A Reading of 'Of The Nothing Of' by Dom Gabrielli

In Favour Of the Nothing Of

I am lucky enough to have followed Michael Mc Aloran's increasingly impressive deliria in both paint and word for some time now. I feel lucky to have sampled one of the sweeter oblivions to be found, here below, in this rather unsavoury neck of the depleted forest that is 21st century poetic production.

This remarkable book, Of the Nothing Of, should startle its readers with its vicious humour and astonishing imagery. Mc Aloran is a master of the subtle, of the minute, of the tender, and then very able to destroy all such niceties with brutal verbal butchery. Yet his images are never obvious nor cliché (unless deliberately to prove a point). This language lives in the muck of the denied, in the graveyard of the repressed. The Beckettian non-narrative is just a start, in fact the meat here is so insubordinate as to remind the reader of another Irish genius, Francis Bacon. Here indeed, Mc Aloran's words cannot be more horrific than life itself. Here we are. In the eternal, modern dilemma to tell it as it is, to rip into and burn illusions and falsities, niceties and conventions. None least of which than existence, ontology itself, stripped, dilapidated and executed with wit. This is a book about difference in itself, the multiplied subject, the zonar and polar consciousnesses which roam, which know too much but can reconcile little. Nothing lurks in the absence of the capability to genuflect to any God or any avatars of such. Of the nothing of. Stutter but do not fall. Fight but do not maul.

The first section of the book is a tour de force. Brutal, dark, pronoun-less narrative, without characters, without subjectivity, without plot. Relentless descriptions of the myriad facets of Nothing and the way the glorious body lives its daily murders: severed organs, razor hands, cum oozing and piss frenzy, open graves, scuttling dead teeth. All will have their moments, parading as mock subjects, their minute ascents, into the slanting ray of glory, raucous night grants the dead in their nothing. Intricate frames where part-sentences, 'apres l'apocalypse' images, partial rhymes and songs, bit-conversations, mingle in a polyphonic surge of voices-images. One of the great claims here is to have invented a style which can absorb all others, whilst surrendering, necessarily, only, to the nothing of, from which it is impossible to rise or escape, without insistent gaseous effort.

"all the while the whispering voices, the murmuring shadows, in a cloud-burst of deathly smoke, haven to fall drenched to the bone with nectar bloodlessness, all having said, and with what absence of sound, click-clack and the spine warping, spit it out the scum of nothingness, genuflect, genuflect unto the memory of the dead god, in the laughter-spill of the orificial night"

Here, language itself speaks the revenge of the innocent, of all the forgotten. Echoes. Where is the author? Where is the hand of the surgeon-poet who is both corpse and medic at his own post-mortem?

Luckily a narrator of sorts will wake in the subsequent sections to 'genuflect to nothing in a vacancy of shit,' to 'inhale the final bones of purpose,' to 'fade as of birth birthed into this death-dreaming.' These, and many more, marvellous lyrical interventions, testify to quite how much insidious humour there is hidden in the bed of Mc Aloran's work:

"I place the blade upon the tongue of my night…

…I am the refuse, of the earth’s quarry…"

To such sentences, there is little to do but admire, keep reading and wait for the next:

"…drag of the old bones, the dead airs, the silent never to become, all ashen and ever bled, till circus, cast aside, the heavenly of, the scarring of…

…i breathe the sudden of…spill of dreaming in a kaleidoscope of shattered colours, igniting the sky…"

And the next:

"the hours pass through me, they claim nothing but the meat of it, the flesh… the endless night is my altar, none else but to expire of breath denounced or spent/ absurd as the wind’s claim, forever, of the else or none…

…the words they fade away, death’s tomes, rustle in the breeze, scattering tumbleweed throughout abandoned graveyards…"

Now it is your turn.
 

Dom Gabrielli, 15 jan 2013

--

(Some samples from the second section- 'of the none exposed')


…A bell jar of collapsed echoes, and the dead entrails of foreign speech no longer the settled, no longer there or else/ (sudden, sudden…sudden gleam of tears…)

…Here rolls the dead eye and the forever getting it over with, (-begin again…)

…All sprung from the withheld…   

(I see the eye yet I cannot see…)

…I laugh yet I am dead…I steal the laughter, from out of the senselessness of death….      

