I:
Shoot the head off that ostrich
and bring it here to Hercules.
Look hard at it, senator, the joke
is it’s yours. And the cripples
I’m about to send in the arena
one’s the Nemean lion one’s Hydra
and last but not least the Chimaera.
II:
I gave you Iraq
and you never stop whingeing
how I upset the neighbours.
And the costs. The goddamn costs.
And zilch return. But you’re right
it wasn’t mission accomplished.
I’d still go for Iran if death let me.
III:
You can take my word for who I am
or believe the Galileans. If I look
like a discarded footstool
a guzzler of gold or the scarecrow you saw
in the Iranian museum then take
it like the rest of their articles of faith
I had my comeuppance.
IV:
The test of a cabbage is
if sliced in two
it makes perfect halves
and the whorls inside are
more orderly than brains
or at least that murderer’s
I tried it on first.
V:
Why can’t the filthy Galileans
keep their hands off Homer?
They have their Luke and Mark.
I turned the eunuchs out too
and saved Gaza. But here in Iraq
what news
Apollo’s temple’s in cinders.
[I: Commodus; II: Severus; III: Valerian; IV: Diocletian; V: Julian]
I
Comminuted fractures: you are here.
No rivers could ever have drifted
devils’ fingers embedded in mastic
wreckage of lives turned to stone.
II
I didn’t like it. The long term health effects
we seek in vain for anything analogous
resembling impossible voracious fishes
image not available in the first stratum.
III
Dentition on which human eyes never rested
what ungodly avidity of this small world
the exuberant provision of saurian extremity
description missing: you are here.
IV
We read in a repulsive language
dispensations of kindness precisely adapted
its debris put to blush okay
oysters spiked with viagra description missing.
V
Inconsiderate ignorance etc
the long term health effects of
nothingness noted for variety of parts
the mean and vindictive measures of New Labour etc.
VI
Last image a salamander found in Massachusetts
skin midnight blue with a dozen bright suns
Dear Paul I’m sending it to you in Belmarsh
it’s the one I reckon’s a critter of best omen.
white persimmon
pianissimo
without permission
~~
‘on our which modernity depends’
and if whether yours or mine it merits
any more than a word defends
or any other language inherits
~~
After falling asleep reading Defoe:
He said, he wou’d send a Man
with ev’ry Poursuivance of Squeeze and Snout;
and, where we now doubted,
we wou’d find ourselves doubled.
~~
This says what I think it
or does it mean that nature aborts
‘an errant operational culture’?
If you listen carefully
you’ll hear the cadence of codenames
erupt in such a caustic acoustic
you’ll wish you
could forget you’d been warned.
~~
A shifter such as ‘Britain’
in Spicer’s Holy Grail;
in Morganwg’s Triads;
in a speech by a Scottish PM.
~~
Intention – Retrospect – Judgment –
‘yesterday when urgent desire
threatened to eclipse them’.
The author’s other works include
Newts & Nymphs: Essays on a Private Pond.
He is said to have said
‘There’s a receipt for everything
and everything in its receipt’
is the 21st century’s true motto.
~~
One whom One whom One
a Slight yoyo
☛ OPEN HERE.
The language
landscape of parenthesis watching
(a version of Pastoral)
(a shifter such as ‘Britain’
when Demetrius
by order of the emperor
as Plutarch tells us
made the voyage
thunder & lightning
the locals said a daemon
of great power was departing)
~~
Apostrophes make no apology.
Despite the initial resemblance
between the Anglican Church
and Agatha Christie
fate can be denied.
Shelley’s bubbles burst
on Watts’ ever-rolling stream
and Heraclitus weeps.
There’s still dormant respect
in a morbid aspect.
The author’s other works include
Morticians & their Mortification:
The Imaginary Conversations
of Lucian, Landor & Beddoes.
~~
‘she is Rimbaud’
‘a bit less and the rest or a similar’
‘That journey was a thousand years ago’.
What would we say
if someone went to Poundstretcher
looking for the key to the Modernist code?
And if he found it? Should we send him
or her to a convent or convention?
~~
Re logoclasody
Dear Gregory
the Logos is certainly
an ordering principle.
Your message
came with the message
ODC
CCR / LVS / HVS
DOC / NDOC
ORIGIN
PORT CODE
1009
~~
Never did a nerve
have such an ending
as in the quest for the Sangraal
where as so often in the wordland
inaction is the key.
Some days Parson Hawker
couldn’t tell a copse
from a corpse
even though
considered as timber
woods are if not misprinted
deeply verbatim.
~~
one
restless spectre
shamefully
faltering
made of
extremity
until it was
destroyed
by a heart quake
~~
WELCOME TO HEELEY –
LANCELOT WORKS –
ANCIENT WISDOM
RIGHT UNDER ARCH.
Ho! for the Sangraal! –
Sir Galahad drives on.
At Recycling
‘Leave it there, pal’
quoth Sir Tristram.
~~
It wasn’t as things turned out
a beetle in his matchbox
but his indisputable real world
which on the day of publication
changed beyond recognition.
And it wasn’t what he once
mistakenly called ‘feathered water’.
