Commons 53 - 55

if I had a fancy sash
my own true love would
rent me out in earings
but if I had a ribbon bow
in scratches & numbers
he’d read my mind, with hail
burning like a city’s
frozen & vivid dead:
but my method is to fear him,
his scorched & wasted coins,
history’s oppressive line,
my thighs
my anarchic scales
oh fucking tide


in Poundstretcher &
zombies
everything you like about em
they are in pain
meanwhile, in trivialities
fiendish pretty glimpses
we go mad
no you don’t
music love abstraction
the twisted branches
at the centre of our lives
ignite on interruption
fear walks ahead of us
I feel like a dog on fire


“as I was out walking
I met this woman
said she was, like
the queen of the fairies
dragged me under the sea
fucked me senseless
for seven years
& now I’m dead
or rather
I am eating your brains
so tasteless
& bland
everything is invisible
your stupid racist town"

Commons 51 - 52

us, for example
these things
these turbulent shadows
this repetitive sun
between my life & yours
stars, air
a knot of sharp flowers
a single moan
a heresy of veins
keys & thighs
veins & keys
we are lashed together
rotten with love
time will destroy us


the town is eerie
rotten with
the sea is
halt, police:
not notes, alphabets
the town isn’t the town
not notes, breathing
the sea is
archaic opinion
sparkling abuse
the sea is
a small note on
zombies
not alphabets

"what the manipulated repel as all too strange is what is secretly all too comprehensible"

Bad Habits (or how to live, part 102)

Francis Picabia - I Am a Beautiful Monster
Tom Pickard - Ballad of Jamie Allen
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF KILLER WOMEN
REVOLUTIONARY ENSEMBLE - VIETNAM
impertinent & irritating communications from various official bodies
Phoebe Gloeckner - A Child's Life etc
various poems by LOLA RIDGE, JOYCE MANSOUR, VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE, MINA LOY
complete cinematic work of Guy Debord
poems in DAMN THE CAESARS, AXOLOTL, REALITY ST BOOK OF SONNETS
Karen Dalton // Bill Dixon // Skip James // Memphis Minnie // Watts Prophets // Peter Kowald // Johnny Cash // Link Wray
toast, tea
ALCOHOL
the realisation that 'duende' is just a posh word for 'boogie-woogie', and further, if you translate the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto as "an imp is haunting europe" etc etc you get a fairly innaresting triangulation
ALBERT AYLER - HOLY GHOST
The London A-Z
William Fuller - Three Replies
NATE MACKEY - SPLAY ANTHEM

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'