Ideen am mein Geburtstag

 Ideen am mein Geburtstag

White Pomegranates

Persephone rose from the Underworld at Enna, later the Arabs rose from the drains. Her vagina was inspected at the frontier. Nicias' gold and purple shield hung in the temple at Agrigentum and his bleached bones were flung before the gates of Syracuse. Alcibiades fled to Sparta and much, much later General Patton sought Syracuse once again. From Reggio to Messina sailed the troop transports of Count Roger the Norman and, later, an itinerant 'insegnante d'Inglese'. Where the change from village to continent, from island to empire, from ancestor worship to belittled gods. Let them eat waffles with great bits of cream extensions added!

Paul Murphy

MINOTAUR

MINOTAUR

I believe in Aristophanic raindance
I believe in the madwoman’s undergarments
I believe in insubstantial tubes of light
That sit on the face and linger, that are

Remnants of antique worms that crawled
Over the earth at the time
Of ferns and the Eohippus.
I believe in the ghost of time

That will return at the inapt moment
To tap on the windowpane
Of our dreams so that
The yellow light invades

The courtyards of Rembrandt
Of Turner and of Claude.
As it invades the sensual
Signature of roses, leaves, trees

To be memorialised by one
 Insubstantial yet deft
Brushstroke that is also
An intellectual worm

Burrowing into fevered
Glands becoming human entrails
Dotted with blood which are also
Confessions of poems,

Spontaneous odes that burn
In the skylight of the membranes
Of vast minotaurs that inhabit
This labyrinthine credo.

TROLLS 

Men and women are like trolls
All wrapped up in hollow swansongs.
The lost hours are underneath
The floorboards that clatter

With the stamp of the trolls
The chatter of the bastards that matter.
The trolls eat, sleep and fuck
And in the midnight they can die Too.

Repay the masters in hard luck
And the trolls moo and moan.

LOW INTENSITY OPERATIONS

After Sir Frank Kitson

The sky is grey. The rain falls. The dead fall of rain and leaves. Trees scowl. All is foliage, greenness. Map 1. Jesus’s tomb Extend a lead for a CCTV Camera in there. A dial With various measurements. Breathing. Heart rate. Blood Pressure. The resurrection Will really fuck up the chief’s Plans for his new open prison, Pandemonium, scheduled to be Built in mid-Ulster. Map 2. Low key surveillance The gods of the Canaanites Are arrayed along with a funky Statue of Astarte found in Iraq Or a (possibly) neighbouring Territory. It looks very like A man with a huge firm. We sent It to Sir Frank Kitson for his approval. Map 3. Sir Frank Kitson’s entrails O fuck looks as if Sir Frank has been Brutally killed in a terrible accident With a pane of glass. This would Have upset Tacitus, Herodotus, Pliny, Plutarch, the minge Of the Venus or Praxiteles, The orifice of Apollo. Ask Sir Frank For his autograph…. Paul Murphy

BERTOLT BRECHT BEFORE THE HOUSE UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES

BERTOLT BRECHT BEFORE THE HOUSE UNAMERICAN ACTIVITIES

 In my nearby canal an unseemly mess: 
The death of a soap star. 
Her torso is all that remains. 
There's her picture on the poster in my little local shop. 
Naturally a pornographer has confessed. 

Brecht stooped mightily over the Landwehr Canal, Berlin. 
There was some more odium to resolve. 
The toothbrush moustache of quantum mechanical knowledge 
Had rid Germany of decent clean beer. 
Now his navy is cleaning up 
The seven seas. I am in clover. 
Bertolt Brecht is in California. 
He wants to confess but stops. 
How did He sever her head, hurl the fat torso 
Into the rat infested black water? 
Why did he gaze back with such a plaintive quizzical look? 

Bertolt Brecht! Are you listening? 
Pay attention! You are in danger of failing! 

The Reichstag lists to one side on history's even keel. 
It has heard you are ruined. 

Bertolt Brecht are you ruined, are you ruined? 
Pay attention! You are in danger of failing! 

Paul Murphy

AFTER THE BRONZE CASTING OF DYLAN THOMAS BY HUGH OLOFF DE WETT

IS THE SUN A MADMAN?

Are waves breaking upon the skin inside?
Is outside dissolved into an empty cipher?
What are the mad words that became symbols that crashed 
Upon the foreshore within the cage of bones that is a man. 
Is sunlight eternal? Can it resurrect the way 
We once felt about being young, walking down Cyprus Avenue 
Or the brightness we once felt breaking the skin? 

HAMPSTEAD HEATH 

Are the daffodils in bloom in April on Hampstead Heath? 
Is light luxuriously dappled against dolphin backed shapes 
Of hedgerows, small children, plein air views of tactile landscapes Dews, silences, deep, deep wells? Does love exist even beating in Tiny palpitations within modest breasts? On Hampstead Heath questions fail in reciprocation with intense sunlight 
Even unwritten on backs of hands. 

PERFECTION OF EXPERIENCE 

The links of rhyme expand upon the unsought place 
Where perfection of experience exalted memory across 
The woods, gorges, ravines, grasses, shimmering rites 
Of Maytime and all, all seemed to fulfil within 
The round tentative exploration of senses, 
Sounds, even the harsh cacophony of my life’s 
Sudden intimate leaving. Laughter and after. 

