NEW POETRY BOOK
THE SUN RISES OVER ARSENAL, NORTH LONDON
by Paul Murphy
Paul Murphy - Biography Born in Belfast, 1965. He studied at the University of Warwick, gaining a BA in Film and Literature. From there he went to Queen's University Belfast to study for an MA on T.S.Eliot and the French philosopher Jacques Lacan. He has just finished a stint as writer-in-residence at the Albert-Ludwig Universitat, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wurtemburg, Germany. His poetry, literary criticism, book reviews and travel writings have been published in English, Irish and American journals. He has published two pamphlets, one previous book of poetry, and has read from his work in Paris, London, Cambridge, Galway and Belfast. He is at the moment writing a history of the Black Forest, and working on many reviews of contemporary authors. He also writes philosophy and enjoys working on the interface between poetry and philosophy.
Acknowledgements: acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following journals: Penumbra, Other Poetry, The Delinquent, Decanto, Inclement, The Journal, Monkey Kettle, Poetry Monthly International, The Bayou Review (US)
1. Beyond the Pale
2. Sea over Zilch
3. Addiscombe
4. Marcus Aurelius will prevail
5. I need the birds in dawn
6. Cold Monkeys of Death
7. Apehour
8. Ingrain
9. Life of Giotto
10. de Nerval's Letter to his Lobster
11.Popocatepetl
12.Bertolt Brecht's Bedroom
13. A Pizzeria, Firenze
14. The Tube
15. Minks
16. Germanicus
17. A Hoelderlin
18. Nocturne
19. Dirt is Good
20. In the Weinstrasse
21. Pennymarkt
22. Bar
23. The Palace of Tears
24. There's a girl from Szczecin
25. Who killed Rudi?
26. Unbreakable Sticks 2: Profit
27. The Sun rises over Arsenal, North London
LUCIFER IS BLUE
Lucifer is blue
All the tideless seas
Black enduring gulf.
Lucifer is blue
Into the blue abyss
The endless parade.
Lucifer is blue
The lights are all out
Weeps into blue chaos.
APPLES
Apple trees blossom at the world’s edge.
Apple is the eternal fruit.
Daybreak spear bulbed apple
Chariots of the sungod
Brush the heads of daffodils.
Laughter comes in at the eye
Sadness comes in at the mouth.
Later the gods of dusk
Hen’s eggs rear up as
Vague impalpable ghosts
The river is an immense bruised heart.
LEMURS
The electric skin of the jungle storm
Greys distantly then splits, on its way
To pull apart the sun’s fleshy lenses.
Lips of ether shroud the beaches
Darkly within or without; is it the mind itself
Or merely a dislocation of the senses?
I walk the beach in Madagascar
A place just in my mind, where I’ve
Never been, nor wish to go.
Reticence, diligence, evanescence: are merely words.
Poems are merely words. Lemurs have more work.
Dander silently, have invaded my senses.
Somehow the lemur knows,
Dark in its forest, dark in its mind.
Retread the distant lightning at the dawn.
JOHN KEATS HOUSE
The sun splits the cyclop’s
Eye of a gravitating clock.
An upturned sundial is
Purpling in fragmentary rain.
Men and women are separated
From their obligatory pain.
Lights are on in the mechanism
Of an ordinary soul.
Glittering membrane called love
That kisses and settles
On the vain peacock colours
That burn so brightly.
WHAT THE FLOWERS OF THE FOREST SAY TO ME
The valley is a million year old
Formula: meaning, what is a poem?
The last chance creation is this.
An upheaval, a certain process.
The ending of a substratum
Replete with faults, depressions.
Perhaps it is the oil of the future?
A sequence of beeps and silences.
The seismographic landscape
Is suffering all of us who live there.
Geological time and its sunbeams
Are travelling in myriad ways.
Everywhere industrial processes
Are forming combinations.
Brown figures are stooping down
In the dusk resemble Van Gogh´s
Potato eaters. Vast cycles
Of nature are re-enacted
What is flowing through the littered
Valley voices in or out of the Spring rain?
SNAIL
Nature´s stain is also the snail
With its broad back. All his luggage
Is included in this crystal sculpture.
I prod at him. For a moment
He retracts his head.
I pass on, then look back for a minute.
He is still there
The great north sun is beaming. His shell is chill pink.
The great north chill sun declines into the pink clouds.
Whispy as horses tails
Strung across the snail´s entrails.
THÜRINGEN WALD
The hill is over the hill.
The sun is over the horizon.
The landscape´s stillness
Is a well-sculpted end vision.
There are no farmer´s left
But still there is produce.
There are no bank´s left
But still there is commerce.
Even if Hell is retracted
The rest is still coming on.
Even is annihilation is imminent
There will still be a discount.
In Manebach the choir
Sings the songs once
Composed in Erfurt
By a hell-faced child
In Arnstadt. The dappled
Organ music is played
In the Bachkircke:
Sunlight in the square.
I’m writing an epic poem using the heteronym Kenji Okanawi, a survivor of Nagasaki, who claimed three pensions, having cycled from Nagasaki to Hiroshima and back again, being blasted three times.
Cycling on a three wheeled bicycle in three different directions, Okanawi is the only man to have three assholes too! Work that one out Niels Bohr!
Blast off!
I was sitting under the pyramid at the Poetry Library, when a sullen melodrama occured to me:
AFTER THE BRONZE CASTING OF DYLAN THOMAS BY HUGH OLOFF DE WETT
Dylan Thomas, you look like a surreal clown
Escaped from one circus to the poetry circus.
