The Introduction by Christine Murray to 'the king is dead' - Reuben Wooley (Oneiros Books)

songs of the redwet bones / the king is dead by Reuben Woolley

mountain poem

put

that idea here

safe. hold

on to it . your life

de-pends

on the next word

the king is dead is a Promethean gamble that pays off for Reuben Woolley, a book that seems to be absurdly minimalist in its expression manages to body-cage and reduce universal themes to striking symbols that set into balance the agonies of existence along with a patient longing for death. Death is a transformative process that has some inherent physical repellence. Its leavings are everywhere, and can destabilise one for moments, or for eternities,

panacea

death came early this morning

I know . I saw her

she came strafing

quiet houses . slashing

infants with shrapnel

gutting the sick with bayonets . she said

I am only here

invited . I limit damage

remove pain . I am

the final cure

The body lets us down all the time. It is the site of the vagaries of coming age that Yeats may have hinted at, although he hardly put the cartilage and the blood-bag into a poem. He put a tattered coat upon a stick and allowed us to derive what symbolic meaning we could from it.

Woolley alludes to medical processes and to bodily experience and perception at the elemental level of being. Necessity advises the theme and subtext of this book. the king is dead is imbued with physicality,

I collect

the redwet bones

of recent unbuilding.

from prey

Here, an Egyptian longing to fuck everything and transform here and now into a sacred and simple animal that does not have all these complex nerve-endings and crosswires. I think of Hughes’ dung beetle symbol,

Imagine

These bone-crushing mouths the mouths

That labour for the beetle

Who will roll her back into the sun.

From The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother, Ted Hughes (Birthday Letters, 1998)

Transformation from the plane of physicality is explored at an elemental level in the king is dead,

we eat

the hearts

of kings we kill . a

curious transformation . are

alchemical gold

black veils

become us well.

The eponymously titled series at the heart of the book explores the rage of human wastage and the necessity of physical and psychical transformation. There is a psychic economy to how mythos and ceremony are presented by Woolley,

& then

the final procession through all these changes

fast & lethal . a song for dawn

when the singer was elsewhere

wasting his stinking mouth

& from his back

fusing

the ritual firebird

in the sunshine crack

from the king is dead (iii)

Woolley discusses his approach to necessity and economy in the beautiful mountain poem, there is little left for the poet but the words that form images of phantasmagoric death queues and unearthly processions.

These are of little consequence when the stumbling bird, the carcass, the news-media act as revelators of the mystery. One need not look far because your death walks beside you at all times, best become his familiar, after all there is no eluding him/it  in the final moments of a life,

guides

my deaths sleep with me

I shall not forge · I

do not step lightly

through bones · I name

all the faces

they are my necessary

ghosts · they fall

like fruit sweet

plenty · putrid

beds of richness · I am not

guilty · I just

survive · just

breathe and sleep

This is an excellent debut from a writer that I have become familiar with on social media. I have read some of his poetry and collaborative work on different media strands. It's excellent news that Reuben Woolley now has a first collection. Expect more and interesting work from him over the coming years.

A Preview of Reuben Woolley's 'the king is dead' (Oneiros Books)

mountain poem

writing on the edge . an awe

full balancing , each word

tight . no room

for whims . no fears

of falling . finding footholds

hang by fingers . no

crampons , no ropes

alone , you & the wind . put

that idea here

safe . hold

on to it . your life

de-pends

on the next word

unholy silence

living here 
is no pleasure . the death
of things , the stillness
here
they do not cry . they stare
with blooded eyes , unseeing
black hills run down
to blacker water unheard , ears 
pierced . the death 
of dreams

they are dry trees , stand
for no flame . no
red licks of bones

we lock these things away 
they will not return with stories
we cannot but hear . blindfold
they will not see
our secrets , our fumbling
games of wet flesh . hoping
for immortality , for
memory . our overwhelming
use-lessness

shadows

birds fly
heavily
over blooded land . it is
no matter . we
did not name
this place
            still
singing hymns before
the sun . does not
rise . the shadow
makers came
before . stripped flesh
from all the living
stories , sucking 
details from bones . eyes
are choice
for rats & crows
            the nothing
that was done
casts long shade
& fear spreads cells
unseen . we do not
move . we are absorbed
in dark streets . we feed 
the screams of all
the silent children . red
meat hanging to dry . we
lost this game . there is
no replay , no last appeal

orchard

I grow arms
& legs . a face
will appear & I
shall learn speech

if bleeding is needed
I'll open
the veins , bead
this orchard red
it will grow bones

