i must come to learn
what is essential, that is
to say to learn to
listen
much harder.

in the event of love
or catastrophe:

take flight.

a fascist walks into a bar
that you're swinging into his face
like you're knocking it out of the park
with all of your might
because it is the only
appropriate course of action.

yes, it is
so, that
the word
is the ******
of the thing—
but it
can happen

that a name
gives life.
it is so say it is
so. say it is. it
remains.
a trace.
at least
forever say forever as if forever
will never
have been
the same
again.

we
will always
have
always
come
what may.
say come what may.
as if always would be always.
a wager.
if you can. if you can.
for you can.

the discovery
of others
is the greatest discovery
anyone
could ever make.
recovery is more than an empty sound.
if you
don't know
this truth, then know
you are close.
closer than you could ever know.
resume the struggle
and you shall be
rewarded
in full.
between one and another
there is a pilgrimage without end.
a friend will save your life.
the body
is the location
of grace.
all the beauty of the world
can be witnessed
in a single caring face.

i must learn to stop staying up so late
as if my wakefulness could keep tomorrow
at bay. i never learn. perhaps i'm lonely.
but am i not here, in the milky way?

it is not enough to know the name. no.
he had told me, always will be enough.
i'm still to learn the meaning of these words.
there is nothing on the other side of

the word: this is the meaning of the earth.
it is not a tragedy, or at least
it does not have to be. it might be worth
our time, to enquire if we are free.

i've lost what i didn't see coming
—i saw it go all too clearly.
i can only wait and hope to find
what i won't see coming again,
and again,
joy.

loneliness is a love that cannot communicate
not even with itself.
the way out is the way home, and back again.

quit your search for the attention you so desperately want
and learn to find
and love the attention you're already getting.
this is not quitting while you're ahead,
this is not getting left behind.

do unto others as you would have done unto yourself
and do for yourself what you would do for others:
take care.

i came here by chance
i remained here by chance
and for the sake of chance
i decide
i will struggle on.

do not die for a definite nothing.
live for an uncertain something
to come, for it shall certainly come
so long as you bet your life on it.

awake
waiting

for the call
that isn't coming.

i cannot let go
of what i cannot
hold on to.

what beauty there must be
in the lines
we forgot to write down,
for what beauty
is not forgotten anyway?

yours, yet, lest you forget.

opening up,
driving
them away.
opening up again,
the only way.

who could you be
if not metonymy
under another name?

i am learning to love with my ears
for if there is such a wonder as love
beating hearts are too frail a vehicle.
a heart hears nothing, a voice is the all.
i could not want for more than a voice.

so it was there in a one-way mirrored sea
like the symphonies of last nights missing
like dreams, tying together a raft of flotsam
and bottles with only their messages
keeping them afloat, the rocks at the bottom
of the glasses, delirium, the deserts
of time, trying to re-member the mind
dis-membered across a splitting headache
that will teach you as much as zen anecdotes
you tell other people, you only have
what was already running out before,
where someone left the idle shore to lose
and be lost to you who will miss the bliss
of whispers before that last kiss, like a grand mirage.

the body of the name lying naked on the tongue

the touch of rust

the sunset at the change of the season

the sea coming home to a lonely shore

the lips asking for more, the ears the amorous organs

emptied of echoes, the cities built on bones

from scrambled noise emerges syntax

that conjugates attraction in parallax

and someone or not-one spoke a metonymy of solicitude

in the beginning in the end, in the garden in the ruins

events ever fragile, encounters that were almost nothing

the hounding difference between a thing and a word

between us and us

between the data, the predictions thereof

and the unexpected

that we have not yet learned to trust

the body unspoken, the touch untranslatable

infinity is easy to reach – woe to them who find infinity when they had sought for eternity,
and mistake the two

who saw them dancing beneath the streets, at the beach?
no-one

a sea between, multiplicity, vectors in every direction, noise—

i can’t hear you
you’re too far away

the only difference between you and me and all the rest
is distance and intimacy and all the rest

speech is belief

an abstract navigation

a threshold unto itself

somewhere else, far off

hell now. hell later. heaven lost.
earthbound. lost-bound. losing ground.
never cede the territory of desire.
ever hell. keep on. keep lost. on-bound.
dispossessed of a heaven at your feet.
your feet treaded heaven, your body enfleshed heaven
and can again. ever again. earth again.
hell now. hell later. ever on.
never lost. no-where to be found. now-here found.
now-here on. no-where lost. now-here bound.
no-where bound.

a voice is solitude,
impenetrable,
somewhere else, among
others.