A live awareness glints in your hollow, bronze eye
Alive to the diamonds and the cheesy bits.
You wear a dapper cravat
Which droops seemingly to your knees.
In the afterglow of your dying cigarette
All the dapper truths mingling with the rest of it.
THE ROAD TO TENOCHTITLAN
I am on the road so weary yet all
Of the fall is around me.
The battles are a foregone
Conclusion as foregone as the strand
Is. The ashes leap out of the flame
The eagle no longer calls out.
All of the wildness is in me.
Out of this rout, paths to divide us:
On the road to Tenochtitlan.
PRACTICAL HAY
Mr Acerbic wears a jagged smile.
Nurse Wetboard is sitting on his face.
Monkey-faced men leer in at the portico
I am on the baby Grand. Attack
Of the strang/lers. We die
In misty, rosy dreams.
We die as we wanted to live:
Cowardly, elemental tinpackers!
Some days later I am still
Underneath the baby Grand.
Mr McGonad is sipping his pint
Of corduroy. Mr Slipgirdle has
A firm. Nurse Rendition
Is throttling him with a loose.
Alibi is hammering in the windmill.
The electric is all blown away.
BEYOND THE PALE
Francis Bacon is beyond the pale:
Pale fence hoardings or pale-faced children
inhabit distended ghettos split like orange skin.
Bacon flies beaming into the next room.
It is very white indeed for every figure
is conducted into wholes and segments.
Each and every gorilla-suited heroine
talks like Anita Pallenberg or Rin Tin Tin.
Arms akimbo, the end, guillotine, lights, action.
SEA OVER ZILCH
(Mark Rothko exhibition, Tate Modern, London)
The shaley grey picture patina trembles
At the edge of the lemonade yellow drizzle
The shaley grey picture patina trembles.
At the end of the life at the end of the line
At the edge of the lemonade yellow drizzle
The shaley dead artist trembles drizzles.
ADDISCOMBE
A green parrot takes off
Over the trees, the trees of Addiscombe.
At Sandilands I found the pitch,
The pitch without the aid of a sat nav.
With old-fashioned means such as
Asking people: barren encounters
In small shops, small talk, ham, eggs;
The petit-bourgeois of Addiscombe!
At Addiscombe and earlier DH Lawrence
Divided his time between number 14 and 16
writing his novel 'Sons and Lovers' in 1911
or thereabouts, a very good year, you might say
wedged inbetween the Russo-Japanese War
and the Battle of the Somme.
What he did in both houses
Is anybody's business.
spattering ink taking down each bright
green parrot fluttering over Sandilands.
O I remember Addiscombe!
The man in the shop huffing, puffing
pointing beyond technological certainties
to older ways of politeness and custom.
This is Addiscombe, an encyclopaedia of conceit,
A ragged waver of all that's new.
That threw Lawrence out in 1913
So that he must wander the planet,
To Sicily, Australia, New Mexico;
To bow down before dark, inferior gods.
Addiscombe even the parrots have escaped.
The click of sticks, the ball crashing
into the net with a clattering thud.
O Addiscombe, you have betrayed yourself!
O Addiscombe, you have no heart!
O Addiscombe, you have an Aztec mystique!
Even the dawn runs out here.
Even the green in the green
Is quintessential as dust.
Addiscombe, bury your head in shame!
MARCUS AURELIUS WILL PREVAIL
I sit and drink beetroot juice
Then sleep for hours in my narrow bed.
Will the Romans appear even in my dream?
Will they rule even for a further 1000 years?
Even those not born to the purple
Sobbing like a wolf’s cub
In the cave that is my dream.
Or in the folds of a bedspread
Are the cold, dead atoms of Marcus Aurelius.
Holding any pilum thrown up
At the Field of Mars
Holding the symbol that is our dream.
All around me the cold dead dream of Rome.
Auxilia, purple, wolf’s cub.
Eagles, legions, vexilium.
Is the cold dead history of a dream.
The cold grey walls of a turret against
The grey of the wolfskin helmet.
The song like the dream stutters on.
So both song and dream are ended.
I NEED THE BIRDS IN DAWN
I need the birds in dawn
All the showering grass
Uplift hour and beyond.
I mew like a black cat.
I milk myself, sleep content.
I need the birds in dawn
I need them they know
Sleep or stare with a coy wink.
Their glinting eye at my window
Know they are indispensable.
I need the birds in dawn.
THE COLD MONKEYS OF DEATH
Are all around me,
They are on me and in me
All about me. I hope they do not
Clamber closer. I hope they
Breath closely and leave.
The cold monkeys of death.
Are all around me.
APEHOUR
The hure is dead
Loved you so, bitter tears:
granite is, is so resilient.
blighted by granitic hardness
all things so fearful: apehour:
so much wasted or wasted.
I see it in the mirror's edges
glimpse the ape within the man.
INGRAIN
Pandora, red-haired girl, green dress
Asks herself: 'Time to close or open?'
For Pandora this is the past but no its a box.
Pandora opens her legs to play her musical box.
LIFE OF GIOTTO
The Janus-faced muleteers turn to face the sea.
At the edge of the crib plastic Jesus is nursed
By plastic Mary. Her vagina is stuffed with myrrh.
Before a Greek soldier armed with a pilum
Rapes her with it, then with his gross phallus.
Plastic Joseph weeps bloody tears.
Mary has a sudden infarction, dies.
Out pops plastic Jesus, the word Messiah
Perched on his lips like a prohibition.
Giotto utters one monosyllable, turns away.
