ON STONE SHORE, ON SEA

I think I will go out now. Sleet as cold and dirty as a threadbare street sock. So let's. Clean clean clean, quite correct - hair on top of the head as thinning as armpit hair. Thoughts as smelly as armpit hair. Left alone with them now for some time but who is ever really alone? Time past and time present recorded in time future. See, Friend of the Pound is already here. A bank clerk in life don't you know. Do you? Always one for a good shot of travel into the ugly realms. Me too. Out and down to the shore. What is this stone? No stone, glass. Chiselled green; hold it up to the light where there is none but grey and see that world past. Not here now, there: London, pub heat unbearable - sweating profusely at the best of times but this was something else. Who can endure? Yet that's not today - a day like this one - any other - grey. Formidable man and character. Indomitable to the last they'd said. And then he'd died. Such is the way, the Tao of all our tiny lives. 

Moley! Who would believe to quest and find him here on this stone shore of all. Pet rock had a place in my khakis wherever we roamed. Warmed by my flesh, would take him out and mother laughed and cried or cried - perhaps it reminded her of poppa? Yes, look at that nose; grey as today and how long does it take for decay to corrupt the nose; send it sailing down to the ear. One last set of tears of the grave from that leaky eye fluid. No salt to it though - still not drinkable. Just like the sea.  Maybe I will walk out there, contemplation was always too stronger word for this world; more like a little cajole, push or a coax. A tickle rather than that vast unquenchable nothingness of the Buddha. So let's. Foam like the eyes of the sea looking up at the spectre of the sky. Should do everything with conviction and know fear but not afraid. Oh but it is the death this icyness, not for me. Not in my cup. So let's leave. Let's. Now these loafers are more like spent boats than shoe. Hastiness makes the man. Back indoors to life and the chat of mine! 

NOT A JOT OF CLOUD

The white sky. The white sky and not a jot of cloud to be seen. 'Oh' it seems to say 'oh I'm on fire' and it is, the sunset cooking all the faces of the streetwalkers. Such glare, they're all squinting at me. Look up again and it's all changed. What a sunset for the midwinter, soon the sky will be electric blue - my favourite colour and almost impossible to capture in art. A pregnant woman is leaning against a lamppost; she's humming with energy like there's a motor inside of her; red face and tiny eyes shaking beadily across the road for a safe place to cross. 'Can I give you a hand' I ask, 'No, I don't want any help" she says in a tremulous voice. Maybe she doesn't want the baby, maybe it's pre-natal depression. I shrug and continue on.   

FARRIER

From an old sack still half his age 
he feeds red apples to his horses 
and tells them the secrets  
of his war-honoured young.  

They take gouts of sweet white, 
coring the soft spheres in moments 
listening only for low
continual sound.

“George was big on his watches 
he’d prize them open; remove their bright insides 
but he lacked the drilling to make them work again.
We were left with only bits and pieces.” 

“Rob, he had a hand and eye for paint. 
portraits of his likeness, mine too  
but not content, he defaced them at the end. 
his blank canvas lines our walls — collecting dust.”

He does not know but he does 
that while they may have believed 
he loved more 
his horses, 
it is his boys' ghosts he treads 
over the fields 

BUT A GAS AT THE BAR

But a gas at the bar. Shade without shadow, I could be the empty silhouette around the wine an angry man through at another on the White wall. The imprint left. That is the whisp of the man felt today. The mug brings me into a solid state. Thank the scientists for paracetamol. Thank the land for honey, lemon and ginger. Thank the procurers and the transporters. A sip of steam and golden lacquer and we begin to feel like a different person. Still imprisoned like liquid in the mug but slowly working our way out. Like the fluid within me, snot dribbling down my moustache and onto my hairy chin. How much would it take to marble me. Become encrusted within the whitegreen effluvium, what an ugly thought: a little jade green statue of a forgotten Gog from Magog. Knees bent in adulation to a greater one, that of pestilence: a fourth horseman, the one that eats up pregnant red rot like hamburgers and spits out the acidity of green decay on the hangover the next day. What a one to pray to. The great unclean! 

