Excerpts from 'She' by Christine Murray (Oneiros Books)

Wake up and walk /

           Carry your injury with you

---

Wake up and walk /

Carry your injury with you

It is of no use to sit and weep

Clear the path for it winds

serpentine from stones to groves

Groves are small coves of tree in a

Black sea

There is no going back

There is no lying still in grief

The journey you are taking is already mapped

Wake up and walk now carry with you the scars

Your tears

Your newly dead,

Your emptied heart cup

Drag

---

Did the mirror rent

What of the spheres

The tongues of glass ?

The memory of a cloud

A shattering arm ...

Not unless it was of mercury

Body drags to the hill

Travel is not light nor is it easy

Mirror’s architrave told the story of a woman

Quitting her chariot to offer a heart-cup and

There are two on the path

Two will not look at her face

Crinoline /

A memory

---

The forest is waxing autumnal

My hem is wet-scooping burrs/

                                        Small leaves

Trailing them noisily

To the low throat music of the thrush

A slow rook overpasses

I did not see the woman

Until she was upon me

Helping me up

She tapped my boot

She grabbed my elbow

I have gone over it again

and again/

       Its always the same

Her eye so bright

As She glided away

I picked the twigs

From the frayed lace

Readied it again for stitching

I do not remember her face

 


from 'Grove'

I dared not look at the trees

---

Their pewters

Their ossified trunks

Their dark feathering

The inky black quills of them

          I was caught there veil-lashed

In the place/not place

Where She stalks

This is not the covered corridor

Where once I heard a building’s low groaning

Where groin-vaults draw to the sky as curtains

Where the sense of others is a low murmur

There is not a shadow here

This is outside

Without weather

Tree as metal

Leaf as feather

Stones as big as man

And they sweat real tears

Willows stand grieved

Their blades lashing her face.

              And proceed ?

'She' is available from Oneiros Books here

the children without guns--David McLean

A new chapbook from Bone Orchard Press by David McLean, available here

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

An Introduction to 'Of the Nothing Of' by David McLean

Of the Nothing Of

In this book the poet alternates between prose and ‘conventional verse’ to depict the nuances of nothingness, the categories of emptiness and absence which constitute whatever it is that a human is. The self here is just reflected emptiness, and its incessant struggle for a homeostatic equilibrium under the name of heaven, or otherwise described as some other sort of not ceasing, some other religion, whether in the name of reincarnation or just having children.

‘…in the dark the skin glistens of black tar, crystals of amphetamine burning their way in and the eyes rolling back-rolling, the jaw taught, teeth a-grind, 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, wordless, mocking the stitch that binds the flesh together, raw as a bloody smile, a bloody cunt, an open wound, star-burst of forever having known, to see the ocean yet unable to hear of it through the winds, they stretch the skin taut, begin again, they say, from out of this nothing births the foreign sunlight, (echo), the joy in paring away the meat, intact, blood spat out spraying the glass, a vein severed, nothing more, till dark again…’

This book deals with the nothing of, for a nothing is always the absence of some specific thing - a god, a love, or a meaning.

yet ever speech

in the space between the fragment

and the settled ash

Which is the miraculous, not the mythological murderer with the jawbone of an ass, not the thirty pieces of silver, not any demiurge, just that this stream of consciousness exists, in the absence of any teleology or meaning, words that make themselves. 

And Mc Aloran is Irish, so his poetry answers to the voices of a great literary tradition. A Beckett to tell us how we murdered and ate Godot before we waited aimlessly for him. There is Beckett here in the dusty sheets of a final room, the tremendous mound of futility the poet piles over humanity like a cromlech.

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

Derrida said once that what poetry is is the nostalgia for a presence that never was, the capturing of the sense of childhood perfection of being. Derrida seems, strangely enough, almost to essentialize poetry as the glorious empty attempt of a futile hedgehog to cross the tremendous Autobahn of a rational reality. The poems in this book reflect the voice that might laugh at the squashing of said hedgehog, the Nyarlahotep that laughs at the heart of the black emptiness; this book “literally” says the nothing, the hardest thing to say. It enumerates the small nothings that make up the surprisingly tiny “big picture” - what is actual is brutal and black, the small cracks where the blood seeps through, the absences that Mc Aloran makes talkative.