He has re-invented Aristotle for his own day.
He sees beyond the muleteers to the sea.
Each wave is rippling on an elongated line.
There was a something surround
Happening between Socrates and the Hellenes.
Lone plasticine Pterodactyls circle
Seize plastic Jesus, devour his gonads.
Stone Age and Stone Age together.
Giotto gently lactates, floats away.
DE NERVAL’S LETTER TO HIS LOBSTER
I like your hisses,
And your kisses
All your dreams
And your screams.
Parody paradise
By the red bucket
Could be Heaven or Hell
Sizzle lobster on my string.
POPOCATEPETL
I was in the planning office of the Harland & Woolf shipyard
Passing plans for two drillships bound for the Mexique Bay when
(I knew) It was the Day of the Dead the volcano Popocatepetl)
Then a million whirling hulls and plans of hulls and screws intended
To go through and through things, (but not through Popocatepetl, no).
My body is being hurled into the ravine, meanwhile my dogs are barking.
The grey hulk of a drillship looms. Mr Warnock, the foreman knows
The two ships are overdue and is discretely asking me, the yard pissboy
To go to the Managers meeting and take the rap for him, but I can’t
Mr Warnock for I’m lodged on a broken nook in the ravine.
My jade jewel encrusted skull is brought on a plate to the Manager’s office:
‘This is the head of the man who made the error unscrewing bit A
He really won’t ever make that particular mistake ever again.’
BERTOLT BRECHT'S BEDROOM
Here the poet Brecht lit a last cigar
Rolled over onto his side, expired.
Are you Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht dead?
To annotate the future, he thought,
Downstairs Helene Wiegel
Lay watching Soviet Olympiads
On her regulation plastic DDR Fernsehapparat.
She felt the failing clutch of a Trabant
She felt the last polluted raindrop fall.
Onto the bare graves of Hegel,
Fichte, Heinrich Mann.
Who lay quite dead in
The neighbouring Friedhof.
Soon to be joined by Bert and Helene.
Failing the future as the past
Bukharin's unworked dithyramb
Compounds the morning's cigarette-
induced hangover: Mao's latest verses;
Your 'Ode to Stalin' or King Kong.
White vines disappear into the backgarden
Trellis, ashen, shivering as dawn
Find the shadow of an unworked reshaped heel.
A PIZZERIA, FIRENZE
She shines like the Tuscan sun
Blonde hair, mons veneris
All her beauty wrapped up
In daylight sunshine.
THE TUBE
Ugly tumours extend as portents
A whole scuttling overture
Shrouded in rain and mist
Descending bomblets pitter patter:
On the heads of those below.
Then music winds, unwinds
Through the rainbow light life
Passes from darkness into light.
I sit, note the stations: Farringdon, Barbican
Moorgate and Liverpool Street.
The names mean little to me.
Just vaguely reminscent perhaps
The names of lagers, detergents.
Everyone packed like pilchards
Damp, dank ridiculous
As metal grinds the tube arrives.
MINKS
Foments the heart's lost
Hidden corpses: now new mink
Must be broken; Bob Niarac's
Manky fetid anorak
A flag laced with teeth, hair, tears.
Old sniffling starved minks.
Head for the hills, sniffing the traces
More than blood on the wind.
GERMANICUS
It was any barren landscape
Any heap of shields, armour
Mail, purple gowns of Emperors,
Lionskin, wolfskin, Eagles;
Numidian ivory, Parthian silk.
Germanicus emptied his cup.
Inflected birdsong, brown treestump
Reflected in his eyes the distant campfires
Burned like ambition in the night's eye
A fleck of white in the wolf's eye.
The marshes filled with a chill wind
The trees bent under a bleak wind.
A HOELDERLIN
A Bavarian black-faced sheep
A pair of headphones,
A wind instrument
Eructation, appetency.
I hold a Hoelderlin and blow
A jazz cornet or saxophone
The hedgerows modulate to the concern
The ever-burgeoning blue note heat.
That rises on a May evening
To clutch every straw hatted star.
That is pinned down
By those black notes and bars.
Burning against the blue heavens
Foaming near the moon’s wave
Its cool glow reflected
In the unending crowds that throng
Dissipate, modulating on the sound
Of trains, blues, moonlight, starshine.
NOCTURNE
A revolution. In spite of insanity
Chopin revolved primly and grimly
On the black piano seat he crouched
Like a jaguar flashing eyes, teeth.
So the big black piano was tuned
A Chopin flew past: tit or eagle?
The many bird metamorphoses
And my glass was empty, empty.
DIRT IS GOOD
Life is rancid cattle
Bending in the June breeze.
Hedgerows filled with plastic cutlery.
Lost gloves, olfactory smells.
Dirt is everywhere and dirt is good,
Says the soap powder ad:
Dirt, death, disease, poverty,
Famine, pestilence, plague, war, genocide
Are good, says the soap powder
Spokesperson. Myriad Madonna
Madonna of the senses, Madonna
Of soap powder: descend and fornicate
With the soap powder spokesperson.
Bed him, give him ultimate fellatio,
Sit on his gross cock, jism of breaking bedspring
Part your vaginal lips, suck all of him
Down into your fecund ovaries.
Make him part to part.
Airfix man, glued yet separate
Flick a switch, fill him with electricity.
Soap powder ovulation
Blacker now than sea salmon, monkey sweat
Glands of heron, herring nosewing
Flowing over your canonical observation tower.
Flay him, part him: lit man bogged downwards
Telling everday lies printed on everyday boxes.