…In my gravestone vanity, I eclipse…I eclipse of the ever having uttered…from smoke till sounding…echoing trails of nothing…nowhere…traces/ ashen…

(The endless night, is melding colours into nothing…)…

…A brick wall, dense with ivy…scattered bones litter the fresh cut grass, with their bound secrets…(all…not a word…beyond sound….)

…Ah, I remember the…I remember the dreaming of…taste upon havoc and the blank teeth chattering…silent…chattering in the murk…

(Cataract of the exposed heart…)

…Torn bleak and wildly in the flaming haze of anguish, to lick the cool stones scattered in the fleshy earth…Soil of despair drenched with final vacancy…

…Till spun hard and closed redressing the scuttle of the limbs, tracing out the burnish upon scattered shadows flittering in the half-light, knowing of the less or of the more, absolved, the gouge in the gait silenced, knowing of the less and less, unto sparkle, unto ever but naught…

…There’ll yet be a heart, it is said, all spoken for, all said I no longer dream I dream of that which……cancels…I ingest my own negation, I scar I cannot scar as if to breathe were something venerable…it comes and goes…as consistently as the flesh’s frailty…

(Knock again…)

…Exodus of…Of the speech redeemed…Drag up thy cross, and walk….


---


...Of a word, (--no nothing--), of which has come before, nor begun, until the last drift, spun silken of sinew clear…

…Spun silken begun of the first sinew till the last echoing breath…dead all but one, having eroded, scattered clear, dread along step where no reaching purpose snares, so echoing, dead, of the first reaching, spun/ begun…

…Tread without mirroring…sky of insectal swarming…the moon pierces the bloodshot eye…embers of laughter…all said yet still the thrash of the blade…   

…The hands tremble…

                              …Night resounds, through spectral tide…


---


…Liquid dreams, carouse the ever having been, yet stillness there, blank, motionless as a cadaver, subtle as carrion flowerings…

…Oblivion sweet oblivion, a violent kiss to staunch the coagulated night, till fallen asunder/

                            stray/

                                        at the hilt of death…

…Embraced/ benign/ flux of the escaping breath, sudden unto downfall, scratching away the skin…

(…In silence’s   

                                     twilight landscape…)
         
…Mocked by the astray of words still desolate, where the lungs vibrate of the spun sharp sickened of, fragmented of…

…All along, it has often been said, elixir of fallen speech claiming the shadows, yet still in tide of spoken, locked to the bone, there’ll yet be another, shock of the dead rat pelt, of abortive scar…

…Bone or lung, and the in-drowning of it…I see/ I see the nothing left of it, where spoken of scatters the strips of flesh/ sinew/ the shudder of vagrant reek, into the emptiness…

…I collide…The walls do not shift I collide, sickened by vacant hope…

…In my dreaming I die, I die absolute, where the feathered mask of decay shifts from one mirror unto another…

                 (Collapse/ dredge/ obsolete/ benign…)

…All but for the…Never knowing of it, wordless/ traceless/ spat out…

…Subtle as winds cracking the whip of it, in dry weather…

…Arc of a dead grace…

…Liquid          as the sky’s indifference…


---
                                                                          

…Cemetery breath…

                         …lashed to the…

…Bone break and the nocturne of it, till amend of sudden shrill shriek of pitch…Bone light in the palm of hand dragged from the vault of night’s endless shadows…Wind clad in some vacated room but one in the depths of pitch…

…Laughter and then…

…Spill lest there echo the in-dreaming of foreign absolute…

…Headless till vast…(succumb)…breath without air…

…Cemetery heart…
 

…of the etched sands of whispers, drenched in foreign, ever where the ocean of the skull unfolds…

…Crystalline tears of…

…Words erased…

…Sound without meaning…ever to clutch the fragrant none of speeches, vagaries…Known without/ ever none/ no not known/ breathing of the lack/ begin again/ end once more…