Mc Aloran, par excellence, is the poet who speaks of:

abattoir silences
the final laughter of the blood

which is what should sometimes preoccupy us. It is the stream of consciousness of a mind aware that most of what is is without awareness and soon we shall join all the absences ourselves and not be. In the nothing of god and meaning what remains is a sort of irresolute stoicism among all the anxiety, all the screaming.

(…shadow is benign, a foreign nothing, nothing claimed, spit it out your sequences, light and shade do not exist…)

(…the none/ nothing of all is a trunk card, a broken jaw flapping in the breeze like a fucked gate in the wind, nothing coming in or out, never leaving…)

What we can do, and what Mc Aloran does, is pretty up the desolation and nothingness. Poetry cannot find meaning and purpose where there is none, but it can render the absences and dust attractive, can make the dry loveless dusty sheets in death’s rooms beautiful. This is a value, making the dull skull lovely, and Mc Aloran does it here like no other.

In the dying heart beats of the close of the book the point we can find in the emptiness is preserved:

‘…breaking none of the without, settled, obscure…

…subtle gleaming of death’s overtures in a dead room, the door ajar…absent echoing…splice of stale air…discarded syringes in a dirty cracked glass ashtray…I cannot…’

--David McLean-

---

Samples from the book:

Denuded
Skull-shine of a collapsed

Breathing/

                     (Ashes)

Lock unto foreign lest there
Never was

Collecting the bone
     Grave(n)

       Spill of murmurs
Eating of the sun’s marrow

Stench till bile of night
              Stripping the carcass ice

Held then unto
Aching of the once again

Cessation/
                    Kiss of

Opened veins where the sky
Devours itself

Rocked to the fore/
                          Core deft

Snuffed out
Absent shuffling
          In a darkened room

--

5...the half-light/ of the forever having sunken unto waste/ fragments all the while/ fathom or non-fathom/ in-dreaming/

      the cold cut of spasm/ locked bone/ arriving/ yet never having departed from/ ever to depart from, through a crimson haze/ dragged out as if the bones were the ragged teeth of the night/

   no no answer/ a scream’s retort and the weighted beasts of echoes/ silenced/ speech without tread and the dry shuddering of the flesh/ collapsed in upon/ from out of which/ from out of which through eclipsed spaces/

      buried below in a tide of death/ silenced endless/ light emerging/ suffocated by gnarled fist/ step again/ erased again/ nothing known/ bone close to the bone/ as if to/ silenced again/ worse than ever held/ before/

   escaping scattering of flies from bloody meat/ nocturne and of the dead veins/ the laughter of the damned/ at the edge of the razor’s tongue/

      boot heel in shit/ tongue licking up the refuse in the ghettoes of the spent transparency of love/ now and for never/ not no/ step again/ they’ll answer naught and drain the roots dry/

   there coming and going until the sun spits shards/ splayed out/ the grasses seared/ let them burn/ nectar upon a severed hand/ soil scattered/ a fossil collapse of headless sky/ dreaming of the less or less/ the absence/ nothing left/    

      celebrating yet fading of it/ a rip of scarlet/ ashen relapse/ said again/ knowing nothing but trinkets of things/ of silhouettes/ begin again/ what of it/ as if in spoken here or now and forever be thy severed/
  
   head buried in the hands breaking apart/ fingers ablaze/ searching still/ no nothing/ buried once more/ lapse again/ furrow dry current of absent roomscape, nothing vital/ nothing taken nor given away/

      ask of the blade’s calling/ the cult of decay/ of dissolution’s breath seeking out the marrow’s pitch/ in a meat hook stylus of buckling bodies/ carcasses to love like nothing else/ in the reek of our due/ seethe of cold colours and the raw red rush of carousel dreaming/

   of tumour nights/ of skies stripped bare and torn apart without question/ coming apart yet never broken once/ laughing at the one thing that horrifies/ the one thing that matters least/ most/
   
      a crown of teeth protruding from the skull in silent victory/ extracted silences/ endless to roam/ blood and cum in a silken handkerchief/ unknown/ that will be the quarter/ atrophic silences/ silences of births/ overtures of welts to the bare skin/

   all of and beyond/ lacking distances/ step again/ begin again/ no no victory no beauty/ strangled out from which to burn/ less and less/ shadow of the outreaching hand/ a dead trail/ the tongue cut out/

      severed now/ till lock and ever hold/ held/ the skeletal figment/ the flesh never yet having been born/ in the distant the foreign lights of a lighthouse/

      searching/ searching/ till dead till none and search once more/ out of which/ till spit/ dragging a burning chain of a cadaver’s emptiness/ echo now/ breathe again/ the fingertips burnt away/ step again/ step    

