Long dawn, from One Noumenal Will

Long dawn

Long night again

the sun bouncing light through my window

off the dazzled borrowed moon

brightens my bedroom

and keeps the semi-gloom afloat and conscious

to the sound of eager seagull children

whistling for food

my insufficient curtain

blowing like the skirt of street cleaners

hovering pre-morning

before they gather the detritus of the town

I am afloat

I am alert I am a sea/ of rogue sensation

anchored to a warm and sweating bed

the breeze sends shivers through

my nervous system

a glimpse of day bends echoes

in my head

    

No Joke

No laughing matter There is no joke unless life here on earth is a joke our death a joke and the sufferings you bring to the world god help you reproduce it is not a laughing matter There is no hope unless hope is in time and we have died many times already the past a joke the future a joke and the present so hard to bear being looked at never mind being laughed at is not a joke There is no game unless the breaking in two of a heart the smashing of families the crockery the least casualty the shock I will always carry with me is cancelled in time There is no point but to ride out our dwindling days bearing vast humiliation and show some empathetic sympathy where you are shown none although you grown faint and fainter each minute is an hour stretched out like days from a childhood some recalled some blotted out but how they’d stretch on forever without feeling them peter out

    

Arrangement - Collected Poems

Arrangement

In front of the mirror

where I pictured you sat on my bed

in my white shirt

still smiling despite major jet-lag and worse

a vase of spring flowers

displays signs of pain

some are holding up their heads

brave and proud

looking back at me

in anger each wrinkled face a reminder

of a bunch of troubled times

others refuse to open

faces buried with the shock of memory

when petals shook with rain

so rarely picked and glistening

unashamedly and so glad

simply just to be here and alive

and something of that must survive

in the cool arrangement

and the encouraging vibes

preserving the once Romantic drive

in the green old shoot

growing from the side

without photographing the fate

of the poor flowers

    

Ghost of Water

Ghost of Waterford

Still you ride by my side

Ghost of Waterford

how you knit how you glide

girl of Water by the ford

if I shut you out

Hair back-blowing in the wind

if I hum as I ride

Water-forder I was wrong

take the laptop I sold

Ghost of water/ ghost with sword

as you swing by my side

as I wander overboard

I would pay it in blood

body of water/ blazoned gold

at least help me sing

Ghost of Water, Waterford

a deal sealed on the shore

scarf of orange

strands of grey

still you slide through the night

to my bedside/ to my mind

if not my first love

be the last one left behind

as I hand it to you

Crossed with water, Waterford
you remain my mind’s bride

bridal waters crossed the floor

as wide as the sea

you were in me Waterford

I depart with the tide

once again my Waterford

like the ring of Rosslare

I am leaving

still you stay

You remain in Waterford

and the sting of Rosslare

you declaim me Waterford

as I soldered my mouth

I betrayed you Waterford

and I pay every day

I am pinned here

here I stay

but you are in my head/my

imagination Waterford

if I release you today

you will feel me

feel my way

what is done has been done

here’s to the future

as the birds circle

bronze statues

Waterford

 

   

The Test Rabbit - New poem

The Test Rabbit

There is nothing well-intentioned or well-meaning

that you cannot conjure up from in yourself

like a rabbit from a hat deep dark and pricey

and destined for the pot

one shot of fakery

for the deaf sound of applause face blanked with misery

monotonous as a landscape finger painting

and you can spend a lifetime swept with waiting

the wind as cold as ice-cube trays

sound of water cracking

and the howling of the sea still old and rolling

as though you had not been here

as though you weren’t alive/ a living breathing being

called out from the void

like that white rabbit domesticised and docile

hung up by its long ears bereft of memory

bloodied in its juices

there was no cause to bring me here/ I boil and stew

no great magician in the sky made up to save me

    

Word count & Brief Window

Word Count

I don't write because I have to
but because I must
not for the lovers 
I do not write for them
in their innocence and ignorance
altogether blameless 
in their little treacheries against
their own full hearts
for who could blame them

I do not write for children
or for the shrill now 
that has already been and gone
nor to the future do I type
anything I think worth keeping
they will have to work it out 
between themselves 
or let it go 
scores addressed to stardust

I do not write for our reason

I write because the universe 
itself saw fit to tell us
and has waited for forever for the words
that have long been around 
but are yet to arrive
I write to keep the meaningful alive
in words we survive
I write because they are
here and because they are not
here even before numbers began 

learning to count


A brief window for rain

Only the smallest of rain today
barely enough time
to take a smoke to the windowsill
plant my feet on the roofing
stare at the sea through closed eyes
take in the earth's battering
the smell of the steam and the stone
walls caked in lichen
the rich swell and the broke barn
the scattered clutch of apple
bent trees dark green 
abundant gobbets of berry
hedgerows hanging limbed and wet
the peculiar quiet of hidden birds
the huddled jumble of puddled lanes
only the smallest of rains came today 
falling like love on the chapel house does
in the fewest possible words

    

Flowers for Rosie

Flowers

for Auntie Rosie

the mathematics of loss

does not compute. the hours

droned out, in their unspeakable

grief, could never add up.

