Post on 25-Mar-2016
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transcript
- 1 -
Dream
Blacker,
Faceless
Engineers !
Fionn Coughlan-Wills
- 2 -
By the same author:
Tumbleweed and a carrier bag…
- 3 -
Contents
Stitch That - 3
Family Triptych - 6
Un love - 7
Pyramid Scheme - 8
Herd Mentality - 10
Spirit of the Staircase - 12
Holding you like I might a bottle of wine - 13
The Loveseat - 14
Valley - 15
Postcards of the Mentally Ill - 16
Coping Ugly - 18
Rolling Hulks - 19
In the Sun - 20
Voyager on the Heliopause - 22
The Spectacles - 24
Bright Side of a Black Hole - 25
- 4 -
Stitch That
I’d had a go of it,
he’d hooked me up,
chucked me up,
threw me over for the
femme fatale type.
Had blown my brains out with
tedious conversations on the terabyte,
fed him tripe,
fed me tripe –
had no excuse to cancel the milk that night.
So when he showed up,
all apologetic corduroy
and humility turtleneck
to say we’d had a go of it – he’s sick of it.
I felt obliged to stick him with it – stitch that I’m thinking.
Milk bottle bust, landed on the floor
made the opposite of a chandelier,
took his dead-weight to the crypt of the car,
saw milk, and blood, and bile mix
become ambergris
- 5 -
I had done with him, popped those clogs
shod the funeral loafers and bin bag attire,
to drive the motorway and dump cargo -
body, clothes and baggage – into the river.
And as they say, Officer, I never looked back.
It might be this reason, that I failed to check
my blind spot, cut you up with the motor
– blues and twos - hesitated, then signalled to pull over.
- 6 -
Family Triptych
Up a gangplank
through the land
between house, home and road
three of a family tree trod,
one in front of the other
digits trellised
dovetailed together
a linked length
of pedigree.
First
Father, grandpa, clergyman drew
Mother, their grandmother, philanthropist
up. Denied purchase from spent years caring.
And steadying the give, behind
The daughter, granddaughter, the student.
Brogues, slippers and walking boots.
Tapping, gliding, clumping.
cosseting the altruist,
with age – under the weather,
weaker between the strength of the others
over scaffold bridge
bonded a chain-gang
of love
of life.
- 7 -
Un love
You eat munchies
When you greet me
The work you undertake:
are opinions
You fail to recognise
Your Laugh
I could forgive you
like a horse masticates on a carrot,
it is as hospitable as Zyklon B,
obsolete like male nipples,
to you unwanted as childhood memories,
the opening bars of ‘All you need is love’,
is a prerequisite to migraine.
But the boredom jars.
8
Pyramid Scheme
She took a bronze saw
nine feet long,
set with sapphire teeth
to business
carving life into
a Pyramid
of manageable
blocks.
Descending to the largest of jobs,
leading to glitches eventually
larger than life -
top down organising,
placing the smallest
in a pocket of time
five minutes from now. Now
the miniscule,
later the monument.
She began:
scratched her itch,
made a meal of it
left the dog the bones,
put things in order,
settled her affairs,
got the job done
shattered sugar-glass ceiling,
left him holding the baby,
almost one time met her maker.
Performed the remit of
9
Serial Note-Taker.
Scrawling every last hiccup into submission
Mason to the stones
around others’ necks
to build
Until
after a whole tome
Centenarian Charleston
beckoned home.
Hung up
the world-worn saw,
reflecting her hair, her eyes, the sapphires now the size of
amoeba fear,
Set a final gargantuan slab,
the foundation stone
for those to continue
by example. And
Pitched back on her heels
to see
.
10
Herd Mentality
Within the picture frame of a tea-caddy valley
an airborne lottery wheedled its way to the nostrils
of the sheep, selected the club night in the cow sheds
promising cuts of cut-rate sweet-meat.
Animals grazed as clan for millennia, hailed
by their thousands, into the news reels and word processors
of the Dictaphone media: no Nazi propaganda, no furnace in the street
the four-legs had reached their zenith and were a jewel in the peaks.
A party was thrown, from the depths of our hearts
onto the celebrating heap, warm animal bodies pirouetting together
in the bedlam of kaylee dancing cattle, heralded humans
in droves to douse the god-like livestock in champagne and altar fire.
Indeed fireworks: multi-shot aerial displays formed night into day,
Roman Candles set the bleating from black sheep shooting at the
youngest jumpers
the gunpowder smell of acrid pleasure, Catherine Wheels likely to
fix landscapes across the nation with a micronova of prescribed
carnival burn.
In their new-found importance, ablaze with screaming laughter,
aware that carnival antics are in ewes, rams, goats and bovine inborn.
