– An old song brought to surface on a trip to the Cornish coast –

Hearthside half-tide the morning-light bride lies 
woollen skins warming limbs and warning him to call them in 
children still bewildered smiling swilling surf and sealife sliding 
over rosy toes and bones, home is known by frozen foams, as 
peace beneath these greasy seas relieves the weary grief of these 
who bend and stretch and heave and lift, defend the nest with weave and stitch 
and steel the heart with timber beams, the hut hold fast the builder’s dreams 
when clumsy thunder thumbs asunder nervous father’s plundered slumber 
and heaving seas breathe unease 
gentle host turned fretful ghost –  
gather in the scattered kin, glowing skin of coal and tin thickening ‘gainst winter winds 
for those of stove-side birth the mirth of earthen love is first incurred 
by naked slap of foot on wood and scraping back the sooty hood 
so father’s breath can fill the room, 
scented laughter clefts the gloom 
and shifting shadows stalking walls unfurl a shawl to draw round all 
as mater-pater bodies blend, extend to end in tender swirls 
of boy and girlchild wordless wombed 
in worldless forms, a light cocoon 
of life defined in furnace-brightness, 
softened clay and whiteness… 
So blessed be these drynesses, 
and simple resting silences. 

This body soaked through, in palpitate waves, with sweating convulsions of nerve
Has turned in the grip of the fidgeting soul to a marbled and smudged revelation
Of bliss melted deep into layers of fat, and cuneiform-ridged indentations
Where seizures of feeling that stunned personality linger in knotted vexations,
Presenting a story to fingers and eyes of a mind shaped in tides of sensation
And reciting the path of the wandering foot, redirected with each scratch and swerve.

Now crises of orientation
have halted the urgent scratchings
of those who depict the world

As crises of malnutrition
distend our gaping culture
in which poets feed on people.

The notes of melting psyche
waft irresistibly
under hungry nose of those
who starve for some contingency;

Their carnivorous minds prowl the marketplace
wined and dined
seduced then sobered
and hungovered,
picking pieces affecting freshness
sucking marrow from bones
rattling names and juicing words
fed til empty
then forced crawl
deeper into Logos’ maw.

For witful quips make fine aperitif
but our muses ache to use their teeth –
to bite through the image and feel the hot spill
of bodies and symbols erupting at will,
of willing as blood in the fingers of meaning,
and drinking the songs that our fingers are bleeding
and tasting the sign in this new act of reading
that tears at the skin to enact its revealing;
our bodies fan open in tomes to be read
by the wandering eyes of the numb and misled
whose gaze we demand be directed onto
ontographical poems spiralling through
the widening veins and slow-bowing of ribs,
whitening hair, the crease-cracking of lips,
apertures in through which worldliness slips –
the breath of fresh air by which words uttered, live

These alien gusts give our mind its sharp edge,
and while shaping our limbs to the path that we tread
have sculpted the shape of the world in our head,
allowing one’s will to be mutely inferred
from the frame of the moment, its angles and curves,
which we alter, in turn, with our firm navigation,
thus subjecting our body to new mutilations –
each step an act of scarification
that enriches our language with novel vocation

So cast down the tablets that hold speech inscribed,
let tumble the pillars that keep sense in line
and dictate, with their mighty tradition and beauty,
the watchful constraint of the tongue’s weary duty,
and replace our hard words, with their stale design,
with a world-inclined dance of action and time,
taking as partners the body, its mind and
the sense-making whole with which they’re entwined
to make art of the instants in which they align,
gestures profound with coherence divine;
elevate the world with your bold intervention
and the whole will exalt in your body’s dimensions,
drawing beauty anew from the act as you steer it
to share it with others, who will already feel it.

On internal and external space
Taken from upcoming collection The Swerve

I watched a dirty bird  
Picking through a flock  
For some minutes  
Before realising it was not dirty at all  
Its feathers were blackened and browned 
It was, in fact, just ugly  
And I sank in contemplation of the individual;  
The cruelty of ugliness 
And the stark ductility of finitude.  
A one is a cosmic stutter 
A dense comma between comprehensible spaces  
Threatening the rhythm of order and meaning 
Through the frankness of its vocabulary  
And I ponder ugliness –  
This menace writ large –  
And beauty, this same menace  
On a warmer day. 