 I’m writing an epic poem using the heteronym Kenji Okanawi, a survivor of Nagasaki, who claimed three pensions, having cycled from Nagasaki to Hiroshima and back again, being blasted three times. Cycling on a three wheeled bicycle in three different directions, Okanawi is the only man to have three assholes too! Work that one out Niels Bohr! Blast off! I was sitting under the pyramid at the Poetry Library, when a sullen melodrama occured to me: 

AFTER THE BRONZE CASTING OF DYLAN THOMAS by HUGH OLOFF DE WETT

Dylan Thomas, you look like a surreal clown
Escaped from one circus to the poetry circus. 
A live awareness glints in your hollow, bronze eye 
Alive to the diamonds and the cheesy bits. 

You wear a dapper cravat 
Which droops seemingly to your knees. 
In the afterglow of your dying cigarette 
All the dapper truths mingling with the rest of it. 

The ROAD to TENOCHTITLAN 

I am on the road so weary yet all 
Of the fall is around me. 
The battles are a foregone 
Conclusion as foregone as the strand 

Is. The ashes leap out of the flame 
The eagle no longer calls out. 
All of the wildness is in me. 
Out of this rout, paths to divide us: 
On the road to Tenochtitlan. 

PRACTICAL HAY 

Mr Acerbic wears a jagged smile. 
Nurse Wetboard is sitting on his face. 
Monkey-faced men leer in at the portico 
I am on the baby Grand. 
Attack Of the strang/lers. 
We die In misty, rosy dreams. 
We die as we wanted to live: 
Cowardly, elemental tinpackers! 

Some days later I am still 
Underneath the baby Grand. 
Mr McGonad is sipping his pint 
Of corduroy. Mr Slipgirdle has 
A firm. Nurse Rendition 
Is throttling him with a loose. 
Alibi is hammering in the windmill. 
The electric is all blown away. 

Paul Murphy

POEMS WRITTEN IN ILMENAU, THURINGEN, GERMANY

WHAT THE FLOWERS OF THE FOREST SAY TO ME

The valley is a million year old
Formula: meaning, what is a poem?
The last chance creation is this.
An upheaval, a certain process.

The ending of a substratum
Replete with faults, depressions.
Perhaps it is the oil of the future?
A sequence of beeps and silences.



The seismographic landscape

Is suffering all of us who live there.

Geological time and its sunbeams

Are travelling in myriad ways.



Everywhere industrial processes

Are forming combinations.

Brown figures are stooping down

In the dusk resemble Van Gogh´s



Potato eaters. Vast cycles

Of nature are re-enacted

What is flowing through the littered

Valley voices in or out of the Spring rain?


 SNAIL

 Nature´s stain is also the snail

With its broad back. All his luggage

Is included in this crystal sculpture.



I prod at him. For a moment

He retracts his head.

I pass on, then look back for a minute.



He is still there

The great north sun is beaming.
 His shell is chill pink.

The great north chill sun declines into the pink clouds.

Whispy as horses tails

Strung across the snail´s entrails.


 THÜRINGEN WALD


 The hill is over the hill.
The sun is over the horizon.

The landscape´s stillness

Is a well-sculpted end vision.



There are no farmer´s left

But still there is produce.

There are no bank´s left

But still there is commerce.



Even if Hell is retracted

The rest is still coming on.

Even is annihilation is imminent

There will still be a discount.



In Manebach the choir

Sings the songs once

Composed in Erfurt

By a hell-faced child



In Arnstadt. The dappled

Organ music is played

In the Bachkircke:

Sunlight in the square.


Paul Murphy

LETTER TO MILAN KUNDERA

LETTER TO MILAN KUNDERA


- poems -

by

Paul Murphy

Paul Murphy - Biography

Born in Belfast, 1965. He studied at the University of Warwick, gaining a BA in Film and Literature. From there he went to Queen's University Belfast to study for an MA on T.S.Eliot and the French philosopher Jacques Lacan. He has just finished a stint as writer-in-residence at the Albert-Ludwig Universitat, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wurtemburg, Germany.

His poetry, literary criticism, book reviews and travel writings have been published in English, Irish and American journals. He has published a pamphlet and one previous book of poetry, and has read from his work in Paris, Cambridge, Galway and Belfast. He is at the moment writing an oral history of the Black Forest, and working on many reviews of contemporary authors. He also writes philosophy and enjoys working on the interface between poetry and philosophy.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Envoi, Never Bury Poetry, Connections, Krax, Poetry Now, Time Haiku, Fire, The Journal, Iota, Poetry Scotland, Black Mountain Review, Curlew, The Quarterly Muse, The Honest Ulsterman, Braquemard, Buzzwords, Marginalia (supplement of Monas Heiroglyphia), Scintilla, The Black Rose, The Purple Rose (USA), Markings.

E-Zines: Baker Street (USA), Seeker Magazine (USA), Can we have our ball back (USA),

I am indebted to Dennis and Rene Grieg of Lapwing Poetry Pamphlets, Belfast, who published the pamphlet The New Life and to Dr Wolfgang Goertschacher and Professor James Hogg of the Poetry Salzburg who published the volume of poetry In the Luxembourg Gardens. Also to all my friends who kept me going through it all.

P.M.