IN THE WEINSTRAßE
Morbid penny poem:
See the large women become squat
See them ride camels through mazes
See their top hats glimmer in the sunset.
Candy coloured demon clowns snorting coke
Seize me and drag me into their van
Make biological observations, beg for sex
Mmm happy days indeed....
Showing me a projected film history
Illustrate the highpoints of my life
A surreal chimera or broken dandelion
Am riding my bike through the hedgerow
But it was merely the demon clowns.
They´ve gone now, backchat from the talking clock.
A videoed projection in dreamtime
Descending. I wake up. The moon is full.
Riding to its zenith. Jim Morrison would have said
Mooncock. But it is merely the moon.
Hollowed rotund orb flung into the rosebowl night.
Bowl of candy coloured demon clowns snorting coke
All clinging onto the craters
Fingering the moon´s first thought.
PENNYMARKT
´First thought, best thought´ – Alan Ginsberg
Wearing my new nosewing:
Altercation checkout
Fistfight: I hand over
Five euroes. Mania
As my five former lives
Black livid umbrella rose,
Mantic in the rear view mirror.
I see you now, Humphrey Bogart
The sheep all have wings,
Are waiting with axes
Behind your back projected
Twenty piece suit.
Bär
Paradise postponed decrees sheep Robespierre
Cake not bread baas Mutton Antionette
More sheep to sheep speak later
A tricolour waved at each sheeped barricade
More than 200 years after the revolution
A bär crosses the Östrreich Grenze.
Seven sheep meet their personal Waterloo
Now is time to turn and turn
Again, for revolution, war, revolution, war
Each bär is killing and killing sheep
History is history is history is history
History is cycle in sheep-shaped world.
THE PALACE OF TEARS
In memoriam - Henri Cartier-Bresson
Here is the Palace of Tears
A stolid, square building.
Bustling crowds cross and re-cross
Enter the U-Bahn, depart.
For homes, workplaces, infernal
Dwellings infested with machines.
Communication is no problem
For a street has a name.
People meet, populate cafes, bars
They have many trivial cares
And many trivial loves and likes
Such talk the future soon forgets.
Beneath the Palace of Tears
Are the trash cans, broken bottles,
Rubble, remains, a yesterday
Broken into, disinterred.
So the crowd disperses
It needs to be told what to do
So intimately, so easily
And a crowd can be led.
Raise a hand, wave a handkerchief
Read out the latest news:
Laugh, cry - the gamut of human emotions.
The eternal photographer grimaces, unkempt
His vignettes and silhouettes and Leica
Camera are everywhere, he is the neatly dressed man
On the train, merely immortal,
Well dressed but cold.
He fiddles with his Leica
He says nothing, he retorts (when questioned)
‘I am a photographer and untrained.’
Not so much a doppelganger
Your brother, he departs.
At the Palace of Tears.
The carriage is chill, not so
Chill as death but almost so.
THERE´S A GIRL FROM SZCZECIN
She hangs off the tower
Turning and turning her hands inside and out.
Then she runs around the parabola
To the point of exhaustion.
I saw her face raining tears askew.
I asked her for just one moment
As she runs into the distance.
WHO KILLED RUDI?
Was it the wind in Moluccas Street
Or a giraffe in the zoo?
Was it the tell-tale stains on the back seat
Of your BMW kalamazoo?
Was it Frank, Mike or Steve?
Was it the 1960 Trabant
You owned for a day then banged
Into the boot end of 1962?
Was it anyone really, was it me or you
And what if it was?
Can he feel it now, cold, dumb, dead
Can he really come after you?
Is he dead really or merely pining?
What if he died or didn´t die?
Can he disrupt your stag night
Or interrupt your first night
Of onstage delirium, can he fly
Past your window or settle cat-like
Licking ash from your window pane?
Rudi is dead there´s no doubt
Never to come again.
There´s ice and snow tonight
And Rudi is dead. And Rudi is dead.
UNBREAKABLE STICKS TWO: PROFIT
Write because you must, there's no profit in it.
Sometimes I wish jESUS would candidly aside
(as he swings Between Lucifer and Beelzebub)
'I'm here because I'm here,' he cries.
sOCRATES, before he died wished for a quiet life
some indiscrete profession in a small town:
for suicide is clean, slow, bitter and obscene.
Its the long journey of a dream
As if the light was undiminished now.
But the dark is at my window.
Seems so incorporeal, abstracted, siren's
Shrieking, pursuing abstract thieves through
Square block on block. On fire.
The poet's bacon is saved. As the cops arrive
Socrates, Jesus, Che, Castro, Lenin,
Mother Teresa, Bin Laden
Are unprofitable, faceless, yesterday.
(are all hiding in my wardrobe anyway.)
THE SUN RISES OVER ARSENAL, NORTH LONDON
The sun is a bad inkblot, anti-art thrown out of college
A big plastic arsehole farting swirling chaotic matter
About the sky. That inkblot floats on the bathwater
All the dreck of yesterday, a scum or crust of spume.
I want to tell you about loneliness; squared on square
Carpet tiles, dirty at my dreams edges. The sun is screaming
All at my window, wanting to let me know that all the sad
Blobs are people, not lettuces, rows of shirts, CDs,
Wallpaper, helicopter training manuals, filthy magazines
Infested with exploited. It smells like rancid skin
It all peels off when you touch it, you peel off the sun.
Your hideous skin burns to the touch. You need to know?
Look up at the nuclear edges, blame its creation
The hollow portion of a rindless orange
A collage you would have despised to create.
I know I suffer, even vermin and field mice do.