Nor were all the guilty
innocent in any common sense
if there is one. These lines
confuse three people but weren’t
they all confused from the start?
The reader is advised not to try
to name them. Dear reader, relax.
~~
[Insert a portrait of the poet
in pastoral pinstripe. Remember
that a forthcoming article remarks
he is ‘nearing sixty’. Are those
laughter lines heroic couplets?
How many times has he
stepped in the same river?
Write his obit and say
in less than 500 words
why he thought that way.]
~~
I looked over yonder
& what did I see
but what I’d been told
all the white knights
in the island of Britain
2008
searching bad debt
for a quid pro quo
pianissimp
passim
permissi
anissimo
particularly
silent corrections.
The distance
I thought
it doesn’t
~~
The author’s other works
are too numerous and scarce
to be listed here
but he sometimes remarked that
hum when erased leaves an
as well as bling and bled
not to mention ility and iliation.
He also often wondered what
R had done
to be heaped with rocks
refuse rubbish ravage ruins
& Resurrection.
~~
it’s not as if meaning means
the imaginary something
something like ‘menagerie’
a hinge of exchange or henge
that hangs in the air and the air
as if obliged hangs itself
_________
Note. Poundstretcher: a UK discount chainstore. Heeley: an area of Sheffield, South Yorkshire; Lancelot Works, a former steel factory, is its outstanding landmark.
I
only Prato would ask why
Serenus the first babbler
of the abracadabra
was so soon to die
II
the texts Miracola’s been fed –
just so – better eaten than read –
III
Eclectus learnt Egyptian in his sleep –
now when he meets his daemons in the mirror
he can’t understand bad Greek –
IV
[ ] anticipates –
[ ] antiquates –
V
stinks of Black Sea herbs – chants
from a Thessalian hymnbook –
spends all day at the gym
watching that wrestler with the moustache –
cheeks the colour of pistachio –
the same Sibylla I [ ]
VI
‘the One which inclines towards the One
is the One without before or after’ –
Posthumus’ new treatise
comes free with a bottle of Avernus water –
VII
you want moly? that’s Fabius’ game –
hellebore by any other name –
VIII
backwinter at the mudbaths –
Aelius is cured –
of everything except
endless chatter about mudbaths –
IX
now her wrestler’s an ordinary ghost
Sibylla asleep or awake
mutters and moans ‘Apollo!’
X
interpreter of dreams? –
Faustina? – a novice –
but Philo pays her a visit –
and pays her invoice –
XI
here lies [illegible]
who once craved to be known
then hoped to forget
what he was known for
Exegesis
I. In his Res Reconditae Serenus Sammonicus, physician to Gordian II, makes the first known reference to the abracadabra, describing how it should be written as an amulet against disease. M appears to suggest that it was either well known or self-evident that Serenus’ publication of the charm provided the motive for his murder in 212 ad.
II. Miracola features in several M poems as an eclectic cult-follower. Perhaps one or more of these cults practised logophagy although M may only be ridiculing Miracola’s enthusiasm for creative writing workshops and literary festivals.
III. Whether Eclectus indulged in catoptromancy or narcissism is unclear. Perhaps both. M appears to doubt that the daemonic language is Egyptian but ‘bad Greek’ does not anticipate Dee’s discovery that the angels’ lingua franca mixes Greek and Welsh. Nor does the use of hypnos in line 1 imply hypnosis.
IV. The most corrupt fragment in this codex. Does it suggest that knowledge of the future would give the present the status of the distant past? M was rarely so philosophic and would have been no admirer of the Four Quartets.
V. The last words have been knifed from the MS. Would anybody censor a phrase such as ‘once loved’? An obscenity seems the likelier provocation. The ‘Black Sea herbs’ and ‘Thessalian hymnbook’ imply that Sibylla hoped to win her wrestler by spells. Perhaps these also required ‘pistachio’ make-up but there is an ambiguity: the complexion is possibly the wrestler’s.
VI. A fragment so obscure it must speak for itself. There are references in the Annales Anticyrae to Posthumus’ Lectures on Plotinus but no text survives.
VII. The identification of moly with helleborus niger has also been made by modern writers such as Triller on account of its black root and ‘milky white’ flower. It is not generally accepted. Fabius appears elsewhere in M’s poems as a con man. We can assume he was more successful in business than our poet although if he too had literary pretensions the couplet may be subtler than it seems.
VIII. The vernal equinox was the prescribed time to visit healing springs. The fragment refers to the cure of the sophist Aelius Aristides, recounted in the second Sacred Oration. In M’s view bad weather was (nearly) enough.
IX. A tentative reading. The doubt in any interpretation is that we do not know whether the wrestler was known as ‘Apollo’ in his lifetime. A fragment in the Tarentum Codex, ‘pleasured by a spook’, possibly belongs here.
X. The apparent formality of the transaction supports a literal rather than a metaphorical reading. Oneirocritics could be found in any marketplace in Anticyra.
XI. The original name in the MS was apparently erased by the same hand which inscribed ‘Mercurialis’ in the margin, as if this is another of M’s mocking self-epitaphs. The bias of M’s fragments suggests that any of his enemies (or friends, by a difficult distinction) might be the subject. To read M as a confessional poet strangely misses the target.