100+8. This Didn’t Ought to Be Like This; But It Is, of Course

Café Belgique, January 7, 2013

“In my created head I don’t exist

As rising bed-heavy the mist

Is fixed though always full of surprises

And the world in my eyes

Is hardly a certainty”

Howe, p 13

Well, the recipe for cold noodles comes up here, I suppose, so I’ll let it. Very simple – just boil the noodles – rice noodles best – leave to cool, dress with a mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil & rice vinegar (some slivers of ginger in it & of course cut up little chillies), plus chopped spring onions, just blanched beansprouts, some cold cooked chicken shreds, a little dried shallot, maybe coriander leaves, that sort of thing. Light & refreshing, OK?

Not much more, really. If you want to know how many words, you can count them.

I’m not going to.

Eat well; join together; resist strongly

we might be OK yet.

At the last text

- unfalsifiable

true to tell

anything can be

Living fluid

Bathing in diurnity

A poet in words

A maggot in pus

- eat away at corruption

  to cleanse the wound

  that is our being

Il naso della pecora sente il precepizio

Time to finish the coffee now

look out

         at the still, dark river

the damp slabbed bulk of the mill beyond

- time to break down

                     again

“Winter tones are rose & glass

the sun as false as all nostalgias

If this world isn’t good enough for us

then an afterlife won’t be enough”

Howe, p 81

93. Park and Ride from Mid-November

but where

do we

escape to?

the light in people’s eyes

- naive but true projection

at this time

a few travellers

huddling together

in case

emptiness calls

everyone you know

is lost somewhere

oh, ripped paper

- that’s so corrosive

Indi un altro vallon mi fu scoperto.

Dante, Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto XIX, l 133

remembrance:

as the leaves fall

shrivel on the ash

You live under the sign of the provisional. Often with faint amusement over little debates: do you unpack this coral dress from storage as if, when the summer arrives in a few months, you’ll still be alive to wear it? Yes – but purely because you enjoy the zing of its colour today.

Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow (Capsule Editions, 2012) p 36

There was also my grandmother’s pink dress. She put it on everytime she set to cook. “I can’t bear any other garment but my coral dress.” She put it over her head like a big bright overall, and then as the next stage, spread out the array of her cookbooks. Now I’m ready, I’ll cook you something that will really heal you. Oh, she did.

Odda Réal Constant, My Broken Life (Burning Deck, 1980) p 93

feelings & words then

rotting down together

90. Meet You at the Obelisk, Then?

All this shaken material

- can’t you hear the crunch of angels’ footsteps

maybe just the tinklings of continuing dilapidation?

Hopeful & dirty

we’ll blunder out of this cave

somehow

& blink in astonishment

at this silver light

. . .  not real

but you are

& sometimes we

Justice should be noisy

- louder than the crash

of all our collapsing

institutions

Insieme la nostra speranza e la nostra maledizione: la positività vestigiale

Most of life here now:

a rapid montage of broken objects

“What we call the present is the point of emergence of each thing into everything, the terrain where the constant passage into relations, the coming of things to life, is occurring.”

Hejinian (2000), p 373

This town & this city

- built on moraines & riverine detritus

on splintered stone & muck

odd, errant pudding-stones here

Old Sawney’s Head this Hallowe’en

- glowing golden & toothless now

So it comes to a stop

but won’t the stop end?

72. Some Needful Things Now

isn't this the enforced senility of this world

with people the tiny grains of amyloid plaque

billion upon billion?

isn’t it easy

isn’t it familiar

to open your eyes!

it is strange

& why didn’t the revolt arrive?

those stretched-out ones

not as huge as they thought

trapped within the legend of their failure

a few whitened stones

all that’s left

la poesia, lo specchio

dove la mano fruga

nel muschio delle scale

de insicurezza

Roberto Sanesi, “Harrington Gardens Suite”, A Selection (Grosseteste, 1975), p 10

look!

you’re just the wrong social class for long life

– so accept it

“A rooted man traffic bike wavering does see most always

over ground, roaming a matter of scripts from shadow on

the only apartments and a few bushes to trees and a light-

ning storm that scares the birds they’ve blown down to in

the wind. He drives off under the clouds. Snow is swallowed.

Now nothing, yet nothing, grows birds.”

Lyn Hejinian, from “WALLS”, A Hundred Posters #38 (February 1979) n.p.

The Bowl & The Wave

grey rain falls

the white book darkens

[Written After The Event]

This city becomes an impossible instrument

the last vision of a dying hillbilly king

while the town remains –

stillborn undeliverance within its grasp of entropy