Word

How to tie a knot
a sturdy knot
that will not come undone
that will not let you down

Depending on the thickness of the rope
will require strong forearms
spend these years then
in preparation,

in anticipation,

save these pieces for a rainy day
exercise regularly smile frequently,
prepare quietly

on your own.

How to tie a knot
depending on the rope
start with the rope in both hands

and create a loop which tightens
when pulled   

dont close your eyes
stay open and loving
and late at night
stay awake practice

in all the dreams that will not come.

How to tie a knot
make a loop like the loop of a rollercoaster
in your life in all the places that drop
suddenly like candyfloss
like drinks with friends
like screaming

How,
it’s easy.
Pull both ends in opposite directions
and the knot becomes taught.

Sit back, relax.
Take a deep breath.

And run your hands
gently over the places that
have come undone.  

After the sound the ladder makes falling
There is a stillness in the air.
A stillness into which anything can enter.
Anything at all.

But there is only you and this silence
Where you stop.
And you can see the ladder
Not where it was.

Next to it, the first thing you see in this new stillness
Are his boots, and then the rest of him.
As still as the ladder
That made so much sound

And then nothing. Which has entered
And hasn’t yet left, hasn’t yet decided
How long it will stay. You stare at him
And he stares at nothing.

And in this stillness, so crystalline
And composed, of verdant green ground
Of wet morning stone
Not even the blood, once you see it

Moves. And then everything
Moves. All at once
Everything comes to life. Which enters
Eyes which first close

And then open.   

If you’re always on my mind, what then, is time?

If time is driven by quantum, am I the butterfly on the breeze.
Can I make a hurricane of your heart. How long will it last.
And how devastated will we be once it has blown over
and we are there in its wake, counting our loss

The hands on a clock – shaking, shaking.

I’ve given up waiting for you. I said, I would wait forever
but forever was too long. Too much time has passed
water under our skin. I held my breath for as long as I could

30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute.
I counted the white spots behind my eyes. I lost count

Of the days and the weeks and the months and the years,
the changing of the seasons and the cycles of the forest.

I gave birth to civilisation upon civilisation.
I gave birth to the twins of conceit and deceit.

I kept the receipt. I stood in these queues that we form
ageless with the patience of saints.

Shuffling our feet trying to find the right words
at the right time

as we approach the booth, as we bend our necks to speak
through the tiny holes in the thick glass facade

that allow our voices to be heard.

All is not lost when we have time on our side.
Lying on our sides, facing away from each other
all those hours before dawn that warp and then blend
into a dawn quilt lit with birdsong

and remembrance.  

Do you have the time for me.
Do you know what time it is.
Can you recall the last time we did anything that wasn’t

For money. The trickledown effect
of planetary wealth.

Standing on the landing, waving goodbye to loved ones from the shore
a journey to the new world by boat that will take as long as it takes.
I can’t wait to see you again

Meaning: I will wait for as long as it takes
for the world to re turn you to me.

Some journeys take longer than others.
Some never start, other’s never end.      

Time and forbearance. Foreclosure. Lost clocks,
broken springs and things. Tiny magnets
that mimic the surge of the sun.

Bent time. Time that hankers back
to the first shocked appearance of stars against
the nightsky – white holes, black holes

Nothing escapes. Not even time. it tends backwards
and then in a rush it is gone taking the ending
of this poem

I took a walk through the battlefield,
They were using weapons I had never even heard of,
Heads presented on stalks following the sun
lowered behind a bastard cloud
all shouting, they are not ready for you yet.

I put away my bag of things
I carried on. I carry

I took a train out the city, and I jumped the tracks
I spoke with ghosts and heralds both
we laughed, and it felt

wrong. all wrong. every word a dog licking

I could tell you a story of how it all turns out
how the giants have no brains yet very thick skulls
how the little men move mountains with their fists stuck in whores
who cry out, Hosannah, Hosannah

And still he does not come.

I could present it at auction, gather crows on whatever
passes for billboards these days
and let it all hang out. I would marry that dancer
and the flashbulbs are the wrong tech, the wrong sentence

in the wrong poem.

I’ve known hammers with more tact than this, heavy things
nails all ablister, splinters and the cunts
who make them do the things that they want

with prompts and jailbreak, with bribes and with snakes

and all along the roadside the scarred out husks of cars
travelling endlessly, between lost markets and bizarres

crying with their oily boxes wet in sand and strep:
They are not ready for you yet. Wait awhile, in this back seat

Or that.