NEW BORN

A bubble of blood on her lip

Pops and a daughter is born

Earth to child, child to earth

The umbilical taut like a whip

Red moss between two trees

Her lungs already hungry 

She wrenches off a scream

A wild untried pitch

Pulls half the ward down 

Mother smiles weakly

She ululates a whine

The pipes crack apart

Flood the neighbouring morgue

Father looks at the nurse proud

The doctor winks and grins 

'There's some life in this one alright'

BEELDENSTORM

"All the churches, chapels and houses of religion utterly defaced, and no kind of thing left whole within them, but broken and utterly destroyed, being done after such order and by so few folks that it is to be marvelled at."

Richard Clough - Account of Image-breaking at Antwerp

Begin at the glass with the first stone

It is difficult to talk with no teeth 

John's head goes sailing by the sunset

The herald of our hungry flock 

It is odd to break this hard bread

Snap these cross to feed our fires

The bloody little lords released;

Strange their pained faces still flicker 

What is this god but gold vanity

Touches of tin and shy knees

There is no god here: the floor

Is as cold as the winter just gone 

Now we have a spot of fun -

Bathe like ducks in the font

Piss in the paints and daub 

Their Lady into grotesques

The organ bellows as we hack 

Out its tongue, spear statues

I prance scarfed

In a spine of keys

Our pious piper starts up 

We close our eyes as bells ring

'Send them back into the earth 

They came from, craven images

Let the Lord forge their true faces

In the smithy of your dreams'

By dawn it was difficult not to smile

Our unwork done was a miracle

RED DUST

Bulbous bright, eyes thicken on stalks

In the pavilion, giant monitor lizards

Slink low after their own eggs

In swelter that cannot be touched

Only witnessed, the cacti have swollen

Purple and the spines bristle

Someone is sculpting some new green

From the stump of his leg

Everything murmuring its life 
A regatta of flies sail past and cheer

In the red dust is the hand of a loved one
But those are not her fingers
Wrist curling, uncurling, working
Up to a rude violence, smeared
Red with love, an eager egoist
A foot falls through the earth

Crawl in the dirt, hair on end
To a cavern and out through

The tunnels of the eye

Into a crude world 

THE SNIP

Fixed in front of myself

Another stood behind

A cruel-looking Perseus

Two swords in hand

Sharp for a scalping

We do not talk O.K. 

No news of the world

No mention of the Joneses

Just 'take what's needed 

- No more than that'

Good, this is ceremony

A rite of passage

Through damaged locks -

Unsnarling of dead roots

From the temple gardens

Beneath these shears

A just thought is loosed:

How much have I grown 

In the months since we last met?

How long is a piece of hair

It is not true that tooth,

Hair and nail lengthen

In death, a trick of the flesh

As the body recedes 

Even in loss
There moves a weave

HELIOPOLIS

“There is a hall in Bloomsbury


That no more dare I tread,


For all the stone men shout at me and swear they are not dead


And once I touched a broken girl, and knew that marble bled.”

James Elroy Flecker

In the blue terror of evening

Men came - shards of tile and mirror

Flaking in their stubbly hair 

They linked the sun on a chain

                                        And pulled

Guffawing at their Aten shuns
Gelding long and quiet ones

We lay down in a box and drove

Through darkness, a moth light

Frazzling the tall grass, a channel

To the kingdom of weeds
Outside the gates, a rabble wrenched
The horny membership
From their stone likeness
And crumbled into dust

Allah à la jardin, the gardener

Redfaced man of allotments

His pruned bush; his pollard tree

                                     Eyeing all

History from his drinking tin, said

'You may not barge in, out with you' 
We shrugged, it is cold in the shadow
Of yet another reliquary
There is no god but all

