Before; then the stone age, then the bronze age, then the iron age, then the ancients, then the greeks, then the romans, then the dark ages, then the middle ages, then the renaissance, then discovery, then machinery, then now.

An insect man sits with his many eyes looking through rituals of decomposition. Through slits of carven writing, through thumb-nubbed tool handles and the faded devices of dynasties.
The insect Man is a factory, a pick-axe handle, a razor of flint, a plank, an ankh, a camera shutter, a tail-fin. Insect man don’t know no love don’t know no hurt; knows blood and guts and fucks though, squeezed into words and sediment, and long rows of figures under headings in a thousand hands.
Insect Man doesn’t know taste. His room is a cave of threads, his bed is of reeds, the uppers of his shoes are london, soled athens, a tongue of rome, it’s straps are flayed donatello and stippled with arcadia.
Then Insect Man is made of emulsion, his carapace is celluloid glazed with moving pictures and a dark cave wall. His mouth is empty, his teeth are stretched out on a rope many nights long.
Insect Man never woke up to it, he has stared for all your lives with his milky insect eyes that don’t know, that don’t know and he is tired, and he was tired, and he tires of tiring when he is born again. Was tired in the first Fire, the first Gun Shot, the first Sling Shot to The Moon and Back, to the first Dull Edge, the first Sharp One too.
An insect man sits with his many eyes, and he cannot see, he hasn‘t got the right, he ain’t got the hang, no manual, no remit, no certificate, no proof of ownership. They’re not his eyes.

Our pigeon visits us daily in our hushed Paradise
He has a tail like a vampires teeth,
A morbid sash of wispy feathers;
Fanned out as he flickers away,
Momentarily distracted from our childsplay.

On returning he whispers something into my ear.
A message from,
A lost love,
Perhaps,
Or a dead relative come to say farewell.
What’s the difference?

Once, as summer showers began to threaten,
He even nibbled your finger.
A token of thanks for the amusement of it all.
He had forgotten,
You see, that
We were of a different kind.

Of his tail my headdress is made.
A blinding shroud, a decorated deafness.
I love him but I did not know.
I asked you to catch him
For me, my love, fluttering in the cage that was your clasped hands.
Your nails on my neck and your breath fanning his frantic feathers across my ear,
Like threads of hair, cobwebs drifting.

On being released
Flustered, he ruffled his quills once or maybe twice
And continued to peck at the shiny thing
That he could not name
But that looked like a cat’s
Yellow
Eye.

We go for each other, the final task
Union always preceding disintegration

Hands slide over hips; and thighs
As I draw you closer, deeper into me
Thick between my toes and heavy against my breasts
I fall wholeheartedly into the feast
Caked in a lifetimes worth of sleek slippery mud, the fusion of our elements,
Twin, bear thy nature, monster from the deep
Penetrating each crevice, bathed in my reciprocation

Soaked and heaving with the effort of disentanglement
I lift my limbs and my crustation of a body from upon yours
Slipping and sliding now, running to the lands of liquid
The tides had anticipated us
Knowing from what deeds we came
it mixed and frothed its depths into a curtain of clouds
A veil awaiting to envelop us and wash one of us away.

I returned to my brothers and sisters
Glistening and snorting they came for me
I clawed and rubbed myself free from your body of dust
Thickly matted hair released itself and reaching out and spreading
Became the silky silver fur of a seal rolling in the spray
I disappeared into my world once more, all tail and flirting whiskers
Eyes of ebony with a melancholy cry I bid her goodbye

She stepped from the waters, shining and pristine
Glad to be rid of me and I of her

All I left was a faint smell of the muddy marshes and salt tides.

I can feel Time flowing by
without touching,
water flowing around a bubble.
The clouds trundle overhead,
their shadows ticking over me.
Even the sunlight seems to be slower.

Bees drone lazily in the young clover,
roaring by my head as they
inspect my ears for nectar.
Grass tickles the nape of my neck,
and something spiky crawls over my hand –
I try not to think what. I try not to think at all.

I surface hearing a steady crescendo
through the earth,
and brace myself
as my dog’s cold triumphant nose hits my face
and the panting culprit collapses, grinning, by my side.

