My jacket hides other bodies.

If only a lover looked like a lover, a Roman looked like a Roman, a murderer like a murderer...

One day I have an ox eye, another, the eye of a king of the Zulus. Poisonous sap might come out of it, or soup.

Regardless, I'm blamed. Unless I can get in first with some kind of story that nobody recognizes as an excuse. Reason is a short time. To the purpose... By the way... In respect of... Phrases are in the body. Bloodless in search of blood.

With what daring hopes I'm as impenetrable as bracken. People rip themselves apart on me - pursuing the wild llama they thought they saw pushing itself inside. They think it was chasing something gentle and vacuous. Some baleful little eyed-creature that the llama wouldn't eat but it might get hoofed to death. I scoff.

But people are cogent.

They also coagulate.

From them you are undefendable. They are blood. Top sellers, liberty and nature. They don't really retreat, even when they appear to. Many of them will think you are the state they live in. Capillary orientated. By being hated, you are popular. Being loved, a market. You are the meaning of the process that you are all in. Those breaking in and those breaking out. Luckily, your body is a prison for blood. A heated debate. A masterful and very controversial account of some few molecules. A big honeypot.

So, I think to take some initiative and explain my own collection as if it was a talking point.

I'm only a small way through when someone says 'And does that mean something?'

I'm boiling. I'm also cold like a nasty smile. A high-up memory is of a school teacher, a rationalist, telling me that I'll never amount to anything. That I haven't got what it takes. And what amount? A good reason to finish it if you want to do it. Not a good reason to want to do it or to want to finish it. There may be many reasons why you want to do it - the amount. But that doesn't mean you should only really do it if you want to.

Now how long have I been doing it?

At least it's not me versus the most seductive ideology. I got clean of that. I have a level share in the garden I've occupied. This I know because of the debilitation of my nerves and the fact that I can now get riled with an expressionless elegance. (Give me that teacher and watch him squirm around in the big tub of confusion I'd push him into. He'd quickly be an ergo and what's to bet he'd grow a duck's bill and start to quack. We could have a good talk now about the ethics of redistribution!)

Anyhow, I'm not vengeful in the morning. I'm up and down like a bellringer and desperate in the first five minutes to remember what I'm a reservoir for. The warm bits are cluish. They encourage followers, investment (ie., tomorrows) and also fright assistance.

This leads to getting attached.

Foster blood stains me with the questions of origin. Blood that does not come from the father or mother blood. Yet it comes from the sun and is attended by shadows. Flows with the same river carrying dead and living fish. I washed my clothes in it and my clothes walked on without me. Shirt for the war, trousers for the attention of death.

Dirty Foreign Laundry Policy

After wandering for the eternity it takes to properly wake I stumble into a dwelling.

Look after all the walls.

It's a house of ills to the end of it.

Traditional - there's still fishing and great intellects; but also radical - the aubade now takes place without associated laughter and there's life (after the discovery of freedom)! People are still chattering about different things but at the very least they have a better sense of their own balancing. When too much blood rushes to one end or into a finger they know to go out of the room and come back in. That usually sets it straight. Or gets them remembering the reason they were there in the first place. It might all be an inward journey but you can only do it moment by moment. There is the initial action, then conflict/conflict, then something else. No resolution and this is the reason for titles.

The Light Shed

To Move

A Day Among Other Things

Signs of Pronunciation

The Looking Bin

They remind us in some way of the person or thing. Shades. Shadow-blood. We're full of police. These know eternity didn't go in any direction. It might as well be turnip-shaped or something you keep adding wheels to in order to get anywhere.

I do it instead of being young. To do what is not the impossible. Not to do the impossible. (On some reports this was a last-minute bid.)

More things you can throw away.

Crucifixion positions. (That blood's already been used.) Stretched out families. (Space or time, doesn't matter. They're like a whiff of death.) Any measurements. (Always new and carried off to some place to be used for no good.)

On each island, words go into the rock to find blood.

Just a little cut and you'll understand. The knife murmuring that it enjoyed you gently. There's nothing as ticklish as the inside of a man. It's biased. Tendentious you would say if you were a practitioner and knew how much damage can be caused with even the idea of blood.

In this kind of discussion I pull all the cushions off the chairs and examine every bit of my body for the bruise.

When you bleed you are the perfect animal of your very own shocking imagination.
 
