Review of Petra Whiteley's awesome forthcoming book, The Liquid Metropolis

Petra Whiteley's defiant latest tome, The Liquid Metropolis, published by Erbacce Press, sets about a ferocious dismantling of the persistently flourishing Social-Christian tenets. Frame by frame, poem by poem, stone by stone, look by look, in a challenging long-metrage between diary and diatribe, poetic epiphany and novelistic dystopia, Whitely walks the amazed reader through the post-apocalypse metropolis of misguided affects. The gaze of leering masculine eagles, the seething anaesthetic of cowardly hatred, did not waylay her from her task. No stone is left un-turned. This is a work of unabashed pride. To walk with these words is to understand the meaning of standing out in the rain, resolutely outside, where the rains do not feel the same, where something ripped from ugly becomes beautiful. From within the tree, poetry never abandons the reader throughout a thrilling conversation with the myths of cherished lies. Poetry emerges victorious as mind and body, as the seconds which exceed Time, as the bare statement which kicks and shouts as it is, in silence, as the nothing that lived and breathed, even these words, even the sun, even its fire, even the unattainable, which crawls 'as a syllable on a promised tongue/ forever no/thing.'

I imagine this enterprise was not without risks and that therefore first it is our role as readers to salute the bravery of this author, who has paid no heed to fashion nor to commodity, but to has listened to her deepest sentiment and revealed with such harsh and beautiful invective, the bare bones of the post-capitalist predicament. 'The clock hands/ of my practical suicide turn/the light backwards, no outer/limits…' Since Artaud, the necessity to un-live and un-think the colonial powers of Christian absurdities has been paramount. Here the manual to exist outside continues, in the rain and without lying. '(God's) endless fingers of words claw suicide/into the everyday smell of my flesh and its throbbing/is the only life left.' Or better still:

'I was there, playing dead for them, the oak of silence growing
into my lungs. Was noise a bruise that spread whitely into me?
Yes. In that poisoned room within the tree, I left traces of death,

lived backwards, the slow drip of birthday butchery.

So long to language and its pain!

Breathe to break the hush of words into music,
unconstrained and unshattering.'.


Hope is for the misguided but love entertains the brave, a love you build between the slow suicides of souls whose de-mystified sexualities can start to sing a song of muscle and beauteous, poetic bone. disillusions many ripped from the misfortunes of previous identities can be stripped in a kind of ritual post-mortem of manners and realities. Can one say, following such adventurers in the domains of the Spirit such as Artaud that another body is possible:

'I wanted you to watch
Me die, to watch the trees growing from my hands
Into the stark digits of night and be the monument
Of my liquid sex. To
Witness the opiate orgasms
In my resurrection.'

What for convenience sake we still call man or woman suffers here a keen and rigorous un-thinking. 'I am the void, the pain and the whiskey lie, a sucked bone, a flute,/and as I,/you will/(desc)end softly as a barren rattle sound.' The Liquid Metropolis is a book-machine in the great tradition of radical thinking, a book for new lover-thinkers, into the hope-less beyond of the naked end of the world. For those who, dare I say, have never bent their knees to kneel nor sheltered their eyes from the glaring truth of society's founding lies. This is a resistance song, a remarkable bottle hurled into the ocean of nought. To collect its messages is to accept that a book requires the reader to work, to pause for moments to collect one's whole intellectual history, to agree to be challenged, to be hurt, to be attacked by the anger of the author, to travel with her to the trees and the colours which sing on the other side: 'our laughter will echo like hard rain when we finally slip away.'


We have become accustomed to Whitely's unstinting intellectual rigour, to the beauty of many of her poems, but never has her true instinct been able to express itself with such uncompromising clarity and fire. The Liquid Metropolis is what the burning libraries of 2012 will need, an at times brutal poetic pamphlet whose language prepares the audacious for the trees which will grow from their hands, for a new laughter for the living who do not wish to postpone their desires and abdicate their enjoyments. 'I dream of Thames at midnight, where at least a rabbit can choose/ the softness of one's own never ever after and push hard towards/the dawn in the city.'

