Remna(n)ts now

I jointly won the Stanmer Prize that I previously mentioned entering, yay! The poem that I entered was 'High Sooner', the last poem published on this blog in May if you'd like to read it. Hello £100! I have a feeling it's only going to see the inside of my savings account for a while, though.

May I also say, this heat is abominable.

Trunk

Sliced ham and pascal bone?
Oh yeah and spicy weight.
Trapped fingers singing alone in a junkyard
USA ditties sitting next to the neck
of the giraffe the white animal
the fuzzy wuzzy inanimate blog leaking
demands underwear.
Stare softly at your feet until you turn blue
and blur your kiwi eyeballs-
no rest for the wicked peeled off goodforit dance partner
won't be a long day
tick away, drums thump underground
and would you like to wake up at intervals, sir?
Nature is a podgy dwarf
waddling in excrement and expressing new music
a pile of white wax atop his vintage crown-
they rarely speak, the others.
Head slows down.

Digression

Diabolical thoughts hit the back of skull
knocking the wind out of the electric connections
and briefly murdering.
Swimming children don't roll alone
without assistance
and there are signs telling us where to jump,
see, street: birds encircle the morally unwell, shriek of pains
beyond recovery
and don't fulfil promises written in scratched ink claws.
You can buy a lucky rabbit's foot within two miles of here;
tablets, stone and sugar coated,
stomach linings for the mentally ill,
coat hangers tangled inside washing machines
found to be redundant,
are taken back with due respect and reported simply,
'inadequate'
not broken, like the hobby horse in his eye-
swirling, gracing us with ugly eyes and stretched teeth,
morphing from grin to grimace leaping from pupil to lens
to terrorised ocean.
Fishes are blue and laugh.
Golf buggies strewn and abandoned form shoals, bobbing up,
playing electric guitar.
What happens if you throw a toaster in the sea?
Sirens go off and on
the chest of drawers screeches to a halt
avoiding narrowly
resentment:
for it contains mercy of the purplest hue.
Entirely acceptable, and to be served
with artichoke.
Lovers watch their only alarm clocks being bleached
and time stretches his arm around Mrs. S. and whispers
'I'd say polenta, wouldn't you?'
Who can know what Mrs. S. replied?
Her flippers play a final viola farewell
and melt into a bakery.

Transport

I want to crawl inside your carcass-
your heart won't need to beat,
I'll do the work
I'll squeeze it in-out make
blood pictures in finger prints and
can you still live
when I'm sat on your liver?
It's just so cosy in here
and it's a wholesome activity
to be filling a cavity
assisting coronary
in murk undulating dark.
I reach up your neck and wave hello-
we have to keep up the charade of politeness.
Your skin is plenty for me,
stroke it back down
(raised like spokes)
People greet you and think you're alone
but it's ok I'll put them right,
there's no need for anyone to come near
when I'm doing your life job.
I'll crunch my spine in line with you
make like a foetus
reach through intestines and trace
patterns through flesh layers.
You have to guess the letters
from the outside.
You're moving slower these days
people can't stand the stench,
back away.
But I know you see my stroked letter words.
And I know your smell,
I can find it with nostril twitches
if I pull out hair strands,
savour
them,
one by
one.
Inhaling is all I do.
I get hungry these days
but I don't mind when I can't see,
I'll follow your head noises
on the Gravesend train stopping.

Agoraphibia

Sunshine outside hits slick child tongues and reaches
for avalanchian appalachian styles that look good inside out-
where bees leave your face unstung,
my nose clear as the day it was formed,
empty fingernails
pulled
off.
The walls smile and sigh in syrup sticking to my hips
holding me
and upsetting my stomach, bubbles
of oxygen in my blood surface as words, alphabetti, spelling
orthodontist.
I can't see blue, I see magnolia.
I don't need clouds when I have swirls of paint.

Expanse of air.
Reaches out, hands me a bargain, I'm ugly.
Mock brickwork, dizzy wasps, regal leaves see me through glass,
they caught a fish a a-live a life- magnified- burned- died.

Grease keeps the old ticker going still when it's emptied of haemo-
glow-stick-inside. Dripping through, ironic filter,
gentle, don't-
tilt
her. Smashed rotten.

Moving film scenes take images and resurrect them,
they are blind and do not see me staring-
they love one another and I am not here-
they live all together and I am outside in here-
I would like to riot if it wouldn't itch to try.

Speak in tonsils to my cortex cerebelly just past the elbow,
it's ticklish after five-
come closer?
Because there is lighter fluid just here
and it's useful
to see natural light, receptors
might as well be velociraptors to irises asleep
clawing cutely
ripping past eyelashes to juicy jelly whites.
I like toys, but
create my new head
and I'll move.

Remna(n)ts

I entered my poem, 'High sooner' in for the Stanmer Prize at my uni, I should have mentioned- I am not sure if much will come of it. I think the idea was that we would submit the pastoral poems that we wrote for the Aspects seminars, but I hated mine so much that I wrote another one, without so much intentional fabrication. Still, always worth trying I guess. They said we could give in an optional explanation of the poem, but what use would that have been anyway? Calling it 'pastoral' is ugly enough. I wonder if the judges share my sentiment?
I doubt being delusional is particularly supported amongst eco-poets, anyway. Did they ever consider that it's probably the only solution?
It's not our world, pompous fools.

Narcissus

I have decided that I should become less self-obsessed in my writing.
Having said this, it's hard when I have no purpose and the world is an enormous filthy pit shouting my name and asking nicely when I could next come over for tea because its feet are getting cold and it needs more bone marrow to throw on the fire.
So, as you can see, solipsism is swallowing my head. I'll get out of it.

Screaming Swan

Various lies on scattered eyes that wreak fiction on tense thighs -
a particularly cold bed is this that vomits each morning and quivers in the bath-
room. Where is my mental breakdown? Where is my vice?
Slumped in sober lands of pine and looking down telescopes at Jonestown
horrors and sea holocausts, gentle junkie floats on
cloud formations, dystopian tree tops, crows cackling
like witches reaching for broom sticks in their search for the kitchen.
I can't admit to libido again. Stunted ramblings
towels thrown across the floor-
wrinkled, fronds become spines, metonymous-
voids, villi, voids -
beyond GCSEs there is only anguish and only beauty comes from resistance :
not revolution. It is all very well to tell me-
'You don't want that'
'It's not the sort of thing you should get involved with'
'It will drag you down too'
'Leave, leave, LEAVE'
It chose me, I am aware and invertebrate and indolent. I will screw my skin
with nails ten inches with rusted moustaches, mallet wielding,
to the sticking place. No mercy for those whose hearts don't thud,
but instead lie stoic, waiting for the body to collapse, give up, rot.
Dualism interested me but repulsion of the gut struck hard at noon and fucked
the unsuspecting customer to my solid doom.
Pulsing in trees and wrecking in car park there's a love that can't be spoken about
because my last words will be you, your head.
Lovely trauma, caressing bones, kissing tendons stretched and snapped long ago.
Transform me into assertion and leave me at the gutter,
I want palpable cruelty, things that stand on courts, stand on the jury, it's me, I'm the victim, the perpetrator, the delinquant. I lied to my parents.

Plot

Lies are tiny spies, sitting on our eyes,
Waiting for the slip that condemns our minds,
For nobody thinks: 'and now I shall lie',
and so thoughtless falsities trip quickly by.