 
 

ALWAYS MORE BLOOD
(LAWS OF VOLUME)

The womb is a part of me.
Three weeks eating oranges and my tongue's greed for juice hints that someone has taken root in this morning-tapestry of flesh.
The dream's field was wide and a place to run - the space of fiction.
Space unknown.
The conversations from there whisper to me.
I whisper to my belly.
We all hear what we are unaware of hearing.
What is written before the book's begun.

The book is under my skin.
It is a poetic splinter I remove with my bare hands and then bleed.
I bleed the story behind the book; the experience that seeded the book; the days and nights denied a view so that I would not miss the book when it passed before my eyes.
My blood has no cells.
It is composed entirely of the alphabet; of letters and numbers and before that of characters and brush-strokes and lines and before that of images and beneath the images the unknown image which rallies all with the incomprehensible cry they understand immediately and without question though they do not know its meaning and do not need to in order to run, to drip, to coagulate into words.
I wipe my skin with paper and the book passes from within me to without.
Looking at it is like seeing my face as it would be created from my own imagination.
A face made by itself to tell a story.
It does not notice, as I do, that blood drips as well to the floor - it is a face that looks only one way.
Towards interpretation.
To the enormous enormity that will be forced into it by motivation and love and reasonless criticism. I am suddenly sorry and so remain forever and silent in that instant of clarity and separation.

Short book.
This is the one with our photographs in it.
On the cover is a tree that holds the ground in its strong hand.
I have written and written in order to fill it but a greater writer has said a book is a grain of sand.
This is a beautiful place to begin for all we know of the grain of sand it still calls to occupy our palms.
I watch the tree in its seasons and hide in my artist's house.
The bothered door shuts.
The windows take the trains.

The evening has taken the last of our voices. They won't return until our knowledge of ourselves has grown huge from listening for what does not harden into words: the silence and its trail, the moan, the interior of the body, all blood and images.

Cover me over with time, our debt to death.
From all directions call the wind.
Be intellectual with the rain.
Make my corpse attractive to this obscure habitus.
Bury me deep so none know I am here, where I am.
Let all know where I lie - compose a song for this that sounds like the call of a day.
This will be my nesting-hole.
This ground will grow for me a title, the story following it into possibility.

The Missing Epilogue

A fine glossy writing paper has been found -
A piece of bark -
Some wood -
Scratchings have made of the soil an extension of the mind -
All is apocryphal -
Summer welcomes everything from Spring.

Even blood.
Even more.
 
 
 

HANGING DAY
(LAWS OF SONG)

People love a death. One that doesn't affect them directly.
How else is it believable.
And contrary to first impressions, people do want to believe death. Unbelievableness, eventually, after shock or awe or bewilderment, induces a state of panic.
Prefer to sing.

A brought brings us.
No-one comes to get hung. (And even though to hang yourself you are not brought anywhere, something has 'brought you to this'.)

Can you remember
his two arms?
Thick as legs
with hands like the feet
of a man.

A boy.
His palms are being
himself.
Desiring.
Resting.

Today he built a wall
with those hands,
made a treaty
with desire.
He cried

before he understood
anything.
Now he rests,
tracing back
to the roots

the black almonds
of his eyes,
the invitation that screams
from his thighs
and yes,

his neck.
He governs himself.
Waiting
like cold flesh
for the noose.

The rope might be from Ireland. Or the backyard. It is never from Heaven.

Wings believe. To hang you can be a skeptic.

When you're hanging your blood enters the sky in little gasps. You cannot see a gasp. You can hear singing. Cells sing a sharp little song. Circles of song. A letter in Russian to the wrong house. Remember the old woman bashing pork with her fat arm. No-one who is truly home can understand. A stanza of English poetry left on a field of war. The dead roll around and around it like planets in a stable orbit. There are worlds and there are worlds.

The devil knows where you live when you sing.
The devil sends the television news to inform you that s/he knows where you live. (You can find the devil's photograph in the television.)

It is sometimes the devil in the television that causes people to hang themselves or causes people to do the things for which others then hang them. Other times it's the devil in the garden, or the devil in ecstasy, or the devil in the river they swum in only once (wrong place at the wrong time!), or the devil in risk. Sometimes it's God that causes everything. The television, the garden, ecstasy and the risk.

The air around a person hanging is rarefied. Unattractive, clock, centre, embedded, coughing, organ, accelerated, universe, unsure, singing, hot and pure.

Like a fish. A fish on a line.

Descending like a deity to earth in the deus ex machina of recorded love. Chorus. While in fact crimson, wet, not too long for the world outside the drama.

Puffed heart.