And I watched a sodden cabbage 
Squatting in the rain 
A loose fist held against the sky 
Righteously declaring disinterest 
And sphericality unto itself 
A limp green gaze turning  
Ever down and away; 
It is only when mud splashes its shoulder 
That it falls into synchronicity   
With the busy pecking and scratching  
Of the shameless act of being 
That flashes all about,  
And the envious eye 
Can rest upon it 
For a minute –  
This lump of satisfaction, 
Plump in pure distraction, 
Silent crown of the swollen earth. 

And in time, 
I saw the growth of one spongey tube 
One cell rippling and straining
Into an entire semantic field; 
An atomic proposition  
Encompassing horizons of meaning 
With its skin stretched around the sun 
And the conspiracy of spatial expansion 
Churning behind the muscle walls of its sovereign domain. 
Flexing in and steadily out, diaphragmatically, 
Its undulous warping is the billowing shape of language 
Pulsing in binary waveforms. 
Thus does the tremolo, pleasure and pain,  
Infiltrate space, dissolve and imbibe;  
Thus does the heart of the creature before you  
Bleed from the lines in which it’s inscribed.  

What does their gaze demand, when we catch them peering from out of the night? 
Whose suspicion raises the hairs on my neck? 
What is this guilt that flashes and threshes across my skin, 
Compressing my soft gall into a great twitching eye 
Raving and rolling its stare up my spine? 
All I seek is rest, an alcove of cool stillness, out of the glare of this night. 

Here is Adam 
Kadmon 
Catching on 

Here is the crown that binds and fortifies –
Against the reachless reliquary of the cloudless sky 
We hold forth a damp cluster of nerves, synapses and clattering bone, 
A club-like appendage to shepherd our scattered energy 
As it disorientates itself in passage through our body. 
Whence this affected fortitude,
This conviction of coherence? 

In the firmament, a shattered bulb, 
A vessel is broken 
That their feet have trampled and mauled. 

And I balk
and am ashamed of the senseless displays 
of these closed-faced figures who denigrate the ways 
of the city’s great veins 
with the flagrant complaints 
of a child too hurt to accept the embrace 
of a mother whose otherness grows daily more plain 

And so I turn to the water and relief of fluid space 
to float,  
reflect, and find 
that the dark tidal muds of our Albion’s ascension 
have left smeared on the bank suggestions 
of foundational tensions, 
smudged into layered inflections –
the pagan ebbs troubling Roman flow, 
etching their names in the clay as they go 
the ossified spires, the esoteric domes, 
the mutant topographies of faith overgrown 
slide down the slopes back into the bowl 
as the pages unfurl in the great heavy tome… 
For while the sleeping still flock with their dreams to enthrone 
the stones of this city have dreams of their own. 

And it’s here that I tune to the metropole’s tone: 
a whining anxiety of compromised possession 
that threatens the security of ontological extension 
now the glassy abode of our shared invention  
has dissolved in the flood of conflicting intension. 

Yet diluvian voices persist unheard, 
“My blood feeds these birds, 
My oestrogen floods the Thames, 
My feet stamp value, in pound sterling, into the Tate’s few unsold Mondrians, 
and it was my brethren 
who nursed the city  
on the milk of their own ambition, 
were the first to crawl back to its fresh opened womb 
when TfL made its incision 
and mouthed blank abuses as the uterine juices  
dissolved their old religion, 
to seed in its place the Oedipal lust 
to wreak fuck on the bust that mantled our thrust 
from deaf-dumb sucklings to the Godheads of luck, 
and bask on the peak of the Mountain of Muck 
that upholds the new justice of Many vs. Much…” 

But this complex itself has now paralysed choice; 
now the city’s many streets churn kaleidoscopes of voices 
that proffer plastic offerings too sweet to bear, 
blast furnace banquets of rubber and hair, 
new-car smell, polymers, sugar in the air, 
til the winds of will scatter, the mind is laid bare, 
the grimace of certainty no longer there  
the blood-need to be happy, as in proving one’s worth, 
clogs up the veins with an opioid dirt 
that leaves grubby streaks on the ground as we pass 
down to the caves that moan beneath the grass;
here we find the peace of a dulled stimulation,
the muffled rush of neurons through silent sensation
and we can doze for a moment in the net of blue and red,
rocked and lurched along the branches
throbbing in our head
and retract our limbs of self-awareness
deep beneath the bed
of dermal tension, trembling fat,
abide as blood instead…

Plunging down through fractal darkness, we reach the Platonic form
of social unit, microcosm, coda to the song…

Then a short drop and a sudden stop and the carriage shudders on 
toward the rising sun
as it splinters and bursts its natural form
in the crystal gardens of Babylon.