…My absence beneath the brailed sky…

…Severed of the all and in between, ruptured once, ruptured once more…

…Attrition/ exile…

                    …I genuflect to nothing, in a vacancy of shit…

--

'Of the Nothing Of' is available from Oneiros Books here

Dom Gabrielli

'The Parallel Body' by Dom Gabrielli is available to purchase here

Dom Gabrielli

LondonAches

(a love and hate poem)

the body stands as the rampart

it is evening and grey

i rise from slumber

i glance across the murky Thames

the bridges churn with the muck

of invoiced dreams

crossing into slums of unconsciousness

i would be that body if i knew

but i abandoned knowledge

for the clarity of seeing

hence my eyes close

and i breathe away the nonsense

and the arguments

i look to hold your breasts

as the poet once dreamed his muse

i am the first to bring these words

into the bloodstream

into the spunkstream of real love

what killed the poet

brought him back again

in the cave and the cauldron

in the simmering desert mirage

came the voice

i ignored them by writing

one by one

they found their way into the fire

of oblivion

chests of raging words

you were not yet born

i could see you

i could see your father's eyes

the generosity of a moon

to lend you the light

to laugh away the idiocy

your body

my body

the sewers of this world

the shit in posh cars

dismissing the journey

watching the screens

of their incapacities

floating in and out

of programmed orbits

the lines cross

this nocturnal raga

the crash victims in their defiled path

the river poisoned to the cold sea

the dead fish and the laden algae

these lines

writing the material possibility

of challenging the texts

of preposterous goons

with proven spells

your body born into mine

as light into light

as echo into echo

close your eyes

there is too much to see

lay it on a disused canvas

until the welcome of forgetting

graces your orgasms

with the lash of living

the buildings in gridlock

the televisions in overload

the Islamist hysterics belting

and belching grenades

from their fingers

the storms coming and going

neither heard nor felt

in the unsent beginning

nothing ever happened

libraries have always burnt

and the writers in them

have always escaped

the statues and statutes

which hope to teach the world

not to follow them whilst

revering their very bones

in crematoriums of conference

my body your body

the light your light

there is no more day

just shades of grey

lodged in the bottom drawer

of a vagabond existence

i need to get out

as Celine blew a hole

in his own mind

i need to hear the music

of the winds in the olive summits

i need the silver under my tongue

your whispers

your Indian whispers

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh, Paris and New York Universities. He has translated widely including published works by Bataille,  Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. Gabrielli has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which he recently translated into French (Les Corps Paralleles, 2012). Gabrielli travels extensively from his home in Salento, Italy, where he produces extra virgin olive oil.

Dom Gabrielli-

morning nostalgias

unclutter this mind, pray undo it altogether. break down the walls of this person impudent enough to still hold a name which desires, which begets, which conquers , which imposters with all the signifying magnets, which invades all the particles of fire which burn, which burn my brother, which burn within, which burn without

where are your fingers, your cigarettes, your baby lips, your smiles, where are the storms which never quite carry, which never deliver, if only the dusts of deserts, the powders of my poems

only half of me is left and that half is dead, in permanent resusitation, aching hands and burning sands. what then is this middle, this inner-outer space, where the molten key, what then are you who slide between time spheres without pain

i know the way to blue. i have wandered the same breezes, the same smokes, late in the midnight diminishing, when the poems awake, the fellow pens, the distant brothers and sisters who tell us what they find

it is not so much an uncluttering. that is just the prelude. to let your voices speak. to see the memories of this windswept mind. to see you again. smiling in your wheelchair. holding my hand, shaking shaking in late spring hallway by the laurel bough and terracottas of fragrant basils

smooth is time perhaps. but only flattened, conquered, dispatched to another dimension. there is no ego without time. you can only become other in the releasing, in the becoming photograph of your person. let me be, let me go. come to me sweet memory of you, dead you, tomorrow

liberated i speak to you, a miniscule freedom, won, in battles with the demons of searchlights and goons unaware of the straighjackets they wear as uniform. i can fail tomorrow in the selfsame way. but is there a tomorrow anymore

where are you silver leaves and open boughs, where are you dead grasses and copulating lizards, black snakes and cistern geckoes, where are you turquoise tramontana blues and heavy sirocco grey-whites, where are you hands full of weeds, black nails and garlic fingers, where are you heart of goodness, song of nothing, wind of blue, wind of you, where did you go, where does this end, where are the coils of smoke which circle the sunflowers of reason, where are the open minds of rampant peapods, where is the scathing cactus irony of summer, where are you my nudity, my pain

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh, Paris and New York Universities. He has translated widely including published works by Bataille,  Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. Gabrielli has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which he recently translated into French (Les Corps Paralleles, 2012). Gabrielli travels extensively from his home in Salento, Italy, where he produces extra virgin olive oil.

