Discourse He was the foam on the backwash of conversation, Repelled by the safety-pier; Seeming to crave a knife to answer The upward wave-choppings, He felt as if there were an invisible plastic partition Segmenting the round, globular flatness Of all within his view – A tank, cramping and inflexible To cramp that perfect essence. Blocks and straight lines […]
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Carnival That peacock opulence, Swarming on strutting grime; That massed ecstasy, squeezing itself, Short-breathed, near suffocation; That sound-abandonment, seeming to plunge To deafness’s peace; Yet keeping those maimed faculties alive, Ever denying their last fulfilment. Maybe it’s only I and it, I, starting in the middle And it, commensurate with my idea Of my own size? Maybe I […]
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Space Capsule Volunteer The final pull of severance will magnify you The downward controls make you equal to the general gravitation You are higher than the air, and so you leave, You are bigger than the air, and so you breathe Caught in a feeling circle Knowing measurements for what they are Your particles arrested Your museum […]
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Action Paint Stripper He did it: Bared around as a torn poster – Slashed in irrigation, blatant in life. Squeezing out worms, slugs And snakes ablaze; All burst to flood Then blended underlay – A laminated rainbow. His luminescence crossed exposure’s edge; Flesh writhed erogenous, Prime canvas scrubbed. Paint frames contorted To every edge and corner, […]
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Cremation I’ve always believed in cremation; Flames bleach the world, unclutter living things. Let scum survivors, grasshoppers Leave cemeteries a mess Of living impulses dismembered. Not knowing fire’s totality But sickly honouring it stunting In tortured carbon stench. I’ve always believed in cremation Ever since I read of great skull mountains; Those potash handfuls are so clean […]
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Ever River Prime time, swallowed whole Could the universe, just once Have poured itself into a molecule So that, thereafter, Nothing could flow? Never to suckle a broken circuit For sparking life; Never split by caesarean pangs Of primal punctures. Black hole never thinned to liquid Boiling mud foundation pustules Turning all to gas. All words now […]
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In Transit Unemployed’s tube journey: For those safe, definable few minutes there is the duality Of oneself and the comfort of the seat – the circle; Seal; it chops perfectly, crossing the antilinear. It induces connexity; the most complete awareness of the toil and monotony which went into making the tube, and the seat inside the train inside […]
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Ritual Roots Trains: Stringing, ringing, lifting, Breathing meringues, with pores distended at the termini Contraction is needed for piercing of bars And holing of tickets. The breaking of one deadlock only Institutes another, more firm, In the hand and in the basket. More futile by far than any old bird’s weak flight Through a Church, a hall […]
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Mid-Life So much happened; So much didn’t – So nice to remember; So painful to recall Now nothing is all, The power to recall Is an anaesthetic – Past strength Is pathetic. In the middle, What’s kept still here What was and is gone, What never was – All levelled. All comes to ground, abrades, That’s […]
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As a new generation of writers confronts global warming, a new book genre has emerged: “climate fiction”, or “cli-fi”. Russell: “In my secret heart, I hope that all these books that are now talking about climate change will help to move public opinion.” That’s Canadian novelist Craig Russell. In his recent book, Fragment, a shockwave sends a massive Antarctic ice […]
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