The Jacquestown Settlement vanishes

Leaving only the unexplained message

'Gone to Croatan'

Goodwin

In your arms

I remember

The sea in your arms

Starfish sea hearts

At your hips

Falling cliffs in your thighs

Moon tide waves

Ribs of lost ships

Wrecks washed

By silver neap sands drifting

Sea wash anchor drag

Across our coral fingers

Locked and scraping

Where they touch

Cargo chests wrenched open

And reefs of bones

Polyp tentacles stretched

Into your arms

From my splintered hull

In your arms

I hear gulls

At the wake

Of our sailings

The Buttoned Wings of the Asymmetrical Man

The Asymmetrical Man is a burst barrel. He plays piano keys of splintered laths.

My unguarded heart

70 years ago, at dawn ...

Death as a Word

Robert Desnos has often tried out death as a word

                                                              – Louis Aragon

For I will sleep

With my eyes openblind

To the swirling columns of dust

My mouth will not open

To the song’s breath moan

The electric ringing

That calls across the carpet

For I will sleep

Between each heartbeat

Soft under the nails

A step louder than my step

In the soft dirt

Into my ears

Drip the murmured cries

Of animals under the myrtle leaves

Snorting their desires

The sky is bleached into sand

Behind my eyes of ash

And the creeping vines

Are dry against my tongue

I am the weight of a sleeping thought

I speak the silent words of a dream

And they catch in the twisted locks

And fences of my garden

As they whistle away

On a flight of powdered air

I fade into one lost word

The shadow of a sun long set

Burned into my closing eye

That is always open

The wires ring with bells

Behind the dark eyes of my dreams

And the mouth still open

Awaiting a word

All I remember

Catches like wool tufts

On the barbs that hold us back

And I will sleep

In a gown

Knitted from the burrs of our past

For I will sleep

While caravans cross the horizon

Of my hollow eyes

And I will see their journeys

And I will be known

By the elephant train

I will be known

By the wide arms of my open-eyed sleep

That will not end

The Dissected Man Transforms

The autorevelation of torrefaction

The Self-Consuming Library

A black cape sweeps out

The lights of the horizon,

Leaving behind books

That explode with their own outrage.

They burn from within

Text blisters into flame

Before the covers even move.

A chiffon swish

A rustle of curtains

Across the leather of the reading rooms.

A figure slipped away

Moments before the shelves erupted,

His only gift

The scabrous and destructive catalogue.

This is no rescue.

This is transfiguration.

 (for DH-M)

With the spring came a premonitory bellow calling the crows to the carrion-to-be

On falling down the stitched leather rabbit-hole

The Tale of the Dissected Man

The Prosthetic Alphabet

A is a metal spider claw in the brickwork
B is full with sperm
C sweeps nestlings from the ground
D is a well without a bucket
E is a rooftop of turrets clogged with birds and frogs
F is a broken wall in a bomb crater
G holds kittens underwater
H pins legs to a table while fixing arms to the light fittings
I is a crowbar
J dredges oysters
K is a monkey in a burning tree
L will catch all the falling
M is a glasshouse frame, its windows broken by escaping plants
N is an iron lightning bolt
O is an astrolabe
P holds her breasts as she floats in the water
Q is an eye floating up from the depths
R is caught in the swirling strands of reeds with the eels
S winds wool in the hair
T is a piton hammered into a rockface
U will hang above the door to mark where the horse kicked
V splits water with a bank of sand
W is a hedge of hurdles
X holds itself open to all suggestions
Y is a funnel that brings all roads together
Z is a tapeworm coiled into a cough  