Dom Gabrielli-

A Poem for a Painter

the blue of the sea

the silver of the olive

the dead white straw of Helios

where your daughter kisses

the absences of jailed night

the white day turns you black

the elite come to inspect your works

they part the pubes of your pride

to insert the probe of their prudery

sometimes they buy

they make out big cheques

zeroes for colours

you wear a black beret

you write long poems in the sun

and recite them to passing trains

film directors from Roma

make films

they win prizes with your character

you have nothing you want nothing

just cigarettes and coffee

the kisses of your daughter

you build the walls of an imaginary asylum

to be alone finally

with the olive trees and the poppies

the choruses of your colours

are the only light left to us

(for Pucceto)

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh, Paris and New York Universities. He has translated widely including published works by Bataille,  Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. Gabrielli has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which he recently translated into French (Les Corps Paralleles, 2012). Gabrielli travels extensively from his home in Salento, Italy, where he produces extra virgin olive oil.

Dom Gabrielli-

Pasolini Rex

there is no wine left

there are no laughs

as the storm descends

with cold under its torrential arm

there is no idiom left

to dispel this hell

there are no films to eject

the instant into rhetoric

there is no being no meaning

no oscillation of heart and pen

there is no desert

dead the sand

there is no sea

blank the tides

there are no hearts

blood clotted the image

the genocide porn of the mind

the mutilation of desire

youth abandoned to the bare bone

from the Roman hill where you were murdered

gathered one last time to the halt of living

to the knife edge

what cuts is no longer

the hesitant kiss

does not attract its believer

the incomplete poem

has lost its ink

it dries in a vain desert for recycled criminals

who laugh as they decapitate intellectuals

where the mafia do what they can to complete the opera

with all their complacent apologists

all their faussaire filmmakers

they found an empty road

they turned off the cameras

drove their money into elegant malls and banks

whoever they saw soon blind

listeners losing ears to fictional gunshot

drowned in millions of joyful pills

dawn has not

since you died

love has rarely

since your assassination

retreat again

into the simple hole of scream

i did not cry i could not

because your words were by my side

i put them into fists

i saw the menagerie they called politics

i wrote from nowhere

for no reason

i wrote a poem

into your poem

i wrote a poem to hear you

sing a poem

to my poem

poems once you sang

i never heard twice

but i should have

the desert had grown

the mafia slang creeping across ivy coloured borders

dialects many dying in the candlelight eve

no one to stoop down and write their resurrection

there will be no tomorrow

no more light

just the willing to raise a body

from a premature grave

to hold a penis as day becomes night

to write what is left of words

across a scroll of broken dreams

you can laugh at anything

you can destroy everything sacred

you can ignore every book written or sung

to the point of losing even the prick

of your heartbeat

down a stray strolling drunk alley

into a fight to the death

with black gloves and white teeth

which emissary likened you to a god

which million of drunken dollars killed a prophet

sing to me now

i have listened

longer than most

long enough

to play this dead Italian music

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh and New York Universities and prepared for his doctorate in Paris and New York. Gabrielli’s passion for French literature and thought led him to begin writing, translating, and teaching. He translated widely including published works by Bataille,  Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. He has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which earned considerable praise. Several new books are on their way. Gabrielli has also published several individual poems and interviews, notably at Leaf Garden Press, The Poetry Bay, Vox Poetica and Real Stories Gallery. Gabrielli's books are here:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/search?searchTerm=dom+gabrielli&search=search. His own whereabouts on an axis between language and nowhere.

Dom Gabrielli-

After Pasolini's Medea

  

