Thursday 21 February 2013

tha beest mead planes

Tha beest mead planes af mace end mehn gah aft awray, as Burns might have put it - & thus it was that, this morning, having been destined (yes, destined) to be interviewed by the lovely Brian Harries of Hope FM fame, I found myself feeling as though various invisible entities were trying to tear asunder various bits of my stomach. 

Was it the awfulness of my diet (I had devoured - yes, that is the word - a packet & a half of hobnobs the previous day)? Was it that antidepressant-cum-sleeping-pill I'd sleepily cadged of a mate, under the (sleepily mistaken) impression that it was nothing more than an antihistamine, & juddered under the ... hyperofficiousness? ... of for some hours? Was it the last-night's-crab-claw I had tried to eat & given up on? Whatever it was, it meant that doing anything more than curling up in a ball & shoouting "Ow!" very loudly, while simultaneously trying not to throw up (malmultitasking), wasn't going to happen.

This, however, is a poem I would have read to a couple of thousand people at 3:15ish, had the above not happened:

I Love You
(with all my)
 Head
Shoulders
Knees
&
Toes


but Hamletlike, the head rulers heart
into lines legion with litigiousness
concerning starts & stops & stops & starts
& starts, big with repressed religiousness
to rule you out, to throw you out with the
bathwater wherein I do wash myself
& don’t wash you, as though what’s you & me
is h minus h = hazardous to health
it cuts by stealth the invisible string
that ties our ribs together, tethers us
like little more than cattle to slaughters
predictable as a squeezed whitehead’s pus
as the three caskets & the three daughters

I love you
& you know that I love you
it’s just the living we’ve got to get through

but, Atlaslike, my shoulders bow & break
beneath the weight of your kiss, beneath the            
skyblanket that reveals what it takes
by night in streams of Sundays to appease
truth, like resurrections highlight past tense
deaths, deep mo(u)rnings, excavate temporal
horizontalities & make less sense
the deeper down you dig, Alicely fall
(or Satanly) into the lightless fire
the strain threatens to shroud me with, to cloud
my bright sunshiney mind with, ‘til I tire
of tracking myself, & you, in the crowd

I love you
& you know that I love you
it’s just the living we’ve got to get through

but my Achilles’ knees crack, premature
the weight of atlases of clouds crushes
the blood out until it’s pooled in the core
like planetlava, pools there & hushes
itself lest it leak its existence to
man, woman, media, is itself crushed
& volcanoed & Pompeiied & ashed too
 &, thus, it plays dead, pivotal but hushed
repeatedly, like it’s a cinema
& loops, a headless, kneeless, ghost, & dies
again – a massacre, a plethora
of knock-kneed negations & jealous spies
disguised as mineral, fauna, flora

I love you
& you know that I love you
it’s just the living we’ve got to get through

but my toes turn out like Ophelia’s
they always have, since I loved my first love
brain inputs & outputs, brain enemas
heavens below, in-between & above
you are my ground & you are my grounding
& you & only you, & only you
our circumferences barely bounding
& binding you & not-you, superglue
cannot pause us in postindustrial
eternities, in emerald cities
where pseudowizards wave wands made of steel
& bees are busy if they’re worker bees

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