We walk through the valley with the shadows

by night. And bless the little ones by day

this is not a game to be explained

by Jesus lightly. like some hand of bridge

written off like a one in a million

chance, of a brighter outcome. there is pain

to consider, staring at us like the irrational remainder

in what could otherwise have been a job well done

No. the heart is the accountant of the soul

and rightly calls him a villain that owes the world its sun.

the dialogues of loss

do not convey. the torrential glut

of tears which chokes the sky in us this day.

the words are rain. watering the ground.

I hear that flowers bloom there in the springtime.

I hear children walk that way.

    

When Autumn turned

When Autumn turned

There are better things than the trees

when the Autumn blows

October leaves and November skies

alive with the aerial dives

of the annual Starlings

where the monument looks to the West

and the lighthouse closed

looks depressed

with its peeling paint and lines like fishermen's jumpers

as the ocean confessed

to a stony indifference that would shake

the promenade down

and smother the pavements with sand

grit the likes of which you never saw

so far inland

the moon as red as a battery torch shining

through a child's hand

there are far better things than the tress

though the hills surround us

the cold blooded fingers of trees

and the flocks of Starlings

are nothing compared to the sound

the gale on the ocean can make

when the earth and her blue skin of sea turns around

    

Eschaton I Sequence, section i, read also in full

E4R6Y2 eschatonIsequence

Y7I8O0 There are terrible things waiting to be written.

F4T6U3 The word world is a mystery, waiting to be cracked.

N3R8O8 A subject is a body of knowledge thinning itself, on grass.

K4Y8O2 Currency is what fails us: we’d flog everything but our back.

N3T7I9 Philosophy is killing us, and still doesn’t make me stronger.

M3R6U7 Philosophy proper is wasted on us, and I am wasted on IT too.

M3R5T1 The meaning of life is essentially sex. No surprises there.

N3T6U2 The meaning of love is essentially death. Again: no surprise.

Z5U7Q1 Madness is a mystery taken very seriously. The mystery is men.

N5T7I2 Man is a metaphysics, woman, a physician.

W3R6U1 The best of doctors earns our love, but never our desire.

V3T7K2 The best of actors learns his art from life, not the theatre.

M9O6Y8 Living is interpersonal. Life is not.

Q2W3D1 Philosophy is learning to serve with the balls you’ve got.

O3T7K2 To abandon a first love for philosophy is not a perfect start.

M2W4T6 Trying-to-make-ends-meet is not even trying to make me laugh.

E4V6Y6 Resistance is puerile. Acceptance is the key to all floors.

V2E1W7 The postmodern condition is to give up the suspicion that all knowledge lies beneath our suspicion.

N2E5T0 Logo-centrism is the critical equivalent of berating our over-fondness for oxygen.

F6Y5J4 Post-structuralism; the state-assisted suicide of professorial self-preservation.

D2V8K5 Love and calamity are more than just a metaphor - they are often synonymous expressions.

M4I8X5 Life and death are more than two trade towers: they are both commodities as well.

K5Y6J1 My will-to-kill-an-hour is tired by abundance, and saddened by solar activity.

V3F5H2 Obscurity is the writer’s best friend, and his worst company.

J3E4R1 ‘Enter’ and ‘Submit’ are two imperatives opening up a portal to a world of pain.

N3W5Y7 The solution to all manner of public loss, is a private gain.

L9P0I4 Going down. Maybe devolution would do to conquer our inertia.

K5G6H1 Life becomes: a hyper-textually transmitted, ultimate disease. i.e. I am terminally ill.

N9K6A2 Writing this is an attempted overdose, with no prescription.

L7U5G3 I masturbate to prove I still exist. Those who can – will.

K6Y5B3 Home’s a place of recall alone. I want credit for having a clean memory.

G1A6R5 I’m a missionary on behalf of misery. I’ve a mistress: she’s plain tenacity.

G6Y7N3 Nietzsche only changed his mind according to the season. We manage with opinions that are altered daily, or even hourly.

D3T5H2 Nothing happens to man he is not formed by nature to be potentially bored by.

C3W6H7 Whatever is yours – or what you make of it – is mine to keep.

V3R5A2 Your will to power crawls on the hands and knees of my will-to-sleep.

B1S7L0 To the spoilt child of Sills-Maria, the ironic bloodsucker of Basle, I say: Dionysus must die.

F4R5N2 Philosophy continues to succeed where the poets fail and the mystics have faltered: she is still unspoken for.

M5T3G7 Faced with demons promising eternal recurrence I’d have to ask: “Who in hell’s supposed to have died and made you [a] Demon?”

C4Y6T5 These are the bite sized meditations of a minor miracle. The miracle is that there is anything here at all.

S3E2V1 Amulets and Omens, what is a life reduced to these? A Give Way sign.