a realist song

i dreamt of you last night walking in the rain
we held hands once
my shadow and yours
sunk in the bed of a mystical river
we sipped ginger tea and honey

i read the diaries of unknown friends
the news of raging madness
reaches my ear lobes too often of late

our children's lungs breathe the slow train of destruction

the paranoid plot simmers
the ice melts and endangered whales are culled
new species of alien are sown in fields of falsity

we walked hand in hand
balancing pints of stout in brown paper bags
we had many vaguely pleasurable moments


we once took to the streets
to throw our anger at the mind occupiers
from over barricades of fibs
fiercely guarded by black truncheons of faith

1990 Union Square New York

three thousand unpublished poems later
i am caught underground
listening to gusting cold winds whistle down the Thames

things are much worse
the proliferation of craziness at an all time high

i know there is a war out there
but i don't want victims
i don't want my anger to close in a fist
i have to keep words flowing from these fingers
pouring molten promise into lost causes
i just want to register these dry stone paths of word
i will have as many names as events will assign me

i have you my funny milk and honey face
our wonderful hilarity

i need nothing else today

there are only landscapes

the lack of it
the half
the less than half
of its diminishing crescent

where once the languishing
only the beat
only the voice alone
in the company of voices
solitudes of light

there is no door
it is the placeless hour
the handle within
leading to the wide expanses

once the wall
broken down so many times
generations of schizos
couldn't see
your beauty
they couldn't take your tongue
from head to toe
laughing with incandescent seed

Casanova did
so much hurt in the wake of love
young girls broken for life
the machine of masculinity
of the twin continents
bridged for instants
by the transcendental prick-pen

stretch them
the canvas of instants
pour landscapes of blue
into the mouth of your song

once there was a wall

now there are only landscapes

and you are not even blue

Poem reading Rimbaud's Illuminations 2

tears rise from piano keys
as wings aroused
by the irrelevance of a sitting torso

with baked finger tips i sing you
with waves of unseen openings

open for me this night
suck the flying from sparrow
the hemmed shade from black sun

burn every ambition
maim every hope

with your caressing

i have been dead before
but not dead enough

too much of me prised open by the luminous outside
when it was i who should have been obliterated

to let morning sing within me

Poem reading Rimbaud's Illuminations 1

with the bees of ancient hedges
with the daggers of gruesome murders

wailing human errors walk blind into every vault of turquoise light

they do not see naked water lovers sing and laugh

they do not hear the misfit genius at once angel and foul

languishing he jeers
his superiority so clear they have tried to silence him
for centuries the same story
Casanova can tell

rivers of dawn carry the corpse of night's iniquity

it rests in so-called memory and rots

so i walk with the illuminated one with the beast
with his song with the sense of his song

burlesque dawns keep coming

over and over again

the ecstasy of magic lips

is that the sense of eternity

Taxing the Seed

QUESTION: Les députés envisagent de taxer l’utilisation par les paysans des semences auto-produites. Votre réaction?
C’est absolument scandaleux! C’est une stratégie de confiscation de l’autonomie des paysans pour pouvoir ouvrir des marchés. C’est aussi bête que ça. Prendre des résolutions comme cela, c’est absolument stupide et meurtrier S’il n’y a plus que des multinationales qui ont le droit de vendre des semences, alors que nous avons un patrimoine semencier de 10 à 12 000 ans, transmissible de génération en génération, ça veut dire que l’on engage l’humanité dans un processus de prise en otage et de hold-up légalisé.

(Pierre Rabni)


On the scandalous proposal of some minister with agricultural multinationals breathing down his neck to tax the seeds peasants grow autonomously as they have always done since the beginnings of humanity, here is a little song:


tomatoes and peppers
drying in the midday sun

for twelve thousand years
they've been feeding my people

now you tell me
they're not red enough for you
they're not big enough for you

now you tell me
i have to pay taxes
on the seeds i grow

minister you must be joking
minister you gotta be crazy

now you tell me
i have to sow your American seeds
now you tell me
my ancient taste buds gotta die

tomatoes and peppers
drying in the midnight sun

no one gonna take them away from me
no one gonna take them away from me

Dylan, Ginsberg and dancing Saints

Dylan did not write songs they say
he picked them from the atmospheres
like ripe lime figs in October

