Boxer by Paul Farley

Her face so grave and serious -
not the nettle-lick of the bulldog
or the irony of the pug
as if she'd been bred to remind us

of the tenderness behind each tough
guy stance. I heard one brindled pup
spent a decade lashed to a nylon rope
in a garden next to an engine block,
another went down with kennel cough
and a third was kicked from a 79 bus

but ours stayed loved, and stoical.
After she died, the hole I dug
was so small, I had to break her leg
with the spade. She's giving me that look.

From: The Dark Film

Sub. Lim. Phil.

MAYBE YOU

are all alone
and cannot love
another for for another

to exist would implicate a duality
as surely as
when the detective

in a murder mystery
points the finger
and everyone is shocked

by old Mrs Haversham's behaviour.
But just because
we are all one

does not mean
you do not need
to try to

LOVE ME.

Home Cooking by Ruth Padel

You spread our Free Range Duck
Breasts with your trade-mark mix

Of honey, soya, Chinese Five Spice
While I etch
A fingernail down your spine

Ending in a fuck
The length of our kitchen table

Making the bread-board rise
To its feet, the dog beneath us whine,
And Sainsbury's poultry burn.

from Voodoo Shop

Le Poète

after Rodin

how is it girls

can conjure up

a baby

using just a spoon

of sperm?

that shit sure smells

like alchemy 

to me.

still, i've not had 

a warm bath 

or wank

for over a month now

and my nuts feel 

like a fun-swim

at my local

swimming pool

so perhaps 

some of the magic

is in 

me.

Breeding ground, Chicago by Imtiaz Dharker

    
     CHRISTINE:

I always knew I was carrying around
a breeding ground
for the devil.

I mastered the art of nodding, smirking,
doing my hair just so
and wearing pink

to mask the stink of evil
lurking right inside my pride.

I could take the cleverest devil
for a ride.

A good thief cuts the glass
quite cleanly, without a noise
and enters.

There's hardly any sign
that things have been disturbed.

That's how the devil got in,
slipped into my skin,
rearranged my thoughts
like old clothes at the change
of the season.

Slice off my fingertips.
I mustn't leave our prints.

I'm burgling myself, and I'm so good
I won't be caught.

There's nothing here I'm afraid to lose.
Room after room of dusty corners
and mouldy shoes.

But what the hell -
Where are all the precious things,
the gold I thought I had,
the soul begging to be sold?

From I speak for the Devil.

Sleeping Dog by August Kleinzahler

The terrier will not relinquish
his hold on it,
frozen in attack he clenches stillness
and would shake it like a rat
but for its vastness.

                           Bad William trembles,
electrons crakling in his wisp
of beard, warrior-sage,
while all of heaven's soldiers
swoop down in staggered assault:
Canis, Ursus, Aries,
first one then the next.

Willie, jump.
No, there, there, Willie, in the rushes.
A terrible exchange.
Stout Wille. Willie the Brave.
Your back, Willie
Willie, five o'clock high.

Behold, your fearsome arsenal,
its plenitude of feints,
its murderous sorties.
Fair William,
Willie the True,
now is your moment arived:

Sweetie boy
you lovely little killer toy
Willie, hold on.

From: Strange Hours Travelers Keep.

First Things to Hand by Robert Pinsky

In the skull kept on the desk.
In the spider-pod in the dust.

Or nowhere. In milkmaids, in loaves,
Or nowhere. And if Socrates leaves

His house in the morning,
When he returns in the evening

He will find Socrates waiting
On the doorstep. Buddha the stick

You use to clear the path,
And Buddha the dog-doo you flick

Away with it, nowhere or in each
Several thing you touch:

The dollar bill, the button
That works the television.

Even in the joke, the three
Words American men say

After making love. Where's
The remote? In the tears

In things, proximate, intimate.
In the wired stem with root

And leaf nowhere of this lamp:
Brass base, aura of illumination,

Enlightenment, shade of grief.
Odor of the lamp, brazen.

The mind waiting in the mind
As in the first thing to hand.


From First Things to Hand

Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

The Plain Truth of the Matter by Sean O'Brien

There are two tribes this world can boast -
The Marmite-lovers and the damned.
Fact is, though, everybody's toast,
Whatever breakfast they've got planned.

It's not for us to turn away
The sort who shun the dark-brown jar,
But sure as sure come Judgement Day
The Lord will know who His folk are.

from November

View from the Old CLR James Library Window

‘OVERCOMERS CHURCH’

says the sign.

Coming over what?
You wonder, tongue bulging

against the pant of your mouth.

For you are without doubt.

Absolutely certain

that the worshippers within

would not find your flippancy

the least bit funny.

My life has been the poem I would have writ by Henry David Thoreau

My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it.

