an undying sunset
what constricts me is what hurts you
it stutters in my heel as i limp
the potatoes are under attack
as they flower in the white heat
the first zucchini small tender
fried with their orange flowers
delectable in egg batter
sprinkled parsimoniously with salt
the radishes are finished
too bitter now too hard
they will be cast to the eager rays of the sun
and burnt to compost
between midday and the dying night
i amble this evening
thinking of how much money one needs
to protect a dream
i fear the air they breathe
i do not trust the words
from beneath their southern smiles
spinach leaves raw peas
pungent rucola coriander plenty
parsley and basil gathered
water sprinkled carrots in ferrous earth
finally starting to grow
pain is a lizard mating in the jaws of morning
the grass snake seems to fly
over the dead weeds
the lizards jump to avoid its black gullet
the swallows year after year
build the same nest of dead olive twig and straw
somewhere you dance
somewhere you scream
i doubt these rumours which have you dead
your flamenco is an undying sunset
as you cry dry tears over your baby's sleeping brow
it stutters in my heel as i limp
the potatoes are under attack
as they flower in the white heat
the first zucchini small tender
fried with their orange flowers
delectable in egg batter
sprinkled parsimoniously with salt
the radishes are finished
too bitter now too hard
they will be cast to the eager rays of the sun
and burnt to compost
between midday and the dying night
i amble this evening
thinking of how much money one needs
to protect a dream
i fear the air they breathe
i do not trust the words
from beneath their southern smiles
spinach leaves raw peas
pungent rucola coriander plenty
parsley and basil gathered
water sprinkled carrots in ferrous earth
finally starting to grow
pain is a lizard mating in the jaws of morning
the grass snake seems to fly
over the dead weeds
the lizards jump to avoid its black gullet
the swallows year after year
build the same nest of dead olive twig and straw
somewhere you dance
somewhere you scream
i doubt these rumours which have you dead
your flamenco is an undying sunset
as you cry dry tears over your baby's sleeping brow
you learn falling
the Scirocco is a wind from the south
it fetches water from the far reaches of the Mediterranean
it brings cloud this morning over the olive grove
in the night the motorbike skidded to its death
the cars sliding under the bright full moon
i had one hand on the wheel
we were kissing the moon and the night
we stripped the blackness
sip my coffee this morning
gather the dead carcasses of the slugs
as i write to the soul music from that other planet
where my fellow poetess suffers
where they are trying to stop her beauty
with forms to compile and post
with lawyers and injunctions
with the insults of jealousy
and inverted adulation
i pick up the compost and the slender tomato plants
what else can i do
i must take advantage of these first clouds
i have lost too many seedlings already
their leaves crinkled or black
you learn falling the man said
there is no way forward
which is not backwards
into the errors we can repair
with love
it fetches water from the far reaches of the Mediterranean
it brings cloud this morning over the olive grove
in the night the motorbike skidded to its death
the cars sliding under the bright full moon
i had one hand on the wheel
we were kissing the moon and the night
we stripped the blackness
sip my coffee this morning
gather the dead carcasses of the slugs
as i write to the soul music from that other planet
where my fellow poetess suffers
where they are trying to stop her beauty
with forms to compile and post
with lawyers and injunctions
with the insults of jealousy
and inverted adulation
i pick up the compost and the slender tomato plants
what else can i do
i must take advantage of these first clouds
i have lost too many seedlings already
their leaves crinkled or black
you learn falling the man said
there is no way forward
which is not backwards
into the errors we can repair
with love
no need for tomorrows
in this baking august-may
the burnt grasses homes
to hungry lizards
must be harvested
much as a piano plays
for the echoes of a lost child
all the farmers know
any more rain is a bonus now
as they fix their leaky hoses
as they plant the final battalions
of peppers and aubergines and tomatoes
the peas are so sweet my friend
they rarely make it to the kitchen
we pull the first garlics
we merrily crunch on radish and lettuce
the rocket leaves marry well
with Parmesan and olive oil
the spinach nourishes the multitude
the last cauliflowers and broccolis
the fave are picked
they lie in the sun to blacken and dry
for faraway rainy winters
the first tiny courgettes along with their flowers
are gaily fried and munched
this cloudless week
has seen many casualties
collapsed seedlings pasted on the red muds
but the lavender and sage and cistus are in flower
there is something eternal
something contrary to man which delights me
in their necessary flowerings
it is dark now as i sip red wine