Contents

7 Haiku Sequence
8 Sunday Night in Paris
10 Vision
12 Dream - in a Garret
13 Mandarin
14 Cats - After TS Eliot
15 Letter to Milan Kundera
16 Rain
18 Fraud of Vienna
20 Still Life
21 Three Haiku - composers
22 Spanish Siesta
24 Jim Morrison
26 De-Commissioning
27 Necropolis
28 The Tower
31 Letter to an Unknown Woman
33 The Sea
34 There was Some Talk of the Word “the”
35 Spanish Landscape
37 Haiku sequence
38 The Abyss
38 Whatever That Was About?

For Doro

HAIKU

I

Lemon dawn, under
A brightening sky, I write
Bright, lemon haikus.

II

Lakeside, four swans
Swimming together beside
Wrack of tide, disgust.

III

Crow flight, swan flight day-
Break without you, I can I
Can’t, and then the day...

IV

Out spreads its wings, flying
To the edge of the lake
The swans hover over

V

And disappear, in-
Finity is the dawn...

SUNDAY NIGHT IN PARIS

The lights on the Seine
Are shuttered, fluorescent flowers of life;
The city, in the walk
From Shakespeare & Company to Finnegan’s Wake pub
Is spangled, and stars shine
Like clusters of lime and orange in a glass:
I reclaim a pint of Guinness
And a whiff of Parisian
Wine and garlic, odour retrograde,
Spasm of neutral laughter in
The afterglow of the fire:
In the Chapel of St.Julien Le Pauvre
Fireworks of Vivaldi...

Possibly on a faulty Tuesday
Of a faulty year, my Ich
Rang out along the streets
Nestled in the buildings
On fire, the sunset and declined
Below the rooftops, we entered
The Labour Exchange, but there
Was no information, we
Sat, sat, sat, on into the dusk,
As the Guinness settled,
And disappeared into
The blackened gullet of a day.

A VISION

I

Black hair, black hair, but not the years
Undone, bitten through, petals of memory
Sighs of repose, the garden rose,
Sunlight, vision of unearthly light
Surround you, but not the years
Pulled back, segmented, split like so many seeds.

II

In a dream, jeweled unicorns pulled the hearse
Frescoes of light figured on the wall,
The image of Botticelean Venus
Rising from the waves in baroque dance
All rose and swayed in a trance
Illuminated nightmares transfigured all.

III

The dream betrayed us, led us on, fitfully,
Through each antechamber
Death and decay, unbearable blackness
Beyond the doorway
Lay transfiguration and repose
It was the dream betrayed us
White light, aura of ashes and dust.

IV

The ceiling rose all petalled splendour
Shining, incongruous metal,
The dining room, trays of silver,
Gold, amethyst, pearl, the dinner
Was consumed, the diners slept, avoided speech...

Dream - in a Garret

I am caught in the tedium
The vacant, dimly lit hour
Before dawn, waiting to dream dreams
Birth hour, death hour, so much between,
The emptiness and the dreadful.

MANDARIN

Impresario of the Kingdom
Juggling his confutations, algorithms
Standing there - Mandarin
Echoes, recesses,
A fan weaves the air

Of form, knowing ends and means
Adages, pithy witticisms
Flat full of rags and filth
A hoard of old merde
Coughing, condemning scheisse
In music and poetry.


CATS

After TS Eliot

The perfume-stained cushion
A copy of the Iliad sitting on it
Lamp in the window
Betrayed

The next day is rushing in
Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats,
Odour of puss - stains of puss
The fetid smell of cat’s piss
Cat’s faeces, cat’s claw.

Nip Nip Nip Nip
I fed the cat.


Letter to Milan Kundera

Scent of Parisian Autumn blown in by the wind
A doorstep mottled with white and Prioritaire
Inscribed upon the lid; I imagined him
Opening my message in the country:
An escape from the horrors of the everyday world
Other people; in a garden in sunlight
Sundials peppering the lawn, amber peacocks
Strutting in a cornucopia of light and shadow
Defecating on the roses, the roses which
Stretched in military lines through the garden
Beyond, basking in sunshine, my few words,
Hypocrit, I reader, my brother.


RAIN

Rain is as
We see and feel
Re-perceives the scene
Fourteen
Days
With
water
Only if we construe verse
As symbolic
Of
How
We
Feel:
Thunder in the mountains
Sound of
Death’s incantatory
Shudder
Finding form and somehow
Rejecting meaning
All
The
Time
Time time
Rain is as
The
Dead
Return
Unemotive images
Of
The

Past;
Shapes and constructs
Looking out into
The
Day
Wept, wept
To see the return
Rain falling
Blur of unemotive patterns
Patterns, patterns
Patterns, patterns, patterns
Wishing for ending.


FRAUD OF VIENNA

Aus Wien aus Osterreich, phallic symbols recede
To the horizon this LSD day
Mit Fraud of Vienna in the Cafe Horizontal
In old Wien mit mein madchen
In uniform, naturlich, “Are you on Urlaub
Or here to stay in the city
Of the Founding Fathers of psychoanalysis,
You leper, my friend, my brother,” she said
Mit Steffi, Vergissmeinicht
Staying in the Hotel Mozart, in the stiff armchair.
“I am an Umlautophobe
Germanophile and minor poet:
Holderlin with a chamber pot
Barking mad with syphillis
Or third-rate manic-depression:
Disguised as a minor European aristocrat,”
Said she to me -
With reference to his
Constant changing of underclothes -
“I am a schizophrenic,” my dear
I said, to the American
Heiress, Chicago, Semite,
Viennese, “and Dr Completefraud
Has agreed to treat me
With the brush handle method
Corrected and tested
In this city, possible ECT
And genital grip,”
Imploding with laughter
The sun exploded in a shiver
Mit Tina und Steffi
Reclining in the Cafe Horizontal:

Shards of the afternoon.