So we left the land for other suns

ECHINOPS

Surrounded in a sea of weeds

Your spear has gained a head

Practice for the wrestlers
Of bee, tussling in your hair

The oceans did not like you

Little punk anemone 

The skies did not take to you

Disguised as planet
You're certainly no tree,
Soft little plum

What is left to do but bow

When the dog cocks its leg

Trembling in wet sorrow

To see you fledged in summer

Fist of Venus, feast of fly

A mace of morning dew

Long I look into your sinew

BE BURIED THE KNIFE

Be buried the knife

That from violence

A tree might grow

Be buried the ring

Tiny silver thing

That from an O

The yawn of a mine

Be buried the ribbon

That tangle in earth

Knot and never undone

Like life, this little one

RELEASE

Found in that moment on the seat of a swing

On a cold November night so cold

The earth pinioned down and locked

Nothing flies but you and in that moment 

Swung out and Icarian, loosed from gravity

Weightless and planetary in the space above

Sing of life unbridled and unleashed

ENUECH

Exeunt! Exeunt! We go out 

From the lights and mechanical traps

Beneath the emerald glow of exits

Into the blue white desert 

Where in the tides of sand 

Stood the inverse Moses, fat

Pale, mottled black with blood

In the thrum of flies, you

Could hardly hear his weep

Of 'follow me' sob 'follow me'

All this sand the ground up tooth

And bone and hair of the first borns

We stood and watched and smoked

In my suit the air, a thick somber grime

Did not affect me; we all so bland

Tiny within the fizzing glass 

My nose blocked, tongue cut out
Tough to say but easy to hear

Even in truth, the act was no good 

GLOAM ON THE FENS

Your old red door

    Banging in the evening wind

Who set the birds off

    Making all that fuss

Your lover last night

    Just bathed in the rain

He had that teethy shine

    Of silver cutlery

     Stabbed in the mud

What you do is 

     What you do is

Sugarwater in a jar

Placed on the blue veranda

     The lid only half on 

The wasps dive on in but

    Never can never get out

     Whole pantry shelves 

Mass graves of yellowblack carcass

This is a house of bedlam yes

        Yes it is

NEIGHBOURS

Nothing on that street would sleep

Flash of headlight and boiled horn

Passing through my cracked head

A wail of anthem and slurred curse

The always open ear, cannot unhear

What was there before the new noise? 

The brunt of wind raising the roof

Skylark running its volt on the wind

Nightjar whirring, tape tether ended

Lament of rutting fox in vixen scream

Call of the wildest love

Leery owls working out who

Who'd poach from their plate 

Even the boom of blood

Present thunder on the brain

The stubborn workings of the world

Will let themselves be known

DROWNING NARCISSUS

There is an eye in the river
Wide open it rolls downstream
A window nestled in endless windows
Retina of rock, tin can and frond
The iris stained and dappled green

There is an ear in the river
Trickling down the canal
Clean as a giggle, delighted
At its own baby burble
Broken open against stone

There is a hand in the river
A bobbing branch's knuckle
Measuring the season's pace
And catching an odd lazy leaf
Dousing it beneath the stream

There is a head in the river
Mouthing the things it hears
Nosy to the things it knows
Drinking in its clear reflection
Behind its veil are many things
The everything of itself

THE DOG GRINNED

The dog grinned, baring its pit
Of greenwhite sharp stones
Big black, the afterimage
Of a hellhound
Tongue lolling pink and rude
Eyes rolling into the back
Of its flat white skull
Pant: a primal chant
You begin to wonder
Does this one remember
The crown of his ancestor
The pack - the hunt - the kill
What we call feral and maddened
Just the bathing in its base blood

RING COUNTER

I lay in the field
Learning the dead
I fed on the dirt
Flexing in the sun

In my wound
You fix your name
Choke you in my hair
Bag of blood
I permit you like rain
To fall and break

In my mast years
I woke up pregnant
In the hush I gave birth
Cast my darlings far