listening to Arabian jazz
i have punctured time
and yet still it screams revenge at me
sometimes an extra glass
brings eternity to your bedside
it is draped in images of olive groves in the sun
what i transmit now is the feeling of it
the rising moon of friendship
which needs not look for tomorrows
Salad for the Heart, for Marilyn Basel
young spinach leaves
crunchy spicy wild rocket
young fava beans from long green pod
spring red onion chopped fine
safran pecorino balsamic vinegar
unfiltered olive oil
cloudy green from terracotta jar
barley bread and malvasia bianca
brings a smile a song from blue
from afternoon heat to fresh dew morning
from celeritous green lizard to lazy black snake
rosemary bloom ends now to thyme and sage
from calendula to poppies
from dandelion to rocket
the day spent kneeling
to rake away the weeds
to part the ferrous earth
for a hundred tomatoes
fearing for their youthful stock
in the burning midday sun
it is late you say to take arrogances seriously
you sung of Rilke as now zinnias and peas
it is the same word you sing for an old fellow
whose echoes wade into the shallows of Michigan
there is love in everything you do
no judgement no shame
just these words which sing despite themselves
and challenge the plentiful to introspection
my knees hurt now as i write these tender words
i will dream of tomato saplings and sprouting purple basil
everything needs a guardian and i know you have one
every plant i place will live within a chaotic logic
garlic on either side of every tomato
mint with the potatoes
chick peas with broad beans
all this you know
you know these weeds are far more than that
they are the answer they are the antidote
far too easy of course to listen to your wisdom
as the world sleeps into folly dreaming of monsters
i open my garden to you
crunchy spicy wild rocket
young fava beans from long green pod
spring red onion chopped fine
safran pecorino balsamic vinegar
unfiltered olive oil
cloudy green from terracotta jar
barley bread and malvasia bianca
brings a smile a song from blue
from afternoon heat to fresh dew morning
from celeritous green lizard to lazy black snake
rosemary bloom ends now to thyme and sage
from calendula to poppies
from dandelion to rocket
the day spent kneeling
to rake away the weeds
to part the ferrous earth
for a hundred tomatoes
fearing for their youthful stock
in the burning midday sun
it is late you say to take arrogances seriously
you sung of Rilke as now zinnias and peas
it is the same word you sing for an old fellow
whose echoes wade into the shallows of Michigan
there is love in everything you do
no judgement no shame
just these words which sing despite themselves
and challenge the plentiful to introspection
my knees hurt now as i write these tender words
i will dream of tomato saplings and sprouting purple basil
everything needs a guardian and i know you have one
every plant i place will live within a chaotic logic
garlic on either side of every tomato
mint with the potatoes
chick peas with broad beans
all this you know
you know these weeds are far more than that
they are the answer they are the antidote
far too easy of course to listen to your wisdom
as the world sleeps into folly dreaming of monsters
i open my garden to you
The image we have of ourselves is not ours (Translation of a Juarroz poem)
One must let the negative of one's image
take shape within oneself,
the blacks and whites transformed,
the meanings transformed,
the abysses transformed.
One must allow the wrong side
to rise to the surface of oneself,
in order to see oneself differently,
to look at things differently.
One must allow the free form of oneself
rise in oneself
and let it mingle with its virtual images,
its lost images,
make it form a bouquet of all its images.
The images we have of ourselves are useless.
They undo themselves like a canvas without a frame,
they collapse like a mirror of dust
into death.
One must seek one's own negative
and instead of developing it, dig into it.
The image we have of ourselves is not ours.
We have loaned an image.
But its negative can be the path
to an image which is ours this time:
the positive side of a thought
which corrects the void.
(Roberto Juarroz, 2002, Translation Gabrielli)
take shape within oneself,
the blacks and whites transformed,
the meanings transformed,
the abysses transformed.
One must allow the wrong side
to rise to the surface of oneself,
in order to see oneself differently,
to look at things differently.
One must allow the free form of oneself
rise in oneself
and let it mingle with its virtual images,
its lost images,
make it form a bouquet of all its images.
The images we have of ourselves are useless.
They undo themselves like a canvas without a frame,
they collapse like a mirror of dust
into death.
One must seek one's own negative
and instead of developing it, dig into it.
The image we have of ourselves is not ours.
We have loaned an image.
But its negative can be the path
to an image which is ours this time:
the positive side of a thought
which corrects the void.
