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by Ian Pindar


  high-pitched shrieks.

  JOAN MIRÓ

  MAN AND WOMAN IN FRONT OF A PILE OF EXCREMENT

  A turd like a curious

  cobra or pagan idol, inwardly

  trembling, knows this man and woman

  of old. It is watching and waiting to see

  if they are going to worship it or

  destroy it. It would like to assume an air of

  insouciance. We should worship it,

  she says. Worship a turd?

  Preposterous! says he, waving a tiny

  pick-axe hand, his red snake fixing

  its one eye on her fingers, aching to be

  stroked and choked but

  she is too busy holding up the sky.

  IT TAKES A MAN

  It takes a man in all he might be

  heavy twisted rope of consequence

  of no consequence

  weighed in the balance and found wanting.

  Not a man but a twister.

  Outside the mob demanding: ‘Who comes?

  Who is it now dares speak for us,

  for our lives?’

  The virtues work

  through us. They do not

  indwell. They do not

  inhere. They are not

  in here. There are no

  virtuous people

  only good acts,

  always virtue and its opposite –

  the virtues working through us.

  It takes a man to unmake

  his masculinity, to unmake

  the man they made him.

  We are come to this. Coming

  here in all innocence, willing to hear,

  willing to be made and unmade

  and taught the virtue of checking

  our facts, consistency, avoidance of error,

  making a life appear reliable,

  a narrative, a story we tell others:

  My name is … I live at … I am …

  I have … I want to … with you

  that they may understand who it is

  speaks to them today,

  and who they are every day of their lives

  until there are no more days.

  Someone will come after me and say:

  ‘This poem was said once, as I am saying it

  now,

  as others will say of me:

  “He breathed – he spoke – he stood

  in the garden at midnight and wondered

  at the wonder of a mortal brain

  coming to consciousness, the cruelty of a mortal brain

  coming to consciousness,

  the birth and death

  of individual consciousness.”’

  Living appeals, as you appeal

  to me, as I appeal to the gods – those crazy imaginary gods –

  as I appeal to the soldiers

  beating on my door

  The great Emathian conqueror did spare

  The house of Pindarus …

  But in wartime

  Husbands dragged from wives

  Sons from mothers.

  At Rodez once

  the Nazis in retreat

  shot thirty maquisards,

  smashed in their skulls with stones

  to finish it. At Rodez in August 1944

  the day before the town was liberated.

  At Rodez, the wind out of Rodez,

  whipping the hill, whipping the old asylum

  carrying the cries of the mad

  to the townsfolk, the benighted townsfolk,

  the cries of Antonin Artaud,

  still awaiting liberation

  at the psychiatric hospital

  with its garden and little chapel,

  the asylum where he grew his hair

  and was visited nightly there

  by his daughters of the heart.

  EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT ANTONIN ARTAUD

  Everywhere I go

  People are talking about Antonin Artaud.

  Turn on the radio

  Radio 2

  And it’s Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu.

  Everywhere I go

  People are talking about Antonin Artaud.

  Turn on the theatre of cruelty

  (I mean the TV)

  And the housemates are in the garden discussing Van Gogh,

  the man suicided by society.

  And there’s nothing the man in the street doesn’t know

  About Artaud le Momô

  Because everywhere I go

  People are talking about

  People are delirious about Antonin Artaud.

  THE WASP AND THE ORCHID

  … and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid …

  A THOUSAND PLATEAUS

  Hiding its one

  terrible testicle

  underground it rises

  Venus-like, immodest

  bloom, complete with eyes,

  antennae and wings,

  its prominent labellum

  (‘covered in long dense,

  lustrous reddish hairs’)

  ‘similar in colour and structure

  to the female wasp’s

  abdomen’. It even

  smells the same: ‘a floral

  scent that imitates

  the sex pheromone’.

  Suckered by this

  counterfeit come-on, it

  attempts copulation

  (properly ‘pseudo-

  copulation’) – mounting

  the labellum ‘with

  vigorous waving of

  wings and abdominal

  probing’, ‘the genital

  claspers at the tip of

  the abdomen partially

  open’. The wasp becomes

  a part of the orchid’s

  reproductive apparatus.

  A becoming-wasp of the orchid.

  A becoming-orchid of the wasp.

  . . .

  Having plucked

  its rose it rests, horns of pollinia

  on its head, before flying

  on to the next false female.

  ARMAGEDDON

  The boy in the white nightgown

  has escaped again. These woods

  are damp. I am invisible.

  Sincerely I believe in

  the Society of Blood,

  the Sick People and

  the Mountain. I am still

  listening to the sea,

  still repeating myself. Something

  has happened to my right hand.

  It won’t be polite to

  the authorities, it won’t

  make a fist in the air.

  Women always make

  an impression. You

  were tender beyond

  compare. The memory

  of the two of us does not

  console. Your face, a

  glowing coal.

  I am weary of being

  examined. I prophesy:

  a wilderness is essential

  to humankind, an indifferent

  wildness, full of varied

  shapes and colours, loves and

  sympathies, and incapable

  of guilt. Perhaps a violent

  storm overnight could transform

  this mute material,

  shape it, as I never could.

  Without the strictures of

  a plot the results are

  as we find them:

  the crash of a statue

  in the dark. I tried to

  remember where I was going

  and what it was you wanted

  me to do. You always told me

  I would die alone,

  My Night Apple,

  my little former friend.

  BLACK JELLY BABY

  ‘… and there is no reason to demand

  that immigrants should renounce

  their nationalitarian belonging

  or the cultural traits that cling

  to the
ir very being,’

  says Guattari in The Three Ecologies,

  but don’t try explaining this

  to your friends down

  the pub late one

  evening after

  work over

  a few pints or

  first the one will

  denounce you:

  RACIST!