God, I have punctured my lungs with sterile pieces of your
last great sale, all the microscopic integers the boardroom
pledges, the fatmen, the metal gyroscopes all swinging

In tandem, at random, clang-clang. God, I dropped a new range
swallowed half the gulf again and ran.

I ran, from every sitting room. I ran for president
of the nascent industrial bourgeois contraption.
I considered contraception the very instant I was born

but still, they are not ready for me yet.

They are not They will not. They are far from letting go
Drawing pictures in the stars, each one pointed down.

If the heart of the beast were cast of iron, who would have smelt it
as we are ever onwards borne toward it,
raised infernal from the depths I rode along the steel length  
of a second sword, though the blood was not my own.

I entered into your House through a hidden door and all the rooms
had shutters drawn, and all the saints were hanged.
And I drew my eyes up to the rafters where the ropes were long,
where they were narrow, and from which the putrid bodies swung.

I cut them down, and I cut them down again;
All through these fields of men where the hopes that lay
were as certain twice unfolding crows, eating
the hearts of other crows, the weaker of the signet ring.

And as the chaliced bugle called lost and interrupted kings
unto the host of their forgotten wars, I sang, with the bloodlust
and the muddeep, one slicing thin the other sucking in, their
sons and daughters dragging from my matted paws.

Once upon a tribute tossed as bones before the sotted hound
I ran, clear through the clatter of a faster age and then,
when the sound could no farther, I released a pale and golden
arrow, straight through the eye of the glorious angel

founding darkness on the other side. As sheer as pleasure,
Camped in every corner, clutching and clawing and taking;
Thieves and soldiers who bore no names whittled
in these snaking flames, that gave no light,

that gave no colour, that gave no heat, no shelter, no succour;
that gave off the vile and pestered stench of bodies in a filling trench.
And here I’ve been digging my claws dull as rotted teeth
in broken jaws, for the jewel of a heart of a beast of a god.

modern day jesus never went near damascus
in any case it was saul on that rented beast
when the blazing regard of god caused such
the insufferable silence. three long hard days   

water from a wellspring poison from an apple
every day is an eden shedding dreams upon
the edifice the efficacy of vaccines the over
tones of warlords in stolen toyota corrolas.

take a picture and send it around the globe
in your new optical fibres colours demons
destroyers ordinary individuals going to
church court funerals landscape resorts.

dying to tell you how beautiful you all are in
your cages in your beartraps eating through
your tibias you bloody lipsticked goddesses
showing off your tits your labias on 5G.

dying to tell you how I nearly never made it
I came across an ocean in a small boat with
countless others I was looking for jerusalem
but we found damascus instead, discarded.

there are jewels that don’t reflect the light
they eat out instead the innards of the sun
and they make warheads laser weapons
they patrol the shore wait for us at dawn.

I came on the back of a flatbed riding out
of mexico across the new border I delivered
a message of hope and eternity in a swill
bucket packed with skinned bloody rats.

I stood at the beachhead where your fore
fathers drowned I had my foot on the head
of everyone of them whispering prayers
watching their eyes for some

recognition / there was none.

To pick yourself up
one bone at a time
to make a skeleton

to feed it muscle and revelation
to watch it walk into the traffic with no clothes on

to watch the sunrise
to watch the birds sing
with no eyes

with your hair already in wisps
the wind whistling through this cage
where your heart lives.

To pick yourself up
one loose stone at a time
to build a kiln where your heart lives

to place your skeleton
immortelle one more unopened rose upon these
chalky steps of time

watch it climb without sinew
without reason fetch the cloudbase in your mind.

to pick yourself up to turn your memories
into gold to pour them molten down your
throat like a longing

To cut the head off a snake
you need a steady hand
and all the time in the world

You approach it headon
obviously

and then, not with sticking knives
or ugly with a spade

but slowly, call it close
in a loving embrace
a lullaby or kind words
draw a pretty blade
 
sharpened on a lullaby
sharpened on kind words
until you find the bone

and then you can relax
watch the flickering gaze
emptying into space

w/o psychotic features
like potplants
that require watering

every day, or they will wither and die.

but not just any potplants
and not those kind

either, ones with wings and things
and thorns

and late at night
horns.

You have recurrent depression. This is not an admission
of guilt

This is just something that you go through
like a tunnel
let’s go through the tunnel

let’s turn out the lights
let’s look for the light at the end
let’s keep going

and if you need to turn around
do so in the middle

where you cannot see any light at all
to either side

and then water the potplants
in the dark

without any light 
without any water

without any hope.