V3H6E4 Rolling eyes, an eyebrow raised, an averted gaze of mine, are all bad signs – of a highly self-conscious design.

F3T5Y7 A little plot is required to cultivate what vegetates under the surface.

B0W1E3 A foreign voice upsets my meta narrative; a more familiar one asserts my need for a metaphysics.

J3B5Y7 So I’ve fallen in love, it’s true, with mere lines.

K3R6Y1 Or is it that I have I simply fallen for a line?

X2E3T5 Well my fate serves me up on a plate to Satan.

G6U8O2 This will be my lost will and investment. Man.

M2K6S2 The privilege of error is reserved for the past.

G3R6Y7 A knowing irony is wasted on the intellect. Irony should waste the body too:

I7V4W5 I should like to tattoo the Titanic on my face. And an iceberg on my ass.

S2R3H6 Every distillation costs us time, and often bottles it, before selling it back in a panic, to those of us with too much of it.

M3E5T3 Uptight. What is it that I’m doing? – creating a knot that’s as illustrative as the undoing of another.

S2R3T9 A philosophy of acting, where the action is itself a text act, becomes only a matter of seeing the world, or write.

E5T6N1 Discussing the ‘meaning’ is a naïve and nonsensical endeavour, since it assumes precisely what it aims to draw into question.

L8I9O5 Instead of Wittgenstein’s thread, let us pull the super-string tight.

F4T6U7 What is Race to me? A failure to discriminate People properly.

J3R6U2 [Absurd to think that you can win it all or lose it by a nose].

M2U7O0 What is this place to me? A synthetic account of my accidental birth.

A2S4F1 And Wales is a minor incident, for what it’s worth.

F3E5Y6 In order to take the chaos out of a current theory

B6J8O2 I would dispense with every category and wait.

M9I6P2 There is patience in overcoming the pain of virtue.

S2W4K1 Alcohol is not managing to take the strain of vice.

M2W4T7 I am leaving – like the ‘plant’, I am shedding my identity.

I6J3G4 Love will not complete me: love is my abandon, or else love is my unwilling. I have no desire to manage many little companies.

H6J3M9 Retaining your identity can only mean rejecting the other entirely. Identify and Destroy.

K2R5M1 Postmodernism tries to scare us back into morality via the medium of insanity.

K3F4G9 My own ‘dark jewel’ is a misery, the mastery of which means defecating on my infant memory.

E3V1H5 Q. Why is there something rather than nothing? A. Nothing is what you’d expect – and do not therefore deserve.

I7F3H4 Posterity is as pointless an incentive to preserve as self-interest is an extra mundane motive to observe.

B4K6X2 A later day miracle: that there are far more brains to be had than suicides. And equally unlikely far less intelligence.

H6J2T5 Arms, legs, objects, trinkets – in other words standard equipment. But what need do we have for equipment without an adequate account of the expedition?

S3E5T2 And I would dearly love to be an untimely man, an unhistorical man, but I am sadly all too of my time. Why are our most suitable, and comfortable, clothes so often hateful to us?

A7J2Q9 I must submit to the fatality of finding form in these fragments, force my philosophy to feel, instead of to simply fathom itself, in trouble.

I0P7N2 Plato’s gods conceal themselves alright: with my head in the clouds my eyes are always full of moisture. If I ever found the gods, would they also wear a vain appearance of weeping?

B6Y8I1 Standing on the shoulders of self-replicating giants, the support gets less reliable, and the prospective fall more potentially fatal, and terrifying.

M8B6V5 To reveal the will in its most complex expression, it is necessary to dramatise the soul.

B4V9I1 My work is no biography but consists of mini portraits of minor affectations of the will.

N7M8Y4 A monologue is on-message has linearity about it. But an inner dialogue is closer to conflict, and requires still a third and further I to kill.

D5R3E2 The fashion of the day is to all everything a discourse. Even for poetry that is poor, but for a philosophy, the poverty is still worse for the prejudice.

A2H6U5 Yes I worry about having a breakdown – I’ve witnessed the AA at work.

G5H7L9 This will be my version: of the World as a Will and a Wrecked Dissertation.

X2S5L9 I want to raise the lightning rod of philosophical catastrophe.

S4S4H8 I piss powerfully against the pearly porcelain: that’s the only will-to-power that enters any real experience of mine.

M3T9M8 Love is the wedge dividing my split personalities. Ours is a sectioned love.

S2S5H1 Losing everything’s what comes of devotion to nothing; and sympathy with nobody from an empathy with all.

R4Y7U2 We will stumble on spectacularly, until the irremediable fall.

M3R5T1 Prey, this is a rehearsal, for something much more dangerous to come.

M2W4G8 From a future Hades I will banish my every memory of Elysium.

E4R3T7 My caution has already cost me your best affection.

M3E4T1 And the collapse of Rome makes an invitation to Attila.

K3Y6J7 I’m so detached as not to feel the calamity, breaking in two above my bed.

A3D5G3 For certain, I am leaving the land that has left me for dead.

O0O0O0