Vision of a Sudden Death

Almanacs, globes, spheres, astrolabes. Strokes of lightning, violent rains,

tempest, plague and pestilence. Wars, discords, conspiracies smeared

with the filth of the fountain. Some swimming, others wading or drowning.

Relentless furies and sly seducers bedewed with floods of tears. The incognito

seized and fettered in all of its infernal forms, the grand ascent of penitential

retrospects, frauds and larcenies, the infidelities weighted down. Squaredoff

predictions for a groat apiece, a purchased glimpse into futurity. The horror

of a sudden death. Embroideries, brocades, damasks, rags. Landaus, coaches,

packs of hounds. Runners on foot following the chase, the long-sought prize

eluding vigilance. The poorer sort. Mad pursuers with plodding steps,

hags, halberdiers at a captain’s place. Mattock and spade, blackbird and thrush,

the devil sneezing on a pinch of snuff. Planets falling from their off-kilter orbits,

afflicted moons of gluttony, debauchery and wantonness. Pedestals, columns,

cornices, friezes, architraves, chapters in half-relief shook from the foundations

of their belief, sent to early graves. Bankrupts ‘in subterranean abodes,’

and hautboy notaries. Sober-tongued scrimshanders of rhinoceros horn

and trephined skulls, cups for wine, aqua ardens, aqua fortis, vinum adustum.

Poleaxed horses in a knacker’s yard. An armametarium of glass shards, flint,

shark’s teeth, and bone. Pomatums of rosin, pitch and terebinth, strychnia,

stramonium, clove oil, bitter almond. Cabbagers of rotten luck made mad

on bhang and arrack. Glasses pricked with acid, the stupefying bitter stuff. Molasses,

copperas, cocculus indicus, mendacious flatterers hard as the rocks of Parnassus.

The Song of the Blind Heretic Harper

Men beget, Women conceive, Every nostril breathes the air

Dawn comes and their children have gone to their tomb

  Harper’s Song: Tomb of Neferhotep

Spur-blind or purblind and half mulvadered from a pipe of wine

and two hogsheads of liquor, I weathered the withering roads

on a dim-witted horse led by a half-minded guide into the hobbles

of near-extinction, a scurrilous cur with a harp next his thigh.

Meanly obscene and pregnant with smutty songs and tales, I rode

straight into the mortuary feast professing the harp to all blind children.

Raisins, figs, prunes, and gingerbread in honour of the deceased,

piled high next the priest with his lowly wife by his rapturous side,

while I new-strung my harp and sang my song of the rambunctious dead:

‘Damn your soul you humping rascals, Ye excellent nobles and gods

of the graveyard and anyone else that pleases to drink their skinful.’

All who come into being pass on, and young blood mounts to their places.

You built your mansions and you built your tombs with your weed ashes

and your privy purses, your sealing money on all signed leases.

Go burn your whiskey in a wooden bowl with canes of sugar

on the bitter tongs. Scum the seething pot with a skelp of straw.

Eat the entrails of unwashed beasts, unsalted beef, the flesh of swine

and swallow down with unstrained milk the filthy lumps of butter.

Rub incense and sweet oil upon your head, grub garlands of lotus

from your breast, cast behind you your drinking and swearing, the blind

addiction to grotesque lust. I’ll squat before you and play my songs.

One says, welcome safe and sound to him who reaches the west.

Striving to Stay Alive

If I really am what I say, it is more than weighing my words / and I am back to rivers now / where 

meanings flow past the point where I stand / the words are weighing me / sinkers revealing 

infidelities,

breakdowns, addictions / It is true that my confessions are bereft of mass atrocities / but I dare 

say . . . /

What exactly is it that I am saying / what exactly is it that I am trying to make sense of / late-night 

skinny-dipping in the creek / ditching our bathing suits amongst the Martini set / I am not making 

light

of this / but don’t you feel it, that chaos in your life / the unliveable striving to stay alive / the water

trickling through the stones at the soles of your feet / shifting the ground beneath you / It’s not

the body of the words that reek decay / but the mind decomposing / Suppose, and I am talking

into the wind, but suppose this claim is true / in other words I am incoherent / the blood clotting

the veins just so / bruised and raging / On other days I wake up terrified / the page conceals the pen 

/

We have reason to be afraid / I have endured the ferocity of the imagination / its confusion in the 

end . . . /

Pretend I never said these things / it’s true the real delusion is thinking we can say what we intend