Anything with cloven hoof apple-bobbed, splatted-the-rat, given a
prize:
A shout-out over tannoy, a double-barrelled loud-hailer, a lit sparkler.
11
Every moment de facto Shangri La, each species a nomadic caravan,
all congregations a vigil. Sung out in all crevices
The King of Love my Shepherd Is.
Epicentres of the crescendo were identified in
Essex, Northumberland, Cumbria and the North York Moors.
Weeks died – breeds cross-pollinated - until fetes, galas, events ceased.
Fires were extinguished; food was off, entertainment encored.
Perpetual motion machines, every animal body a top
another, on their backs, ashen, asleep.
A lottery spent.
It was later found that rather than announce Lent early
(commend critters to respite, quadrupedal Butlins and organised fun)
Tiring them out throwing a party now
would cost fleecy market pockets less in the long run.
Carnival abated. skies no longer alight. Bleating eulogy silence.
For months after aside dry stone walls before entering
the hallowed grounds of the sacred feasts
our sign of respect was marked by a blessing:
to wash our hands with buckets of water and disinfect our feet.
12
Spirit of the Staircase
That night we smoked cigars and broke onto the roof of a
seaside diner
just for a better centre of the sky,
the night when someone became half-cut under inspiration,
ran screaming headlong into the canopy night,
a life ring around his head, an illicit halo keeping him buoyant
through the air,
how we gave chase, regained a friend,
wasted no time inundating arcade high-scores with our initials,
we shouted from the dark cove of the seawall stairwell
(themselves a rock pool)
to strangers passing in the twilight
'we aren't thugs, come this way',
impromptu guiding lights in a black world of human reefs.
That very day we had skinny dipped in the North Sea,
not one hundred yards from where I and my family
have ritually placed our infant feet,
generation after generation, from various walks and an orchard
of trees,
for the first time, in salt water.
13
Holding you like I might a bottle of wine
On my favourite sofa. both eyes reflect
over my shoulder
your mother, left. your father, right.
Each one separate and both combined
Your father’s face, a pride you cannot fathom yet
through blurred vision people become the air.
And hers, simply in disdain of your
furrowed brow to do so.
Outward from those gleaming irses,
micro-film to read under a voice projecting later,
in my hands, one
cradles your tiny head,
the other on the small of your back,
no wider than a handspan.
I hope, for years to come,
it is impossible to watch your
developing repertoire,
without seeing one, or the other,
in either eye.
14
The Loveseat
While She shaped
the pyramid,
spending an aeon
crafting for others,
He whittled a select timber shaft
Each season
scrimshawed his digits into the grain.
Fashioned an X-brace marionette’s soul
to rest on spun struts, a giant’s cane,
cross-hatched the
skeleton frame with
upholstery.
Her choice, rested. Only to
spring the leaves, decades on,
to recede under worn, time-drawn
arses.
After filling the chair’s bladder -
filaments:
horse hair, peacock feather,
phoenix mane, barguest tail,
complete
the swan’s neck of wood between them
hands laced,
A third presence
giving them away.
only one.
Their loveseat.
15
Valley
Home. Home is in the hills.
Among valleys where flora turns
emerald ice dead winter,
Where water tastes of dew from
the strands in a duck’s moustache.
House is the habitat.
Home when breath breathes ‘welcome back’
a ghost-hello, condensing words in air.
‘kettle’s on’, or ‘put kettle on’,
steam birthing brew.
The brick and mortar, the
tile and plaster, carpet and cutlery
can be dust
For trusting limbs, natural smiles,
are crux to kitchenware teeth.
16
Postcards from the Mentally Ill
Let fly a culture of Freudian slip
between the legible
black on white
indelible ink, imperative:
I was not involved with my cousin Carol.
as though the recipient
has power to endow dignity
lost to diffraction patterns
in boyhood mishap
otherwise a foul in genealogy
Yet heightened amiability,
the fact you know the middle-name,
despite the impossibility
licks my stamp
but perhaps is perturbing
Ominous •
your still using telegram stops • as big as
squashed flies •
on a square no bigger than • a chapbook fly leaf •
One mind in staccato rhythm
17
A simple admission
that quirks are not faults
despite harm.
Stability is a priori
the human condition: a smidgeon of
grit to the egg and the chicken
18
Coping Ugly
You were a rubbish dog
and all I could think about;
never came when called,
scared of the stick when thrown,
would lurk in the dark of the stairwell –
where I still step over
the memory of your fury body
ready to turn tail and bite
under pressure of a foot,
didn’t like children,
had a mind all your own.
You were an absolute dog.