                         this
is my graveyard . 'm
behind these stones
singing
with new lips . I grow
skin for these rites , coming
in profusion , renewing
dead earth

the king is dead (ii)

hero , you have sold your golden armour

for a night’s lodging · priest,

a lady has taken your robe for a pillow                         

the ventriloquist’s dummy

has stolen his words

& all our eyes

have been pierced

by the same silken thread

we will make

the same mistake again , all of us

when the time

comes again

those of you

who chew your food slowly

against the coming of the rats            

consider

the king did not go short of food

madame             

the flowering tree

has been corrupted              

& the other parts of the body

fell off

long ago


'the king is dead' is available from Oneiros Books, here

A Review by David McLean of Abattoir Whispers (Oneiros Books)

Abattoir Whispers

Michael Mc Aloran

Oneiros Books

review by David McLean

This is one of Mc Aloran's best books of prose poetry. The text, as often is the case, providing almost metatextual commentary on the thought, fragmentary since it is operating without the standard illusory surface effects of the allegedly “internal” psychic language that create the aura of normalcy that surrounds the drooling about seagulls trees and suffering that passes for poetry with the beastly poetic das Mann.

Temporality is often responsible for the internal commentary, perhaps Mc Aloran's superego (good luck to him).

I inhale the birthed treachery of the air, I inhaled it, as if coming up for breath from having been drowned, skull-death of obituary, dragging it kicking and screaming from the beginning…no I do not wish to leave, yet I do not want to stay, either, something has shaken the fruits from the razor tree, they sparkle upon rent soil in the moonlight,

Origins are important in poetry, as in philosophy. One wonders what the passing by of the last god, in Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, would look like, would feel like. Would it be the spray of light that hits the broken brain in a nascent psychosis? The steadfast reticence that stays silent be gibbering to itself? The ground upon which one “stands” before leaping into awareness of Seyn “is” the void. And so often in poems the fucking void is the problem.

The void is not a place. It is not a cozy resort for “madmen” to sneak away for a quiet linguistic wank before breakfast. The problem of meaninglessness is not that there happens to be a shortage, a defective supply of meaning. The problem is more fundamental.

I am the aborted sun, I am the disfigured sneer, I am the slash-hook of my emasculation ejaculating the blood of one thousand ruptures, as the winds subside, someone has locked the door to this barren room,as I no longer exist, nor have I ever been, a smear of blackened bruised flesh, draped in the nightscapes of this foreign absence…

To be in the world is to be dispossessed, dislodged and indeterminate. The Greeks looked at the world with wonder, as children might. We look at the world, Heidegger says, with foreboding, we are fucking worried about it, or as Mc Aloran might say

I am nothingness, I ejaculating into the void with streaks of dissipating words, my death, my death my starry death I am alone, no not else, ever else, the violence of existing, the ferocity of birth,a cold stone hearth in which the bones of a child rot unto idiocy, I too am that idiocy, that murder, that abortion, the time taken to un-learn, to forget, dragging as if to speak were enough, as if a whisper could caress, so sayeth the walls, those eternal walls, I collapse I reach I am blind, paralysed, paralysed by dread, beginning now and forgetting for all time, somehow the speech never catches up, as if I ever listened, the maggot of time selects, easing throughout the flesh to subjugate muscle, dragging a million possibilities along with it -as if it mattered

because there are more important things to think about than beginnings and ending, there is the sullen glory of all the empty:

I devour my own shadow, I scrape at this flesh that I cannot bury, I observe my scars in wonder, I cannot then see, I suffocate on the bile of my dying, something grips me, viciously and I expire, void of my ineptitude, I am this flesh, this meat, this absolution, this waste…I smile…

The question asked here is not the leading question of western thought, but the basic question, what is being, here reformulated as it must be, “What is this shit?”. Not, “What are all these horrors?”, but, “What is this disgusting?”.

I lock the door to my own self, swallow the razor key, inhalations of razor blades and the stretch of the sunlight upon spent bones, laughter is death, my shit is death, my cum is death, I laugh at death, my absence, fruitless either way, I have ceased in my dreaming, my longing, I am dead for all time, either way…

This book might in fact document the process whereby one becomes divine, and becomes the sterile progress of the last god as he passes.Anyway, you should get the book which is on sale here:

 http://www.paraphiliamagazine.com/oneirosbooks/abattoir-whispers/

The Introduction by Aad de Gids to The Zero Eye (Oneiros Books)

2POETRYMICHAELMCALORAN

"The Zero Eye"

with poetry and poets, with art, it seems a veritable probability that in the "produce" of this art there are personal developments going on which affect this art and making it a "developmental" "work in progress" even if the art executed, in this instance fullblooded poetry, is expressed in a continuous stream of perfectly formed and inherently consistent isles of artistry, expression, expulsion even exorcism orexoticism. this is in my opinion highly the case with michael mcaloran's poetry and the steady produce of high quality immanently consistent collections of poems resulting also subsequently in this striking chromatography of books.