Ginsberg saw Blake rising like a bearded phantom
he lost his mind
to the greater outside
where his mother's pain
stripped the skin from his wrists
he lay out there in the rain
howling for she who could not be
poems flowing in universal breath

many events have no explanation
to interpret them is already to lose them
often the only response is laughter
not a laughter which kills
but rather gives birth
which heals the lame

the screens which adorn our mobile prison walls
have too many words on them
too many images we cannot turn off

break them i say with feathered fists
let haloed saints dance on gilded shards

the tomorrow of me (a midnight poem)

i have been away too long
i have been through the desert
i have found myself at dawn absent in the sands

what i long for now
i cannot tell
but i can feel it

it is neither anticipation nor arousal
which impresses the nerves in me

it is the fact of you

the bone of you
nailed into my flesh
the lips of you
living the tomorrow of me

11 - 11 - 11, a rant

when will the pneumatic drills stop? the buses? the trains on the tracks? the jets on the tarmac with their managing directors on cocaine singing wild anthems at rampant androids gone berserk? banks emptied of cash, wallets full of useless plastic? is it just a bad film? weak psychology's anxiety at a buffoon's end of the world pushed as it teeters into a bed of thorns? can so many riches be wiped off in a day? will they come back tomorrow the same way? so much pain, so little blood. but the blood is spilled elsewhere.

democracy you say began with principles, the notion of the many, not the mass, not the undifferentiated, but the identified minnows within the group and groups within groups, all with names, all respected, taken care of, massaged into old age and gently lain to rest upon final heartbeat. they all had a vote upon adulthood. they cast their die into the winds of change. songs and images tossed at the aerial witness of perpetually new dawns.
until the new dawn never came. billboard faces came however and melted into screens. every household room multiplied. their smiles and their slogans reverberated ad nauseam. there were hopes. there were tomorrows. all based on principles of well being and prosperity, health and riches for all. masses moved toward this magnet of dream. they came ashore to the land of plenty from all corners of the globe, shipwrecked on an image, which jangled, stuck in the head.

so why now does the screen flicker ? why do the graphs hurry downwards? wasn't it the best of all possible worlds? the greatest good for the broadest mass of mugs? so why now does the dominant politician stumble as he reaches democracy's pulpit? what does he have trouble hiding now, as discontent mounts? did they prepare him for this at school? did his history lessons tell him what occurs in the heartburn of action? when you have to think without thinking and pay for your decisions forever? what is fear now as it rises along the backbone of your arrogance?

the leaders are seated. their smiles are a deck of cards shuffled and re-shuffled for cameras from carnivorous photographers. ideas and advice, everyone has them but the graphs seem to have a mind of their own and money is having a frightening habit of vanishing when you need it. the more you need the less there is. something is wrong in the central breakdown cortex of the brain. nothing can be built without faltering. no solution holds more than ten minutes and the populations are grumbling. they are throwing units of broken ideas at the camera men on the high street. they are running with stolen goods. they have odd ideas and alternative talk. they are getting suspicious. just when the leader-images needed the masses, it looks like the masses are leaving. all hell broke loose and no one had seen hell for a while. death having been banished and deformity lost in wastelands of dull pain.

what is a million? what is a billion? what is a trillion? how many drills do you need to break a million walls?

my words are anathema to the politician's smile. i was a school with him, the fiend. i could look him in the eye then and spit at his future. now he is protected by the army and the prison-language of hordes of housewives huddled around their newborns.

it is late. it is grey. my overcoat is not enough to keep my warm. my hat my scarf my gloves. every minute is money. food for someone i love. i keep at it. i keep smiling. i am fighting a lonesome fight. i am a slave just like any other. these useless words won't help me. whichever readers there were are too busy watching the graphs, the double dips and the exchange rates. i learnt my lesson long ago. i should have kept quiet. i should have stifled this ludicrous will to sing.

On Michelle Williams' Female and two poems

Variations on Michelle William's book, Female


There are several stages in the revelation of a writer to the world. The first is perhaps the revelation of writing to the writer, an uncanny moment when one realises there is something more than just speech and thought, there is another voice, a flow of something deeper than both thought and speech, something primordial and yet simultaneously artificial, a river that pours itself out in ink. Words come and create another body. I hid my voice for years and many friends and family are still unaware of my silent vocation to write. Having such a vocation as mother and wife is probably even harder. Every moment of every day is full with tasks to perform. Where and when does time leave us the moments to speak this secret voice? Such is the predicament of poetess, Michelle Williams, outlined in subtle, whispering tones in her first tome of poems, Female.

