My friends, I wish to make an end.
Gaukr welcome me home kicking out
this lifeless body, hatching my spirit
I am to be sent to the hall of the greedy ones.
uh oh uh oh they say uh oh uh oh
I shall gladly drink beer with those lofty
creatures up in the high seat;
hopes of life are past me; I’ll die laughing.
Cokkou, probably from Old French cucu
(whence French coucou);
perhaps via Latin cucūlus.
Displaced native
Old English ġēac
Proto-Germanic gaukaza;
Old Norse Gaukr
Ancient Greek κόκκυξ,
Middle Irish cuach,
From the verb to weep, or caí-oh
Polish kukułka,
Finnish kukkua.
Sanskrit कोकिल (kokila)
hatching other brood parasites
urdu-hindi koyal
forming koel, koel.
You rush after The Critic leaping through the forest,
scribbling furiously, you want to get their thoughts down
verbatim - the truth is important to your readers
Fingering birch bark upholstered in wet moss
'The composition is off but I love what they’ve done with the texture'
'In Art: texture is everything' you scratch into the page
And you've lost The Critic, you fluster, listening for footfall
you hear a branch break and you're off,
bounding towards the source of sound
holy shit there they are
kneeling by a thin blade of fern
scrunching up their face like a sponge
'ooo they’ve really made the most of the light
and just gander at those angles! They flatten me out!'
You scrape into the page: 'In Art: Angles crush it'
After a chance encounter with a curious muntjac,
you see a stutter develop in The Critic,
uncertain about how best to articulate the space.
By the time they begin a comparison of four chimeral
holly leaves on the pathway, they're flummoxed,
garbling inverse ratios and tangents of Phi,
visible modalities, negative culpabilities
spinescence due to ungulate damage
that is: pricks as mechanisms of defence
The Critic flaps wildly
and lifts off from the wet earth
pitching into a blackbird's song
You don’t catch any of it,
the ink's gone sappy anyway -
the paper returned to wood
Don’t mind us we’re a grassroots fascist movement
Don’t mind us we’ve dissolved coral in your tea
Don't mind us crying out for light
Don't mind us just watch the video
Don’t mind us we’ve converted your dog to bark all night
Don't mind us darkening your door with excrement
Don’t mind us we’re a dock full of ammonia nitrate
Don’t mind us try our creamy pink new taste today
Don’t mind us we’re a vortex of bad juju and red pepper
Don’t mind us we’re a magpie trapped in dustbin
Don't mind us it's the kids you should worry about
Don't mind us laughing at your old underwear
Don’t mind us we’re a radioactive ice cream van
Don’t mind us we’ve travelled light years to get here only to find the store is closed and they only had it in green anyway
Don’t mind us you fucking pigskin
Don’t mind us we’re more pixels than human
Don’t mind us we’ll do the minding here
You might easily miss me
a pebble cloaked in moss
a fruited body of fungi [US]
why should you give a toss?
Well, I'm the prince of ponds,
crowned in a kingdom of mud
conducting world and wood
with the flick of fern's frond:
a down and dirty spellcaster.
Natterjack, they call me Bufo
Calimita, the word Latino [sic]
for natural disaster.
I know it's not that grand
but to lips, a smile I bring
so hold me in your hand
if you don't croak, I'll sing.
"We had to do it. These people were against Saddam Hussein. If we got orders to punish him, we would go and do it. [If we were told] to cut off his tongue, we would do it.”
Abdul Kareem Kassim, ‘A Prosaic Description of Unspeakable Torture.’ Washington Post, 22 April, 2003
It happens as it always has.
The patient is bundled
into the operating room
kicking and screaming
their rights, these wrongs, of art and the obscene.
Really, it’s a last chance
to offend, to speak free.
No. No one is listening.
They’ve heard it all before.
Poor thing, our subject here
has no idea
the problem is there, there.
No. No time for bedside
manners, the story’s
moral is decided. Final.
Stone-faced nurses pin the patient down and pray,
whispers steadying
the doctor’s hand while
extraction is performed.
Easy now, easy does it,
with scalpel, axe or stone,
they sever at the palate,
the tuft of flesh
just where the phonetic You
is pressed into breath.
Of course, it’s a success.
In all, a decent act. They hold up
the gibbering thing in calipers
as it draws back.
How this shrivelled bit, this mor—
sel could cause such offence
is the root of the bother.
(Though these problems tend to stem
from articulate mouths in other rooms.)
As you might expect, the patient,
breathing out, expires.
They throw the straggler
into the corner.
Under sterile light,
the heap of pinks
are washed white.
They cart in
the next case.
Always time for one more.
A figure moves through the stable’s darkness.
From a hessian sack, over half his age,
he feeds red apples to these once prized horses,
telling each stories of life before the war.
Their heads nuzzle his palm, snuffling
out the difference between hand and apple.
Each mouths the soft spheres in moments
listening only for his low, continual sound.
George would lose entire days to tinkering.
He’d prize his watches open; remove their bright insides,
but lacked the drilling to make them work again.
We’re left with only bits and pieces.
Rob, he had a hand and eye for paint.
Portraits of his likeness, mine too.
but discontent, he defaced them in the end.
Scuffed up canvases line our walls, just collecting dust.
He fits the headstall, fixes in the bit.
He takes the reins and leads them out
in slow procession, guiding them along
the same path he takes each morning,
the same, irreversible steps.