(Roberto Juarroz, 2002, Translation Gabrielli)
Blues for Maalouf 2
so many empty chairs
when to many a stone suffices
how much to lose
on the ascent
the tumbling hoof
stones once more
falling on the innocent
i climb with you
we are here by chance
we are visitors
we are accidents
which somehow do not happen
standing still
in a future moment
i feel like kicking all the chairs down
all the stones into the blue air
punching the living daylights out of
the goon who sprayed his weed killer
on once resplendent orchids
the victory of arrogance never ceases
his will to greater
and the dying bees
and the dying snakes
in the midnight moon the lame fox
preys on the mutant mouse
the earth cries from its open wound
and we are in there
our anger is only the will to continue
is that another arrogance
wouldn't it be best to push it all
down the burning slope
a fine apocalypse finally
the bees and poetry and all our magnificent children
sometimes smiling is impossible in this south
yet the sun effaces even idiots
the Mediterranean takes the lonely coke bottle to hell
and leaves it there with my bad temper
it will rain your music on this unknown city
on this my anger
i call it blues
i take so many supreme liberties
none greater than this writing itself
which stutters
which strides
which your trumpet soothes
serenading the bees as they die
for an extra ounce of meat
for an extra litre of oil
for some meagre profit
it is always for profit
the waters ineluctably polluted
the people slowly surely
poisoned and cured by the same hand
the taxi driver will risk his and your life
to take you to where you needn't go
to smoke a cigarette under a millenary olive tree at midnight
what does it matter
don't forget your malt whisky and hashish
your raw fennel munchies
hugging the most beautiful girl in the world
you will look over the valleys
signs
still to be written
in music
the bus will take you at dawn
through the pine woods and the groves
the homeless gathering kindling
in the waterless plains
you have to take your sound with you my brother
you cannot stop at every village
you are always already leaving
you must leave your tears in your eyes
one or two heavy suitcases
to cross the historical water
the ethnic divide
our chance is to be born into ignorance
the walls will no longer come down
they will rise again the same evening
in these lands of the deaf and the blind
in these lands of suffocating beauty
if we have enemies
even they are as unknown as us
they are the common murderers of beauty
bee killers and snake assassins
man cannot rid himself of the organ which kills
the ladies in headscarves know that
as they carry the grains to market
they sit on carpets
they talk in silent signs
the men smoke
dogs bark
you play your trumpet in silence
dawn your sister on a hill top
echoes
with stripes of silver and blue
when to many a stone suffices
how much to lose
on the ascent
the tumbling hoof
stones once more
falling on the innocent
i climb with you
we are here by chance
we are visitors
we are accidents
which somehow do not happen
standing still
in a future moment
i feel like kicking all the chairs down
all the stones into the blue air
punching the living daylights out of
the goon who sprayed his weed killer
on once resplendent orchids
the victory of arrogance never ceases
his will to greater
and the dying bees
and the dying snakes
in the midnight moon the lame fox
preys on the mutant mouse
the earth cries from its open wound
and we are in there
our anger is only the will to continue
is that another arrogance
wouldn't it be best to push it all
down the burning slope
a fine apocalypse finally
the bees and poetry and all our magnificent children
sometimes smiling is impossible in this south
yet the sun effaces even idiots
the Mediterranean takes the lonely coke bottle to hell
and leaves it there with my bad temper
it will rain your music on this unknown city
on this my anger
i call it blues
i take so many supreme liberties
none greater than this writing itself
which stutters
which strides
which your trumpet soothes
serenading the bees as they die
for an extra ounce of meat
for an extra litre of oil
for some meagre profit
it is always for profit
the waters ineluctably polluted
the people slowly surely
poisoned and cured by the same hand
the taxi driver will risk his and your life
to take you to where you needn't go
to smoke a cigarette under a millenary olive tree at midnight
what does it matter
don't forget your malt whisky and hashish
your raw fennel munchies
hugging the most beautiful girl in the world
you will look over the valleys
signs
still to be written
in music
the bus will take you at dawn
through the pine woods and the groves
the homeless gathering kindling
in the waterless plains
you have to take your sound with you my brother
you cannot stop at every village
you are always already leaving
you must leave your tears in your eyes
one or two heavy suitcases
to cross the historical water
the ethnic divide
our chance is to be born into ignorance
the walls will no longer come down
they will rise again the same evening
in these lands of the deaf and the blind
in these lands of suffocating beauty
if we have enemies
even they are as unknown as us
they are the common murderers of beauty
bee killers and snake assassins
man cannot rid himself of the organ which kills
the ladies in headscarves know that
as they carry the grains to market
they sit on carpets
they talk in silent signs
the men smoke
dogs bark
you play your trumpet in silence
dawn your sister on a hill top
echoes
with stripes of silver and blue
For Tomás Segovia
I heard with great sadness that Tomás Segovia has died at the age of 84 in Mexico where he was still teaching. Segovia was a tremendous poet but unfortunately very little has been translated, if anything, into English. There is a good collection in French called Cahier du Nomade. He used to post poems on his blog. His wife has kept the blog going. You can visit it here: http://tomassegovia2.blogspot.fr/. It is moving to go there and feel the signs of the passing genius. He has just flown to a land of echoes, to join with the echoes he has always left, here, the leavings of leavings, robbed from time, strange objects, outlaw meanings in a labyrinth of the precarious. Here is a translation I did of his rather complex but superlatively fascinating metaphysical poem, Don de lo Hecho. I remember sending it to him at the time and he replied in perfect English (he is very well known for his translations of Shakespeare). He said he was astonished that I had got so close to the original. I was moved and then sent him some of my own work including a piece which I dedicated to him and is now in The Parallel Body, poem 32. In fact the translation of this particular piece led me to the poem. I then send him the full collection and he wrote back immediately saying how he spontaneously enjoyed them and that my poetry was the type of poetry he immediately felt drawn to. Later when speaking with my editor, Marcus Reichert, we wondered if we might not use a sentence from his informal comment in an email for the back cover of the book. He quickly replied: "Of course you can, I do not believe in intellectual property." Truly the comment of a great and humble man. Later he invited me to the Spanish consulate in France for a talk on Cahier du Nomade. I could not make it. I wanted to go to Valencia and meet him last year. I didn't make it there either. Now it's too late. I really should have gone. Here is the stupendous poem. Tomás , sorry I never made it!