  Then the other

  (closer to your heart):

  RACIST!

  white faces of anger and indignation.

  Racist, they’ll call you

  racist and you’ll try to

  explain but they’ll

  call you racist

  and storm out

  into the night, and you’ll sit

  there many eyes upon

  you and smoke another

  cigarette with trembling

  hand, then walk

  home alone to your crappy

  flat and wonder

  what all that was about.

  And the next day your

  friends will send you

  an email calling you

  Enoch Powell

  but lunchtime will bring

  a bag of jelly babies by way of

  a peace offering

  and you’ll take

  one and one of them

  will say: ‘It’s a black

  one! It’s a black one!’

  and you’re not sure if

  you should eat a black

  baby but you

  eat it and they are

  happy and you

  chew the jelly baby

  chew it all

  up

  and swallow it.

  KISSING

  On our last day

  when I kissed you so

  passionately, you had every right

  to bite off my tongue and spit it out.

  Instead you cried. I cried two

  days later, listening to a Jew

  on the radio describe

  how he survived Auschwitz

  by the skin of his teeth.

  The skin.

  The teeth.

  DUST

  For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

  GENESIS 3:19

  Tout cela se résume finalement, pour reprendre Duchamp, à un «élevage de poussière».

  JEAN BAUDRILLARD

  Dust over

  everything. Nothing

  but incomplete

  exposures and

  obscured views.

  The ambiguity

  of moving parts

  never seen

  in toto

  and never explained.

  Motionless pennants

  and the heart

  of a machine

  beating, crystalline,

  housed in an underwater

  cavern, visited by

  defeated characters

  after dark

  half-dressed and

  curious, half-alive,

  who die

  if awoken,

  before they can

  touch

  the beating heart that isn’t a heart

  but a natural formation in the rock

  and there is no machine.

  LOON

  A STUDY IN HYGIENE

  I

  Lo!

  Loon is

  Loon was

  alone and never alone

  being in the world.

  II

  No!

  Loon has

  no past

  no future

  being in the present.

  III

  Loon forgets

  everything. Also:

  Loon forgets

  everything.

  (Memory is

  unhygienic.)

  IV

  Loon has no

  interior.

  (This poem, too, is all

  exterior.)

  V

  Loon was

  Loon is

  at the mercy of

  encounters

  events

  sympathies

  antipathies.

  He flees

  the sad

  the anxious

  neurotic

  paranoid.

  Sadness is

  contagious.

  A slave logic.

  VI

  Loon has experienced more than once a revelation, though seldom any sense of levitation, being bound by the laws of gravitation, occasioned by his inclination to inebriation, to which must also be attributed his tendency to profanation and the occasional eructation, through the incautious potation of liquids created by an ancient process of fermentation and whose stimulation is generally held to be the ruination of many a fine soul whose life ends in dissipation. But far from making this a cause for lamentation, as would many who find Loon a source of extreme irritation and look upon his irregular ambulation as a cause for disapprobation or even condemnation or at the very least grounds for the confiscation, in accordance with the relevant legislation, of what he fondly and without hesitation calls his medication and only consolation, resulting in a confrontation with those who would subject him to interrogation, using insult and intimidation, with a view to his immediate transportation or deportation, or who would at the very least, adopting a sombre and serious intonation, call for his reformation, regarding him as a blight upon the nation, we offer no explanation, other than to point out the obvious correlation between Loon’s desolation and his exaltation.

  VII

  Illness narrows Loon’s

  possibilities.

  (Skip this part

  if it tires you.)

  VIII

  Loon is

  USELESS,

  rejecting the capitalist values of production and exchange.

  IX

  In death did Loon transcend

  in some inscrutable way

  the matter of which he was composed?

  X

  He did not.

  SILENT SPECTRES

  Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour … It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.

  MAXIM GORKY ON FIRST SEEING A MOVING PICTURE

  Sound is superfluous in

  death’s realm, in

  faded prints.

  Narrative lost, morbid

  radiance,

  shimmering

  liquid tremor. They shudder

  and blur, shift and

  bulge as in

  a funhouse mirror. Scuffed

  snapshots of

  reality passing,

  most beautiful when

  their strength is least

  assured.

  These shadows posturing

  resemble dimly,

  dimly recall

  the duration of

  bodies,

  the ancient forms

  empirical, action

  reaction.

  Is it still life

  at 18 frames a second?

  Is life only a question

  of speed?

  THE RAINY DAY MURDERS

  Bring the girl into the basement,

  The sophomore, and cast her down

  On the bloodstained and mouldy mattress.

  Let the Doberman Pinschers above bark

  As you tie her to the wall, and let the wind

  Through the broken window

  Move the hooks descending,

  Then everything goes into reverse and a happy ending.

  Listen to her breathing,

  Missing the people she trusts, the camper van

  On the beach where she spent her last night,

  The rain erasing all sign of a struggle.

  If she has stopped hoping it is because

  Your mouth is at her ear, so close

  There can be no more pretending,

  Then everything goes into rever
se and a happy ending.

  AN ACCIDENT IN SOHO

  Your third marriage collapsed like an old barn.

  The crash of it silenced the saloon-bar chatter

  like the cry of a newborn.

  You never expected to stumble and shatter

  like a fumbled glass, or drown

  among strangers in a bar.

  On sunny days, the curtains drawn,

  Pernod on tap but no beer,

  the décor emerald green and gold,

  your early promise unfulfilled,

  you hid away from the world,

  certain you had failed.

  Your looks dropped away with the years

  and the people you knew.

  The son you stopped talking to cried real tears

  at your funeral, but not for you.

  LOST

  lost in living

  making love

  and a little money

  the heart

  grieving

  lost

  attention

  inattention

 

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