A person hanging has blue gems, like sparks, like earth-seeking stars, at the tips of their digits. Hands and feet point at the darkness with this glowing periphery. A hanging person has only one face but twelve eyes. They are all pressing against the window. They are growing out of the head like branching hair. They press against the window from the outside. Singing. Hello in there!

They have much to say but we see them in only one way.
What kind of pose is hopeful?
Soft shoulders. Head lolled to the side and falling forward. Little feet pointing like a pirouetter. (The spin helps with this effect.)
[A spinning-house was a place of correction where lewd and incorrigible women were made to spin.]
Spineless but through the rope growing a spine. Mincing. Nipperty-tipperty. The shallow sound of a fish as it beaches. Pis aller. The last or worst shift.

Work songs. Song and dance.

Pass by the hanging on your way.
You never really pass...

Hanging is always the first moment.
A sentence left hanging...

Then just the song that breaks from the body. Hewn. Like the spirit from belief.

[Footnote: The dead sing. The body loaded back into the universe. No longer a body. Different. Undifferentiated finally from everything that the living look at. The dead sing as they are set adrift. The rope is cut by those who still know moorings. Even piled up the dead continue to sing and don't complain. You can sing without being able to think.]
 
 
 

IN THE BOX
(LAWS THAT EXIST DESPITE LOOKING)

It is true to say of the box, that you see what you get inside.
What you see has everything to do with your resistance to looking.
Let's just take one type: The witness box.
You tell us what you saw and we'll tell you what it means.

[It's not going to help to blame anybody though. Blindness is what it means.]
 
 
 

TASTES
(LAWS WITH NO USEFUL PART)

The Taster: I asked a child What's it taste like? And he said 'I don't like it'. I asked Why? And he said 'Because I tasted it'.

Water tastes like a sad, difficult, sweet rose.

I'd prefer to tell you what I like. Most of these are inclinations rather than developments.
Stupid tastes and bad. Don't run from them like a bubble blown about by the wind. Motion has been found out.

The sea nymph never helped anyone. Didn't stop her being born. What we keep doing is starting again. With washing our vests. With organizing our hair. With feeding our intrigues. We are born. We are born.

Only one person at a time but we share nightmares.

The negative is gigantic. What stops you. Fences never do much for people. Not for people alone. It's only when you introduce plants and animals that they become really useful. Now contradiction is an interesting thing. And what is a metaphor? Some people find time to distinguish them from what is. These people are unfortunate. For example, a book becomes more of a problem in every instant following its writing. Some foolish writers are even proud of their books.

A book tastes like strangling, like a metal gate, like helping with an invasion. (War comes with inventiveness.)

I prefer to talk about what I did not write. Who I did not kill. Her name is no-one else's name. She is mad. She lives in the downpour that comes when magic executes itself. Her name points not to her. It is mad.

Have you organized yourself for the orange? Otherwise, what is it?

Fruit smells like an example of the thing.

Birds are too ensemble for my tastes.

What you call bad taste should frighten you much less than your predelictions. Keep your sense of yourself difficult and your thoughts simple. The appearance of something is simply something to look at.

Touch, handle, estimate. Predelictions are bias. More judgement. Taking sides. Everything you do is taking sides. I'm on the side of the banana today, I'm humourous, and then totally unfunny I'm having bread tomorrow. Oh, only to be as insipid as God. Tasteless. Neutral. 'A plague on both your houses!' Making the best of a bad job. This is why we talk about judgement so much - and what kind of furniture, clothes, hairstyles are acceptable - because God's not going to do it, we have to do it for him (her, whatever).
 
 
 

WHERE WE LIVE
(LAWS ABOUT BEING THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE (THE ONLY LAWS WE ALL UNDERSTAND))

This land at the centre of the world - at the centre because unknown - what millions of people walk behind it and call to it as if they had not thoughts but were birds or a tired herd dragging their heads barely the distance before eye-blurring above an absence - a desert thinking them - yet never arrive for to do so one must know to where one comes.

This land has no yesterday only then-depth.

The land walks into their arms and without questioning they know what they hold.

At dawn the dawn.

Yesterday is mercy - so much time ago.

And the trees, violent in their tops, spreading through all of speech so they starred their words and gave the lizard their tongue and the tongue to the dead.

This land at the centre of us, our assembled bodies, our concealment - shall the guilt dig, the heroism dig, the natural fear dig and reveal the hole our spirits groped in for the raw true suffers, the new bones with our own eyes, or shall there be found there the furthest endurance - life ambushing the unknown, just passing passing and never passing?