These are some of the sincerest musings I have read in a long time and I listen to them in tranquil rapture as they induce me to think. They bear their fragility with pride. They recognise obstacles and the contours of failure. Williams writes: "she remains/ scarred for wanting/ that which she carries/ empty with understanding…" Or: " for it is/ the ancestry of my gender/ the sacred burden of my sex/ to be/ the core of strength within/ each weakness/ perceived/ to always equal the greater sum/ of my circumstances…" The peaceful reflections here belie the hurt and the battles which must have preceded their writing. There are scars here which have been overcome. The serenity with which the poetess writes is wonderful and much of the writing's beauty resides in the joy of writing itself, the pleasures inherent in the activity of poetic practise. There is a longing and a pining in a poem which lives and breathes within that poem. The senses are contained there. The beauty of this singer's voice is such that complications and excessive ornamentalism are not prerequisite. "i have held the keepsake of mo(u)rning/ in a reverence meant for lockets/ and solitary breaths"

Of course, she is already elsewhere. She has been for many years. But the paths poets embark upon have aleatory beginnings. The important thing is to begin. Somewhere, to don a mask, to speak these words:

"i held you there
in moments of eyes
you filled my palm
with the willingness
of your empty
and how the clasping
remains"


From my sojourn with Female, came the following two poems:


one


in the trinity
of wife of mother of woman

much of what falls
will fall on you

you who in arias of silence
write the future

it will fall
as you grasp the moment
which must not fall
as all around it fractures

you must not fall
in the fall
but rise
between midday and midnight

with the poem


two

you write your portrait
in secret text

it is dangerous to be understood
unwise to open to the sun

what protection we have
is our poetry to listen to

what you call vocality

we have it
we keep it
we travel with it
to unknown destination
on paths at dusk

where whispering sings

The Desert and the Nomad

where did the sun go
has it penetrated my skin my eyes
where did the sun go as the wind blows against my tent
has the sand hidden my face

the surface of the dunes shifts
in infinitesimal migrations
crests of suspended yellow swarms
beat against us as we fight to the sandy summits

these are the masters wind and sun and sand

the nomad is a listener a seer or not at all

what a lesson to know you can never win
to know domination is in vain
and indeed vanity must be banished to the dark alcoves of night

i have dined with the nomad
i have listened to his music
i have witnessed his closed eyes smiling

these moments of light will rest within my eye
as the voices of dawn painted by the wind

i shall continue to sit outside
ever more convinced in my choices

the nomad writes directly in the sand
he writes directly in the sky
with her hands writing love on his black body
in silence the songs begin
just as babies cry at the heart of the camps

take up your instrument
and bide your timelessness

Through the Desert

where does the light fall
from the colossal bleeding eye of dawn
where is the immensity of everything
as it dissolves into deep blue
as i lose my hand in the dunes of golden sand

here the night is full of donkeys screaming sex at the stars
full of your absence
and the smiling voices of children

there is only the sun now
so hot this desert so blue the skies my love
the houses are mud ovens baked with straw
the walls are hot like winter fires

i have been touched by respectful fingers
who know the heat and the mischief
which burns on the heads of liars

come to my house and drink tea the man said
my house is your house he said as he axed the emerald palm branches
come taste these dates they are good for the heat

what this berber man gave me
was part of the nothing he had
just carpets on the floor where he slept with his ten children
his house full of pride
full of the desert
full of the oasis

i have four dates in my pocket
i have already eaten four others
should i eat them
what can be kept of a moment
of dawn as it pours into midday
i have closed my eyes again and again
to empty the living gut of my pain

how can one keep what cannot last
is love the only fruit
which defies these laws of time

The Innocent Ones (for Vincent Van Gogh)

i am with the innocent ones

the ones who never willed fame

the ones who understand the suffering of women
their kindness beneath the shame

the ones whose steps
become apparent in shy moments
barely audible fractions
solemn scrolls on dancing shoulders

the innocent ones
who wrote letters
to the day
to the hour
to colours

the ones who feared the winds
and the grumpiness of a father
the shackles of religion as they constricted a mother
into denying the art in her son

the ones who carried out a minor task
a craft they loved and which only they could do

the innocent ones
who could only try to understand how or why
doubt and uncertainty within their every sentence
like the cold sits in the mistral
like the ache in the vertebrae from an unkind comment


one does not await one's hour

moments approach

a poet cannot invent his reader
any more than gold can convince a thief

gingerly i walk these lost territories
stones jangling in my ripped shoe

i do not rue the day i left the path to sit under the olive tree
it was the day a canvas looked at me
and asked me to paint