STILL LIFE


Under the moon’s halo in dim city street
The unkempt children, I ill at ease
Tease at the still life: revolution within
And only the blank gaze of the street urchins
I could not vent my anger or hope to relive
Another day of this disease, hoping for
Unique, inbuilt hysteria, to ease my condition.

Mahler

Architect of souls
A supreme lapse, rising, falling
Rhapsodist of fate.

Beethoven

Sharp, severe moonlight
Death can be sympathetic
A mid-winter’s day.

Bach
Ashes of two hundred years,
The harsh, unforgiving moonlight
Years between.


SPANISH SIESTA

The endless beaches myriad to the horizon;
Palm trees bend in the evening breeze
I am an outcast; I ask Elisabeth
For a coffee, she gives it willingly
I wanted more; I’ve gone to Villa Seca
Reus, the names fall like Spanish coins.

In memory I’ve pounded this road:
Anyway, the bookies, the bars, the knick-knack shops,
The Euro-discoes with their pungent, techno beat:
In the port Tarragona,
A tanker lists out to sea, like a dying whale,
This was the town where Pontius Pilate was born:
I have made poems out of flowers,
Flowers with Latin names, but somehow
There are no flowers here; two American
Tourists argue, talk to the Spaniards,
Who greet me with downcast eyes:
They must know I’m bad news, there is
Bad news in the offing, bad weather:
I read the paper, dream of gathering mushrooms
In the moonlight: at the Fundacio Joan Miro
I have a reunion with my blatantly unSpanish-
Looking amiga, reading a copy of Ulysses
In Catalan: bizarrity is compounded with
Bizarrity, I wonder why I bother, I could sleep
In the shade all day; Hasta la vista (baby).

JIM MORRISON

Like Christ you are crucified
To the black plastic poster

Your will is undivided
And your attention - elsewhere
As a beer-bloated hippy
That ‘something else’
You pointed to
Is fulfilled in Rimbaud:
You are like Europe
Tethered to the drunken boat of America.

In the Gard du Nord
I was surrounded by your ambience:

And though I did not venture
To Pere La Chaise
I dislike icons

You floated like a buoyant
Sperm whale in my bath

On the 3rd day
I left Paris never to return:

I was soon surrounded by white casas
And Spanish graffiti

Miros, Picassos and Gaudis
I went into downtown Barcelona
Another coup by activists was taking place

I took the metro to the Holy Family


You, Jim Morrison
You remind me of the Sagrada Familla
Another bit is always

Being re-invented.

DE-DECOMMISSIONING

This is a word left out
Of all dictionaries
It is our newly-formed catch-phrase,
It is wedded
To all prefixes and Urs;
Ur-city, Ur-necropolis,
Ur-Babel, before
The explosion of languages
Will render all linguisterie
As meaningless and harmless
As a rack of pistols:
Not meant for de-
Deflowering, de-humanisation
Decontamination, or one
From schooldays
Debagging,

Not that either.

NECROPOLIS


How I remember you -
Lewis Mumford
Because, behind me now
Is the necropolis
The wind fans the flames
Of the little candles -
Placed there for the dead
The Padre Pio statue:
But this was the beginning
Of all cities, in the past-life and afterlife
Of civilization;
I wander into the city
Of the dead, it is no more
Than a row of bungalows
Of neat, little thrones.


Letter to an Unknown Woman

She lies on the sand, a Pallas Athena
I picked up in the street. She said ‘I’ll give you money’
You know the sad story, always unfolding:
And in the lamplight, in the hotel room, here I lie
With an unknown woman, and her story unfolds
In harsh, unsentimental detail.
The Milton we were taught at school, the Blake
Was no preparation for this unpoetic story
Too grimly real, naivety, innocence, honor
I don’t know any real words; on the veranda the lights
Don’t illuminate the unknowable skein
Of this woman’s mind: there is nothing to say
The word love is too rough, too coarse
For this, and for all that I maintain
A chance encounter thousands of miles
From home, is as real as the brushes
With honor and destiny at the doorstep:
The images are unclear, and out of this sadness
This scene, bed, bathroom, light
Is just like the madness we all inherit
I unfold the past, the distorting, reflective
Mirror it doesn’t illuminate anything
It’s not like Tragedy or Epic, it’s real
It hurts too much, and all our blindness
Is uncountable, as the sand grains
Pallas Athena’s head stirs, I sleep too.



THE TOWER

For Steve and Sina

I

The gentle snowfields
A dour, sweeping sky
Wind from Eastern steppe.

II

Each train track is
A finger pointed eastwards,
The stark, segmented light.

III

The tram from Kropcke:
A line of haggard faces
I sit blankly stare.

IV

How is it that we
Never commicate, what
Is this concrete shell

V

Of city. A blasted,
Abstract and pitiless
Core of unbeing.