--

Breaking/
           Broke/ broken

Echoing of the all undone
   Reduced to

Burning breath and
          The scarlet’s knowledge

Here or there

      (Says with a whisper…)

 [insert pulse beat]

Back then unto haemorrhage
    Scarred without wishful

Head alack/
            (Vibrating edge of blade)

        Skinning the reek
(That was when there…)

Broke bones of the bone-weaved sky
           Till death parts

(Nothing/
                 Sequins/
         Dead diamond eyes)

Yet ever speech
In the space between the fragment

        And the settled ash

--

Sun smear/
    Fingers of severance

The eyes smeared out

Writhe/
        Writhe in pageantry

Of absurd meat
             Silenced all by the once

The thrice

     (Breathless again/ inhale)
                             
Wordless but for the…

           Said again
                   (Never uttered)

   Erased the one thousandth
           Cutting the shadow from the

       Eye’s banquet

Dreaming of the nothing new
         Closing around

The throat

The fingers of severance


---

6...echo now/ breathe again/ the fingertips burnt away/ step again/ some solace of rapture through endless night/

      burning away as of tide till spray of sunlight jack-knifing in the distance/ the shadow once more, erased/ hollow breath/

   all back from then what held till diabolist sheen/ wrench unto havoc clear cut through by prism lock and casket carcass kisses/ in the bone shuffle of ever-born/ stilled born/ hack in a dry room of dusty sheets/ redeeming the sullen artefact/ shadow there/

      horse teeth of an obliterated smiling/ all of one or else/ pulse of dead dreaming locked till stray/ never to be released/ fathomless blade/ razor cum in a dead hand/ blood without colour/ black absences/

   the eyes struck out into some foreign realm/ nothing ever left behind/ step again/ once more/ step again into shadow dreaming of the more or less/ waste without beginning/ waste without end till light exhumes further nothingness/ till dark is redressed/

      haven to toil/ closing the skull around the tomb age/ blessed scars of empty scarlet/ emptied out/ dislodged/ picking the raw meat from the teeth of embers/ traces/ vapours of taxed hope/ all said/ step again, say it again/ traces of waste shimmering in the eyes

   known once/ yet never known/ recede/ retrace/ back then unto stationary/ speechless bones harbouring night’s paralysis/ where then the exigent/ where from none can follow/

      spitting out the cleft heart/ the worthless shit of it/ the scars coughed up like phlegm/ in the fractured mirror from which the helm balances the here or never to become/ bite the jugular/ a trail of blood screaming at the distant skies/ without purpose/

   knowing nothing more than before/ where vault and desert are but one/ where sands and time are unacquainted/ (echo, echo)/ echoing unto naught where the spasm flesh is caught in a smear of vice/

      some shadow/ piercing not yet ever seen from below/ as if…colours seen from below where shadows drift as if…from below…well strike a match/ blow it out/ there naught or less/ shifting writhing in the burning soil/

   nails in flesh/ a face obliterated/  burn the bone’s will/ burn this fleshed amphitheatre/ dread of one thousand lapses/ lay down/ begin again/ step again as if it were to ever matter/

      skinned flesh in salt/ the eyes gouged out/ emasculation of laughter/ till…from what of out will trace as of a salvaged tongue/ night upon night/ breaking still yet never ending/ unto nowhere yet having been the same

   rupture of spun silken blood/ yet having been nowhere else/ ever/ perhaps more of the less than known/ to spy with the little eye/ something beginning with…/

      exile burrowing it’s way in and out from wherever out and until then back again/ still the unspoken/ the paralysis/ bled out/ spat upon/ through a filigree of murmurs/

   scattering silences/ given unto speech from out of which dreaming less was murmured/ the gutted bloated self spilling its intestines unto the cold stone tiles with a slap and a silence/

      head of frost/ soundless pageant/ begin again/ less than from what there ever was before/ a closed fist of the dawn will stitch the wound/ seal shut the eye of spasm/ collect the sands the dusts of dreaming/

   spat out from accord/ into the dissipating hands/ dragging furrows of emptily/ collapse once more/ never having uttered/ breaking of the less than one where the bone broke/ the marrow spilled         