11.9.11

sometimes Nina Simone sings

the depth of her music
stretched over water over land

i can listen to her today
because what happened then
was already withheld within her broken beauty

she still sings from the future

a symbol strong enough
to enter catastrophic time

in the belly of my wounded being
the parched ground shakes
miniature deaths falling into my useless words
burning my eyes with speechless prophecies

sing with me now
with what of the true remains

There are no Answers, an open letter to Tim Barrus

what is beauty? i have often asked myself. why does one feel compelled by one image rather than another? what emotions are there in between myself and a painting, a poem? what emotions which are only mine because the poem or painting instills them in me?
what has washed it all away? beauty and emotion both? a kind of pornographic violence, a dulling of the wits, an attention deficit raised to the level of world.

what is disgust? greater perhaps than anger i can speak beyond anger because my disgust for this world is such that i can stand away and vent far more than anger, and show all my pain. i can write it but i cannot show it without hurting. thus what you have done is to me impossible. my anger is invisible. it is a moment permanently superseded with words which flow constantly even when then pen cannot act.


what happened to Pasolini? is like asking what happened to the truth? why did the herd turn on him then? why was the sexuality of his pain so evident then? what did he go seeking? was he so consumed by guilt? an exit from love? from the love of his mother which dominated everything forever? could one hate society more than Pasolini? could it have grown worse? poetry in the form of a rose and 120 days stand side by side, antitheses one man could no longer bridge.


those who live without pain are not our friends. we can only disbelieve them. i write because i live my pain as an offering, a walking over, a step to the side, and i write it.

we live our pain victoriously. i do not mean we have overcome our pain. i mean we are unashamed to be who we are and feel what we feel. we call it a dialect of wounds.


so the shame at being human is a disdain for sexual practises which are locked within power games, within ounces of punch, grams of speed and high. it is a question of being to them when love is always about feeling. being is a sham. i have never been anything but a river of becomings. and yes i have been punched but i have retaliated. they have come for me in numbers just as they came for Pasolini, plotting his murder, plotting a rape, a perfect crime.

love and sex ever pushed further and further apart. money the liquid key used to exchange dreams for fantasies. fantasies of big and better. fantasies of forbidden. fantasies of a long way away, never to return… only you have to and sometimes there is hell to pay.

we seek poetry within certain fields, we seek it out but in a way it is the only thing you cannot find. it is there already or not at all. in that outside particle of becoming. when a guitar stands to play and propels us beyond with fingers from heaven. what is personal becomes universal, it unfolds a story which could never have been told otherwise. it was always there. it has just been chosen.

pornography is not a science. can it be an art? i have my doubts. but it is a form of commerce. and very effective at selling through subliminal manipulations. the kicks hidden. the broken jaws of children as they break on the rocks of disease and racism cleansed and polished. everything shines even the sexual organs of drugged actors as they oil the cogs of anti-seduction. pornography is monotony itself, the repetition of a knockout blow. bodies empty and fill in complete irrelevance. what is animal had to be overcome, the human being a stillborn nightmare. we are nowhere near achieving anything at all.

i saw the Pasolini in you. i saw the monstrous sincerity in your words. i cannot read your videos but i can string the abstract line which takes the sex away from your brain and lends it miraculously to the river of becoming. there is no sense in lying. we are too far gone for that. some of us can barely dance so scarce is this air we breathe, so full is it with the converted lies of dystopia's being, the radioactive insincerity of governments overcome by marauding reality.

our blood breathes in poems. every moment saved from murder writes itself to us in adulterous pitch. this is just the beginning of the end. it will take us a long time to die.