Wild and rude
I grow into
This soft bed

THE COOKING WORLD

I hover like a body of flies

Above the cooking world 

The man up a planetree 

In his dirty vest

Slices electric the branches

Fall like soft fat

The tree shuffles sweat

A woman and her baby

All pinky blue

Grind their pram wheel 

Axel stuck with a fist 

Of dry pigeon bread

Greenred bike 

Rusted shut with dirt

Handlebars the pedals

Prized off, the torso

Sears black the grass beneath

Window addressed

A barber shucks a jaw

Clenched, eyes locked

Pinned by sunlight

Foam slips down the mirror

A beech has burst its banks

Grown an iron fence

Drips of wood around ribs

Long since this happened 

It is still happening

DOG

Eating the dark of the dark

Breathing out steam and light

We swan listless along canal

Our double wagging along

Just how much the city in there

Laughing drunk drowning 

In that water oil mirrorland

Upsets the ducks and rivermen 

Noise at this black hour unheard of

Dog goes for a swim and that

Is that hands on hips whispering 

Our yells of dog dog dog 

He appears wode in weed

The water so upset it began to rain

A black shoe in his mouth the bone 

Given flesh writhing in the jewel light

You kicked it back in dog said nothing

SMALL MERCIES

If not for wind

Web would fill the sky

If not for axe

Tree would stick the sun

If not for dog

Wolf would eat our door

In the bloody bones
There’s the solid night
Brick shivers on your bedroom wall

If not for a laugh

Old wounds would open

If not for the tooth

Well, we’d swallow the Earth

If not for guile

There could be no us

In this empty room
There’s me, there’s you and the view
A passing cloud dissolves us all

VIDEO / HUMAN HAIR - DINNER DATE

Human Hair - Dinner Date from Penny Mills on Vimeo.

HAMMOCKED

I am a fly swaying in a spider sac

Under their covers, eyes blaze red

A cave wall of dancing webs

Threads move in trembling flame

The who of a bird, screech stolen
By the languid heat, my grey shirt
Bruised with the punch of sweat
Slow-cooked in the galled sun

Make a slit in the screen and watch

My brother, green beneath the oak

Slick with sweat, painted in grass 

Drive on the growling black belly 

And chew the spring-fed lawn

This headless ox - an earth eater

Appetite insatiable, rotating hunger

For grass for cud for ant for stone

Bearing its gnash of bracelet teeth 

Down upon the population grown

Too cocky; wild and untamed

He snorts behind the chattel, his teenage

Frame lummocking over the metal reins

The executioner's grimace on his face
Whispering curses of loath work done 

In this light - the moving and unmoved
All is slowly razed

VIDEO / CLAW MARKS - SOUL FOOD

THE HUM

The thought comes to me

But is too quick the itch

Of fly on my skin

I just cannot swat 

I hate the way they

Rub their hands together

Like a plotting bishop 

About to give communion

All I was were curious about the world

Now look at me, now hear

Not a thought to my name

Stuck in the space between the words

It could always be worse

The man driven mad by constant epiphany

He would be covered in flies, made of their song

Bathing in their hum and tickle and black

Or worse still, the man bored 

With not a fly to speak of and to

Only himself to prickle

PEACH STONE

We are settled in our quiet hunger 

Then the clop of a stranger shoe

And we rise to buzz, lifted above

Fuzzy rot around a peach stone

Just like a heart, that gored case

And soft within the hard frame

Frail within the core of the core

Atoms must be soft to the touch

Or like us, fizzing black atoms

Ready to return to fruit in time 

TO THE NINES

We quivered up to the kiosk 

Woozy from the long walk

Following the sun up then down

Head ached from the day's load

My muscles slid in their jeans 

Inside a woman hardly there;
An automata, her face painted

Cracked and eroded from a day

And life in the stripping sea wind

Dad asks for dressed crab
My head is a tacky postcard:

Shorelines full of swaggering

Beachy nude crustaceans

She eyes him, holding out

A palm for tender; the coins
Handed, she shakes

A broken white bucket 

Chocked full of cooked shell 

Wrestles a prize onto its back

Snaps off the weaponry

Chucks rude pinky spears

Into a bright red bucket 

The dumb torso shivering

She slits with the long blade 

Round the carmine carapace

Coils the dead man's fingers

Around two of her own

Flicks it into the red bucket

Takes a crack at the mouth

Lovingly picks at the sac

Beneath is the tender brown

Meat, I become aware;

A singing in my belly

She folds the carcass 

Onto a bed of metal foil

Drops the foil into a box

And thrusts it out

Already looking away

Her eyes running on

Into her next customer

HOW WE GO ON

How we go on

I have heard some secrets yes

But none that I desired

Here then, some of my own 

I have heard the call by day

Of adventure in the forest 

That turned to gloom at dusk

I have eaten many fat plates

Lay my boots, let the grass enter

Felt the head rot grow like gout

I have bellowed my griefs

With fist with chest with mouth

And had the wind kicked out

I have played the fool in my own court

Asked myself riddles that I alone knew

And royally confused the answer

How we go on, I do not know

But there's one thing I've learnt

You are always giving what you ask for

But never what you want