The Gift of what is Made
We should learn to forgive ourselves
for not having made the world Love you and I
to forgive the enigmatic nastiness of Time
humiliating father who never gives up
we should learn to stop fearing him
to look at his ghosts so they remain ghosts
to not die for having lived
to not be the ghosts of our ghosts
time - not love - made me
time nourished me from the sap of its betrayals
time sowed me already poisoned me with pluralism
all that time brought me was perishable
apart from the negation of myself by which I efface time
but what to do Love with this trickster
how do we play your triumphs against him
if you win against Time Love we have lost
I betrayed you since birth
I gave you lots of faces which only Time devoured
and all of them were you who were none other than him
and you always repeated yourself and you never said anything
or each time you spoke a real name
and all save the last you give to him
and once again you rip me up to give me to him so he can eat me
let's not joke Love shuffle the deck of cards
eat time and eat my life
I can tell you all your false names
and your false true names
start by speaking start at the end
don't start with the defences of fidelity
which is like building a castle with a moat of treachery
start by launching an offensive into the heart of Time to fight it
in your name I will betray my betrayals
and I will become faithful to the infidelity of Time
to you Love I can say everything
to you Love i can speak
in your name I oblige my time to speak to you
it is he and not I who will give you what he stole from me
you alone will be able to give the gift which is yours
this said for you there is nothing outside your life
and i am yours only and you alone are you
The Gift of what is Made
We should learn to forgive ourselves
for not having made the world Love you and I
to forgive the enigmatic nastiness of Time
humiliating father who never gives up
we should learn to stop fearing him
to look at his ghosts so they remain ghosts
to not die for having lived
to not be the ghosts of our ghosts
time - not love - made me
time nourished me from the sap of its betrayals
time sowed me already poisoned me with pluralism
all that time brought me was perishable
apart from the negation of myself by which I efface time
but what to do Love with this trickster
how do we play your triumphs against him
if you win against Time Love we have lost
I betrayed you since birth
I gave you lots of faces which only Time devoured
and all of them were you who were none other than him
and you always repeated yourself and you never said anything
or each time you spoke a real name
and all save the last you give to him
and once again you rip me up to give me to him so he can eat me
let's not joke Love shuffle the deck of cards
eat time and eat my life
I can tell you all your false names
and your false true names
start by speaking start at the end
don't start with the defences of fidelity
which is like building a castle with a moat of treachery
start by launching an offensive into the heart of Time to fight it
in your name I will betray my betrayals
and I will become faithful to the infidelity of Time
to you Love I can say everything
to you Love i can speak
in your name I oblige my time to speak to you
it is he and not I who will give you what he stole from me
you alone will be able to give the gift which is yours
this said for you there is nothing outside your life
and i am yours only and you alone are you
Video and Reading of Poem 22 from The Parallel Body
A big thanks to Vincent Segal and Ballake Sissoko for allowing me to use their sublime music from their recent album, Chamber Music. Hope you enjoy.
Orillas del Sar (A Translation)
ESTABAS desleida en la dulzura
de los secretos jugos de tu cuerpo
y te llevaba el agua
como a una larga cabellera verde
engendrada en los limos
obstinados del fondo.
Era tu forma ese deshacimento.
Brotar.
Fluir.
Abandonarse.
Bajaba el aire hasta los limites
perfectos de tu piel.
Blancura.
Y ya oblicuo, el poniente la encendia
para nacer de ti aquella tarde
de que lugar, que tiempo, que memoria.
(Orillas del Sar)
YOU WERE diluted in the sweetness
of the secret moods of your body
and the water carried you
like long green hair
bred in the obstinate
silts of the river bed.
