Mervyn Peake (3 poems about)

1. China

Madness
even at your beginnings,
ranged with scurrying, bells,
vanished limbs -
you draw it all into
nowhere beneath the ridge of yor brows.

Pleasure
erases itself to white in time, the
always ebb of things;
knit these into paper,
each stroke the start of a forgetting.

2.Gormeghast

Marble, flint, most of all granite -
excavations of yourself,
raw-boned battlements, the
verge of a lifetime;
youth, dressed in its skin, braving
nothingness - the sea.

Pilings of ancient wood and rocks,
exterior and interor at once -
arterial journeys are made,
keen winds jumble the here and the there -
eventually these differences will not matter.

3. Belsen

Moving toward shadow,
eyes which follow the cross-hatching
razored out of ink, the
vision's field cut to clarity;
your gaze pours out black that
no paper could swallow.

Pelts of lead make their skin, she is the
evolution of fossils, her birth
ancient as continents, her
knowledge the falling off of thought, her
eyes the consumption of your dark.