I have no authority like the crowd,
I will show you nothing,
Listen not to what I say
But to what the people know,
The people who know.
A cigarette
A brief moment of contemplation
That is still smouldering.
A dropped bomb
At a garden party,
No boots on the ground.
The unity of paper torn,
Fragmentary although it appears to cohere.
A sudden switch of scenes between two lines,
A cut up job on specifics.
The isolation of people in a crowd
Like petals.
The sinister eyes of animals
Upon the collective,
A reminder of the savage nature.
A militaristic outline,
Class position, implying who you are.
Who do you feel you are supposed to be?
The powerful hawk looking down?
They love the heroic strong man
He does not exist,
A wolf in a pack.
Give up the type – the writer is defunct,
Supreme antagonist, the animal against your own society,
You cannot fly from this,
It will end for you
You, the implied addressee,
Listen,
Listen, not to me.
The cohesive group,
They aren’t literally attacking you,
But you,
The perspective shifts, not direct
The idea of seeing things in a different way,
A figure for everybody
Could suddenly explode in mania,
Be carted off with an attack of the nerves,
How the powerful may fall,
The financier,
The language means you must be in with the poet to get it.
So common to be parodied
The superior wink of the shared secret,
Aped the way it is done
The linguistic to include, to make you think
You are included
It is the, not a,
The definite article,
The people, the farmer,
You know this particular thing,
You are implicit,
But you do not understand,
Everybody knows but nobody speaks about it,
You’re supposed to know, at least
Through the glass window to the alpine night.
Conjuring up the dead,
A sexual perversion of your dreams,
Stability,
Substantial idea of love,
Disappear within the camera of a dream
A dream on the screen,
Our shots will shoot down the gunman who himself shoots our dreams.
Desiring the unattainable,
Desire exists in the night.
The daylight and the starch,
Stiff.
Leading him to a direction he can’t chase,
In the night, when blinded,
Anything occurs,
Nothing coheres
In a clearly laid structure,
Fail to repay the debt
The gambling rich
Lost in a photograph
In a delusion
Desire lost in a photograph
As it cannot exist for real.
A vision of a complete false world
Into the darkness, drawn into a world of light
Presented with what they want you to see,
Projected from the onlookers eye,
The hangover from the war the night before.
Remembering or not remembering
Accept the tatters
Bring the old dead back or banish them,
The life of the everyday person
Divided in society.
Sex sells
Inciting the need for desires
You can’t fertilise the seed,
No origin, immortality born upon the screen.
What if this future is seedless?
He doesn’t go to university,
Begins work as a jobbing writer.
Doesn’t have to work for a living.
Contrast,
Stratified by class,
Patronised by London,
For his less cultured ways.
Act as though poetry has a profound moral impact,
Talk in an authoritative tone,
Confidence a cropper.
Necessary murders
Murder, murder, murder
Implying killing is as necessary as it first sounded,
Pulled up for employing his powers of rhetoric for the wrong ends,
Ran having predicted it,
Traitorous?
Troubled by the power of what he didn’t necessarily believe,
Not tenable to speak grandly anymore,
When ever he raises his voice he sounds ‘phoney'
So he whispers.
And repeats.
So he whispers.
Pretend to understand nothing,
Understand only what is pretended to be known.
‘Allow the good and the rich to enter the country’
Should art and politics collide?
Deride one another?
OH! AND SO BE NOT GRAND
Be poor,
Step back from a role,
Less density,
Not too forced, it is okay.
An argument for the limited and mundane
Less frightening my dear,
Brothers showing off,
Arm in arm, no gnarling minds.
Men walking in step with each other is a sinister thing to see,
The storm troopers on the will.
The limestone landscape crumbles ‘neath the ugly feet.
Stripped away for change or renewal.
Perfect yet prone to imperfection
Faults are exactly what you find.
A network of words like a net,
Shooting at a net, you can always miss,
We are capillaries, a network of veins,
Networks.
He quotes Aristotle but cannot say ‘quay’,
Oh, how the poem connects the present to the future,
Ontological don’t you know,
Density constituted by memory.
Oh shhhh!
A shape in the space between words,
The gaps are as
Important
As
The
……
Don’t wait to hear what I have to say,
You have the instrument and I cannot write the music,
I would rather be the fisherman who only sees the fishes,
I am conscious that I am killing you,
But you do not exist.