there would have been delight once

in the scattered body of the victim

whose blood was smeared upon the grain and the pod

on the black and brown surfaces of the earth

his handsome face and hand his testicles

carried in a frenzy to unknown summit

so he was just a smile

at the executioner

his destiny a broken neck in spring

as the crowds gathered to scatter his axed members

the camera's deliberate shaking

like the smile a man sends to another

in the hiatus between jagged stills

the beauty of any wholeness is just colour

is just a body just a face a pair of eyes or legs

deep valleys and mediterranean rocks

burning in the power of almighty indifference

what then is a world without gods

what then is a world without sacrifice

the god that hid in an enigma

the god of a premonition the god of a smile

which ushered you to make love

as life depended upon it

to assassinate your rival

in the same wild act of love

gods were never benevolent entities

you could never talk to them

they admonished as they killed

they ordered the scatterings of innocent men's blood

they raped and pillaged for jealousy

they were the intolerable and the unjust

the hero is not himself

he is just the feelings he has

spontaneously between one sentence and another

between the orders of a fool

and the hideous spittle of a monster

just a conduit

between one god's game and another's fury

the dialectic of his insignificance

playing in fields of the unknown

the movement between one god's penetrating finger

and the amussis of judgement

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh and New York Universities and prepared for his doctorate in Paris and New York. Gabrielli’s passion for French literature and thought led him to begin writing, translating, and teaching. He translated widely including published works by Bataille,  Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. He has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which earned considerable praise. Several new books are on their way. Gabrielli has also published several individual poems and interviews, notably at Leaf Garden Press, The Poetry Bay, Vox Poetica and Real Stories Gallery. Gabrielli's books are here:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/search?searchTerm=dom+gabrielli&search=search. His own whereabouts on an axis between language and nowhere.

‘Liquid Metropolis’, by Petra Whiteley: A Review By Dom Gabrielli

Petra Whiteley's defiant latest tome, The Liquid Metropolis, published by Erbacce Press, sets about a ferocious dismantling of the persistently flourishing Social-Christian tenets. Frame by frame, poem by poem, stone by stone, look by look, in a challenging long-metrage between diary and diatribe, poetic epiphany and novelistic dystopia, Whiteley walks the amazed reader through the post-apocalypse metropolis of misguided affects. The gaze of leering masculine eagles, the seething anaesthetic of cowardly hatred, did not waylay her from her task. No stone is left un-turned. This is a work of unabashed pride. To walk with these words is to understand the meaning of standing out in the rain, resolutely outside, where the rains do not feel the same, where something ripped from ugly becomes beautiful. From within the tree, poetry never abandons the reader throughout a thrilling conversation with the myths of cherished lies. Poetry emerges victorious as mind and body, as the seconds which exceed Time, as the bare statement which kicks and shouts as it is, in silence, as the nothing that lived and breathed, even these words, even the sun, even its fire, even the unattainable, which crawls 'as a syllable on a promised tongue/ forever no/thing.'

 I imagine this enterprise was not without risks and that therefore first it is our role as readers to salute the bravery of this author, who has paid no heed to fashion nor to commodity, but to has listened to her deepest sentiment and revealed with such harsh and beautiful invective, the bare bones of the post-capitalist predicament. 'The clock hands/ of my practical suicide turn/the light backwards, no outer/limits…'  Since Artaud, the necessity to un-live and un-think the colonial powers of Christian absurdities has been paramount. Here the manual to exist outside continues, in the rain and without lying. '(God's) endless fingers of words claw suicide/into the everyday smell of my flesh and its throbbing/is the only life left.'  Or better still:

 'I was there, playing dead for them, the oak of silence growing

into my lungs. Was noise a bruise that spread whitely into me?

Yes. In that poisoned room within the tree, I left traces of death,

 
lived backwards, the slow drip of birthday butchery.

 
So long to language and its pain!

 
Breathe to break the hush of words into music,

unconstrained and unshattering.'.

 Hope is for the misguided but love entertains the brave, a love you build between the slow suicides of souls whose de-mystified sexualities can start to sing a song of muscle and beauteous, poetic bone. Disillusions many ripped from the misfortunes of previous identities can be stripped in a kind of ritual post-mortem of manners and realities. Can one say, following such adventurers in the domains of the Spirit such as Artaud that another body is possible:

 'I wanted you to watch

Me die, to watch the trees growing from my hands

Into the stark digits of night and be the monument

Of my liquid sex. To

Witness the opiate orgasms

In my resurrection.'

 What for convenience sake we still call man or woman suffers here a keen and rigorous un-thinking. 'I am the void, the pain and the whiskey lie, a sucked bone, a flute,/and as I,/you will/(desc)end softly as a barren rattle sound.' The Liquid Metropolis is a book-machine in the great tradition of radical thinking, a book for new lover-thinkers, into the hope-less beyond of the naked end of the world. For those who, dare I say, have never bent their knees to kneel nor sheltered their eyes from the glaring truth of society's founding lies. This is a resistance song, a remarkable bottle hurled into the ocean of nought. To collect its messages is to accept that a book requires the reader to work, to pause for moments to collect one's whole intellectual history, to agree to be challenged, to be hurt, to be attacked by the anger of the author, to travel with her to the trees and the colours which sing on the other side: 'our laughter will echo like hard rain when we finally slip away.'

