to sainthood and patronage

both blind and sighted.

 Revolution

The room in which the mirrors come and go

makes revolution easy, the plainness

of your clothes defines need without want

and marks the travel of light

a hundred years of sun to earth

disguising Petrograd

in at your grandfather's window

and on and off the looking glasses

so arranged to let you see your back

while painting frugally

the uniform of coup and statehood.

Defining its albedo through the clouds

You have detained the glow of that day

a century of imprisoned depth

a fisher of the changing halo

the mistress of your own image

wreathed with a smile, tempered these days

by failures of dogma, to a regretful

lift of the mouth in remembrance

of sunnier days, which government

would now call decadent

in the bright, marine aurora

of your dressing room

a decade earlier, before October.

It was snowy in Neskuchnoye that day

but you painted your room like summer

bare shouldered and elated

ecstatic at your dressing-table clutter

all of it practical but beautiful

each thing a gift of early wonder

and you not long not a child

recalled each thing arriving in the house

being unwrapped or unhidden

by your father, back from business

in some far city like Saint Petersburg

sleeping in this same mirrored room.

The stasis of these later, sombre hues

becomes your exile, all the ideologies

defined by idiots in false fury

meaning nothing but separation

and repudiation of your homeland.

The articles of revolution are dry dust

or spent rounds in a basement

though that is not it at all

say all your marks on canvas

your curves of snowy exaltation

painting the cold air with kindness

and compassion.

Cooperative         01/01/2021

This is a railway town
its city walls, a ring of rust
iron released to the green of England
nettled and abandoned

our train is hours away
a single connection of recession
hauling, empty, and implacable
the only light in misty flats

and ice that steels the stagnant
fleeting ponds of last year's rain
a sleepy, machine-made worm
of grimy yellow, crawling home

across a whitened prairie
its grasses stiffened
and fragile, papery in the cold
of January winds.

We have made ourselves alone
sole customers of oily tea
and stale biscuits, salvaged
from behind dusty, angled glass

together the subject of regret
but happy and not outside ourselves
we have no thoughts of anything
beyond a café and a locked gaze

our future is never to be together
but at this grim moment,
we are one over this greasy table
measuring each other's saccades

thinking of nothing in memorial
of children's infatuation
but the moment we were happy
and I was not the only person living.

Your tea is the first thing
I have bought for someone not myself
and the first time I love someone
unconnected.