A little baby powdery snow on its cheeks on this holy night.

September

The first September of the pandemic, The sky’s a watercolour, white and grey, And Pembroke Street is empty, and so is Leeson Street. This is the time after time, What the world will look like when the world Is over, when people have been ushered into Seats reserved for them in the luminous Heavens.     Moving towards the corner of Upper Pembroke Street and Leeson Street, An elderly man wears a mask; his walk is Sprightly, his movements brisk. I catch His watery eye for a watery moment. Without stopping, all matter-of-fact, He says: ‘Someone told me you were dead.’

“Imagine Lucifer . . .”

Imagine Lucifer An angel without angelness An apple Plucked clear by will of taste, color, Strength, beauty, roundness, seed Absent of all God painted, present everything An apple is. Imagine Lucifer An angel without angelness A poem That has revised itself out of sound Imagine, rhyme, concordance Absent of all God spoke of, present everything A poem is.         The law I say, the Law Is? What is Lucifer An emperor with no clothes No skin, no flesh, no heart An emperor!

Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers. Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child, Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog, The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils, Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister, The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night, As if she understood the wind and rain, The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert. —O I am sad when I see dogs or children! For they are strangers, they are Shakespearean.

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions? And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly Clouded with glory, learned in dark Nature? The dog in humble inquiry along the ground, The child who credits dreams and fears the dark, Know more and less than you: they know full well Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well: You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.

Regard the child, regard the animal, Welcome strangers, but study daily things, Knowing that heaven and hell surround us, But this, this which we say before we’re sorry, This which we live behind our unseen faces, Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished, For we are incomplete and know no future, And we are howling or dancing out our souls In beating syllables before the curtain: We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

missing middle

no no see, you're all missing it...

it's not dystopic, it's a dystopportunity!

Anxiety criticises the weak Consoles with happiness they feel Peace and serenity exist never to heal The insanity that kills.

All Hallows

Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen sleep in their blue yoke, the fields having been picked clean, the sheaves bound evenly and piled at the roadside among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence. And the wife leaning out the window with her hand extended, as in payment, and the seeds distinct, gold, calling Come here Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

Anyone else seen this possibly insane man driving insane truck?

There's this truck, I see it hauling ass everywhere around town like it's blasting across the alkali flats of some future hellscape.

This truck has no regard for traffic laws the regular citizen is upheld to.

It's missing a headlight and has a stuffed dinosaur shoved in the whole where the light once was.

The man inside appears to be some kind of psychotic but handsome construction worker, he leans out the window and calls old men "baby". The truck itself while already loud usually has some sort of loud music emitting from it, last time I saw it was limp bizkits popular 90s track "nookie".

Anyone else seen this fool? I can't be the only one. This truck+man inside are lawless hooligans.

THIS WRITING IS FOR MY FRIENDS IN MIND OF ALL COMMON & HIDDEN MEN AND OF THE SECRET PRINCES AND TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE WITH ME IN THE COVERT AND IN THE OPEN FROM THE BALCKWALL THE BROADWAY THE CAUSEWAY THE CUT THE FLATS THE LEVEL THE ENVIRONS AND THOSE OTHERS FROM TRAETH MAWR AND LONG MOUNTAIN THE HENDREF AND YR HAFOD THE PENTRE PANDY AND Y DARREN THE MAELORS THE BOUNDARY WALLS AND NO. 4 WORKING ESPECIALLY PTE. R.A. LEWIS-GUNNER FROM NEWPORT MONMOUTHSHIRE KILLED IN ACTION ON THE BOE- SINGHE SECTOR N.W. OF YPRES SOME TIME IN THE WINTER 1916-17 AND TO THE BEARDED INFANTRY WHO EXCHANGED THEIR LONG LOAVES WITH US AT A SECTOR'S BARRIER AND TO THE ENEMY FRONT-FIGHTERS WHO SHARED OUR PAINS AGAINST WHOM WE FOUND OURSELVES BY MISADVENTURE

----

Evil betide me if I do not open the door to know if that is true which is said concerning it. So he opened the door ... and when they had looked, they were conscious of all the evils they had ever sustained, and of all the friends and companions they had lost and of all the misery that had befallen them, as if all had happened in that very spot; ... and because of their perturbation they could not rest.

We Cry Together

Her shriek is raw, snapping all the world’s quiet As dreams, unborn, tumble into the abyss of almost. I don’t know this sound; an anguish that pierces my soul. With what little strength I have, I grab her hand, Weaving through the grooves of her sorrow, Though my grip is frail. The geography of her face is foreign to me, As the doctor explains the terrain of a pain I cannot mend. A black hole I cannot save her from. Nah, this can’t be right. Look again! Refusing to accept my wife’s body, As the site of such an inexplicable vanishing— A promise left lingering in the world of daydreams.