the books share one feature described in many styles,which alone already make michael mc aloran's poetry a force to reckon with not only within the cusp of irish poetry but perhaps even more so,within the modern poetry as how it is entamized now, how it is organized around its topics now. so one thing in particular stands out: these are not the books of "vanillapoetry" and heidi on the mountain with her fucking granddad. this is endtime-poetry, perhaps in a tradition of malcolm lowry, beckett, céline but set in the time now making his poetry the answer to those eschatologist writers and ending-searching at the desolatest fields, nonfields, destitute endworlds andinnersarcophagous' milieus, interstitial, physical and highly visceral"nonplaces" postmortem or roaming around and across these places of contemporary history of death or even actual stretches of societal death hidden either or ignored, nevertheless unoverseeable fields of dereliction, disdirection, despair and an empty searching to what is known to be nonexistent. (as persistent and where this doesn't matter anymore in absinthe hazes.)

the paradox now is that there always has been developmental aspects also in michaels work. yet within an "endpoetry" at some moment it is really "the end of the line" which seems to be exhumed. i believe this is the case with "The Zero Eye", michael’s latest, last, offering of intensely stylized poems. it is the culmination of the necropolises of our endworld, but not, as some perhaps safetywise would like to believe, a world to which we are still heading. no it is the world here and now and formulated with such acuitry, that it is unsettling and disturbing but also bizarrely veritable and an astute societal portrayal of the posthuman world into which our world NOW has grown.

what i want to do now still, kind of concluding, is to insert two pieces of text out of "The Zero Eye"and then come with a kind of stupefying conclusion of which i thought i would never have the fucking analysant brains for it to reach such lucid clustering contrivance: compression.

"the zero eye will ever be/ shape without form/ density of rind branded by sting of inescapable/ rots through unto/ until/ yet given to silence/ scatters breath of nocturne/ clasp of weight/ says nothing more of I/ clean break/ subtlety of design/ crafted in absence of voice/ here or there a nothing of/ claimed yet ever-fading/ yet silenced ever/ still yet/ breakage upon rock of night’s forever distance"

"in shed of flame that was never light/ better yes never of it/ bite down upon edge-solace of/ trade anguish for oblivion/ yet naught as ever/final as/ less or more/ ever was/ remnants of then or nothing left to/ no/ no breaking forth/ no never again/ let it/ decline of/ yes death of/ yet will not/ clings unto/ as if to say/ the zero eye/un-scattered none/ falls unto or not/ utters without pause for/"

here we have the writing on the edge, a topic of the specific poetic genre michael excells in yet not as "a trick" or "device" or profitist mock or vaudeville stance. it is clear this poetry really costs blood, sweat and tears and more modern perhaps alcohol, cocaine and cigarettes or otherwise psychotrope substances even if it is abstinence bc there is a kind of feverish absolvence at stake, at the stake.

then we reach the apex really and it is as well the description of infinity or and the aggregate of finality as a machine whirring at the surf but also in our fucking cities and the rests of our woods, here is an antiheidicodex as what adorno would call: "index falsii",or: the whole is unreal, as in a philosophical treatise on the world, as he also cited somene, in "minima moralia": "life doesn't live", here we have reached the endworld, ok possibly (alone much much further) beckett’s "endgame". our posthuman society as we see buster keaton hustle around in a prepostcataclysmic world in beckett’s film "film" where all is debris, hubris, rest of nazist capitalist communist autark islamist zelous clinical murderous afterclang of our sociuses: it is happened. this is what we wanted.

"(…text no/ this is not a/ this is not/ not this/ is/ a text not/ not this a/this/ this is not text/ not a text/ text not this is not/ a/ this/not a/ text no this is a/ not a text this/ this is not a/ this not a text is/ this not a/ not a this a text is not/ not/ not this/ a text/not a/ text not this is a/ this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text this is not a text/ text no this is not a/ text no/ a text not this/ not a/ text not this is not a…ad infinitum)."

then to recapture a question somewhere in the beginning of this microdissertation:

"how is this poetry going to develop?". what L'Wren Scott did today, hanging herself in her million bucks NY home, friend of mick jagger, fashion designer, apparently with millions in debt. she hung on a silken shawl on the doorknob. she phoned her assistant around ten: "can you come?". and this assistant found her...after such radical theory poetry no, rather a poetry of abnegation more than absolvence.

michael and i had a conversation just now where he said:

"we need something, yes..."

--Aad de Gids