VI

It was tempting to
Say phallus, but there you are
Wasserturm, so

VII

Zeppelin-black
Pointed at the inselaffe,
England, as if you

VIII

Witnessed junkers, madchen
Fire-pointed streamers filled
The auburn Autumn.


Two poems about the occult knowledge, which tarnished my reputation in Guadalajara, Valledolid, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome and Paris -
for Mebdh

THE SEA

Esta es muy silencioso...

A channel stone turns up bumping on the bottles,
The sea of bottles, echoes, plashes,
Light, no longer, fire, trembling,
Water, underfoot, elements, all things,
Signatures:
The Inlingua School was shut
So I deliberately reminisced, it wasn’t that hard,
You could have said,
"This reference from Professor Pfeffermint,
Unmoglich, unheimlich,
Of the Viennese Institute, is a forgery,
Take them,
They are the Keys to the Kingdom,”
You know I couldn’t have said better myself,
So I did.


There Was Some Talk of the Word “the”

For Elena - dolce naufragere in questo mare...

I am dismissed from my casual post
Of Applied Metaphysician and Neo-Aristotelianism
I have not mentioned anyone
I have not used the word “the”
I have not talked in acrostics, acronyms,
I have been seconded to the Institute of Dunces,
I am not speaking your language,
In fact I am not speaking at all.


SPANISH LANDSCAPE

A piece of paper, pen, light
Waiting for inspiration
To condescend

Distant light, waves, the sea’s shimmer
Daylight pouring through the window breech:
This is a Spanish landscape
Courtyards, villas, sea and sky
Waking at dawn
For composition to begin
The hills, bulbous and shunted
Fat with blossom, the clouds hang
The eternal swansong
Of living flowers, plants and trees
Emotions hang like their colors
A patchwork of grays and blues

The locals I cannot understand
In an unkindred place
I hang listless as a mother tongue without a root

I learn the Catalan for slower
the Castelano for questions
As if this new language
Spoke to me, hangs over the ocean
A thousand suns immortalise its Prussian blue

You who caressed me from torpor
And lifted away the impenetrable night
Are gone, lifted beyond the heat and haze
Of the afternoon, in this place
I cannot understand.

Haiku Sequence

I
April lietmotif
Hang in the air, showers
Of rain and smooth beer.

II

Spanish Jew ambles
In near Arabic gear through
The station’s mid-night.

III

Thoughts and images
This summer afternoon, dark
Moments of Mozart.

THE ABYSS

They’re responding to an aesthetic:
I know this, for after every observation,
Measurement, surreal hypnosis,
You can’t but realize the newness,
The audacity: I liked the absence
Of paint, chords, notes, just
The silence, the chilling, tomb-like absence
The nothingness, the abyss-like bottomlessness,
Like nature it has absolute repetition
Of nothing, even the birds don’t chirp
Nor do the leaves fall upwards, or
The trees crumble, like an old piece of bark
In my sink, you are useless, pretty unaesthetic,
Pretty, pretty, pretty (a bit like me, I’m so vain),
But you are the art I create.

You won’t do, you won’t do,
Back to the abyss with you.

Whatever That Was About?

Put words and connections together
Find the inherency
Not here, not there:
Wine floats in glass with cork
Blood red wine on cherry lips
Oozing blood red cherry halos
Coagulated on my lips.

Whatever love is
A headband on a head
Of thick matted brown hair
Glossy, like a horse’s mane,
Or an endless cornfield, love
Is a definite question mark
Suspended, or written upside down,
A forever, or never.

Like a dry valley one must
Find it, in season,
Or migrate southwards,
For replenishment, by a sea
Of infinite light, or lost in infinite night

It is the thing that keeps us alive,
We, strangers, in our cosmic ditch
Like tramps, after a night on the tear

Search each other, blind men
De-Gaussing, phenomena, magnetism,
It is all lost in the aureate air.

THE SUN RISES OVER ARSENAL, NORTH LONDON

THE SUN RISES OVER ARSENAL, NORTH LONDON

 by Paul Murphy 

Paul Murphy - Biography Born in Belfast, 1965. He studied at the University of Warwick, gaining a BA in Film and Literature. From there he went to Queen's University Belfast to study for an MA on T.S.Eliot and the French philosopher Jacques Lacan. He has just finished a stint as writer-in-residence at the Albert-Ludwig Universitat, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wurtemburg, Germany. His poetry, literary criticism, book reviews and travel writings have been published in English, Irish and American journals. He has published two pamphlets, one previous book of poetry, and has read from his work in Paris, London, Cambridge, Galway and Belfast. He is at the moment writing a history of the Black Forest, and working on many reviews of contemporary authors. He also writes philosophy and enjoys working on the interface between poetry and philosophy. 

Acknowledgements: acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following journals: Penumbra, Other Poetry, The Delinquent, Decanto, Inclement, The Journal, Monkey Kettle, Poetry Monthly International, The Bayou Review (US) 

1. Beyond the Pale 
 2. Sea over Zilch 
3. Addiscombe 
4. Marcus Aurelius will prevail 
5. I need the birds in dawn 
6. Cold Monkeys of Death 
7. Apehour 
8. Ingrain
 9. Life of Giotto 
10. de Nerval's Letter to his Lobster 
11.Popocatepetl 
12.Bertolt Brecht's Bedroom 
13. A Pizzeria, Firenze 
14. The Tube 
15. Minks 
16. Germanicus 
17. A Hoelderlin 
18. Nocturne 
19. Dirt is Good 
20. In the Weinstrasse 
21. Pennymarkt 
22. Bar 
23. The Palace of Tears 
24. There's a girl from Szczecin 
25. Who killed Rudi? 
26. Unbreakable Sticks 2: Profit 
27. The Sun rises over Arsenal, North London 

BEYOND THE PALE 

Francis Bacon is beyond the pale:
Pale fence hoardings or pale-faced children
inhabit distended ghettos split like orange skin.