Saturday Rain

suddenly the rains camebringing grey-black marauding strangers
to world's end horizon
this ancient land
where Aeneas once came and left

the vines of Byzantium
seeded in this sweet red earth
entwined with skulls of massacred Christians

the scream of a Gypsy
on the dry cascading rosemary stones

the serpent in the cistern
sitting patiently on a crucible of quiet

the fiendish steps of a dancing woman
smitten by a tarantula on a scolding hill

in this location in this operatic chest
words fall down like sacred rains

four months of drought
banished in one october night

Last Comment

When we’re in pain, to whom can we stretch out a hand? Who’s still there to hold us in the split-second that precedes the fall? Who can anticipate it is at that moment we shall keel over? At that moment we must run to help? And when you’re all alone, you can speak out loud and hope and wager someone out there’s going to hear. Humans close off their ears to suffering. God? God in his absence. We’re alone, Professore, we’re alone.

The Sacrifice is done. At the end of transcendence, at the end of the possibility of better worlds? Why? What sacrifice? For the work! As a good writer said: the body becoming book, or becoming painting, it’s the same thing. Leaving the biological body for something different which is definitively non-biological. That’s what they can’t understand at all. A question of sensations. And our way of leaving biology is our particular style, if we’re good enough to have one. The will is a stain left on the page by our passing bodies. The poet’s honest food is tears. He senses the tug of something eternal linked to the music of another time. An image can conjure up this temporality. A good writer must live there. I am not what you see. My fingers write burnt by the third degree.

Il Professore died this morning. Of all folk I know and knew, he was probably the one who most helped me down this way of words. He took the jump. His suffering too great, he decided it was time for death to take him. He killed himself. He decided to stop eating. He had just enough strength to pull his wheelchair to the window. The wind and all his words and all his ideas tumbling to the ground. My Professore’s eyes closed on this life with mine regurgitating their centuries of grief. You suffered the physical consequences of bad luck. And now my eyes are stinging in retreat. There is no point speaking to me. My grief cannot be heard. My eyes communicate with dark soils. I plunge my hands down and dig at the crust. I roll about and clutch my ankles. I lie on my back and cross my legs. I outstretch my arms and press the palms up. Just as they carry you away for good now. Just as they banish your handsome face forever, closed in a wooden box. As if your memory could find a box big enough.

And now they have dug a grave for you, a cold hole in the mud. And they put a stone cave above your neck. Just like the others. Just like the others that got carried away too. The eighteen year old villager hit by a car, the mechanic with cancer, the 93 year old granny. Their bodies lined up under the earth, waiting for impossible affection. Just like the others, you lie in your best suit and tie. Your sun tanned face smiling at the closed vents of blackness. And whenever the passion plays, I shall seek out a landscape for my eyes to sit and weep and think of you. Why don’t they feel this passion? How can they laugh and mock so easily? It is the collusive mob which you depicted so well, their sinister weakness and their eyelashes clogged up in the blood they sheepishly spill. I’ll sit at the memorial and sing the optimism of eternal life which you had obtained long before you died. I can feel your cold stony hand closed around mine forever.

How do you expect me now to believe in this body, this time, this space? When we cannot tolerate being pinned down to any single spot? We are everywhere already as we come. Just as we move through the folds of memory, as fluid timeless bodies. I leave utopia. Everything I say is practical and proven by fact. I am an empiricist, a rogue to the State. Yet, we are talking of the Spirit now. What would become of us? What of our worldly memories? Of our minds? And this faith in another life? An afterlife? St. Augustin imagined himself in the company of angels, marvelling at images of a perfectly peaceful bliss. St Francis of Assissi had the certainty of an afterlife. Paradise was a just accomplishment for those who had followed the Christian way. What gave them such faith? How could they be so sure? What disturbing meditations lay in ambush for those who could not allow themselves such blind faith? What sounds, what words formed of sounds scratched across the blank tambourine of this notebook can render our intellectual turmoil as I ruminate upon such questions? I have surrendered the body.