Paul Murphy
by Paul Murphy
Paul Murphy - Biography Born in Belfast, 1965. He studied at the University of Warwick, gaining a BA in Film and Literature. From there he went to Queen's University Belfast to study for an MA on T.S.Eliot and the French philosopher Jacques Lacan. He has just finished a stint as writer-in-residence at the Albert-Ludwig Universitat, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wurtemburg, Germany. His poetry, literary criticism, book reviews and travel writings have been published in English, Irish and American journals. He has published two pamphlets, one previous book of poetry, and has read from his work in Paris, London, Cambridge, Galway and Belfast. He is at the moment writing a history of the Black Forest, and working on many reviews of contemporary authors. He also writes philosophy and enjoys working on the interface between poetry and philosophy.
Acknowledgements: acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following journals: Penumbra, Other Poetry, The Delinquent, Decanto, Inclement, The Journal, Monkey Kettle, Poetry Monthly International, The Bayou Review (US)
1. Beyond the Pale
2. Sea over Zilch
3. Addiscombe
4. Marcus Aurelius will prevail
5. I need the birds in dawn
6. Cold Monkeys of Death
7. Apehour
8. Ingrain
9. Life of Giotto
10. de Nerval's Letter to his Lobster
11.Popocatepetl
12.Bertolt Brecht's Bedroom
13. A Pizzeria, Firenze
14. The Tube
15. Minks
16. Germanicus
17. A Hoelderlin
18. Nocturne
19. Dirt is Good
20. In the Weinstrasse
21. Pennymarkt
22. Bar
23. The Palace of Tears
24. There's a girl from Szczecin
25. Who killed Rudi?
26. Unbreakable Sticks 2: Profit
27. The Sun rises over Arsenal, North London
LUCIFER IS BLUE
Lucifer is blue
All the tideless seas
Black enduring gulf.
Lucifer is blue
Into the blue abyss
The endless parade.
Lucifer is blue
The lights are all out
Weeps into blue chaos.
APPLES
Apple trees blossom at the world’s edge.
Apple is the eternal fruit.
Daybreak spear bulbed apple
Chariots of the sungod
Brush the heads of daffodils.
Laughter comes in at the eye
Sadness comes in at the mouth.
Later the gods of dusk
Hen’s eggs rear up as
Vague impalpable ghosts
The river is an immense bruised heart.
LEMURS
The electric skin of the jungle storm
Greys distantly then splits, on its way
To pull apart the sun’s fleshy lenses.
Lips of ether shroud the beaches
Darkly within or without; is it the mind itself
Or merely a dislocation of the senses?
I walk the beach in Madagascar
A place just in my mind, where I’ve
Never been, nor wish to go.
Reticence, diligence, evanescence: are merely words.
Poems are merely words. Lemurs have more work.
Dander silently, have invaded my senses.
Somehow the lemur knows,
Dark in its forest, dark in its mind.
Retread the distant lightning at the dawn.
JOHN KEATS HOUSE
The sun splits the cyclop’s
Eye of a gravitating clock.
An upturned sundial is
Purpling in fragmentary rain.
Men and women are separated
From their obligatory pain.
Lights are on in the mechanism
Of an ordinary soul.
Glittering membrane called love
That kisses and settles
On the vain peacock colours
That burn so brightly.
WHAT THE FLOWERS OF THE FOREST SAY TO ME
The valley is a million year old
Formula: meaning, what is a poem?
The last chance creation is this.
An upheaval, a certain process.
The ending of a substratum
Replete with faults, depressions.
Perhaps it is the oil of the future?
A sequence of beeps and silences.
The seismographic landscape
Is suffering all of us who live there.
Geological time and its sunbeams
Are travelling in myriad ways.
Everywhere industrial processes
Are forming combinations.
Brown figures are stooping down
In the dusk resemble Van Gogh´s
Potato eaters. Vast cycles
Of nature are re-enacted
What is flowing through the littered
Valley voices in or out of the Spring rain?
SNAIL
Nature´s stain is also the snail
With its broad back. All his luggage
Is included in this crystal sculpture.
I prod at him. For a moment
He retracts his head.
I pass on, then look back for a minute.
He is still there
The great north sun is beaming. His shell is chill pink.
The great north chill sun declines into the pink clouds.
Whispy as horses tails
Strung across the snail´s entrails.
THÜRINGEN WALD
The hill is over the hill.
The sun is over the horizon.
The landscape´s stillness
Is a well-sculpted end vision.
There are no farmer´s left
But still there is produce.
There are no bank´s left
But still there is commerce.
Even if Hell is retracted
The rest is still coming on.
Even is annihilation is imminent
There will still be a discount.
In Manebach the choir
Sings the songs once
Composed in Erfurt
By a hell-faced child
In Arnstadt. The dappled
Organ music is played
In the Bachkircke:
Sunlight in the square.
I’m writing an epic poem using the heteronym Kenji Okanawi, a survivor of Nagasaki, who claimed three pensions, having cycled from Nagasaki to Hiroshima and back again, being blasted three times.
Cycling on a three wheeled bicycle in three different directions, Okanawi is the only man to have three assholes too! Work that one out Niels Bohr!
Blast off!
I was sitting under the pyramid at the Poetry Library, when a sullen melodrama occured to me:
AFTER THE BRONZE CASTING OF DYLAN THOMAS BY HUGH OLOFF DE WETT
Dylan Thomas, you look like a surreal clown
Escaped from one circus to the poetry circus.
A live awareness glints in your hollow, bronze eye
Alive to the diamonds and the cheesy bits.