"****
the romanticisation
of despair"

a surface of water, still, no depth, no body,
surface only in name, water more than name,
a trans-finite plane; ripples out of nothingness,
still again, ripples again, a mirror again, disturbed again;
reflections clear as day, a void, a chaos, lost constellations,
new constellations, a cosmos,
a black sun, a radiant dark,
disturbed again, ripples again over the surface of pure experience:
who else but us?
experience only in name—us, only in name.
who dares becoming-ocean wins.

rust is the template of our salvation.
we are all drug addicts and prostitutes,

                                                   ­                                except there are exiles.

we fixate on the mirror to escape
ourselves.

there are no real words, we vanish into
a misspelled being. sight imaginary; thought
symbolic; only touch is ever real.

it’s impossible to think your way out

                                                            ­                           of a refugee camp.

you can only struggle

or be privileged
enough to move like capital across borders
(freely).

the other is injected into me:
it is the denial of the addiction
that is making me sick. *semper eadem.

tempests out of breath.
better an experiment
gone horribly wrong
than a life left untested.
rest, repeat, difference.

better to have slept and dreamed
and dreamed and dreamed and dreamed.
staying up all night
where you are far away dreaming.

i have hit rock bottom, and now i am
pestled into it. my body has been
forgotten, my metal appendages
are becoming independent. o man
you beast, you insult to beasts, you maker
of beasts please i beseech you unburden
yourself of yourself and me now learning
i have squandered my learning and learning
of my eyes and teeth, lips and tongue and wonder(s)
unclean, torn, horror, rot set in where hoarded.
lexicographers of injustice all
bribed to omit that which was done to you.

by that time every body ventured
had been a surrogate. a gateless gate
left completely unopened wide
so too was i. pretending pretending.
they emerged out of nothingness like
heart valves. metaphysics could not hold them
shut or otherwise. the step-ins force me
down and out like the street hands ignored.
i am just a shadow in the dream of a ghost
of these flows of light that are lost on you
like so many endless turning maelstroms
at a molecular level, i too
not noticing through all the commotion
i am in the orbit of a black sun.

my life is either empty

or too full to appreciate what’s there.
i must set off from the middle
and get lost
if only i wasn't so obsessed with figuring out where i am.

the poet in me is shorthand for everything i dislike thereof
his clumsy wrist smudges what there is of worth amid his average words.

the soul is in the noon shadow of the very profoundest rock bottom
and the receptacle fills with sorrow still
joy erupts subterranean and bursts high enough to stain the heavens
no matter where they fall
for they must fall if we’re all to eat.

i am learning i cannot deal with silence
because for too long it has sharpened my inner ear
and it is cutting into something unpleasantly.

simply
you set free in me
that which would live fully.

by that time it was the second worst time of my life
by now it was the third

unless you’re a mathematician
infinity
is a dream
but this set-up is not-all
keep your trans-finites, we'll keep our dreams

if Nietzsche teaches us anything it’s that we had to invent laughter
if only to live with our tears
but he teaches us many other things, useless and wonderful things
like dancing

and Seneca asked why cry over parts of life
while the whole of it calls for tears
and well
perhaps because its parts come too few
or too many at a time

all we lack are general and special theories of error

decisions
against decisions

it’s true you have to repeat the same to reach something new
but it only happens through that final repetition
that infinite fold
where you’re told

you’re untold

again

rest

yet

your wisdom will get old before you do

your unrest will outlive you and i know it’s no comfort but resistance is never futile
just look at the ant slaves stolen at birth with no future who revolt against the empire of their oppressors to spare their former homes where their same blood struggles on again nameless
and drop the drugs if they impede your work and stop you from being the animal at your limit
if they cut off your body from what it can do
there’s even less than no future for you

‘my dear sea up in arms at the wrong shore’
i was a beached whale
but yes Don Paterson can **** the time like no other before it kills me

and as for the tests to come, sum(s) will have cheated you all out of two or three centuries at best

unless

living for predictions
will ruin your life.

bathed in these colours like petals falling

from the fragile mosaic of hazard

finding you far off shingles and caverns

far from me that is:

fragments, multiples, deserted islands

discoveries

stellar puzzle pieces of no design.

the passions rising the tides of asking.
in the grapples of night quenching thirsting
       more.

there is for lack of want no lack of want
of want, nor time lost in the direction
       of origins

of endings

of one unfinished.

before you know it you have set up a world
of selves and others
where one of you – more often more – is bound to get hurt.

the stories telling themselves
apart.
the whole remaining inconsequential.

the body will not be accepted
as easily as day
gives itself up.

treading the shifting waypoints
the choices waysides of occasions
of partials.

i set out like a madman
into the streets of alibis
looking for a word
as incongruous as love.
before i knew it, all the lights
were switched off.

it’s not a light story.

i just think before knowing you won’t know that it’s something you don’t want to know
so if you take this road
know i will be running ahead
and i may fall for all my looking back.
turtles all the way down.