I honestly think something in my mechanism went,
when we weren’t allowed the formality of burial.
This is me attempting ‘goodbye’.
.
19
Rolling Hulks
Exibit chesspiece,
Leviathan, foreigner, imported, cast iron, steel-alloy, turntable,
turnpike,
contacts ignite, piston rupture.
Walking around, tripped by invisible
wires between men and their cameras.
Iron giants – immobilised, geriatric, asleep.
Oil on the air, in the lungs -
sorry, excuse me – Finley, come here! -
Excuse me. Stephenson’s over here, Gresley’s
grizzling in the corners, counting the lubricate spots on drip-trays
and the days until fire breathes in the smokebox,
pending steps on the footplate, shattering pressure to release, to
accelerate.
20
In the Sun
In the sun
somewhere, anywhere, dusty
a man, no name, anyone
digs to divine water’s loci.
In the sun
there, everywhere, all over
an opaque hand, bigger than the Cayman Islands
salts the earth, drives water deeper, undermines his spring
quicker.
This limb, spanning the hemisphere
incubates expenditure
in its palm half a world away, thinking of it
as offspring - hatchlings
Justified by this view,
obliviously watches the world over,
- this new mother –
fleshier bodies, younger than a babble, weaker than a cry, be
spent as walkingdollar.
21
It is said they are developing.
Really they bide time, choosing
to preserve the truth of the matter,
opting out of a world so ready to
mortgage humanity
happily
to uphold
the spectacle of a filing cabinet,
draws akimbo,
haze of paper aflutter,
balanced perfectly on the snout
of a pink, pot, piggybank.
the size of jersey
To expose this manic circus trick,
replacing marble and brick with glass, and air, and window
polish.
will cost a mint in sweat and dough -
To refrain from doing so?
May cost the earth, but nothing more.
22
Voyager on the Heliopause
A particle to cure the common cold
passed me by 12 light-years ago
and teased me
for my metal-flake paint
within its orbit, I didn’t feel less parky -
and if I gathered it up with my
monkey-puzzle-tree limbs
It wouldn’t benefit the sole of a soul.
Like my dish feels less dishy than 35 years ago -
I can only compare it to the sun
which without fail, is brighter, more circular
and has featured in more chart hits than myself -
but Supernovae are
beautiful cracks
in the heavily-rouged makeup
of constellations;
so I will play the waiting game
recording nuclear death throes
with a satellite lit by wilting solar buds -
sun, sun, sun – here it comes.
My partner and I
parted ways at Saturn.
Since then I am girlishly attracted
23
to anyone with an immediate gravity.
though I think companionship
is a form
of poorly interpreted
Stockholm Syndrome.
solitude is the way forward
Filling time via a method of entropy,
I take sick-days,
to indulge a passion
for amateur photography.
Travelling nowhere
at thousands of metres per second,
I seize the ultimate
holiday snapshots,
but keep none.
An orange-rind neutron star collapsed
on the walrus back of the universe,
giving my lenses a little-death, as they suspended its entirety.
But developers lack business
on High-street Heliopause,
so I beam every bit and byte along a wave,
through a keyhole of space-time
home
I wonder if they receive my postcards.
24
The Spectacles
Are a pair of transparent con men,
thick as thieves.
Through their obscuring prescription,
we take turns to wear and rent
our eyes.
Not made for us, but for another
long dead.
They are framed for something
they have not done and cannot do
Warping the world as through departed eyes
Death’s personal kaleidoscope.
Impossible
25
Bright Side of a Black Hole
On the Brigg, an old man shifts past,
barely walking for the shake.
His are no longer legs – like yours –
but reference points for gravity’s centre.
You spot the bright side of a black hole,
then, pulling us through it, whisper;
That dance will ne’er catch on.
Now at your hearth,
three squares to the right of your 73rd
birthday,
you tell us all, with head like a weathered eggshell
that from a defunct brain,
your shake has shimmied in its wake
to the tips, of the tips, of your arms.
Someone sheds a tear for your heyday, to remember
a privateer discreet in drink,
Cultivator, in small quantities of marijuana.
Growing green in your greenhouse,
among the innocent tomata, Master Cropper;
Heyup, Cocker.
Back at your hearth, the hub of your warmth, your oven
a tray of sand dries,
cracking, blackening,
like hands mummified with living.
Why, Dad, bake the Brigg?
One wry smile, a grain of grit in your humour
Am makin egg-timers.
26
Interstellar probes called Gladys,
Telegrams from schizophrenic philanthropists,
Wine bottle babies cherished as though they
were made of glass.
This is for everyone I love. Thank you.
Dream. Blacker. Faceless. Engineers.
©, etc.