You wear a dapper cravat
Which droops seemingly to your knees.
In the afterglow of your dying cigarette
All the dapper truths mingling with the rest of it.
THE ROAD TO TENOCHTITLAN
I am on the road so weary yet all
Of the fall is around me.
The battles are a foregone
Conclusion as foregone as the strand
Is. The ashes leap out of the flame
The eagle no longer calls out.
All of the wildness is in me.
Out of this rout, paths to divide us:
On the road to Tenochtitlan.
PRACTICAL HAY
Mr Acerbic wears a jagged smile.
Nurse Wetboard is sitting on his face.
Monkey-faced men leer in at the portico
I am on the baby Grand. Attack
Of the strang/lers. We die
In misty, rosy dreams.
We die as we wanted to live:
Cowardly, elemental tinpackers!
Some days later I am still
Underneath the baby Grand.
Mr McGonad is sipping his pint
Of corduroy. Mr Slipgirdle has
A firm. Nurse Rendition
Is throttling him with a loose.
Alibi is hammering in the windmill.
The electric is all blown away.
BEYOND THE PALE
Francis Bacon is beyond the pale:
Pale fence hoardings or pale-faced children
inhabit distended ghettos split like orange skin.
Bacon flies beaming into the next room.
It is very white indeed for every figure
is conducted into wholes and segments.
Each and every gorilla-suited heroine
talks like Anita Pallenberg or Rin Tin Tin.
Arms akimbo, the end, guillotine, lights, action.
SEA OVER ZILCH
(Mark Rothko exhibition, Tate Modern, London)
The shaley grey picture patina trembles
At the edge of the lemonade yellow drizzle
The shaley grey picture patina trembles.
At the end of the life at the end of the line
At the edge of the lemonade yellow drizzle
The shaley dead artist trembles drizzles.
ADDISCOMBE
A green parrot takes off
Over the trees, the trees of Addiscombe.
At Sandilands I found the pitch,
The pitch without the aid of a sat nav.
With old-fashioned means such as
Asking people: barren encounters
In small shops, small talk, ham, eggs;
The petit-bourgeois of Addiscombe!
At Addiscombe and earlier DH Lawrence
Divided his time between number 14 and 16
writing his novel 'Sons and Lovers' in 1911
or thereabouts, a very good year, you might say
wedged inbetween the Russo-Japanese War
and the Battle of the Somme.
What he did in both houses
Is anybody's business.
spattering ink taking down each bright
green parrot fluttering over Sandilands.
O I remember Addiscombe!
The man in the shop huffing, puffing
pointing beyond technological certainties
to older ways of politeness and custom.
This is Addiscombe, an encyclopaedia of conceit,
A ragged waver of all that's new.
That threw Lawrence out in 1913
So that he must wander the planet,
To Sicily, Australia, New Mexico;
To bow down before dark, inferior gods.
Addiscombe even the parrots have escaped.
The click of sticks, the ball crashing
into the net with a clattering thud.
O Addiscombe, you have betrayed yourself!
O Addiscombe, you have no heart!
O Addiscombe, you have an Aztec mystique!
Even the dawn runs out here.
Even the green in the green
Is quintessential as dust.
Addiscombe, bury your head in shame!
MARCUS AURELIUS WILL PREVAIL
I sit and drink beetroot juice
Then sleep for hours in my narrow bed.
Will the Romans appear even in my dream?
Will they rule even for a further 1000 years?
Even those not born to the purple
Sobbing like a wolf’s cub
In the cave that is my dream.
Or in the folds of a bedspread
Are the cold, dead atoms of Marcus Aurelius.
Holding any pilum thrown up
At the Field of Mars
Holding the symbol that is our dream.
All around me the cold dead dream of Rome.
Auxilia, purple, wolf’s cub.
Eagles, legions, vexilium.
Is the cold dead history of a dream.
The cold grey walls of a turret against
The grey of the wolfskin helmet.
The song like the dream stutters on.
So both song and dream are ended.
I NEED THE BIRDS IN DAWN
I need the birds in dawn
All the showering grass
Uplift hour and beyond.
I mew like a black cat.
I milk myself, sleep content.
I need the birds in dawn
I need them they know
Sleep or stare with a coy wink.
Their glinting eye at my window
Know they are indispensable.
I need the birds in dawn.
THE COLD MONKEYS OF DEATH
Are all around me,
They are on me and in me
All about me. I hope they do not
Clamber closer. I hope they
Breath closely and leave.
The cold monkeys of death.
Are all around me.
APEHOUR
The hure is dead
Loved you so, bitter tears:
granite is, is so resilient.
blighted by granitic hardness
all things so fearful: apehour:
so much wasted or wasted.
I see it in the mirror's edges
glimpse the ape within the man.
INGRAIN
Pandora, red-haired girl, green dress
Asks herself: 'Time to close or open?'
For Pandora this is the past but no its a box.
Pandora opens her legs to play her musical box.
LIFE OF GIOTTO
The Janus-faced muleteers turn to face the sea.
At the edge of the crib plastic Jesus is nursed
By plastic Mary. Her vagina is stuffed with myrrh.
Before a Greek soldier armed with a pilum
Rapes her with it, then with his gross phallus.
Plastic Joseph weeps bloody tears.
Mary has a sudden infarction, dies.
Out pops plastic Jesus, the word Messiah
Perched on his lips like a prohibition.
Giotto utters one monosyllable, turns away.
He has re-invented Aristotle for his own day.
He sees beyond the muleteers to the sea.