Because the boys are on their bikes,
Because the boys are on their bikes!
The misery invites
And the misery invites
No drastic action!
Acceptance is admiration,
Admire your state!
Futility dances hand in hand
With your wilting lusts,
Your misplaced desires!
The way to go, the way to go
(Like you don’t know, like you don’t know)
Is bite the bullet, rope it, pull it,
Wrap it round your red raw throat,
Tighter tighter, you mustn’t smile!
Else hide your head in a rabbit’s hole.
He shouldn’t mind, by Frith;
Your fondest wish, you’ll get her goat,
And all because the red raw throat
Is tangled in the doorway
With the bloody briars;
For ’tis October,
the autumnal time,
When you must sup on
acorn wine,
And frolic in your fading and
Don’t light fires, listen to
Town criers
At the tolling of the bell
And at the bailing out of Hell,
October, dismal, never spoke
Your name before
So crisp, yourself lightly,
This is the lesser year.
When are we vacuous,
When more expansive
Than when falling,
Dropping metaphors and
listening to each other
without trying?
Ah, trying -
There’s a pancake worthless to toss,
And October leaves no survivors
Who fight her fading light -
Failing light,
The winter coming, endless night
Into your cloth
Seeps seed so deep,
Clawing and crawling into tubes,
Clawing and crawling;
Terrible mirth;
You’re broken since birth,
And all this said,
Don’t ship your misery
Into my waters,
Ship nothing to me but daughters
You’ve collected on the Earth.

Are you not sure now?
Is this your time?
Mocking little creeper bird,
You can’t reap October,
She’s poison;
Yes, poison, maybe, fearfully here,
You’re watching promises of the
Spring grown ripe (unfulfilled)
In the summer,
Slip in sullen frost
From the lunar landscape,
Autumn apples bear news not fruit,
Of cold, of lasting years.
New memories of the past,
It’s time for the big fast,
Bouncing and full skimmed,
A veritable spring, yet brown,
This is the landscape,
The soil-maid,
She pines, she’s poison.

Yes, October, you, and I’m addressing you,
Wing, first wing of the destroyer,
Bidden to wipe the slate,
Lick clean the plate,
And what is poison, then,
But the promise, the threat,
The promise to start again?

Wash and slacken,
Unbuckle those boards,
Of tired country dancing halls,
Ache yourself in,
Peel those shells,
This is memory time,
Break or forget your promises;
Your promises, your misery
Is a conifer
And you don’t tell secrets,
Nothing to October.

(from “Wolfblood”)

The purpose of poetry, like any hunter-gatherer society before it, is
To fund a currency of truth &
Beauty.
In this vein sandwich is a conduit, a prism of
Idealism, one investibule
Lubricant to corsair,
Except inside a manor mia kirshner.
Resonant ants on a buyers road flip,
Just as global relevance during a changing
Primate scenario is a lower back to reach but
Must be done like
Many of the off
Spring of two.
If there are strings attached of coarse
Imaginings,
Not strings but little rings or
Bubbles, but let’s call them strings,
Then flags will flap to unisex;
Else go to stand/buy bigger branes.
What does the author say? What does
The author mean? And is
It true & beautiful?
Gluons are true,
Drugspills in loo queues beautiful,
In purple flesh tenements fazed snarls of a fake leather jacket faint;
Yet experimental verification lies beyond
Sour beans of
Intellectual tears & mythical
liverless comprehension. Poems are to produce
Meaning meaning with a capital ing.
Once we pound two poems
Smack dab in the idyll
Like matthew to
Dark
One query quits:
Does the poem make the most efficient and profitable use of available Resources?
This leaves us with, does this leave us with,
Where to smear the glycerine,
if not inside a manor mia kirshner.

Purple for you, my dear,
The green ones mine,
Our colours for candles
You gave me on Valentines’.

Burnt to their ends they stand,
Either side of my room,
Their fires dead, and ours too.
In your candlesticks they loom.

They say
That for the maximum effect
To avoid direct reference
How Auden in Musee des Beaux Arts
Talks about Icarus
In Brueghel’s painting and
How the rest of the world
Seems
To turn away as he falls to his death and
How the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry
I recall another painting
As beautiful as Brueghel’s Icarus
A corn field
A pale blue sky
And a not so modern abstract
Like the eyes that looked up at Guernica
As the sky fell
Where the dogs go on their doggy life
And the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree
And I heard a splash
As Icarus fell.

(In 1995 7,000 Muslim men were executed at Srebrenica. The UN Dutch force who were supposed to be protecting these men ignored orders and handed them over to the Serbs.)