This disappearance was your form.
To spring.
To flow.
To let go.
The air descended to the perfect
contours of your skin.
Whiteness.
And already oblique, the sun set it ablaze
to be born of you that night
in that place, that time, that memory.
(The banks of the Sar)
de los secretos jugos de tu cuerpo
y te llevaba el agua
como a una larga cabellera verde
engendrada en los limos
obstinados del fondo.
Era tu forma ese deshacimento.
Brotar.
Fluir.
Abandonarse.
Bajaba el aire hasta los limites
perfectos de tu piel.
Blancura.
Y ya oblicuo, el poniente la encendia
para nacer de ti aquella tarde
de que lugar, que tiempo, que memoria.
(Orillas del Sar)
YOU WERE diluted in the sweetness
of the secret moods of your body
and the water carried you
like long green hair
bred in the obstinate
silts of the river bed.
This disappearance was your form.
To spring.
To flow.
To let go.
The air descended to the perfect
contours of your skin.
Whiteness.
And already oblique, the sun set it ablaze
to be born of you that night
in that place, that time, that memory.
(The banks of the Sar)
Blues for Maalouf (when will you become a woman)
To the Following Music:
and the trumpet sounded the orient
where do you come from
in the night as the piano plays
another blues
when will you be woman
woman with a voice
you share a bed with memory
dark soils hide you from dawn
night a deeper cloak for a smile
there is no trust which is not distance
which does not sing from another land
in the desert sands
i was closer to this sound of trust
i played this naked piano first
i watched the blues pour from your eye
it wasn't a crime
it was the play of love on love
it was dawn being dawn
we are paths to nowhere
our graces are words
folded fingers of perfumes rare
leavened scriptures
kneaded by our bodies
crawl across
to where woman becomes woman
and the trumpet sounded the orient
where do you come from
in the night as the piano plays
another blues
when will you be woman
woman with a voice
you share a bed with memory
dark soils hide you from dawn
night a deeper cloak for a smile
there is no trust which is not distance
which does not sing from another land
in the desert sands
i was closer to this sound of trust
i played this naked piano first
i watched the blues pour from your eye
it wasn't a crime
it was the play of love on love
it was dawn being dawn
we are paths to nowhere
our graces are words
folded fingers of perfumes rare
leavened scriptures
kneaded by our bodies
crawl across
to where woman becomes woman
evening note to Rumi
I am not good but I worship your goodness.
I am not the red of wine but I am drunk on you.
Even if I am prone to ecstasies, my love for you is only slightly mad.
I am not the red of wine but I am drunk on you.
Even if I am prone to ecstasies, my love for you is only slightly mad.
an instinct to differ
poems are colours lost in the sky
voices below paintings
talking to songs
in search of logic
paths are to wander down
will they ever end
it is legitimate to ask
what makes the poet stop along the path
an instinct to differ
in what spheres has the poet travelled
to listen to a stone
to wait before a tree
as if mesmerised by a lover's chant
into what temporality
do guitars make me cry
with headaches of acoustic similarity
you are an olive tree
your cross armed kisses lost in shouting
you return
in fields of orange suns
on scattered carpets of snow dusts
beneath ancient olive bark
there is no knowing you
there is nothing
until the next time
until the next time
voices below paintings
talking to songs
in search of logic
paths are to wander down
will they ever end
it is legitimate to ask
what makes the poet stop along the path
an instinct to differ
in what spheres has the poet travelled
to listen to a stone
to wait before a tree
as if mesmerised by a lover's chant
into what temporality
do guitars make me cry
with headaches of acoustic similarity
you are an olive tree
your cross armed kisses lost in shouting
you return
in fields of orange suns
on scattered carpets of snow dusts
beneath ancient olive bark
there is no knowing you
there is nothing
until the next time
until the next time
a rare emotion
i was in a waterless river
its bed made of brittle stone
water had not filled it for millions of years
it would rain there
only two or three times a year
plants would grow
flower fertilise and propagate
in three day spans
before the sun's parched burning
exterminated all but their hardy seed
i threw that frontispiece poem out
i wrote it last
as if to say this is what i meant to do
i had no assurance i had done that
but the songs had sung in precedence
the pen had dipped into impossible rains
and something had been built
within the shadows where this writing dwells
a picture of something which cannot be
and must never try to
Celan spoke of the hour
between midday and midnight
when the rope is thrown
and the light of the star
could maybe shine
on you
but the poem you write
must court not only the star
but also the rope
which could easily
burn your throat
every time a poem touches a poem
something miraculous is born
the rarity
of finding an ego-less eye and ear
roaming these common paths for survivors
it is a rare emotion
for a poet
who never expected to be heard
(for Lisa Gordon)
its bed made of brittle stone
water had not filled it for millions of years
it would rain there
only two or three times a year
plants would grow
