I.

 

and there's times, obviously, when the heart's diesel droning

inert and idling, waiting for the full beat again; it's awkward then

phlegm, the cusp, sidetracked thought local trains disrupted, love, sheared off, wrecked

in some suburb, the sharpest glimpses cauterised with alcohol, perfume

tongue's diffused litmus tests conduits space lacunae stagnant canals

corridors turnstiles tables labels turntables enclosures thresholds habituated to

bricks and occasional letters litter stale urine gasometers retching pins and needles bad eating habits bad reading habits bad skin the soon-to-be-quaint making of comp tapes amphetamine-fuelled maniacal wanking over memory's glossy polaroid palimpsests

idiocy amnesia the smell of coffee coinages shouting through thin walls arousing strangers' pasty bug-eyed enmity speaking as if another language planning preposterous seductions dining on bread and wine the ticking growth of bristles and airborne dirt sky's twilight cortex

blotchy enflamed muffled tv sets grease on the fingers......

 

 

 

 

II.

 

a security camera, an extractor fan, an exit sign, a leadlight window....

jaded in a faded booth in the rochester castle, disconnected gaze drifting up,

i was brushed by the downbeat of a corvid angel's wing, the sudden flash that, were i on my deathbed, with my eyes about to close, i would feel such an unbounded flood-of-love for

these humble, functional things, the last of the works of man that i was to behold...

and lest you think me maudlin and that i should perhaps swear off certain stuff, let me

with resignation (enervated bravado) plainly state

no glass brimming burgundy in slanting rays, river refractions,

no such goblet of cathedral light, set gently before me will ever suffice;

a mere stalactitic ruby drip in an eternally thirsty chthonic lake --- the resultant ripples

trace the weird call, set restless electrics, currents, stirring;

i'm dimly alerted to an undivined well that disturbs my sleep;

i was doomed to suffer (but got distracted.......)

 

 

 

 

III.

 

the first purple storm swells ripe to meet its skin (a pupa in its chrysalis!)

then ruptures magnificently to unfurl (all vision) illuminated wind! after the rain

has let off steam great stains trickle down the brutalist expanses of bare concrete block;

it's as if those careless edifices have pissed themselves! waterloo's brooding, indifferent monuments to homelessness ...wracked by hangover's obloquy (river murmuring vagaries) why wanly make meek amends? blah haunting thoughts, encrusted nostrils, corrosive neural particulates clogging breath's eroding pathways blah. i miss our dank burrows south

of the river, crumbling railway arches where we rehearsed our songs, recombined sundry hermetic texts, swathed in stale stench of spliff and cigarettes, beer and sweat, mapping the retarded waltz of invisible spores' nebulae .........formulae of great efficacy

were devised and lost to posterity. there are traces of key tracts in isolated pockets

all over the world, but much that is fundamental has been smothered

under clumsy, degraded later additions, all of dubious provenance.....

 

 

 

 

IV.

 

our familiar ‘scapes made sudden with death (the gilded yielding of airy boughs, buds and leaves now petrified stark and harsh, (sky, like a smudged page torn) that formerly formal drowsy sward now bristles with misty dripping daggers (most refined, romantic and cruel of blades........) bejewelled with precipitate beads, poison green cold copper beech

i always hoped those fumbles in darkened party hallways would lead somewhere,

not these lonely, gusty parks with a damp arse, listless and exposed to

pigeons' grotesque insistence on parading their unseemly fixation with mating, subject

to arcane by-laws: "no radios, no instruments" - no unscheduled listening permitted,

be grateful just to be allowed to sit, buffeted by the choked bluster of traffic, clanging flagpoles

and the howl of stood-up tower blocks - congestion an aesthetic - ineffectual

nasal spray, an accumulation of riparine clay in the brain, shopping trolleys,

tyres, the torso of a small boy...i'm out of credit and my phone's dead.

i should take out a contract...

 

 

 

 

V.

 

....on myself. but did i mention the parks? the magnificent parched parks

of the capital that summer, coarse yellow hessian lawns.......

out-of-it-at-work, skiving on-line, fancifully tongue-tied, the languid hanging gist

is always there to be got, (pick up where we left off...) aestivated evenings' muzzy submarine dreamtime slips by with insidious ease, refuse in the room piles up:

newspapers (plus ‘supplements', ‘weekend magazines') bookmarked books, wine and water bottles, dust a constant drizzle of skin for mites (my unseen minions!) to feast upon,

(manna from a far lesser heaven), middle-of-the-night-stew-of-the-day

from the turkish place, a glance at a chance passage

(moved to real-too-easily-real tears by the centurion's epiphany)....

the game is on, the pubs are packed, the blare of tv's

interwoven with the breeze, like the amiable, tipsy flight of the bumblebee,

the wavering, stumbling intelligibility of half-heard commentary....

 

 

 

 

VI.

 

this availability, boon and bane, boon and bane;

i was moved in the moment, disconcerted by the hour,

prone to a regrettable tendency to romanticise oblivion,

raddled contemplation of awquidditas etc. (the id = 'i'd'. get me?)

crossing the internal courtyard, the clack of her heels, black seams tattoo,

the sagging canvas of the rain-battered marquee the morning after the festivities...

my mind wandered meanwhile; i was entranced by snail trails on mausoleum steps, glistening like seams of some precious, ectoplasmic mineral, strung like the tinsel score for a rare silvery, lilting, distracted music. the tip of your tongue is my flickering home,

the balanced absence of wind between branches in raw space. in the cuttings

glance/Grenze flash autumn iron tracks, gravel and leaves - death's

sodden ochre missives, which needn't trouble you now;

they're not addressed to you; not yet, anyhow...

 

 

 

 

VII.

