32. What Is Familiar

OK, okay

                                   build it

        let there be a feast

                       simple    

                       without lies

                      children arrive

      yes, okay, okay, it is a voyage

                     daylight & all

                            forms of human joy

                              luscious and easy

           grass waves

             this is strangeness

                        then

             what is familiar

26. Oh, People & Places

Let’s get this poem singing more about people

Then if it’s confused – we’ll say “hunhhh” –

This isn’t the world it’s all who live in it

Only them

We can’t lie: this landscape is ugly

But also gnarly and lumpy as language

“In Your face” it says, that close to

– Enough!

Whatever wounds you, yeah, it’s here now

Relax, eat a pie, drink coffee, or

Work hard if you must at loving both language & people

Dirty & hopeful

Any more questions? Not really, no

We aren’t defining this world, rather refining

Through obscure processes of entropy & turbulence

Starting up suddenly as if from sleep

Oh, people & places they make us speak

9. Essential

Please hold sweetly onto consciousness

like, the “I’m” is now acceptable and nice

here, I’d dedicate this to you, Fanny

let’s crank it up in venture to high art

dress ourselves all proudly in pellicules & mantles

the colour of damson ketchup – ahh! breathe it in

in this new era such joy unexceptional

there will be balancings: this the one hear then

when the city pulls itself in & rests, oh

like someone who has eaten too much beef

you know, bad for the wits but not unpleasant

not like real diseases caught from Faber & Faber

see – let’s hew at the lot & then build

this page isn’t empty because of fever but fear

fear of what’s empty, deaf blind & aphasic

so let’s be heroes of some ridiculous sort

swinging through in our primrose clothes – oh posturing

a kind of delight to behold, sufficient

for this whole thing issuing out like pie juice

                                      haemorrhagic

                                      language leaking

                                      process unending