i’m like the world, i’m in permanent crisis
but like the world i am vast
i hide serene places, and lonely places full of factories
and deserts populated by those sharing triumph
and defeats and misery and not the means for us all
and by all means let the flowers bloom in the ruins
but worker bees will be needed and the right dance to boot.

this pen writes out the end, my walking stick,
my staff for parting seas on this planet
that’s personal and purely arid.
this spells out the end, this called here and now:
new beginnings
tides summoned
sails set
ends of the earth reached and leaped across.

waiting
waiting for someone to have been waiting.

the empires that seep into the marrow
of the bones breaking under the weight of
ghosts from every time period leaden
with unrevolted tools – unreal futures
exchange on tomorrow collaterals
echoes of empty homes unheard amid
the jeering of parliament and bomb drops
racket media revolving doors all’s
for the taking when it comes to foreign
resources or big business building walls
and the means to defend them and to send
people fleeing as if turning treadmills
of off-shore profit in hoards and stomped on
for state’s sake or fossil fuels which are like
investment banking and nuclear subs:

we do not need them, they will **** us all.

i am just a shadow in the dream of a ghost
of these flows of light that are lost on you
like so many endless turning maelstroms
at a molecular level, i too
not noticing through all the commotion
i am in the orbit of a black sun.
your woman, your woman does not exist.
a man is made of insecurity
and all the history of violence.
the symbolic universe is not
big enough for freedom. it will not be
expanded by words: detention centres
must collapse – yarl’s wood, its whole idea, a start
to end systematic sub-contracted
sexist racist subsidised violence.

and man should rather perish than take and steer
and twice rather perish than make himself
hated and feared. he said from on high
paraphrasing a misogynist.
britain: two women a week are murdered
at home, by a partner or ex-partner;
one third turned from refuge for lack of space;
austerity closes thirty-two refuges
and counting.

by that time every body ventured
had been a surrogate. a gateless gate
left completely unopened wide
so too was i. pretending pretending.
they emerged out of nothingness like
heart valves. metaphysics could not hold them
shut or otherwise. these step-ins wear me
down and out like the street hands ignored
the talk of the place of the door replaced
on its hinge other not left unswung yet
yet, another could not find their way in
for lack of my trying, for lack of want
wanted, of a whole ark’s tender madness
where like palestine every olive branch
burns to cinders of grief
on no tv.

here no messages to be drawn, or else: struggle.

other than something or nothing
caught up in the scrambling of being and non-being
only where we can catch glimpses
of the joyous multitudes of a life
like fireflies in the dark.

here again
thinking of what could have been
and what will never be
again, never
—enough.

dark consuming thoughts:
cannibals
secreting themselves.
(out of the nothing, no longer,
that was the voice of truth.)

today is a miraculous disaster, like the same before but repeated: something new and undialectical. now i hear footsteps in the corridor of the sanatorium skull sanctuary. thoughts of the proto-symbolic muse have crept in like winter mists over the empty fields as the sun sets again. turning over in bed. deferred, all around me, the dead ones, the days, the exiles. teach me to speak
a language to-come
for the waves of love have long been forbidden from this one. aftermath of machine makers: beautiful, too feeble a word. the notions of self and hatred have become too antiquated and too childish for self-hatred to be of effect. wastelands too have their day. the way is non-lineal, wrapped in complex points. seeking to saturate the atoms of a life: immanence. seeking to witness the vistas of a soul’s minimum of two multiplicities. it’s too easy to spend too long counting your obsessions. the sovereign says nothing again, it’s nothing new, it’s not nothing either; it’s not something to stay silent about. the day is gone; but stay a painting with me a while longer. the day is gone; how many of us are forgotten? i don’t remember
when i stopped counting.

barred
from the body of paradise,
i seek for knowledge.
experimenting, transgressing:
the ethical act—
fleeing:
all the while in search of brick-like concepts
and comrades to throw them with
and build with,
whether it be barricades for the many
or shelters for all.
we'll look back, and say that our salvation was in fact the Fall
or we shall not be:
praise be to Eve, teacher of freedom,
the courage to stand, be counted, and refuse,
and love too;
praise be to Eve, breaker of the neurotic's dream,
my Venus and pioneer of the mind.

the sharp sting of shame, barbed, serrated and twisting,
will be dulled by the long passing of time i will soon forget...
but this is no comfort or consolation for me tonight,
as i am reminded of other days i would rather not have lived.

why do i hate this person so, to whom i have been
so little exposed,
of whom i know no more than a meaningless name?
because they express traits i repress in myself.
traces of hatred remain,
with all their searing weight and strain,
for as long as i, myself, the world's flows-and-structures,
stay the same, in torrid stasis, code, and axiom.

just when things were starting to look up,
the whole sky
fell like a tonne of bricks.

a world for us all
or no world at all:
it's not a motto,
but a question, yes, solemnly,
and a call.