--

Abattoir tears/
                   Foreign

Stripped/
           Aligned

Nothing else claimed but the
Burning winds

Held to rust or shadow delved
      (Till rot or rake)

Yet claimed
            In the spit of dreaming

Ache of valiant
Till blood to settle under

Violent teeth still in the claim of it
    (Said without rupture…)

Lest the rapture compete with the burn of it
          Settled then to fall…

                   Till else

Shroud/
     Abattoir silences

The final laughter of the blood


--


7...breathe again/ till sudden/ cessation -no/ gallowed by the fever of it/ the drought of it/ ask of it again/ no/ not known/ all said/ begun/ with what flourish it was held/ step beyond/ nothing there/ never was/

      not the how nor the when or why/ emasculated it might be said/ till what, how and ever/ begin/ stop/ start/ cleft alone/ wailing of the drifting shadows/ no recourse/ headless/ alack/ no/ nothing/ shape gestural or formless/ ashen light/

   the half-scar of it/ blinded still not known/ no not ever/ (retracing again)/ to leave or to stay…grasses knee high and the bone revealed through the wound like a slashed sneer/ absence of tears/ of course/ dead now/

      hollow shun/ hollow shunt of breaking lapse what from which the sneer/ the hollow/ the distance furthering/ all said there was ever nothing/ till what/ what next/ lapse and then/

   raking through the skull the fever like a talon light/ no force/ breaking still from what line/ haven and then from what foraging/ stealing out of the silence/ dread birthed like a still blue sky/

      and the cupped hands they cup fresh blood mixed with ash and a symphonium of the dead man’s advocacy/ bloodless eyes reflected there/ no thought/ erased/ time erased/ knuckled to ransom/ slice again/ laughter again/

   collapsing in spasm/ breath again -breathe/ cylindrical walls they rotate out of which the dead light shimmers/ seeks to strike the marrow/ haven of flesh spilled foreign like a deserted shore/ dreaming of the caress of the ocean to erase the footprints/

      else or not/ stung/ bitten kicked and punch drunk/ not a word/ not a murmur/ stammering all the while/ of dream of death of sun of pulse/ the lay of the land/ glide/ glide/ web spun/ cloud-dust of/

   given the advance/ working the flesh/ always the same/ never the same/ spilling the shit of dreaming/ of ice/ deft pageantries still-born in a heartless scope of atrophy/ break once more and to be done/ yet breathe again/ stammer and pulse and the mocking itch/ the stitch womb of it/

      the burn/ the scald/ the dead summers of waste and wanton/ filling the bloodless eyes with light that was never wanted/ not once/ breath again -breathe/ the less and less/ ever erasing/ with what ease/ drifting/ drifting from far unto leave or cessation/

       no/ not a maggot’s chance/ stone in the eye’s reaching fathom/ as if transported yet never having left the dusts of that final room alone/ hissing upwardly/ step non-step/ stepping forth or back without an ounce/ not a taste/ exiled by this way or that/ roots to rend to fertile nothingness/

   well call cards/ shimmer/ shed the skin of the endless night/ known for the never once breathed/ breath -breathe again/ no/ stop/ cease/ a mimicry of this or that/ call it being/ spat out/ the jugular severed/ the swallowed tongue of ice/ paralysed knowing/ steam/ lock-held/

      at the beginning of it/ what less to know/ pare away/ (never to be known)/ nowhere to from out of the searching dark/ the hands cold/ body in raptures/ it begins/ it ends/ stop breathing/ cease