Bacon flies beaming into the next room.
It is very white indeed for every figure
is conducted into wholes and segments.

Each and every gorilla-suited heroine
talks like Anita Pallenberg or Rin Tin Tin.
Arms akimbo, the end, guillotine, lights, action.

SEA OVER ZILCH

(Mark Rothko exhibition, Tate Modern, London)

The shaley grey picture patina trembles
At the edge of the lemonade yellow drizzle
The shaley grey picture patina trembles.

At the end of the life at the end of the line
At the edge of the lemonade yellow drizzle
The shaley dead artist trembles drizzles.

ADDISCOMBE

A green parrot takes off
Over the trees, the trees of Addiscombe.
At Sandilands I found the pitch,
The pitch without the aid of a sat nav.
With old-fashioned means such as
Asking people: barren encounters
In small shops, small talk, ham, eggs;
The petit-bourgeois of Addiscombe!

At Addiscombe and earlier DH Lawrence
Divided his time between number 14 and 16
writing his novel 'Sons and Lovers' in 1911
or thereabouts, a very good year, you might say
wedged inbetween the Russo-Japanese War
and the Battle of the Somme.

What he did in both houses
Is anybody's business.
spattering ink taking down each bright
green parrot fluttering over Sandilands.

O I remember Addiscombe!
The man in the shop huffing, puffing
pointing beyond technological certainties
to older ways of politeness and custom.

This is Addiscombe, an encyclopaedia of conceit,
A ragged waver of all that's new.
That threw Lawrence out in 1913
So that he must wander the planet,
To Sicily, Australia, New Mexico;
To bow down before dark, inferior gods.

Addiscombe even the parrots have escaped.
The click of sticks, the ball crashing
into the net with a clattering thud.

O Addiscombe, you have betrayed yourself!
O Addiscombe, you have no heart!
O Addiscombe, you have an Aztec mystique!

Even the dawn runs out here.
Even the green in the green
Is quintessential as dust.

Addiscombe, bury your head in shame! 

MARCUS AURELIUS WILL PREVAIL 

I sit and drink beetroot juice
Then sleep for hours in my narrow bed.

Will the Romans appear even in my dream?
Will they rule even for a further 1000 years?
Even those not born to the purple

Sobbing like a wolf’s cub
In the cave that is my dream.
Or in the folds of a bedspread
Are the cold, dead atoms of Marcus Aurelius.

Holding any pilum thrown up
At the Field of Mars
Holding the symbol that is our dream.
All around me the cold dead dream of Rome.

Auxilia, purple, wolf’s cub.
Eagles, legions, vexilium.
Is the cold dead history of a dream.

The cold grey walls of a turret against
The grey of the wolfskin helmet.

The song like the dream stutters on.
So both song and dream are ended. 

I NEED THE BIRDS IN DAWN

I need the birds in dawn
All the showering grass
Uplift hour and beyond.
I mew like a black cat.
I milk myself, sleep content.

I need the birds in dawn
I need them they know
Sleep or stare with a coy wink.
Their glinting eye at my window
Know they are indispensable.

I need the birds in dawn. 

THE COLD MONKEYS OF DEATH

Are all around me,
They are on me and in me
All about me. I hope they do not
Clamber closer. I hope they
Breath closely and leave.
The cold monkeys of death.
Are all around me.

APEHOUR 

The hure is dead

Loved you so, bitter tears:

granite is, is so resilient.


blighted by granitic hardness

all things so fearful: apehour:

so much wasted or wasted.


I see it in the mirror's edges

glimpse the ape within the man. 


INGRAIN 

Pandora, red-haired girl, green dress

Asks herself: 'Time to close or open?'

For Pandora this is the past but no its a box.

Pandora opens her legs to play her musical box. 

LIFE OF GIOTTO 

The Janus-faced muleteers turn to face the sea.
At the edge of the crib plastic Jesus is nursed
By plastic Mary. Her vagina is stuffed with myrrh.

Before a Greek soldier armed with a pilum
Rapes her with it, then with his gross phallus.
Plastic Joseph weeps bloody tears.

Mary has a sudden infarction, dies.
Out pops plastic Jesus, the word Messiah
Perched on his lips like a prohibition.

Giotto utters one monosyllable, turns away.
He has re-invented Aristotle for his own day.
He sees beyond the muleteers to the sea.

Each wave is rippling on an elongated line.
There was a something surround
Happening between Socrates and the Hellenes.

Lone plasticine Pterodactyls circle
Seize plastic Jesus, devour his gonads.

Stone Age and Stone Age together.
Giotto gently lactates, floats away. 

DE NERVAL’S LETTER TO HIS LOBSTER 

My love,

I like your hisses,
And your kisses
All your dreams
And your screams.

