Commons 49 - 50

the cuckoo is split
- the image, cracked -
so its easy to imagine
our masters do tell us
what we confidentially
inside their saying
what ‘they’, hounds
all thinking forgets
outside, o enchanting
we are sparkling things
this brick, for example
its crimson vitriol
their image window
the philosopher’s stone


as I was out faking
letters \ weirds wrecked it:
my character scoured
words gone, locked inside
the cuckoo has no eyes
or perceptual shriek
wrecked inside poetry
its tidal crust
where sickness came
we were documentaries
resident in a system
- HAIL SHIT -
I can’t say ‘moon’
with a ribbon in my pit

" . . . . the cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name . . . ."

Commons 46 - 48

" . . . . something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is emeshed"

“I ain’t faking, no no” -
but put a businessman’s
girdle round the earth
is a dream deferred
like all protest media
& sected corporate urgency
BANG
its musical voices
- blank -
it is not sexual
their guitar strings
a study in asphyxiation
tightened on the known stars
scrawled out, ‘their’


he was a big freak
transformed into normality
all the night through
a specific negation of history
& the sea
where scorn was
recent irruptions of unmeaning
flatter the official town’s
insolent noise making
secretly my small thighs
trickling down our
sobriety, pronounced
as their favourite line:
goodbye, sweethearts & pals


the wind shall blow hurt
inside every earth's
cut-price reverie:
- insert world of banking -
- outside -
pretending that people were
sexual gestures & thrushes
gargled with sweethearts -
I don’t eat your duty,
build money with a system
of mystical swine
& social trickling -
insert your heads,
have sucked your poem dead.

Commons 44 & 45 (plus note)

‘she got him up upon her back’
‘I intend here to drown you’
a stranger, perhaps
weirds had reckoned them -
his lily-white hands,
the only true thing
is what is contained
- ballads of irrelevance -
a specific utterance
a raised glass
a perpetual shriek
alight inside his metal throat:
ok, who are they?
a speech, perhaps?


& then we were letters
thinking cities, even
varied, fierce & gold
but swallowed by events
in rainfall, its tides
& police were talking
in social cheap wine
whose life was ludic
with biting, swallowed
by yuppie reveries,
justice, for example
& simpering passion,
a black & burning pit
half-price in woolworths

Notes on The 'Commons'

Baudelaire in English - out now

I'm quite pleased. its 90 pages long and fits happily in yr coat pocket, so you can read it aloud to people on public transport.

you can get it here. some of it was published in Onedit about a year ago, and there's a film of me reading from it at the Openned site. Over here you can read an essay all about it.

Commons: Working Notes (plus 42 & 43)

as I was out walking
our musical voices
split to a single chord
- reference code -
insert seizure
- unavailable -
insert hope & love
a layered pit of stung starlings
as I was out
‘hold me fast & fear me not’
inside the lower city
I would suck their snarling
- paraphrase -
I would rather be the devil

as I was out
dashes
in ordinary conscious
in parenthesis
the sun
in italics, my
welfare application
met a fair
apostrophe
met a
inside the lower
met a hyphen
a black dot
a

Highly recommended . . . .

Here and here
some excellent visual poetry . . . .

also, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets is out. Congratulations to Jeff, who for some reason, has put a picture of someone's arse here. peculiar.