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

Zarina Zabrisky

CARVED

 carved
 from an unborn rib
 before dawn
 hours all wrong
 

 i waited
 for the sun

 my mouth
 stuffed with
 the cotton wool
 of sunless dread
 
 my own ribcage--
 a human cage
 for my body
 
 my own ribs--
 the teeth
 gnawing on
 the yearning hole
 
 but for the others--
 i turned into a toy:
 
 button holes
 for eyes,
 black scratches
 for tears,
 lips sewn
 in a coy
 smile.
 
 a velvet
 pussy cat
 voiceless
 clawless
 soulless
 
 at midday
 i tore
 through the fake furs,
 i turned
 into a scary bird
 
 i flew out
 through the window
 glass shards
 for feathers
 
 wings growing
 through my ribs
 at all angles
 barbed wire
 of the freedom
 and terror
 
 and i screamed
 at the empty corners
 
 not from pain
 
 i screamed for you--
 
 a street walker
 a rope walker--  
 said the passer bys
 
 i ripped
 a jagged wound
 for my mouth
 blood lipstick
 all pretty
 
 not a song
 parted my lips
 not a moan
 
 it was a prayer
 to be heard
 
 but
 
 not for pain
 i screamed at the corners,
 oh deaf strangers
 
 when it hurts
 i am silent
 
 a steel blade of the broken knife
 with ice of indifference  
 cuts from my throat to my cunt
 fits tight
 fills the void of the lost rib
 at the core
 
 pain is me
 
 at the corners
 i screamed
 my soul desire
 
 last night
 i felt
 the translucent skin
 of our cells
 merging
 fusing together
 an amalgalm
 of you and me
 spiraling up
 sparkling like
 the whiteness of the bone
 in the hotness of the joint
 the watermelon broken in snow
 shards of milky glass
 splinters of DNA
 diamonds hidden in the depth
 of the sugary watermelon
 chunks of sacred meat
 vein juices bleeding
 from torn sweet flesh
 split
 as i was born back into you

From 'Of Silent Parameters' - Christine Murray/ Michael Mc Aloran

#1
 
if there are birds here
then they are of stone


draughts of birds
flesh bone wing
claw in grass


collective eye shears
lung ashen
subtle as eclipse


a mercury sun breath
severed/ obsolete
night’s-claim-snap


while day
not day but light
cast from (...)


surely light would retain in
silica's cast or flaw


till knock of blood from which
or laughter of


burnt time
lessened the deathed
feathers of------------bind


in overlay
of silenced


- bind
to staunch the blood/rush


welled now pool
hand held to the
wrist

 
-it gathers still

(-)ness
of the parched redeem


flight from blind winds
echoes to stun


the trace’s lack


groaning wings
of the ever after


and here
claw in grass


surface-wet
bone in blood

seamed


blinded by pulse and the
regalia of


subtle-deft-winds
carried forth


in momentum’s quarry
abounding


stone struck iron
outside the perimeter of


not wanton gargoyle nor eagle there
they are of-one-piece


seamed to


by sinew of none
collapsed the blind signature
till scope of


sky-burst/
nocturne of bleached lime


the raw machinery of absences
                                                     

--

#6-

‘To stand in the shadow
Of the scar up in the air.

To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
For you
Alone.

With all there is room for in that,
Even without
Language.’
 
--Paul Celan.
 

stasis aglow harbours the scarred light’s cleft


the hour’s locked tombs
(here or there/
a spun lapse tidal glisten-edge)


amber nothing weights the fleshed reprisal


alone the ash
stone voices of the redeem


in circus
aftermath of carousel’s ignited blood


and walk the circle of it


stalk the open ring
not ring  but waystation


those others speak him out of chrysalis


it is voice brings us alive
an unearthing of -


wrenched scarlet wings of stray till touch
all spun together/ as of


silently the lock of jaw the spurious eclipse
(I look to the unlock of iced black hands


in the dreaming of the night’s veranda
a closed fist of dreaming
stillness till break-birth-knowing…)


hands bound by feathers
red-wings of a difficult birthing
warm though, that blood on hands
that are bound-not-bound


the gash, female-d,
the silks/integuments (of low tones)
but a birthing of nonetheless from voice


(stillness of reason to breach…)


till locked/ still from out of mercury atoned
spit of the lack


pulse of the blackened arbour/ fleshed/ abounding
at the hilt of nowhere less, the murmurs of


from out of which


till silenced less or-more-or-less/
a-skylight/ crumbling alabaster


these walls cylindrical
taste of the benign dusts of fleshed accord

--

#12
 
babel


glove /unglove(d)
button / - hook


hand touches iron / something like stone is met


/ unaccountable
                            

--
               
#13
 
‘wind tomb
river tomb

my death fakes my voice
which can only reach

to the ache of teeth

little flower
little ear you know
to what point
I am afraid of shit.’