Parody paradise
By the red bucket
Could be Heaven or Hell
Sizzle lobster on my string. 

POPOCATEPETL 

 I was in the planning office of the Harland & Woolf shipyard

Passing plans for two drillships bound for the Mexique Bay when

(I knew) It was the Day of the Dead the volcano Popocatepetl)

Then a million whirling hulls and plans of hulls and screws intended

To go through and through things, (but not through Popocatepetl, no).



My body is being hurled into the ravine, meanwhile my dogs are barking.

The grey hulk of a drillship looms. Mr Warnock, the foreman knows

The two ships are overdue and is discretely asking me, the yard pissboy

To go to the Managers meeting and take the rap for him, but I can’t

Mr Warnock for I’m lodged on a broken nook in the ravine.



My jade jewel encrusted skull is brought on a plate to the Manager’s office:

‘This is the head of the man who made the error unscrewing bit A

He really won’t ever make that particular mistake ever again.’ 

BERTOLT BRECHT'S BEDROOM 

Here the poet Brecht lit a last cigar
Rolled over onto his side, expired.
Are you Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht dead?
To annotate the future, he thought,
Downstairs Helene Wiegel
Lay watching Soviet Olympiads
On her regulation plastic DDR Fernsehapparat.

She felt the failing clutch of a Trabant
She felt the last polluted raindrop fall.
Onto the bare graves of Hegel,
Fichte, Heinrich Mann.
Who lay quite dead in
The neighbouring Friedhof.
Soon to be joined by Bert and Helene.

Failing the future as the past
Bukharin's unworked dithyramb
Compounds the morning's cigarette-
induced hangover: Mao's latest verses;
Your 'Ode to Stalin' or King Kong.

White vines disappear into the backgarden
Trellis, ashen, shivering as dawn
Find the shadow of an unworked reshaped heel. 

A PIZZERIA, FIRENZE 

She shines like the Tuscan sun
Blonde hair, mons veneris
All her beauty wrapped up
In daylight sunshine. 

THE TUBE 

Ugly tumours extend as portents
A whole scuttling overture
Shrouded in rain and mist
Descending bomblets pitter patter:

On the heads of those below.
Then music winds, unwinds
Through the rainbow light life
Passes from darkness into light.

I sit, note the stations: Farringdon, Barbican
Moorgate and Liverpool Street.
The names mean little to me.
Just vaguely reminscent perhaps

The names of lagers, detergents.
Everyone packed like pilchards
Damp, dank ridiculous
As metal grinds the tube arrives. 

MINKS 

Foments the heart's lost
Hidden corpses: now new mink
Must be broken; Bob Niarac's
Manky fetid anorak

A flag laced with teeth, hair, tears.
Old sniffling starved minks.
Head for the hills, sniffing the traces
More than blood on the wind. 

GERMANICUS 

It was any barren landscape
Any heap of shields, armour
Mail, purple gowns of Emperors,
Lionskin, wolfskin, Eagles;
Numidian ivory, Parthian silk.

Germanicus emptied his cup.
Inflected birdsong, brown treestump
Reflected in his eyes the distant campfires
Burned like ambition in the night's eye
A fleck of white in the wolf's eye.

The marshes filled with a chill wind
The trees bent under a bleak wind. 

A HOELDERLIN 

A Bavarian black-faced sheep
A pair of headphones,
A wind instrument
Eructation, appetency.

I hold a Hoelderlin and blow
A jazz cornet or saxophone
The hedgerows modulate to the concern
The ever-burgeoning blue note heat.

That rises on a May evening
To clutch every straw hatted star.
That is pinned down
By those black notes and bars.

Burning against the blue heavens
Foaming near the moon’s wave
Its cool glow reflected
In the unending crowds that throng

Dissipate, modulating on the sound
Of trains, blues, moonlight, starshine. 

NOCTURNE 

A revolution. In spite of insanity
Chopin revolved primly and grimly
On the black piano seat he crouched
Like a jaguar flashing eyes, teeth.

So the big black piano was tuned
A Chopin flew past: tit or eagle?
The many bird metamorphoses
And my glass was empty, empty. 

DIRT IS GOOD

Life is rancid cattle
Bending in the June breeze.
Hedgerows filled with plastic cutlery.
Lost gloves, olfactory smells.

Dirt is everywhere and dirt is good,
Says the soap powder ad:
Dirt, death, disease, poverty,
Famine, pestilence, plague, war, genocide

Are good, says the soap powder
Spokesperson. Myriad Madonna

Madonna of the senses, Madonna
Of soap powder: descend and fornicate
With the soap powder spokesperson.
Bed him, give him ultimate fellatio,
Sit on his gross cock, jism of breaking bedspring
Part your vaginal lips, suck all of him

Down into your fecund ovaries.
Make him part to part.
Airfix man, glued yet separate
Flick a switch, fill him with electricity.

Soap powder ovulation
Blacker now than sea salmon, monkey sweat
Glands of heron, herring nosewing
Flowing over your canonical observation tower.

Flay him, part him: lit man bogged downwards
Telling everday lies printed on everyday boxes.


In the Weinstraße


Morbid penny poem:
See the large women become squat
See them ride camels through mazes
See their top hats glimmer in the sunset.

Candy coloured demon clowns snorting coke
Seize me and drag me into their van
Make biological observations, beg for sex

Mmm happy days indeed....