You have recurrent depression.
Keep going

there was a memory of the light
that you held in your heart

like a flame
like a fire

like a wildflower in a wildfire
that you forgot to water

that withered and died
that reignited

a pyrotechnic display
a shadow in the middle of the tunnel

in the dark
you have kicked over the potplants

by mistake
and their dry soil has scattered across

the macadam
you are standing in the middle of your

life and there are headlights
coming

from both directions and you can’t find
the middle of the tunnel

or your life or the centre
lane

and the noise is silence just before you   
walk into the tunnel

without any hope of reaching out
or through

You have recurrent depression.
You have 1 New Voice Message.

You have deleted all the potplants.
You have stepped into the water.

You are feeling well watered and
incapable of withering.

You are heading deeper
into the tunnel

it is upside down in your mind
and there is hope

that you will somehow find your bearing
your posture

your image in a mirror
like this

hanging askew along the edges
tipped up and swimming

towards the light of the
sun. You have won.

You are being showered with blessings.
there are smiles in every photograph

you will be seen in camera flashes
the shiny glimmer behind policetape

do not cross into the tunnel
keep going

along the mountain pass
searching for water

carrying these goddamned potplants
all the way to the edge

they will thank you in the end
there was a drought

and it was a kindness there was kindness
in your heart once

of all things

you have recurrent depression  
you are currently the first caller

in the queue
you are not watching your reflection

in the rearview mirror
you are driving

there is a person in the middle of the tunnel
and his hands are raised

against the glare of your headlights
and he is smiling.

You have recurrent depression.
You take your eyes off the road.

The potplants on the passenger seat.
The windshield glass in your hair

under your collar on the leaves
of the geraniums

shiny like dew. You have
completed this level.

You are showered with blessings.
You receive a message from the queen

she misses you she loves you
she pulls the trigger.

You have one new afterlife
and brand new potplants

signed for and delivered and the weather report is sunny
without any chance of rain.

You will have to water them
every day again

or they will wither and die. 
Or you will wither and die.

You will wither and die;
You have recurrent depression

you are currently without water
in the middle of the desert

your potplants are your hands
as you raise their thorns

to your eyes     

draw the curtains against the afternoon sun 
and unloaded

remove the magazine

make space on the duvet and dry brush the chamber
and the barrel brushing

in a chamber to muzzle direction, removing large carbon
and iron

fouling from the bore. reach for the beer
and tip the last tepid remains back

replacing the empty bottle
on the nightstand.

place a cleaning patch dipped in bore
solvent on the tip of your cleaning rod 

push the cleaning patch through the barrel
and out the other side

get up grab a new beer
from the small bar fridge you keep for emergencies

saturate the chamber and the bore surface.
avoid pulling it back. this will deposit

gore. dirt and gunk. back into the
bore

allow the solvent to break down bore fouling
for a few minutes

while you knock back on the cold beer.

check through a chink in the curtains that no-one has come home
the neighbours are still out

the only sound the sound
of now. use the bore brush to scrub the inside of the barrel

knocking back on the beer as often as you like
in between brushing

using a new dry patch to remove any residue
keep it running through the bore until the patch

comes back clean. stare at the white wall
making patterns in your mind. conversations

then. use a pull-through tool impregnated
with negative connotations

solvent, such as a bore-snake

to further clean and treat the bore surface
against corrosion. cleanliness is

next. clean the exterior of the barrel. barrel lug. feed ramp.

remember what it was like the first time
how she

you need to clean and lubricate more than just the barrel of the gun.
you need to clean and lubricate the action

you need another beer. you walk around the empty house
with all the curtains drawn. music

the action, slide. pump. bolt. use a nylon utility brush. dry cloth
old t-shirt that she once

dont you. spray the action liberally from the top of the frame/
receiver

allowing carbon and metal debris to drip into the drippan
the shimmer of the heat of the taste of her skin

use the manufacturer’s recommendations for your particular model
allow the cleaned subassemblies to dry.

use a towel. use a beer
use the used pieces of your heart

lastly. use a needle applicator to precisely apply
lubricant drops

at the specified lubrication points of her smile
in the afternoon light the sound of cars passing

the ocean washing up at your feet. the bodies of memories
the mystery of the moon. the frame/action

the slide assembly. the exterior of the barrel

dont forget the magazines. the pictures the times she took
more than you can

drain the last of the sixpack leave the bottles where they
lie

special purpose brushes are available. use extra care
during disassembly and reassembly as magazine followers

are spring loaded.
are summer fun. are autumn’s decaying
of the angel

reassemble the method
and perform a functional

check. leave the curtains closed
the sleeping dogs