--Georges Bataille


ice/ vascular
till hilt of streaming else spoken echo


the drags pelts the stone wall gait of bone’s tryst
collective


the hard scar births the ocular’s derision
river of none


and the death which only fakes the sun’s cracked yolk
walls/ wombs/ distances


of -


a star strangled in the reaches of a tree
capilliary of branches and the music is wooden
rattle of branch


to branch
green yet budded yet

' under the greenwood tree'


black yet the only moon is the new moon
settled in the arc of breath


one stone
more to follow


tooth against tooth (he said)
yet


beneath the pupil’s cataract of night’s align


this is the blood of else
twice the price of the twice starred


unlock(ed)


singed
hair /feather/fur-or the-smoke-smell


rises up,


it is not a burning.
it is a star (or stars) caught into a branch,
(of blue / of ice-)


it is only sulphur-singe ( a street-light) / eye-caught / eye-wavered
it is a hollow-song / a wind-song double-reed-trembling

                
--

#22-
 
iron separate


speech onto speech
a blossom-extrusion


            from hollow(ing) metal


wordless as molten
ash unto blessed
chunk-stun-light
shimmering/
            one or the other


razor steel and the echo(ing) of
speech unto speech erased


and not -
shimmering with/
molten-tree is an architrave for birds
metal-as


it gathers coil-in
(with light... maybe)
even the gnarled corridors of
are blossomed out


the stun’s relapse sears
subtle/ absolute/ hollow(ing)
till trace metallic
        (metallic breathe of echo-fold-echo-silent)



the light’s regress
iron death of the spun alack a-grip
flight forever mast/ taken of wind(age)


--


#32

‘Murky passages flow
From our eyelashes down our faces

With a fierce red-hot wire
Anger hems up our thoughts

Scissors with raised heckles
Around our unarmed words

The venomous rain of eternity
Bites us greedily’

--Vasko Popa


drained light
fettered by winds
a clean bite masks the uncertain eye’s revolt
skin(ned) till task
the rib-cage echoing of glib desire
raging
into naught
till bite of foreign skyline’s shadowing
its slow metamorphosis from

to
edge to edge of. a tear(ing)

is a falling-through
a snap-to


body as gateway /
waystation
it already has the fibres
(of)


the spun fleshed light of regalia unsung
a clear edge
sudden lash of what will(ow) sudden
the rib-cage echoes through the pissoir
night


breath upon breath and the lapse of/
accorded/ (recorded…)
murmurs yes
from drought of eye


light’s claim
an outplay.
the searing moment
the
elastic-snap
back


derangement of form
passes whitely into
chrysalis of
blind heat in solace breath
scattered soil upon white flesh in accord meld
severed the non-breath death forgotten

Antony Hitchin (AD Hitchin)

Burn

fairy godmother after-births
vanity palms upturned
goldfish ghosts upon the bottle
shadows already
dead

twilight placenta gristle
yellow-blue-green jesusflesh
my tree hung
dictator
gossamer abstract tooth of teased forgiveness…

laying waiting knees
bent
outstretched hand airbrushing moon
fear is open now
along with cunt and punishment
how I watch myself flail and beg…

half-light spectral web
playing white hot
wet squat
of her wound
dregs of cold limbless beggars
coalesce
and eat ill in the slow vice of her burn 

Samples From 'Things The Dead Say' by David McLean (Oneiros Books)