An Interview with Slavoj Žižek.

Slavoj Žižek is best known as the recession celebrity who fucks frustrated idiots like a grizzly bear and, true to form, within moments of our first meeting he invites me to join him in a postmodern, permissive, pragmatic form of consensual anal rape, before mentioning, discreetly, that he was “never able to finish into the woman’s mouth.” 

Not even when staying at the Burj Al Arab hotel? I enquire. 

“No,” he tells me, “women are always angry with me for not proposing complete solutions for controlling global capitalism on an immense international level.”

We arrive at his apartment in Ljubljana where he spends most of his time double checking the counter cultural establishment for little slivers of plastic macdonalds cups. Innumerable languages fill one room alone yet his kitchen cabinets contain only clothing.

“Contradiction is encoded into almost everything like mother nature eating an organic apple.”

he tells me.

We talk about his latest book The Perverts Guide to Living in the End Times in which he gives a graphic, blow by blow account of his affair with the Slovenian philosopher Jacques Lacan. I ask if, perhaps, his obsession with the tacky ostentation of swimming pools atop singaporean 50-storey hotels had led to a ridiculously intimate perspective of eternity.

“Fuck you!” he replies “None of us is gay, just good friends.”

Oh No, Not My Baby by John Burnside

But who is this other, waiting in the dark,
the one she listens for?
No ordinary man, but Brother Bones
calling to her in whispers from a place
she's known since girlhood: miles of perfect snow
to cancel out the fever of a body.
What treasured story makes her love the cold?
Some hallowed father, hunting in the blood?
Old wives-and-mothers, stiched along the marrow?

Everyone wants to tempt Providence, but she was lost
before we knew that lost was possible
and something in the woods, unkempt
and knowing, not
one body, but an undivided host
of looks and cries was waiting for its time
to drag her down, in some exquisite fall
to icebound realms
of hyacinth and vellum.

Sliding away in dreams she had rehearsed
for years, that tomboy sweetness in her face
of one struck dumn with awe, she shed her veils
in endless rounds of theme and variation,
but everything she touched returned to dust
and scattered to the wind as, at the end,
she scattered from my hands, no longer hurt
so beautifully, she seemed more song than woman.

[from: Black Cat Bone]

Shirt by Robert Pinsky

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,

The nearly invisible stitches along the collar

Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break

Or talking money or politics while one fitted

This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,

The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,

The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.

One hundred and forty-six died in the flames

On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street

Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step

Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.

And then another. As if he were helping them up

To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms   

Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held

Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared

And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,

Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”

Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly

Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme

Or a major chord.   Prints, plaids, checks,

Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,

To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed

By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers

To wear among the dusty clattering looms.

Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter

Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton

As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black

Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma

And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied

Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality

Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters

Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,

The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

Forest Forment

Birds murderously

scrap it out for shade that there 

just ain't enough of.

The Room by Stephen Dunn

The room has no choice.
Everything that’s spoken in it
it absorbs. And it must put up with

the bad flirt, the overly perfumed,
the many murderers of mood—
with whoever chooses to walk in.

If there’s a crowd, one person
is certain to be concealing a sadness,
another will have abandoned a dream,

at least one will be a special agent
for his own cause. And always
there’s a functionary,

somberly listing what he does.
The room plays no favorites.
Like its windows, it does nothing

but accommodate shades
of light and dark. After everyone leaves
(its entrance, of course, is an exit),

the room will need to be imagined
by someone, perhaps some me
walking away now, who comes alive

when most removed. He’ll know
from experience how deceptive
silence can be. This is when the walls

start to breathe as if reclaiming the air,
when the withheld spills forth,
when even the chairs start to talk.

Illiterate in the Library

The top of the forest
stands tall and upright
above your head so
when you enter the light
is blocked by canopoly.

Way up there, each tree
has its own leaf, distinguishable
from the others like fingerprints.
If you knew how to look
you could tell them apart.

Held up by unmade paper
smeared by many
a miniture message
unseeable by you or anyone
bigger than a beetle.

Down at ground level,
tracks and signs of creatures
all around can be read,
yet to you mean nothing but
meaningless marks in the wild.

This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Nomads in City Road by Yiska Fonseca

Curtains strewn up like a bad theatre play, rooms divided and subdivided. 
The fabrics seem to breath in the wind - the howling cold wind, sent to fret.

Drapes hang in a gesture of privacy, walls being built, yet they don't even block out the cold/keep in the heat. 
They hang in an attempt to partition space, like Japanese paper walls. 
Their illusion becoming as transparent as the walls in my mind, as they blow in the wind, I can feel my thoughts tumble past. 
How easy it is now to see Me, standing bare and strong, in amongst the hanging fabric of my reality.

Concientious Objector by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.