 We have become accustomed to Whiteley's unstinting intellectual rigour, to the beauty of many of her poems, but never has her true instinct been able to express itself with such uncompromising clarity and fire. The Liquid Metropolis is what the burning libraries of 2012 will need, an at times brutal poetic pamphlet whose language prepares the audacious for the trees which will grow from their hands, for a new laughter for the living who do not wish to postpone their desires and abdicate their enjoyments. 'I dream of Thames at midnight, where at least a rabbit can choose/ the softness of one's own never ever after and push hard towards/the dawn in the city.

 'Liquid Metropolis', by Petra Whiteley, should be purchased from Erbacce Press, here
'

A Review by Dom Gabrielli of 'The Hell In Me, The Hell In You', by Craig Podmore

‘In a place where material progress, where the conquests of a superficial perfection in which we cannot participate either emotionally or physically, where all stable elements are concentrated on commodities to the exclusion of all interior progress, we can say that true culture has ceased to develop.’ (Artaud)

Many sane and less sane writers and thinkers have spoken of the ills of the so-called Western civilisation based on technology and capital at the expense of, and  for want of a better word, what one could quickly call the Soul. Pasolini saw the rise of the Consumer culture as fulfilling fascism by other means and it led to his apocalyptic critique of society, his still unwatchable film, the Salo or the120 days of Sodom, loosely based on Sade. What in simple terms he meant was that the particularities and subtleties of cultures of diversity and tolerance, many of which were extremely old, had been suddenly and callously obliterated, at least most seriously attacked, by a cultural imperialism from the outside, a hyper-capitalism which threatened the very basis of human relationships, of the poetic word and spirit. Pasolini was convinced, most contemporaries laughed at him and saw a personal vendetta, a megalomaniac's delusion. However, as Artaud before him, Pasolini had seen that true culture had ceased to develop and with it, true love and true relations, of course.

I have often asked myself what would happen if Pasolini or Artaud for that matter - souls who had based every hope on a particular form of revolutionary culture - returned to see the world as it has become today. What would they think of the liberation movements? What would they think of the development of pharmacology? How would they see the ubiquitous television advertising moving image?

Craig Podmore give us a partial response, or rather one possible answer, taken to its fullest and most brutal conclusion. Podmore's The Hell in me, the Hell in you, now available from SAM Publishing takes as it parting first principle, the obscene inhumanity of the hyper-capitalist people, that sprawling anonymous mass of consumers bombarded continually by subliminal messages and modulated as if by magic into walking robotic criminals. 'Bruising trash/Fuck-able car crash, Ashtray eyes/And gilded vulvas/For the target audience./Our children are bored/So they kill others to pass the time./'

In the manner of the sadist's clinical ordering of his desires, Podmore dissects the advertising/media hell which as the book amply proves is in you and me and most certainly in him, and even more surprisingly in her. It is a shocking enterprise in  slow sea sickness, the dark humour of which is often only a veil over a grander and more revolutionary anger. There is a genuine growl, a well of intellectual discontent which gathers pace through the book. "Televise my problems./Make my wounds propaganda./A punch in the eyes will do./Starve me because your power makes me horny./Cut off some strands of my hair/And sew them into the liver of a eunuch./Beat my child up./Feed me oil./Shit and piss all over me./Desensitised to inhumanity. Masturbating to war and chaos." And most importantly, this:

'Please note; this is not a list of submissive perversions but the thoughts of the
powerless workingman. We are passive to the corruption we nobly accept.'

In conversation with Podmore, he said:

"The violence is a metaphorical mirror of the obscene inhumanity we witness in our civilisation (as it were). The riots in the UK last year were a big factor of inspiration specifically the poem 'Unrest'. The violence is used in order to portray the cold and brutal culture of consumerism. Pornography is the very typical nature of it. How society sexualises (due to advertising/control) mostly everything just for the masses to consume, buy and seek identity. The religion in the material is to emphasise how it seeks violence and war. How it is a demon, another consumerable, indifferent element of our society. I think that the themes of the book are like a cycle. One inflicts the other. I wanted to visualise society as a trash can - like one big heroin addict. I think the pornographic element also plays with the idea of how sex and death have an intense, transcendent relationship; on an ecstatic, spiritual level so, in a way it's very much a 'Bataille' inspired collection if I were to mention an inspiration."