flower fertilise and propagate
in three day spans
before the sun's parched burning
exterminated all but their hardy seed
i threw that frontispiece poem out
i wrote it last
as if to say this is what i meant to do
i had no assurance i had done that
but the songs had sung in precedence
the pen had dipped into impossible rains
and something had been built
within the shadows where this writing dwells
a picture of something which cannot be
and must never try to
Celan spoke of the hour
between midday and midnight
when the rope is thrown
and the light of the star
could maybe shine
on you
but the poem you write
must court not only the star
but also the rope
which could easily
burn your throat
every time a poem touches a poem
something miraculous is born
the rarity
of finding an ego-less eye and ear
roaming these common paths for survivors
it is a rare emotion
for a poet
who never expected to be heard
(for Lisa Gordon)
Tonight
Tonight
smiles lost to stray gargoyles
cars to colliding good sense
ladies in the Adriatic winds
walk unto me
which way do you turn
do you look to the stars
do you unearth a wish
without you
i could not face the street
i could not curl nor unfurl
i am hidden in Drake's guitar
I write the word midnight
again and again
smiles lost to stray gargoyles
cars to colliding good sense
ladies in the Adriatic winds
walk unto me
which way do you turn
do you look to the stars
do you unearth a wish
without you
i could not face the street
i could not curl nor unfurl
i am hidden in Drake's guitar
I write the word midnight
again and again
Musings on Naught, Michael Mc Aloran's new chapbook from Erbacce Press
Mc Aloran's stance, awkward as it might seem, is ever clearer: the stubborn pursuit of his own difference. In this sense the poet is a geographer of the self, writing an intimate cartography of sensations. Such is the polysemic and molecular complexity of the land of Naught, the landscapes of this minutely individual world are becoming ever more fascinating to those of us who have seen Mc Aloran grow in stature and confidence. Of course the superficial diagnosis is gloomy and one can imagine the smirks as prudes and show-offs run for cover at the inglorious images of ungainly becoming which populate this world of poetic spirits. But in the fearful agony and pain, black too folds, its grey tinges weeping freely in the liberating drunkenness of release. Nursery rhyme ritornellos remind the fellow traveller of the coordinates of profound fear when personality can no longer help, where identity has been long gone and sensations are free to roam, to run, to sail. Yes there is another newly regained time, one which is a very well kept secret. Not a time to reminisce or pine, not a time to lament. Such Times are irrelevant. For the new nothing is a time of the surface, a time of moments immediately undone as they happen. Of minuscule events whose beautiful (in)significance is only apparent to those who have relinquished all forms of ideological bombardments in a world without ideals, hopes or purposes.
Surgeon scalpel to hand, the poet explores his own wounds and kicks dust into the voyeur-reader's judgemental countenance. The book? The narrator? The poem? Nothing so grand, barely fragments, barely sentences, barely words in this decidedly post-Beckettian cosmos. Hence this tongue in cheek, this lick in wound, humour, sarcasm and buffoonery. Irony died with the subject. Some internal rhyme, some petales du mal, sprinkled with black pollen, in a sunless desert. Mc Aloran guides us through Naught with malicious brilliance. There is no entitlement to hope, no body, barely these living wounds inscribed with the pen scalpel in the writer's land of affects, and some abject vomit and piss. The bile of centuries of literary invective has been learnt. Many past writers have been buggered and bastard infant-poems birthed. Critics and philosophers surrealistically ingurgitated. Poem dogs have been noosed to the eunuch totem of anxiety's future.
So the poet gets up today relatively free. He writes on the tympanum of futile tomorrow. He carries on despite the apparent apathy and indifference which surrounds his valiant efforts. He doesn't give a fuck that everyone seems to prefer poet laureates and Oxbridge graduate's effete musings about 'the truth,' 'first loves' or 'daisies and buttercups'. The poet is an animal and like a tick's essence is to suck blood, a poet's essence if ever he had one is to bleed the arteries of nothing. The counter-productive and counter-cultural vocation of the outlaw is to write the law of the future, a brave man once said. Even if there's no future? Why carry on then? Because there's little else to do, once you've travelled this place of Nothing, but to sprinkle this negativity with the dust of stars.
I find these mutterings beautiful and fascinating, I encourage you to read them, to live with them. To chart this country and live with the patois of a beautiful vagabond.
Strangely and amid great guffaws of laughter, the agonistic struggle of the ephebe continues. Beckett, Bataille, Popa, Rimbaud, Cioran can be heard in the interstices. The gauntlet constantly changes colour as any decent painter would will it. There is no fear of going mad. Literature has long been on the pyre, in the abattoir, in the pit. Artaud has burnt the interpretational masks over this chaos-cosmos.
