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What else can you do in the empty, silent, unspectacular and utilitarian city, but run amok, disrupt the silence, bash, aim, blast, shout and strut? In the vacuum of such a city, how to find a role, how to write, how to live? There are many ways to peel an onion: sharp knife and tears; under water like your mother taught you; surreptitiously, creeping in, layer by layer; or with sunglasses on.
There they are, those devastatingly onion-like little poems, with furled skins and layers, offering up biting street-scapes and cafés, half-remembered far-away places, distant friends, rock & roll, and lost, ordinary cities; that deceptive, seemingly autobiographical voice cruising between wit, boredom, disillusion, nostalgia, paranoia, irony. Always irony. Always the slippery poetics of knowledge warping, even as you obsessively scan the texts for narrative for seeking of untranscended life itself. Well, one last thing you can do is turn the irony back on yourself, the poet.
Yeah….now about the city. Nothing sacred here — all legend (text and belief) casually self-erasing. Or is it?
One effect of the irony is to mock the languidness of poet and expected audience, the “cultivated and singular minority”, that adopts the gesture of power, the eradication of all legend, but at the same time hails its own laxity and jejune cannibalism of the very thing it claims to mock. So the empty streets of the poem are filled with pissing and spitting bodies; narrative excitement is unlocateable, and mocked as the tedium of the blessed, and comically whipped up in the violent acts of nameless poets… I am just an example.
A yearned-for somewhere
adverb-physically
as lost as now
gazing across
the chunky valley
to a hill
of quivering lights —
There is no
destination —
just a place
no site
not Olympic
village site
only running wheels
casino site
nor section
of expressway
just east
of where
coincidence
has determined
your residence
in a city
you returned to
to remember
why you left ...
Inventing
nostalgia
for elsewhere ...
you’ll live there
in the future ...
And here am I,
nibbling
my jejune nourishment
with the laxity
of a cultivated
and singular minority
Languidly
erasing
all legend
flick flick flick.
nibbling
my jejune nourishment
with the laxity
of a cultivated
and singular minority
Languidly
erasing
all legend
flick flick flick.
Drinking in remembrance
of friends,
of ideas,
of projects,
of eight millimetre films,
of sketchbooks, screenprints, letters all
eliding somehow in the depths of the pile?
The extemporary verve of designs for a life
which never evolve into actual manufacture.
And now, in a kind of inner-suburban
isolation, brilliant — bright — paintings
are attentively wrapped & stacked
at the back of a wardrobe.
Mild domesticity
where reasonable evenings become numinous nights
of reading difficult books patiently flat
on your back and raging,
privately, laughing, noting the clues,
improving your vocabulary,
But never your method.
Thus setting out,
a scarlet flower
behind my ear,
into the wide
world into
banner-adorned cities
faking
permanent festivity
Here I am….
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