9

They pulled them from the bulkhead
In shirts with bowties & tophats
Heaving them free, embracing them
Like late arriving guests at a ball.

Further out, moving with the swell,
Some more with shawls of red
& crimson cummerbunds & cravats,
& tongues fat with salt, livid blue.

They went naked in Chelmno, 1942.
Hiroshima & Nagasaki were undressed.
Vietnam, a child wore a shirt of fire
That left her nude enough to rest.

No need of costume to expire.

8

The idlest gesture of an arm,
However slight, is born
Of some livid tissue's catastrophe.
Human action, seeming free,
Is finite engine of a subatomic will.
Only death is still.

We are prodigies of helpless motion,
As breakers to the ocean—
The disjointed music of a limb
Plays at the world's whim.
For all our intermittent grace
We are a spastic race.

7

What of all our works?
He spoke softly into the dark.
The dark broke, and lightning
Came, leaping over itself,
And in the light the dark spoke.
But it was no kind of language,
If it was a voice at all
It was malignant and insane
And he climbed back down
Into the hallowed valley.
He sung his child to sleep
And returned to his works.

6

The red-eye flight goes softly on
In the dovegrey dawn—
                   Through the portal
A bleary passenger
                   Watches the lion star
Erupt to galvanise
                   The world of form—
Chimera, of which
                   All dark is born.

In an eastern city
                   A boy walks the dusk,
Suburbs rolling away
                   From the same sun.
In every window
                   Lions are being born.

5

At the cliff edge the ass bucked
Into the atmosphere. The earth
Crumbled, hot sods into the ravine,
Hoofwise into the dark, into the earth.

At the night edge the earth bucked
Into outer space, hot-rock into the dark,
And the soil of space was wet
With rain all through its long night.

The ass was broken into a constellation,
Its flesh was consumed by astral fire
And its bones lashed with the rain
Coming in from Andromeda in the dawn.

4

The old man knelt at the grate
Lancing the knuckles of grey wood
With a poker. Light flashed, a jaw
Of flame rose to the hearth brick,
Writhing, smouldered and withdrew.
Cinders fell into the child's hand.
Faggots broke with a roar inwards
And light bloomed in the wreckage.

The light is child of the fire
And is not the fire, the man said.
Light is ghost of what we don't see.
Fire is the death of wood,
And it is an ancient, starred thing
And it is slow. You see? And he
Passed his hand wholly through.

Over the limbs of the starlit trees
Under the hill, a colourful wind blew.

3

In a garden, candle flowers.

A tide of wind comes in
From the coast, and leads
The blooms to nod, and nod.

The moon shivers in
Upturned leaves of ivy,
In ephemera of algea

Swelling the ornamental pond,
In the sinewed limbs and
Hollows of an oak.

Starlight tangles frogspawn.
Eggs and old light
And a studded placenta

Birthed the same in some
Pool of darkness beyond
Starfactories, in reeds.

Hours pass. The candles,
Burnt down, begin to blur
Toward such an old light.

2

Chain me to a comet,
Drag me by the heels

Through a thicket of stars
And I may be bloodied,

There may be damage
In that fiery ricochet,

         But if I hang

Upon a thorny nebula
My last and wasted rags

And if in millennia that
Iron umbilical is consumed

With age and perishes
And the comet dances free

         I may clothe me

In hydrogen and dust
And be some regent

Morningstar, and pirouette
Across the event horizon

1

Wake from a dream of you climbing
For hours out of a vast lake at night,
The lake a fissure in a dark landscape,
Distant mountains drunk with cloudlight,
Bare sometimes like a cracked scalp.
By some stagecraft the lake illumines
Of itself like an organ of light,
Out of which your pale body rises
Without witness, to some other index
Of temporality—astral or geological—you rise,
As the stars excavate the vaulted dark,
As if a chainsaw of the cosmos
Had rent a cataclysm for you to fill.
The vast waters are innocent of you
But the night is not, starkiller.

Holding to the curtain I survey the world,
Drizzle coming off the trees in braids.
The world is falling from your hair.

Be My Baby

Be My Baby is not a pop record. Not a thunderclap like a call to dance in the masque of the red death, a century bleary eyed waking out of a war with hands darting across the bed for its revolver. Not Cuba the previous October—won’t you please be my baby!—calling out in love an endless stream of serial numbers as the cloud rises, the strings coming in at 2:00 like afterwaves of a nuclear blast stripping a hemisphere apologetically of its flesh, the minutes stretching inchoate into a nebula of undecided time. Not the Spector of death. Not the sweat and grief of a hundred proms, a hundred populations of dancers now on medications in homes and graves. Not the tempo of this mantled earth, its diurnal rolling over into night, into morning. Not the artifact of rhythm and blues construed by some variety of madness into a mercurial force, momentary loss of blood pressure, totem, talisman of some sexual apocalypse hidden in Richard Nixon’s briefcase. Not the song Lee Harvey Oswald may have listened to as he masturbated in the bathtub with a mirror in the other hand and a dove with a snapped neck hanging like the victim of an avian lynch mob from the steel handle of the medicine cabinet above the bath. Not the mushroom cloud pushing phallically into a soft bank of cumulus, cactuses mourning the blasted corpses of New Mexican coyotes, the glow of the cloud like a milkshake, or a puff of magicians smoke, or a god of popcorn that learnt the origin of evil and gave its soul unflinchingly to space, the bloodied head of the desert rearing and falling gaspingly with the sound of horns into a busom of cloud all hung with stars. Not the skull of a buffalo slick with oil like vinyl blood, like the trophy of an alien war fought some distance from the American Empire and brought back home to be made into movies and serialised. Not the insurance policy Job took out, God speaking out of the tornado like some mannequin of a forgotten arcadian shopping mall. Not the Four Horsemen riding out on the campaign trail with Smith and Wessons and microphones taped to their necks like bulging black arteries, screaming slogans out of pandemonic stacks of speakers borne up by slave armies of cherubs, burnt red by the desert and screaming out the taglines of movies and detergents and the names of all the sporting heroes of the past, codewords to the dark door. Not the nuclear fire blossoming like a rose in winter and the rolling drums fading out into a soft night of thunder and eclipse. Not the horse rearing with the bullet between its teeth, appearing in its own hourlong network special, facelifted and laughing like a harbinger of holocaust and ruin. Not the specter of death, grasping blindly into a vinyl night, the lights of every soul long extinguished, dancing off into the next configuration of matter to wait there as the event horizon conceptualises a sun, ready to bloom for a billion billion years when time is come again, our planet but a child of children of matter a thousand years perjured and inane. Birth, and a little span of light, and we collapse with a moan into the fire: woah oh oh oh ohh.