 

tho' sometimes i fancy i hear her moaning through the walls,

in the ache of writhing pipes, the twist of a tap torture,

touched, tender and sore, beyond the mere reach of rivers

(rain's rehearsal) the ancient floodmeadow seeps

up through sheets, the sweet hollow, saline curve of her helixed back....

at night especially it becomes possible to discern in the plumbing the disturbing

gurgle and hum of the weird interdimensional machinery behind (inside!) the houses' walls....

the city in general is of course haunted on a far vaster scale

by this subdued but insistent engineered thunder, ominous borborygmus,

the restive mutter of a perpetually incoherent cosmic ventriloquism.....

and to make matter (sic) worse, the craquelure scoring the richly begrimed surface of the walls here - its fine tectonic tracery - both belies and suggests the awful proximity of the most sinister fissures and abysses; i must tell you: i fear more for ‘reality' than my own reason!

 

 

 

 

VIII.

 

aspects auspices - the spire of st luke's (hawksmoor) winter rose crystal sun,

the cormorants' tower, a shabby hunched heron guards the mouth of the tunnel, (sullen sinister psychopomp), gilded silver atlantean shopping carts' brittle mercurial

gleam in the canal's greeny deep...just past the drinking island met an old friend;

he was leaving, gave me some pills; funny, we used to kinda measure ourselves out

that way then...i have kept these things, trinkets, keepsakes, tat (tvam asi),

objects around which the rickety nexus of memory coalesces...

the tv mast, stone dinosaurs, flocks of ring-necked parakeets and

in surrender, haemorrhage of rueful fire, dusk clotting thick and purple on the horizon

at the foot of the hill under the demonic gaze of headless statues....

from the bus on the way back down i see people

rise in their rooms above shops, cross them, sink back into the dark

like fish in uplit aquariums (flaring auric)

 

 

 

 

IX.

 

(do you remember the occidental? i was the other night pissing in a pub (name escapes)

and that splash on ceramic (oh, there's no satire as deft, swift and light

as the tinkling bright peal of piss chuckling into the trough)

the dainty toxic cupcake scent of those urinal deodorant tablets, head tilted back, released

a flash flood of memories: watery beers (lion red), smoke, the carpet,

upholstery, wallpaper and fake gaslight fittings a symphony of dinge, a gloomy, grimy still life

(dead game birds of some european kind we could not identify, lustreless fruit and lugubrious hounds) the afternoon grande dame with her bloody marys (i wish i'd at least once talked to her)...outside a glorious spring afternoon breezily squandered

it's gone now, like so much that touched (sunk in) and faintly pulls still in that city,

gone as if swept away by a drunken, absent-minded caretaker

humming a stupid song. it's a part, a remnant of the reason i left,

looking for a more indelible history....) air across the eye like fire jetstreams

 

 

 

 

X.

 

that easy eloquence of youth eludes now; i still admire and now envy articulacy

but its stream is heraclitean and silence seems so deep....

gulped cold apple juice from the fridge; that helped

for an hour or two. warmth creeps in, warmth seeps away,

things are shared shed go astray disappear

into thin air's intimate void constantly, the lissom

drifting smile of shimmering dust, motes' slow-mo cascade,

a profusion of roses on blenheim gardens estate

ballooning in the sun-encumbered breeze, cracked brick

stutter bright spindly spray of lilac's skeletal static

sharp as that single beam aslant that falls askance

and in an instant shifts and undermines nothing

but all of us

 

 

 

 

XI.

 

guest in the flesh, mercy catch glimpses in glass, flat shop fronts

is god with bated breath and (parenthetic) curve of cars' screens;

what you see behind your head they all distort

shadow mirth / the shimmy of meniscus distract and refract

in the just-set-down-again into that too true,

carafe near dark distance

decant descant recant

drink gilds the hours these brittle spheres of activity,

thunder hatching in the trees, stir of the leaves' bourgeoisie,

expectant green chatter of folliage (the performance is about to begin)

blackbird pouring forth in the estate's evening cherry blossoms

soft pink froth,

the wind rising, undecided.......

 

 

 

 

XII.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

XIII.

 

so clouds' wispy shift and swifts' stitching embroidered

the high canopy of summer sky now

leaves pave the palace of the wind,

deciduous the years ephemeral exhaustive record

an archive in perpetual erasure yet eternally relied upon....

pixel embers dim another approximate aeon on stand-by

empty fluorescence of staff kitchens and lunch rooms

after hours communal infinite else

lights' weft loom diaphanous

but oh, there is death between us (death alone, but not only)

something drastic amiss with time: unconfirmed lunatic reports

of stars of fluctuating metallicity lung-lights

galaxy of lit blood all only now ( a sweet for the descent?)

 

 

 

 

[excursions] (skerricks I)

 

shadow and echo, don't they fall in love?

• yen yen-chih

 

 

 

 

 

dim recollections; the lake's acacia twilight

skimmed hirundine orbits ripple

 

stippling the obsidian mirror

 

 

 

 

 

blasted shell of a once vast oak,

a garland of rooks,

ghost mistletoe

 

 

 

 

 

tin sun in sea mist

engulfing the birdsong

the cliffs

 

 

 

 

 

the wilted shades of bluebells in late may

make processional

our wayward way

 

 

 

 

 

 

rain, hangover, rain

still,

early days

 

 

 

 

 

die Ebereschen, ihre bittere Beeren,

die leere Flaschen

und ich so....

 

The poem Londinium, by Cameron Bain, was written to accompany Max Reeves' recent and eponymous photography exhibition at the Barbican Library (3rd-28th November 2009). Max Reeves' work also featured in Mute Vol 2 Issue 14 , avalaible at http://www.metamute.org/node/12999.