From 'The Freddy Poems'

this we said
 
this we said to them and returned
to the water, to the blood
to the womb where the dead are
stacked already waiting

for life's patient rape, for a nightmare's
clawed glove, for days waiting to dream
and feel pain in an empty anesthetized
world where nothing is genuine

but the murderers. that's why we love them,
murderers and madmen, eternal children;
heaven is here inside us, white
and impartial and timeless

we never needed it, never asked for it,
and it's burning, we need demons
to turn into, moralities to fall
apart through us, to be new

every sin they ever knew,
futile and renewed

--

long nails
 
god comes covered in long nails
made of metal and petty restrictions,

he paints pretty pictures in blood
and flesh and love

he comes for us, calls himself Freddy
today mostly, we can never get enough -

we love whatever fucks us up
and touching suffering fucks us

better than drugs, long nails
of filled syringes trailing

in the flesh and dust,
a crucial fiction

a pretty picture
to nail nothing up
 
--


night falls
 
night falls over us a remorseless slasher
and cuts blood from suffering sheets

it is dreams we need
and drugged junkie heaven

it is salvation and night fall
appalling

and every body dead again
it is dreams we need

and bleeding
it is anxiety and nightfall

it is sleeping reason
and razors

we are children
when we are screaming

and the dead believe in them
Freddie and his cocaine heaven again

falling apart to dust and bugs,
to bodies, bodices and love

--

From 'The Jason Voorhees Poems'

bull on the king's highway
 
Jason becomes the obdurate bull
on the king's highway for us today,
the devil of rebellion and the innocent body
that does not care for law or reason;

he has become us in our murderous innocence,
the treason of the flesh that cuts the head off
and tells capitally sensible jokes about surrender
to the logical arrogance that says “give in,

for these are the self-imposed limits of living.”
he is above law and reason and restraint
and the rebellious devil was flesh, not fucking, forever -
angry Thanatos who loves dead men best,

so sudden death under him becomes heaven
and we what we love best, dead men
draped in sexy robes of their daily decay,
an eternity of toothsome deliquescence

is the enormous end after the little death -
an eternal orgasm so much better than sex
and each slash in the impotent skin
is a gaping opening to let gods in,

like chaste dead children innocent as little nipples
and death's small void, vacant like all the living was,
no devils in our temporary Hell but Jason and murder -
no gods either


the feet of murder

i should like to see the heavy-booted cumbersome feet
of murder buckling city streets
where thoughtless lovers fumble their whorish
minutes, where idiots express themselves
about time and some transfinite eternity
they do not truly grasp,

not as well as a real man's hand curls sexily
round the ineffable pondus of a machete,
and death shall come to lovers, to everyone,
as all these feeble whores of each sexuality and sex
so richly deserve, psychopathic love
crushing the pampered weak skulls

round weak brains, even more pink flesh to touch,
even more cunts cut up, gaping just as cretinous
as the impotent mouth of love, wasted and capacious
and full of nothing, not even cum, just Jason
getting his loving duty done -
chopping up all the cunting scum

'Things The Dead Say' is available here

Samples From 'Blind-Worm Cycle' by Christopher Brownsword (Oneiros Books)

   

‘It pains me to sit and watch you struggle with this empty space - your nails scratching at cinders on the floor.’ ‘This is the place my thoughts return me to.’////////Through dread of what it represents, N and I keep to the edges of the room, avoiding quite intentionally the interior: a vast geological system rich in iron oxide and populated almost exclusively by tapeworms (a single tamarisk also; though in its shade cadavers gorge upon themselves unceasingly).////////There is nothing left for me to do but scratch.////////‘It pains me to sit and watch you...’////////Nothing left...////////‘Clear shallow water infected by kelp. This is the place my thoughts return me to.’ ‘I recognise little of the beaches...sky trembling with birds.’////////Ah, of what use to rip my balls out, employing as an instrument a chisel made from the thigh bone of an orang-utan, and to contaminate the excavation with cholera then plead with N to drink of it!