Each wave is rippling on an elongated line.
There was a something surround
Happening between Socrates and the Hellenes.
Lone plasticine Pterodactyls circle
Seize plastic Jesus, devour his gonads.
Stone Age and Stone Age together.
Giotto gently lactates, floats away.
DE NERVAL’S LETTER TO HIS LOBSTER
I like your hisses,
And your kisses
All your dreams
And your screams.
Parody paradise
By the red bucket
Could be Heaven or Hell
Sizzle lobster on my string.
POPOCATEPETL
I was in the planning office of the Harland & Woolf shipyard
Passing plans for two drillships bound for the Mexique Bay when
(I knew) It was the Day of the Dead the volcano Popocatepetl)
Then a million whirling hulls and plans of hulls and screws intended
To go through and through things, (but not through Popocatepetl, no).
My body is being hurled into the ravine, meanwhile my dogs are barking.
The grey hulk of a drillship looms. Mr Warnock, the foreman knows
The two ships are overdue and is discretely asking me, the yard pissboy
To go to the Managers meeting and take the rap for him, but I can’t
Mr Warnock for I’m lodged on a broken nook in the ravine.
My jade jewel encrusted skull is brought on a plate to the Manager’s office:
‘This is the head of the man who made the error unscrewing bit A
He really won’t ever make that particular mistake ever again.’
BERTOLT BRECHT'S BEDROOM
Here the poet Brecht lit a last cigar
Rolled over onto his side, expired.
Are you Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht dead?
To annotate the future, he thought,
Downstairs Helene Wiegel
Lay watching Soviet Olympiads
On her regulation plastic DDR Fernsehapparat.
She felt the failing clutch of a Trabant
She felt the last polluted raindrop fall.
Onto the bare graves of Hegel,
Fichte, Heinrich Mann.
Who lay quite dead in
The neighbouring Friedhof.
Soon to be joined by Bert and Helene.
Failing the future as the past
Bukharin's unworked dithyramb
Compounds the morning's cigarette-
induced hangover: Mao's latest verses;
Your 'Ode to Stalin' or King Kong.
White vines disappear into the backgarden
Trellis, ashen, shivering as dawn
Find the shadow of an unworked reshaped heel.
A PIZZERIA, FIRENZE
She shines like the Tuscan sun
Blonde hair, mons veneris
All her beauty wrapped up
In daylight sunshine.
THE TUBE
Ugly tumours extend as portents
A whole scuttling overture
Shrouded in rain and mist
Descending bomblets pitter patter:
On the heads of those below.
Then music winds, unwinds
Through the rainbow light life
Passes from darkness into light.
I sit, note the stations: Farringdon, Barbican
Moorgate and Liverpool Street.
The names mean little to me.
Just vaguely reminscent perhaps
The names of lagers, detergents.
Everyone packed like pilchards
Damp, dank ridiculous
As metal grinds the tube arrives.
MINKS
Foments the heart's lost
Hidden corpses: now new mink
Must be broken; Bob Niarac's
Manky fetid anorak
A flag laced with teeth, hair, tears.
Old sniffling starved minks.
Head for the hills, sniffing the traces
More than blood on the wind.
GERMANICUS
It was any barren landscape
Any heap of shields, armour
Mail, purple gowns of Emperors,
Lionskin, wolfskin, Eagles;
Numidian ivory, Parthian silk.
Germanicus emptied his cup.
Inflected birdsong, brown treestump
Reflected in his eyes the distant campfires
Burned like ambition in the night's eye
A fleck of white in the wolf's eye.
The marshes filled with a chill wind
The trees bent under a bleak wind.
A HOELDERLIN
A Bavarian black-faced sheep
A pair of headphones,
A wind instrument
Eructation, appetency.
I hold a Hoelderlin and blow
A jazz cornet or saxophone
The hedgerows modulate to the concern
The ever-burgeoning blue note heat.
That rises on a May evening
To clutch every straw hatted star.
That is pinned down
By those black notes and bars.
Burning against the blue heavens
Foaming near the moon’s wave
Its cool glow reflected
In the unending crowds that throng
Dissipate, modulating on the sound
Of trains, blues, moonlight, starshine.
NOCTURNE
A revolution. In spite of insanity
Chopin revolved primly and grimly
On the black piano seat he crouched
Like a jaguar flashing eyes, teeth.
So the big black piano was tuned
A Chopin flew past: tit or eagle?
The many bird metamorphoses
And my glass was empty, empty.
DIRT IS GOOD
Life is rancid cattle
Bending in the June breeze.
Hedgerows filled with plastic cutlery.
Lost gloves, olfactory smells.
Dirt is everywhere and dirt is good,
Says the soap powder ad:
Dirt, death, disease, poverty,
Famine, pestilence, plague, war, genocide
Are good, says the soap powder
Spokesperson. Myriad Madonna
Madonna of the senses, Madonna
Of soap powder: descend and fornicate
With the soap powder spokesperson.
Bed him, give him ultimate fellatio,
Sit on his gross cock, jism of breaking bedspring
Part your vaginal lips, suck all of him
Down into your fecund ovaries.
Make him part to part.
Airfix man, glued yet separate
Flick a switch, fill him with electricity.
Soap powder ovulation
Blacker now than sea salmon, monkey sweat
Glands of heron, herring nosewing
Flowing over your canonical observation tower.
Flay him, part him: lit man bogged downwards
Telling everday lies printed on everyday boxes.
IN THE WEINSTRAßE
Morbid penny poem:
See the large women become squat
See them ride camels through mazes
See their top hats glimmer in the sunset.