King's Quoit

Three red eyes shine in the black hill

While from the graveyard dunes

A tuneless wind of unhearable fairy music

Played on pipes of razorshell and netting

Reaches the ear

From the railway sand rise spikes

Of purple darts and trumpets firing heart-ceasing smoke

In trembling clouds

One green eye,

The rattle of legs beneath broomhead wings

A low growl from the stones

And above it a whistle through the teeth of an animal

The howling overture to

The Bait Diggers of 1933

With scorched fingers and velvet wood thighs

The clambering horses rise in dry and powdery lusts

From the shore

The predatory bonecrawling forms

Prise their way out of the burrows

In search of sleeping flesh

The lip skin bulbs of sparkling trowel heads

Shimmer to the lover’s touch

The washed skin ripples with swollen deep sea memories

The sunken toeprints of a man dropped into soft sand

On a beach of green moustaches

There are burnt hooves washed up in the foam

While the fetish sticks are black with use

And each round stone is a carved Ogham map

Later, in the time of hollow mountains

When minutes shine gold against a sky with its eyes shut,

The fairy horns sound again

Reveille for the naked monks

A recall to the 8 o’clock rock they cannot pass

My heart is the unknown hero lying under the cromlech

It slips away, down through the sand,

With each gulping peristaltic beat

My hair falls in pigeon wings behind my head

Fingers bristling with the dry spears

Hurled from the clifftops

Diving through fields surrounded by the mystery smoke

The reptile flowers coil around me

In the holes through walls and bushes

Where whistling echoes on the glowing face

And in numerous pairs we see

The murk ascending

I wear my dreams on my face

Weredog candlechild

In the grey dark of late winter, among the stones, ice tigers prowl the empty slates. Snowy gusts overturn marzipan sails, and we slide from the Turkish decks of scandal.

The blue-grey shadows fall on us from the hillside but she burns black, a dark lantern against the speckled snow rage. The cold swirls in smothering layers that swallow the light, and she burns blacker and blacker, this dark beacon, this summoning. Blinded moths hurtle extinguished into the dark star black hole.

At her centre shimmers a flame that burns without light. The lantern shutters flash and clatter to reveal a matchhead dark glow swaying upwards to its own dance. Untouched by snow or wind, untouchable, each leaping gesture throws wisps of smoke to wreathe and choke the night around us.

This is the end of misrule. Her order is the splendour of a self-sustaining chaos. No no, just because she has worn Nigerian costume does not mean that she is Nigerian herself.

She is the child of the candle.

I follow her flame as it burns out of the cellar, out of the room of mirrors, out of the walled corridor, out of the velvet hall, out of the puppet theatre, out of the bar with bare floorboards. Through the dancing flickers of her black combustion roam and prowl a dog, a tiger, a wolf, with human eyes behind their snarling foaming. She burns steel-grey with animal hair and black snow. She fears her candlehead will consume her, but it calls all those who also change themselves into animals to her side. Our howling will echo through the frozen rivers.

White bones of an evolutionary future

Eerie Brothels

Do not step out of this area

It is the place where places do not exist

This no-land where languages return

While the hares race

On the eel road

Moose hands

The cynic work of mussels

Brittle spiders climb clinging from the wall

The door throws its hands up in angry alarm

This is the axe of the new generation

A world where people eat themselves

From compulsive necessity

White banner roads into the woods

Where they stop dead

A deer’s foot cupholder

Split feet of gold

Like broken-handed roots

Stump eyes and steel-grey fields

The bristling beasts lie huddled and powdered

Hard-water pawprints in the fields

Like an animal walking upside down

Its footprints rising from the soil up into the snow

On the pea road

Black sperm jackdaws are spilled out

Across skies blue above cells

Whale-tail axe-heads

And spiral fingers curling into danced moustaches

Pointing home with swollen bulb finger joints

As eyeball coracles with white skiff sails

Drift across a pastry-brown sea

There is the brick omphalos

A mirror made of plaster and stone

A cupper’s tool

Napoleon reaches his stone bridge border

Everybody remembers but he can go no further

This mountain lies like a jewelled dog

White-stained water,

A lying leopard covered with moss

She will leap, she will leap, in the trees

From the trees

Skin x-rays on the surface of the moon

The unfinished city

The experiences of my departures

White-faced, a paper doll

Blown on dusty paths

There are cries one sometimes hears in the silence of starless nights

A portrait of the Comte de Lautréamont, done for his birthday by PC and Merl Fluin

Red Mercury separates into its component parts

Town and Country

My face is a desert with cactus clumps

Lambent flames of island shorelines

Where sand burns to glass eyes and leaves

Playing the euphorium

Black wire tears from dissolution

Beige petals behind bars

And spoons in batboxes

Twist the chrome-plated dancers

Into the blinded goggles

The filament handwringing

Of the silent.

I will see valley sides of blue flowers

Fingered teeth dipped into freshwater pools

My eyes bulge with molten ash

Will burst like boiled fish

Salmon skin hands and fillets

Will touch your blue hair and water skin

Silken ropes will brush my head