She asks me and the doctor to leave the room, Needing a moment to plead with the universe. From the hallway, I hear her sobbing, an ocean devouring her smile. My knuckles meet the steel door of a sterile hospital room, Attempting to punch away our misfortune, until I can replace it With something she actually deserves. For all of the IVF shots, The nights we debated over names, the anxiety attacks about money, And the moments we pinched ourselves at the idea of being chosen by Saadiq. Saadiq Joseph.

How do you stitch a wound living in the syllables of a name never called? There is nothing to say, when spun into a vortex of unspeakable loss. We spend weeks huddled around grief like a campfire, Telling silent ghost stories about the people we stopped being Just days before. Nurturing a flame so small it could be mistaken for hope.

In the most somber hours, when the world took its deepest breath, I sat beside her, staring at the slight crescent of her unhoused belly, For so long, I swore I heard a heartbeat, but it was actually planets collapsing In the cavities of my chest. And I wondered, how are we going to survive this, And in time, my question was answered: Together.

TAOING

The way you can go isn’t the real way. The name you can say isn’t the real name.

Heaven and earth begin in the unnamed: name’s the mother of the ten thousand things.

So the unwanting soul sees what’s hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants.

Two things, one origin, but different in name, whose identity is mystery. Mystery of all mysteries! The door to the hidden.

THE BALLAD OF STEVEN SLATER

Ain't we all had a day When we just had enough Ain't it true each one of us Has been battered, worn, and rough Ain't you never felt irate And won'tcha get irater Well, my friends, we have a hero now I speak of Steven Slater

It ain't that easy to ride the skies Laboring for JetBlue A man's got to keep widened eyes For terrorists or shampoo And worser still are the passengers They turn a kind man to a hater Won't nobody stand up to this? One man: Steven Slater

There was a particular day And a particular customer Who grew abusive to Steven when he instructed her She was endangering herself And he didn't care to debate her And all at once she struck his head She struck at Steven Slater

Some will say he made a scene Or it was a crime But Steven he had had enough And if he has to, he'll do time Perhaps it's great to keep your cool But sometimes it is greater To bid one final fuck you too As did Steven Slater

He cursed her on the intercom So that everyone could hear And he then bid his adieu And he grabbed himself a beer And threw open the JetBlue door With an escape slide and its inflater And he slid down, drinking, shouting fuck you Our hero, Steven Slater

The police they went after him They caught him in his bed He was supposed to finish work but he was In flagrante delicto instead A hero and a lover now, not a Circumnavigater Say what you will, but tip your hat To a man who had enough A man named Steven Slater.

nickleback

Some people who have trained themselves to have their emotional catharsis through sophisticated art

get annoyed at untrained people having an emotional catharsis through unsophisticated art.

Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn

Count Eberhard the Beard From Wurttemberg’s domain On a pious journey fared To the shores of Palestine.

One day as he was riding A woodland path in spring From a hawthorn bush He took a little cutting.

In his iron helmet He placed the hawthorn spray; He carried it off to war Over the flowing sea.

And when he was back home He set it in the earth, And soon the leaves and buds Into life were stirred.

The count, faithful and true, Each year came to the sprig; He was filled with joy To see it grow so big.

The count shrank with age, The sprig became a tree. Beneath it the old man sat In deepest reverie.

Its high-arching limbs, Its whisper in his ear Remind him of the past And of the distant shore.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Yellow Bittern

Yellow bittern, there you are now, Skin and bone on the frozen shore. It wasn’t hunger but thirst for a mouthful That left you foundered and me heartsore. What odds is it now about Troy’s destruction With you on the flagstones upside down, Who never injured or hurt a creature And preferred bog water to any wine?

Bittern, bittern, your end was awful, Your perished skull there on the road, You that would call me every morning With your gargler’s song as you guzzled mud. And that’s what’s ahead of your brother Cathal (You know what they say about me and the stuff) But they’ve got it wrong and the truth is simple: A drop would have saved that croaker’s life.

I am saddened, bittern, and brokenhearted To find you in scrags in the rushy tufts, And the big rats scampering down the rat paths To wake your carcass and have their fun. If you could have got word to me in time, bird, That you were in trouble and craved a sup, I’d have struck the fetters of those lough waters And wet your thrapple with the blow I struck.

Your common birds do not concern me, The blackbird, say, or the thrush or crane, But the yellow bittern, my heartsome namesake With my looks and locks, he’s the one I mourn. Constantly he was drinking, drinking, And by all accounts I’ve a name for it too, But every drop I get I’ll sink it For fear I might get my end from drouth.

The woman I love says to give it up now Or else I’ll go to an early grave, But I say no and keep resisting For taking drink’s what prolongs your days. You saw for yourself a while ago What happened to the bird when its throat went dry; So my friends and neighbours, let it flow: You’ll be stood no rounds in eternity.