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.