Now spells are cast and sail freely through highly digitalised space. Messages are sent in real time. Tribes of like-minded poet warriors gather and disintegrate instantaneously. Spies and madwomen follow from acute vantage. Luckily Naught cannot be photographed. There will be no films or clips. The only trace is the one you read, inscribed in your blood. The poem without author. The bones without body. Precursors have failed miserably at such attempts because wounds must remain wounds in this world of anti-words. Why try to heal in a rotten and sick world? How absurd is that? Speaking as the last, after the last, in the impossible lasting, words are shattered, fractured, bludgeoned, infected, painted with venom and silent sickness and lovingly posted into the world become asylum. Silently they shall live in this laboratory for saccharine dependent patients with unlimited diseases.
Mc Aloran is a leader without followers. The best we can do is buy all his books and collect this marvellous and futureless opus.
This infectious book can be found here:
http://www.erbacce-press.com/#/michael-mcaloran/4542338472
Surgeon scalpel to hand, the poet explores his own wounds and kicks dust into the voyeur-reader's judgemental countenance. The book? The narrator? The poem? Nothing so grand, barely fragments, barely sentences, barely words in this decidedly post-Beckettian cosmos. Hence this tongue in cheek, this lick in wound, humour, sarcasm and buffoonery. Irony died with the subject. Some internal rhyme, some petales du mal, sprinkled with black pollen, in a sunless desert. Mc Aloran guides us through Naught with malicious brilliance. There is no entitlement to hope, no body, barely these living wounds inscribed with the pen scalpel in the writer's land of affects, and some abject vomit and piss. The bile of centuries of literary invective has been learnt. Many past writers have been buggered and bastard infant-poems birthed. Critics and philosophers surrealistically ingurgitated. Poem dogs have been noosed to the eunuch totem of anxiety's future.
So the poet gets up today relatively free. He writes on the tympanum of futile tomorrow. He carries on despite the apparent apathy and indifference which surrounds his valiant efforts. He doesn't give a fuck that everyone seems to prefer poet laureates and Oxbridge graduate's effete musings about 'the truth,' 'first loves' or 'daisies and buttercups'. The poet is an animal and like a tick's essence is to suck blood, a poet's essence if ever he had one is to bleed the arteries of nothing. The counter-productive and counter-cultural vocation of the outlaw is to write the law of the future, a brave man once said. Even if there's no future? Why carry on then? Because there's little else to do, once you've travelled this place of Nothing, but to sprinkle this negativity with the dust of stars.
I find these mutterings beautiful and fascinating, I encourage you to read them, to live with them. To chart this country and live with the patois of a beautiful vagabond.
Strangely and amid great guffaws of laughter, the agonistic struggle of the ephebe continues. Beckett, Bataille, Popa, Rimbaud, Cioran can be heard in the interstices. The gauntlet constantly changes colour as any decent painter would will it. There is no fear of going mad. Literature has long been on the pyre, in the abattoir, in the pit. Artaud has burnt the interpretational masks over this chaos-cosmos.
Now spells are cast and sail freely through highly digitalised space. Messages are sent in real time. Tribes of like-minded poet warriors gather and disintegrate instantaneously. Spies and madwomen follow from acute vantage. Luckily Naught cannot be photographed. There will be no films or clips. The only trace is the one you read, inscribed in your blood. The poem without author. The bones without body. Precursors have failed miserably at such attempts because wounds must remain wounds in this world of anti-words. Why try to heal in a rotten and sick world? How absurd is that? Speaking as the last, after the last, in the impossible lasting, words are shattered, fractured, bludgeoned, infected, painted with venom and silent sickness and lovingly posted into the world become asylum. Silently they shall live in this laboratory for saccharine dependent patients with unlimited diseases.
Mc Aloran is a leader without followers. The best we can do is buy all his books and collect this marvellous and futureless opus.
This infectious book can be found here:
http://www.erbacce-press.com/#/michael-mcaloran/4542338472
The Time Sculptor (re-opened)
I was lonely. Sitting down with empty pads, writing what I assumed were ideas, sculpting the contours of something, which resembled the outline of a thought, abstract shapes and black lines of suppositions. I didn’t ask anyone if I was right or wrong. I didn’t care. I was so profoundly alone I made friends with books. I cancelled dream and hope. I lived in a domain some people liked to call nothingness, but it was mine. It was my web and I was spider.
I imagined an impossible space, a space-less circle, in which my mind wandered and I spoke to myself on the wings of a secret music.
