Destroyer

None will ever claim to have destroyed me.

None has ever cast me underfoot.

None has ever dared raise their hand on me

or hurl words meant to hurt.

I am no weakling.

I am not one to fidget.

I am not one to budge

nor am I one to prostrate.

I am not one to show a weakness

for I have none.

None will ever harness

what will always be one.

I can play with my foes

and my lovers alike

in the fashion of felines,

I can swallow their bones

or just leave them in stacks,

stripped of their very import,

for I have power beyond measure,

for I have wrath beyond reckoning,

for I am a destroyer.

If this be the verse, this be the news

"It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

William Carlos Williams, American poet and physician (1883-1963)

Fragment #11

Your smile, in the half-light of the drowsy bedroom,

discernible in the thin shaft slanting through the louver,

is like a sleeping dragon,

breathing slowly through a century-long sleep,

never has sun shone through jalousies with such passion.

Corps

 

Corps-sujet (corps-je-ils-nous-tu)

Corps-dépendant-à-corps-défendant

Corps à corps

Corps-décor(um)

Corps-frontière (corps-Schengen)

Corps-fierté-corps-lié

Corps-re-source

Corps-ex-sculpture

Corps-citadelle (corps-Samarkand)

Corps-action-(axiome)

Corps-à-dessein

Corps-armé-pétition

Corps-ouvert-fermé

Corps-si-leste-céleste

Corps-cœur-de-pierre

Corps-de-contact

Corps-détruit-intact

Corps-sain-produit

Corps-vigile (corps-musée)

Corps-étendard

Corps-de-principe

Corps-muet (corps-secret)

Corps-sacré-corps-fin-en-soi

Corps-centre-O

Tea-time

Tea has – and always will

be – spelt with an 'L'.

Why, you ask me,

quite rightfully?

The reasons are dead simple:

because it can serve as

a handy looking-glass,

because it may also be a well

with which you may your thirst quell,

but 'tis also a book by the fire

or a meal when times are a-dire,

'tis a long-lost child,

a brat you can't chide,

'tis a feisty woman on your knees,

a pouty Gill who says: “Pretty please?”

'tis a radiant Sunday afternoon

or a masked haiku by the moon;

tea is a deer throttled by a hound,

tea is midnight's fog on Edin's Mound,

tea is the books you'll never read,

tea is the crumbs and the birds you feed,

tea is a plane's fastened seatbelt –

that's why it can't but be spelt

on Earth, in Heaven and in Hell,

with anything but an 'L'.

I left a copy of this piece sellotaped on a concrete pillar in the Looking-Glass Bookshop in Edinburgh (fine place which I strongly recommend for the quality of the books, the warm welcome, the ready-for-anything spirit and the taste of tea I had there). There may be differences in the punctuation (same for the dating of the writing...my memory doesn't work wonders) and I originally left the title to be added by any potential reader, but it is essentially the same.

The fight

"Why bother? We have enough

Cans to last us a siege

And water to have us laugh

At the very face of the liege!

There is no darkness we fear

There is no man that can us bend.

As long as we live we will leer

As long as we breathe there is no end.

They will see, those barbarians,

What it takes to be a man,

And to feel every human sentiment,

What it takes to shoot a man,

What it is to have delicacy and nuance,

What you earn by curbing your essence.

What they are, as they stand behind our walls,

Is beastly, coarse, and unlikely to make us fall."

Double dash

Like a dash of spilt dark tea

Over the bright tabled glazing

I run my lucid dreams over and over

Until they seem dry and exhausted

And then the real story begins

"Know no fear."

She awoke with a start,

They were all there, still

Stilled. They would, eventually

Remain here and rot.

Mouth agape and contorted hands.

Wounds ope on the innards,

Discreetly yet unashamedly.

"Know no fear."

She breathed in and out,

And resolutely gripped

The broken handle of her jagged knife.

 

To the line

Journeying to the line

Unembarrassed by desire

Or hatred, or vindictiveness,

Or gain, or fear, or shame,

we went on, seeking not adventure

Nor meaning to obey orders

Or do our abscond duty

Nor driven by the will to conquer,

We were there as chance willed,

By some fluke of fate,

Owing to a long and serpentine

Chain of events no one governed

We went on because we thought

Liberty was a woman.

Fragment #22

Things need to come to an end

-- however ugly it may be --

for as things now stand,

my life goes by horribly.