Candy coloured demon clowns snorting coke
Seize me and drag me into their van
Make biological observations, beg for sex
Mmm happy days indeed....
Showing me a projected film history
Illustrate the highpoints of my life
A surreal chimera or broken dandelion
Am riding my bike through the hedgerow
But it was merely the demon clowns.
They´ve gone now, backchat from the talking clock.
A videoed projection in dreamtime
Descending. I wake up. The moon is full.
Riding to its zenith. Jim Morrison would have said
Mooncock. But it is merely the moon.
Hollowed rotund orb flung into the rosebowl night.
Bowl of candy coloured demon clowns snorting coke
All clinging onto the craters
Fingering the moon´s first thought.
PENNYMARKT
´First thought, best thought´ – Alan Ginsberg
Wearing my new nosewing:
Altercation checkout
Fistfight: I hand over
Five euroes. Mania
As my five former lives
Black livid umbrella rose,
Mantic in the rear view mirror.
I see you now, Humphrey Bogart
The sheep all have wings,
Are waiting with axes
Behind your back projected
Twenty piece suit.
Bär
Paradise postponed decrees sheep Robespierre
Cake not bread baas Mutton Antionette
More sheep to sheep speak later
A tricolour waved at each sheeped barricade
More than 200 years after the revolution
A bär crosses the Östrreich Grenze.
Seven sheep meet their personal Waterloo
Now is time to turn and turn
Again, for revolution, war, revolution, war
Each bär is killing and killing sheep
History is history is history is history
History is cycle in sheep-shaped world.
THE PALACE OF TEARS
In memoriam - Henri Cartier-Bresson
Here is the Palace of Tears
A stolid, square building.
Bustling crowds cross and re-cross
Enter the U-Bahn, depart.
For homes, workplaces, infernal
Dwellings infested with machines.
Communication is no problem
For a street has a name.
People meet, populate cafes, bars
They have many trivial cares
And many trivial loves and likes
Such talk the future soon forgets.
Beneath the Palace of Tears
Are the trash cans, broken bottles,
Rubble, remains, a yesterday
Broken into, disinterred.
So the crowd disperses
It needs to be told what to do
So intimately, so easily
And a crowd can be led.
Raise a hand, wave a handkerchief
Read out the latest news:
Laugh, cry - the gamut of human emotions.
The eternal photographer grimaces, unkempt
His vignettes and silhouettes and Leica
Camera are everywhere, he is the neatly dressed man
On the train, merely immortal,
Well dressed but cold.
He fiddles with his Leica
He says nothing, he retorts (when questioned)
‘I am a photographer and untrained.’
Not so much a doppelganger
Your brother, he departs.
At the Palace of Tears.
The carriage is chill, not so
Chill as death but almost so.
THERE´S A GIRL FROM SZCZECIN
She hangs off the tower
Turning and turning her hands inside and out.
Then she runs around the parabola
To the point of exhaustion.
I saw her face raining tears askew.
I asked her for just one moment
As she runs into the distance.
WHO KILLED RUDI?
Was it the wind in Moluccas Street
Or a giraffe in the zoo?
Was it the tell-tale stains on the back seat
Of your BMW kalamazoo?
Was it Frank, Mike or Steve?
Was it the 1960 Trabant
You owned for a day then banged
Into the boot end of 1962?
Was it anyone really, was it me or you
And what if it was?
Can he feel it now, cold, dumb, dead
Can he really come after you?
Is he dead really or merely pining?
What if he died or didn´t die?
Can he disrupt your stag night
Or interrupt your first night
Of onstage delirium, can he fly
Past your window or settle cat-like
Licking ash from your window pane?
Rudi is dead there´s no doubt
Never to come again.
There´s ice and snow tonight
And Rudi is dead. And Rudi is dead.
UNBREAKABLE STICKS TWO: PROFIT
Write because you must, there's no profit in it.
Sometimes I wish jESUS would candidly aside
(as he swings Between Lucifer and Beelzebub)
'I'm here because I'm here,' he cries.
sOCRATES, before he died wished for a quiet life
some indiscrete profession in a small town:
for suicide is clean, slow, bitter and obscene.
Its the long journey of a dream
As if the light was undiminished now.
But the dark is at my window.
Seems so incorporeal, abstracted, siren's
Shrieking, pursuing abstract thieves through
Square block on block. On fire.
The poet's bacon is saved. As the cops arrive
Socrates, Jesus, Che, Castro, Lenin,
Mother Teresa, Bin Laden
Are unprofitable, faceless, yesterday.
(are all hiding in my wardrobe anyway.)
THE SUN RISES OVER ARSENAL, NORTH LONDON
The sun is a bad inkblot, anti-art thrown out of college
A big plastic arsehole farting swirling chaotic matter
About the sky. That inkblot floats on the bathwater
All the dreck of yesterday, a scum or crust of spume.
I want to tell you about loneliness; squared on square
Carpet tiles, dirty at my dreams edges. The sun is screaming
All at my window, wanting to let me know that all the sad
Blobs are people, not lettuces, rows of shirts, CDs,
Wallpaper, helicopter training manuals, filthy magazines
Infested with exploited. It smells like rancid skin
It all peels off when you touch it, you peel off the sun.
Your hideous skin burns to the touch. You need to know?
Look up at the nuclear edges, blame its creation
The hollow portion of a rindless orange
A collage you would have despised to create.
I know I suffer, even vermin and field mice do.
Paul Murphy
posted by Paul Murphy at
February 22, 2011
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