--

N’s thighs gape hideously as if the aperture of which they mould were in a state pertaining either to ecstasy or distress. Serpents awaken from several ports scattered about my body, entering in one fell swoop her anus, mouth, and cunt; the squelching of juices making all the more apparent the heavy atmosphere of the room. In hugging her chest N breaks each of her ribs, and as a type of silt pours from her eyes she is temporarily blinded. She requests in Braille that I bind her at the waist using instead of rope strips of her own muscular tissue where it hangs out of numerous excavations. Similar to a lampshade wounded by firearms, I wail and shout, but radiators prevent me from decoding the syntax of gun powder! Whilst she remains in bondage, and birthing fragments of sky, N takes my prick in her mouth then gnaws it loose, a thousand beetles conspiring to replace it in one congealed mass. She caresses me with her feet as one might a startled mule. Pressure is applied. She begins slowly, divested of uncertainty - rejoicing in the motion like a forest does the seasons.////////There is no part of N that is not open to me now (entering in one fell swoop). I might just as easily penetrate her pelvis as I would her cunt. The bone is soft and yielding like melted wax. Her interior is that of a plum gone rancid. She pukes algae and sunbeams across my face. I bleed a larval mush in the early stages of pupation, the body of which remains unshaped but for a set of jaws.

--

Glancing at my cock, stiff in the palm of my hand, I notice it has reconfigured itself into a double cord of nerve, broken up at intervals by immense swellings from which additional nerves branch out, appearing to connect the body of what can only be considered an insect. Segments bulge before forming around themselves an exoskeleton in order to support the internal organs. Compound eyes stare out at the interior of the room. The Door is o-...Formic acid dribbles from its tip. With instinct of its own the transformed phallus makes a series of rapid vibrations from its thorax - this, coupled with the movement of wing muscles, causes air to pass through spiracles as a mating call is sounded then returned by N. I pull her towards me. She does not resist. Anal claspers emerge from my buttocks to hold her in place until the act of coition is over.

--

Try though I do, I cannot tame my hands from shaking. Many days have gone by since my last meal. Shadows flit and combust along the window ledge. A stream of energy gushes out through my ears...nostrils...through my arteries as well - the latter of which I have rent asunder using a solitary pubic hair. A calf is ejaculated in three stages from my cock. It is stamped to death in a moment of boredom then the two front hooves are removed and used to replace my eyes, which, like forty watt bulbs gone dim, have been released from their sockets.  

--

Prior to ejaculating, a band of light sears my vision...the walls of the room dissolve to reveal a plateau delimited by the easternmost range of a mountain. Blackberry thistles advance across the clay soil, annexing territory from its competitors by putting down rootlets like pipelines to mine nutrients from the earth. The tendrils of creeper vines coil about my legs, searching for a vertical surface around which they can stabilise themselves as they grow towards the sunlight. Mist dissipates across the plateau, and scored into the latitudes beyond it the hills twitch with vegetal hunger. In the far distance birds of passage coordinate their flight patterns to form undulating waves, scanning the territory beneath them for insects whilst their shadows cast a melancholy image like that of faded curtains admitting sunlight into an empty room (ossified momentarily on the threshold of the void then annihilated). Meanwhile, their fluid gestures program my brain rhythms into an alpha state, instilling within me a notion of my oscillating in accord with them. Despite the sun only moments ago having entered my perceptual frame above the rim of the horizon, I can feel its warmth dilating the arteries in my body and reinvigorate the cells in the surrounding tissue; the darkness shrunken away now to angular shadows rooted to my limbs. ‘Remember,’ I say to myself, registering every synaptic impulse from the dorsal horn of my spine to be aligned with the solar flux, ‘it is the earth that revolves around the sun, not the opposite. A hundred billion suns distributed among a hundred billion galaxies, each of which shall one day burn up and die, as too is destined to become of us all.’ I raise my arm at an angle of precession to the sun in order to shield my retinas from its active flares then survey the degrees of curvature in the landscape, connected by points of light, and understand them to branch out from my neural axons. Sliced into algebraic dimensions and contours after the last ice age by glacial shift, the terrain sloping away from my feet at a gradient flows resplendent with tall fescue grass and rhododendrons screening ruined settlements. The cool mountain air is filtered by my bronchial tubes into my bloodstream and my wrists shine with moisture from the shrubs. I notice the rootlets of the plants to be assimilated into my nervous system, having first located an entrance via my urethra, as they spread forth like fungi in a vast network, my cock blossoming into a flower, each petal retracted in celestial joy, ejaculating spores.       

Blind-Worm Cycle is available from Oneiros Books here