I wondered if it was space at all. My main preoccupation was time or how to annul it. I was a negativity trying to negate another. It was unequal combat but I felt strong. My Nietzschean vocation wholly intact, I hoped by ridding myself of inherited co-ordinates to surreptitiously creep away from physicality into a form of forgetting, a land of molten memories, a land of pure time, from peak to peak.
All my thoughts focussed on destroying memory as I aimed to take Time back into the marrow of nothingness through a breach in thinking. I wanted to make myself infinitely small and crawl through this hole painstakingly punctured in the membranes of time itself. The gamble could only be achieved of course if I myself became nothing, so slight as to be invisible. I could not personally get in the way of my experiment. I had to be absent a priori.
I sought out ditches, caverns, dimly lit grottoes where a terrifying obscurity heralded an infinite optimism and a beautiful forgetting. I was on a journey through darkness to the other side of the night, to the humble acceptance of a new dawn as nothing. Here, I whispered to myself: there is blindness in seeing so let us close our eyes. There is too much noise, too much useless music so let us create silence. I shall sculpt nothingness. Non-time will dance through my fingers. This is my obstinate objective, my aim and my hope. I call it freedom, although you could say that I am trapped in paradox. I know that the words I use are inadequate to express this venture, but there are no others. I will follow the poet and pray the non-religious prayer: Accept paradox and the sky’s thundering. Yes, I am getting there.
Instinct guided all my movements. Improvisation was everything. My words had to be bled of moments. I forced myself to write only in states of fullness or total emptiness. Nothing in between. Events spoke through me and I simultaneously freed myself of what I never could become in fact.
There is euphoria in the renting open of time. There is a hilarious passage through, out and into an outside world of wonders. Something like paradise in this hell, something like a vision after a season in hell. Our eyes can’t believe what they see because believing always comes after; hence we can truly write what we see without seeing it. We can laugh without scorn and hatred. So it is with these movements of thought, which come as they are written. O patience and song! O navigation in rivers undone!
The time sculptor is here again. He left and came back. He withdrew into the sea to live with the colour green, where the scorching Mediterranean sun is his friend, he said:
Be patient, sometimes we need to begin at the end before discovering the middle without beginning or end. Keep moving, these pages are infinite.
The Time Sculptor counts grains of sand in dunes of night. He is an undoing and a running. He is a pool of infinity. Non-time can be written.
I imagined an impossible space, a space-less circle, in which my mind wandered and I spoke to myself on the wings of a secret music.
I wondered if it was space at all. My main preoccupation was time or how to annul it. I was a negativity trying to negate another. It was unequal combat but I felt strong. My Nietzschean vocation wholly intact, I hoped by ridding myself of inherited co-ordinates to surreptitiously creep away from physicality into a form of forgetting, a land of molten memories, a land of pure time, from peak to peak.
All my thoughts focussed on destroying memory as I aimed to take Time back into the marrow of nothingness through a breach in thinking. I wanted to make myself infinitely small and crawl through this hole painstakingly punctured in the membranes of time itself. The gamble could only be achieved of course if I myself became nothing, so slight as to be invisible. I could not personally get in the way of my experiment. I had to be absent a priori.
I sought out ditches, caverns, dimly lit grottoes where a terrifying obscurity heralded an infinite optimism and a beautiful forgetting. I was on a journey through darkness to the other side of the night, to the humble acceptance of a new dawn as nothing. Here, I whispered to myself: there is blindness in seeing so let us close our eyes. There is too much noise, too much useless music so let us create silence. I shall sculpt nothingness. Non-time will dance through my fingers. This is my obstinate objective, my aim and my hope. I call it freedom, although you could say that I am trapped in paradox. I know that the words I use are inadequate to express this venture, but there are no others. I will follow the poet and pray the non-religious prayer: Accept paradox and the sky’s thundering. Yes, I am getting there.
Instinct guided all my movements. Improvisation was everything. My words had to be bled of moments. I forced myself to write only in states of fullness or total emptiness. Nothing in between. Events spoke through me and I simultaneously freed myself of what I never could become in fact.
There is euphoria in the renting open of time. There is a hilarious passage through, out and into an outside world of wonders. Something like paradise in this hell, something like a vision after a season in hell. Our eyes can’t believe what they see because believing always comes after; hence we can truly write what we see without seeing it. We can laugh without scorn and hatred. So it is with these movements of thought, which come as they are written. O patience and song! O navigation in rivers undone!
The time sculptor is here again. He left and came back. He withdrew into the sea to live with the colour green, where the scorching Mediterranean sun is his friend, he said:
Be patient, sometimes we need to begin at the end before discovering the middle without beginning or end. Keep moving, these pages are infinite.
The Time Sculptor counts grains of sand in dunes of night. He is an undoing and a running. He is a pool of infinity. Non-time can be written.
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.'
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
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
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
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