Yes, this is an important book to understand what neither politics nor religion in all its extremist furore, can come close to understanding and why a poet with a good stable mind to navigate through the while and the horrors, a fair grasp of the history of words including a necessary passage through surrealism, has more chance of helping us through our atrocious times. Because we are talking about the fundaments of man, his psychology, his primitive resurgences and the sinister Burroughsian powers who have understood, as Artaud prophesied, how to manipulate the masses down into their very sexual habits and instincts. The sexual robotisation of the masses here amply proven and documented. Podmore, whose sensitivity was palpable in his previous tome, Diary…, has understood and he needs to be first read and then listened to. Here in hell there can be no sensitivity left in you nor in me. Here the death of affect is law! And we need to start thinking…


You can buy 'The Hell in Me, the Hell in You' by Craig Podmore here

Dom Gabrielli-

 The Body Without Organs-

 he said legs crossed/listening to eight cellos sing/eyes closed to better see/the notes paint the sounds/softly relinquishing/any will to rise/this notebook his blank lung/he was floating /he was India in monsoon/heaven a concept/he had played as a young man/he had dabbled in paints/and women and sex/he had learnt how to live outside/beyond the tracks/without losing this libertine core/later they came for revenge

/women and dialects with rage/in their bloody bosoms/asking for money for stints/they had done inside/as jailers of the writer's words/about then he turned to time/playing symphonies/with kisses out at sea

/pianos and cosmic-coloured fish/he had been convinced/there was an exit/for something in him and the pen/from this prison for coded riders

/but now all that mattered little/because blood/was controlled directly by the pen/he hadn't a brain to think/nor thoughts to speak/because the notepad was outside/and he imagined his hand alone/without a body

/scrawling black words/on infinite papers/they said this is very eastern/all this nothing and unwilling/this breathing/he retorted it is very western/Artaud had gone west not east/and the rite of the black sun

/had finally got the better /of both the poet and the sorcerer/because there is a moment when wills/are better not being wills/but lungs and hands and blood/moving in waves against the jugular/Artaud's merit beyond all other poets/was to state clearly that man not society

needed to be transformed/his attack on sexuality on organs and god

was a radical manoeuvre/to regain a non-human will beyond the man form/from beyond the grinning man-mass/with eyes of soul theft/he foresaw in his marvellous madness/the panopticon and its necessary implosion/our loss our welcome apocalypse in the bone/and van Gogh was suicided  /because society couldn't tolerate/his new found freedom

/because they don't allow you anything for nothing/you have to pay and they know how/instinctively like sucking/they learn it young/as they run/and push your hard-earned beauty/back down your lung/because an ear wasn't enough/they needed more of him/a corpse to stampede

and erect as a shrine to the dollar/and the nuclear bomb/a dead artist to worship after murder/no cross that's the modern jump/make them/do it to themselves/innocence and joy/the last pure emotions to die

as the mob sings murder dressed as suicide/to kill the artist/and what is intolerable/is that precisely what he had learnt/how to rid oneself of the will to kill/how to die/to collapse and rebuild the body as it were

with breathing and reciting poems form the journey/with a notepad to fill /with his discoveries/so the man is just an accessory /and this is how we see him now/sitting in the park/barely noticeable barely breathing/with a wry smile on his face/of perfect imitation/as words poured from his pen/he calculated about five or six pieces/every sitting/there is no measure of time for that/it's the pulse from another sphere beating/with poems for units/he likened them to winds or waves/or reptiles in the sun scampering and slithering/there was no need for revenge anymore

it was the ultimate anti-fascist act/it couldn't even frighten the masses with a stick/because he was dead to them dead to the world/he posed no threat to the mind of the law/because they were incapable of reading/and history had gone blind/and was cumbersome with its murders/so the man just sits/outside in the park with his stubble and his nobody mind/breathing in poems/proper name on a book with a mast and a sea/his signature two snakes dancing and black/mating in every twist and turn/of frenzied words caught open in a shriek

gone away with every line/with every word 

 

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh and New York Universities and prepared for his doctorate in Paris and New York. Gabrielli’s passion for French literature and thought led him to begin writing, translating, and teaching. He translated widely including published works by Bataille,  Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. He has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which earned considerable praise. Several new books are on their way. Gabrielli has also published several individual poems and interviews, notably at Leaf Garden Press, The Poetry Bay, Vox Poetica and Real Stories Gallery. Gabrielli's books are here:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/search?searchTerm=dom+gabrielli&search=search. His own whereabouts on an axis between language and nowhere.