I felt il professore’s spirit invade my mind and I suddenly realised how close he still was to me. I imagined his essence no longer knew the slightest boundary and could alight in all those who thought strongly of him. Thus our love for him could live and claim a long life. And simultaneously, I lamented that if no one thought of him, supposing that were so, then his spiritual existence would become ephemeral if not extinct and his newly found ubiquity would not be of the slightest use to him. In this sense, an afterlife would still be linked to this earthly existence. Indeed, he would be condemned to a vigil before his successors’ memories. I imagined the afterlife was a facet of memory. I computed that if writing was the greatest exploration of memory known to man and that writing was nigh an extinct practise then humanity would soon lose any rational link to the afterlife, leaving only superstition and magic in its place, and that death as reflexion would soon die for lack of thought, and writing would follow rapidly behind, leaving spontaneous chatter and sounds to placate the anxiety of the world become mass. Here I am again, crying. The world dies, you die, I die. We are dead. Serve me a drink. I can still drink: red ruby wine. Deep black spices from the Mediterranean. Poor olive oil from my groves. Feel my throat sting. Chew on the wild rocket, sun dried tomatoes. Cling to my loved ones and write poems for nobody.


From The Eyes of a Man
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Eyes-Man-Dom-Gabrielli/9780956103819

Thirst and the Sea

you lost her
in your arms
her final heartbeat
was yours
you turned to the desert
not the sea
your poem
began that day
your parched throat was hers
in a sea without water
your thirst for her
for her hand
for her lips
for her bosom
waves in your verse singing
for her who was still you
in the desert alone
you would always be together
you called her back
line after line
you begged
the wounded earth in labour
to bring her back
your voice
calling to the elements
calling each tear with a new name
all names were hers
your voice
hers to call
to unite thirst with thirst
and live on in song

A reading of poem 15 from my book, The Parallel Body. The poem is called Thirst and the Sea and was written for the Egyptian Jewish writer, Edmond Jabès.

http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780956103857/The-Parallel-Body

Morning Eulogy for Nina Simone

with every mistrusted minute
intolerable loves
break out into an insufferable song

the hapless gasp of what cannot be
runs through every conduit of light and dark

to place the impossible jewel of the impossible love
into an impossible crown

betrayal beckoned
blackened the blackness
liberated the hatred
sung the sweetness
for nothing
for hopelessness
for you who were you
lastly
alone

and the crowds came
to cluster around your piano
around the dulcet venom
around the unforgiving anger

applaud the queen
applaud the goddess
applaud the diva of soul
high priestess of intolerable beauty

lost child in life's mayhem
loved by her voice

which the populace could never hear
until they placed rhythms to it
which never should have been

plastic close ups beat the fragrances of spring kisses

who can still smell your lament

as the mass weep before heaps of hideous plastic flowers
for the dead they can't remember
for their dead friends who live in their salacious minds
programmed to erect eject salivate reject

yes my dear
so it is
they have no heed
your voice hopeless
from a land yonder
unwelcome here
where dreams of nonsense rise
in collective orgasm
exchanging artless loves

O the incompetent lovers

they were not worth it

whoever was you never met
or never trusted
or never sung
the echo of your mutual becomings
lost and misunderstood
forever
in this diminishing land of lost souls
where love cannot be
where the winds are the objective complement
of the highest angers caressed by God's finger
where History spoke hushed crushed
as your piano
as your black bird
as your Porgy

as you


(for Nina Simone)

Conversations with Neruda 1

i cannot wake the lateness
the parted anticipations of your sleeping legs

i read sonnets
celebrating the greatness of a love
great time justified and redeemed by love

time i once
lost to the harshness of thought

tear away at the corpse
break illusions and romance

absent rivers
crash through the walls of your poetry's absent house
meter and rhyme and cohesion
tattered and torn
lines going nowhere
but to the love who gathers all to herself
the earth and the flowers and the fragrances of wonderment

against you
thought emits signs
in another sphere
close to the unthought
rises the pearl
which buds

and the loved one suffers
the badness of my company
institutional pariah
sunk in a song of perpetual becoming

oh yes i do
i love your stamen breasts
your pollen your orange fragrance
your bud your clusters your saline promise

you overwhelm the poem
with a common metaphor

because the sun still shines
the sea changes colour every hour
the sunset deceives every mortal minute

and i love you as a second skin of perspiration
i love you as the shadow of my own feminine absence

it was hot that summer in Salento
the figs were sweet purple and golden with drops of sugar lime
we poured primitive wines over each other
sipped with black lips under alternative suns

there were no invitations
only the pull of the tide
scarves of spume draped around our kissing necks

love was a moment
ripped from a fragment of blue cloth
shreds of erect tongue
on the surly bud of metaphor

come with me girl
deeper
three miles down
past the bluesman and the novelist

on a journey out of time

burning fiercer than romance

if you could only follow me
if you could only bend with me toward this black sun

kiss me as thoughts rise
penciled on your mauve softness

yes something would be won
something great will come
from eternity's horizon
drops of silver
from vanquished sobs of a mutilated sun