Showing me a projected film history
Illustrate the highpoints of my life
A surreal chimera or broken dandelion
Am riding my bike through the hedgerow

But it was merely the demon clowns.
They´ve gone now, backchat from the talking clock.

A videoed projection in dreamtime
Descending. I wake up. The moon is full.
Riding to its zenith. Jim Morrison would have said
Mooncock. But it is merely the moon.

Hollowed rotund orb flung into the rosebowl night.
Bowl of candy coloured demon clowns snorting coke
All clinging onto the craters
Fingering the moon´s first thought. 

PENNYMARKT

 ´First thought, best thought´ – Alan Ginsberg

Wearing my new nosewing:
Altercation checkout
Fistfight: I hand over
Five euroes. Mania
As my five former lives
Black livid umbrella rose,
Mantic in the rear view mirror.
I see you now, Humphrey Bogart
The sheep all have wings,
Are waiting with axes
Behind your back projected
Twenty piece suit.

Bär

Paradise postponed decrees sheep Robespierre
Cake not bread baas Mutton Antionette
More sheep to sheep speak later
A tricolour waved at each sheeped barricade

More than 200 years after the revolution
A bär crosses the Östrreich Grenze.
Seven sheep meet their personal Waterloo
Now is time to turn and turn

Again, for revolution, war, revolution, war
Each bär is killing and killing sheep
History is history is history is history
History is cycle in sheep-shaped world. 

THE PALACE OF TEARS 

In memoriam - Henri Cartier-Bresson

Here is the Palace of Tears
A stolid, square building.
Bustling crowds cross and re-cross
Enter the U-Bahn, depart.

For homes, workplaces, infernal
Dwellings infested with machines.
Communication is no problem
For a street has a name.

People meet, populate cafes, bars
They have many trivial cares
And many trivial loves and likes
Such talk the future soon forgets.

Beneath the Palace of Tears
Are the trash cans, broken bottles,
Rubble, remains, a yesterday
Broken into, disinterred.

So the crowd disperses
It needs to be told what to do
So intimately, so easily
And a crowd can be led.

Raise a hand, wave a handkerchief
Read out the latest news:
Laugh, cry - the gamut of human emotions.
The eternal photographer grimaces, unkempt

His vignettes and silhouettes and Leica
Camera are everywhere, he is the neatly dressed man
On the train, merely immortal,
Well dressed but cold.

He fiddles with his Leica
He says nothing, he retorts (when questioned)
‘I am a photographer and untrained.’
Not so much a doppelganger

Your brother, he departs.
At the Palace of Tears.
The carriage is chill, not so
Chill as death but almost so. 

THERE´S A GIRL FROM SZCZECIN 

She hangs off the tower
Turning and turning her hands inside and out.

Then she runs around the parabola
To the point of exhaustion.

I saw her face raining tears askew.
I asked her for just one moment

As she runs into the distance. 

WHO KILLED RUDI? 

Was it the wind in Moluccas Street
Or a giraffe in the zoo?

Was it the tell-tale stains on the back seat
Of your BMW kalamazoo?

Was it Frank, Mike or Steve?
Was it the 1960 Trabant

You owned for a day then banged
Into the boot end of 1962?

Was it anyone really, was it me or you
And what if it was?

Can he feel it now, cold, dumb, dead
Can he really come after you?

Is he dead really or merely pining?
What if he died or didn´t die?

Can he disrupt your stag night
Or interrupt your first night

Of onstage delirium, can he fly
Past your window or settle cat-like

Licking ash from your window pane?

Rudi is dead there´s no doubt
Never to come again.

There´s ice and snow tonight
And Rudi is dead. And Rudi is dead. 

UNBREAKABLE STICKS TWO: PROFIT

Write because you must, there's no profit in it.
Sometimes I wish jESUS would candidly aside
(as he swings Between Lucifer and Beelzebub)
'I'm here because I'm here,' he cries.

sOCRATES, before he died wished for a quiet life
some indiscrete profession in a small town:
for suicide is clean, slow, bitter and obscene.

Its the long journey of a dream
As if the light was undiminished now.
But the dark is at my window.

Seems so incorporeal, abstracted, siren's
Shrieking, pursuing abstract thieves through
Square block on block. On fire.

The poet's bacon is saved. As the cops arrive
Socrates, Jesus, Che, Castro, Lenin,
Mother Teresa, Bin Laden

Are unprofitable, faceless, yesterday.

(are all hiding in my wardrobe anyway.) 

THE SUN RISES OVER ARSENAL, NORTH LONDON 

The sun is a bad inkblot, anti-art thrown out of college
A big plastic arsehole farting swirling chaotic matter
About the sky. That inkblot floats on the bathwater
All the dreck of yesterday, a scum or crust of spume.

I want to tell you about loneliness; squared on square
Carpet tiles, dirty at my dreams edges. The sun is screaming
All at my window, wanting to let me know that all the sad
Blobs are people, not lettuces, rows of shirts, CDs,

Wallpaper, helicopter training manuals, filthy magazines
Infested with exploited. It smells like rancid skin
It all peels off when you touch it, you peel off the sun.
Your hideous skin burns to the touch. You need to know?

Look up at the nuclear edges, blame its creation
The hollow portion of a rindless orange
A collage you would have despised to create.
I know I suffer, even vermin and field mice do.