GENEALOGY

For Michael Ailwood

“The poet must spend himself with warmth, brilliancy and prodigality ... a violent assault against unknown forces ... ”

 – Fillipo Marinetti

Songs without music and

lens-cap photos;

here and there

a random image sleeps

piled under refuse.

All in battered notebooks –

hard-covers show how serious

in pubs, at parties –

Lowell and Dransfield come in late

fighting Keats and Byron.

Mostly rhyming couplets

about last night

last fight, last fuck

and someone’s hurting –

mostly me.

I saw one in there

          you said

slicing away dead skin –

Here’s how to cook the bones.

SELF-INTEREST SONNET

Churches open to all, but

conformity helps you stay

Preachers drowning in donated cash

cry for a saving contribution

Governments husband the welfare

mostly of those who can buy one

Pundits parcel their wisdom

mostly to those who agree, like

doctors treating the healthy

abandon the waiting sick-room

Worse however is

the surgeon excises a tumour

against the patient’s will

Each has a right to own

          his death.

HUNGER

By Arthur Rimbaud

(My translation)

If I have a taste, it’s for no more

Than earth and stones.

I breakfast on air,

Rock, coal, iron.

Turn, my hungers. Graze, hungers,

          The fields of sound.

Suck the carefree venom

          Of convolvuli.

Eat the broken shards,

Old church stones;

Pebbles of ancient floods,

Bread strewn in the grey valleys.

                   *

The wolf howled beneath the foliage

Spitting the beautiful plumes

Of a feast of fowl:

Like a wolf I consume myself.

Salad and fruit

Wait only for the picker;

But the hedge-spider

Eats only violets.

Let me sleep! Let me boil

On the altars of Solomon.

The stock runs over the rust

To mingle with the Kedron.

VERITE

Je te vois –

je te vois en me voyant.

Je te vois en mentissent –

à moi

à toi

à tous.

Je vois

que tu ne le voie pas.