As the Beggar Sings

from the perches of your amorous perfection
the irony of your smile
daggers my wounds

i dream of crying

i can cry tearlessly all the sadness
from the rump of that bitch of the Mediterranean
as she crashes down on my cowed corpse

as the beggar sings

i never buried nobody
never stole no cents
all this judging cuts holes in my flesh

the embrace of darkness' cinders scolds my hollow eyes

flames burn lonesome in the ruins of useless embers

my enemies do not sleep and they hunt in packs
they have large stupid jaws with ugly words hanging from their tongues

my back is an open target
for their venomous darts

evolution had its way

it beat singularity and creativity to death

and now i roam
and now i roam

and now i beg a god could come
from this battered earth
and leave me solace
in the form a lonely poem

Witness to a Storm (after reading Yeats)

the grey stormbuoyant and dark in the sky
my legs crossed upon a bench
dark shiver from the deep

ladybird on my knee
boisterous fly expelled with open book

ladies' silhouettes past my insouciant eye

great is the spectacle beyond
lightning's prongs stabbing the rising waves
digging into mirrored grey spume

anger gnaws at heaps of seaweed
at the beach's diminishing border

the sun dances in my lap
seemingly unaware
of the storm's vagrant antagonism

just so i have been witness to the world
to the howls the rage the despair

bathing visitors hurry to umbrage

still my pen holds sway

i have no eager appetite to negate
long murky lines of horizon's rains
drawing a smoky curtain
over naked nature's pains

rather turn the pen over
spill this ink
clasp the concave moment
as light assembles into dark

clouds into torrent

Solitude 1

one day i shall writewithout hiding my words
from the smiles of day

i shall clothe myself
in dry stones

lizards shall cavort within my vagrant walls

my infinite limbs shall stretch
from the ends of the earth
to the blue horizon

i shall finally accumulate thoughts in emptiness
as the black snake stores heat from the southern sun

i shall laugh as i sing
a meandering passage toward the light

under the ink waters of silence

"Ecrire le livre, c’est associer sa voix à celle, virtuelle, des marges, c’est écouter les signes nager dans l’encre – tels vingt-six poissons aveugles – avant de naître au regard, c’est-à-dire de mourir en se fixant dans leur dernier cri d’amour, alors, dans l’essentiel, j’aurai dit ce que j’avais à dire et que chaque page savait déjà ; c’est pourquoi la forme aphoristique est l’expression profonde du livre, car elle permet aux marges de respirer, car elle porte en soi la respiration du livre et exprime l’univers en une fois." (Edmond Jabès)


i am singing under the ink waters of silence
i have no idea where i am going
until i hear you
you who are as lost as i am
you who ask how the question questions
and swim within it

you walk along the same path of words
with the same gravel stones in your shoes

my wounds are your wounds
in the fourth dimension
and the fifth and the sixth

everything must be reinvented
you found your loved one in a tree which did not exist
you serenaded him with Harlequin's borrowed guitar

thus there was a clearing in the wood
there was shade from a scorching sun

flocks of fluttering words gathered to this sacred umbrage
i would happily lend you all my songs

i know it is dark sometimes
as the lines of destiny fall
into the black holes of misfortune
we are profoundly lost in these moments
we fall foul of our words
and we insult language
opening our flesh with scathing daggers
the words which swarm
are poisonous ants
tarantulas and pestiferous vermin

we do not dare turn
the dagger on our loved ones
so we turn it upon ourselves
cutting with precise incision

i carried my pain with me
to the millenary olive groves
to sit with me on my ancient Greek rock
to feel with me this warm dawn of pale pink seduction

o gentle words
i feel your silver shoals around me
glinting in the absent lights

if you lose me
make a rope of coloured letters my love
tie them around this olive tree
with leaves of lavender scented winds

if you lose me
leave red wine tears in the punctured vessel of time
look through its primitive perforations
you will see me dancing
with the body of a silver harp

only in the desert can we read the signs
on the inner lining of our blue eyelids