Six Political Poems

Glimpsing a  hint of something 

a multitude of scales 

of individuals  

different types 

                       she’s sculpting her anger and disappointment into a brightness 

                       and releasing it to join the others and strengthen their intervention

Living by building walls,

afraid of the dark and the different,

whistling Dixie.

They take the signs emitted by their masters far too seriously

and then kill for a heavily guarded and 

aggressive timidity.

Teeth of the worms of the teeth in a scarlet pit;

               blazers and shining buttons and cocktails

and teeth clinking against glasses and worms and the teeth of the worms

               and auto-satisfaction in the smiling pit, ringed with diamonds,

and the crisp shirt stained pink against deep pink flesh.

… pick up and shift it shift it over there over

there shift it drop it off then pick that up and shift it 

over there wrap it up then pick it up and shift

it over there there over there shift it pick it up and shift it 

unwrap it break it down and rebuild it across those four 

then wrap them all up and shift them shift them 

pick them up and put that one here put that one there put

that one here put that one here shift them put that in there 

put this one in here in here in here then that one there on there

are you trying to put it there there make a career out of that

pick this up and shift it over there pick pick it up and put it …

Waiting flames, scarlet and vibrating yellow, licking tarmac

in the heat of expectation of nothing but shining signals

of intense intention, masks and raised flags declaratives 

of a desire for lives lived according to a genuine dialogue between 

necessity and desire, instead of under orders, rising &

flickering in variations, forever around the edges & anew

in every trembling eternal differential duration, rising &

singing in scarlet fire and shuffling across bright ground. 

Under sensitive fingertips is red-brown rust raised up from the colder, 

smooth black paint of the post they’re clinging to, sky shining far away, 

damp, aching and obscure (and there again, both closer and just as distant, in the

gutter-puddle). A cold surface of skin lightly brushed on occasion by thin denim

registered at the far edges of a cramped daydream as a bus approaches; an

aching hollow chill at a deep core of need needling a perimeter of transition to

others and outside and that cushion of anger and warmth a metre or so away. 

Face

Contagion

Across the water I falling in my waves and particles 

Brightening myself as I'm cutting through and elements

Mingling as I merge as I watch myself watching under my 

Racing sky, warmth on my face and across my concrete 

Surface beneath my feet walking running standing and pivoting

I'm kissing and I'm watching me kissing with taut

Passionate cheeks that make me smile in my waves and particles

As I'm borne on my wind and torn and scattering wetly into my air

Face

Energy running through a plane expressing waves collective 

imposing subject expressing passion in energy imposing plane

waves pursuing energy inverting subject exposing ripples

shining moist collective passion waving across plane

wheatfields fecund shining golding warmth modulating 

with a surface spreading as across a shoulder a buttock

a smooth pale stone a pursuing moist collective plane

across exposing ripples a shoulder a modulating buttock

waves expressing wheatfields fecund surface imposing 

shining ripples collective plane exposing energy modulating 

plane smooth subject spreading a collective fecund surface 

running through a subject a passion pursuing expressing passion

waves across a shoulder through a buttock modulating moist

smooth pale stone in a wheatfield golding passionate smooth

plane rippling with energy shredding subject pursuing collective

expression fecund collective expression singular gait and gesture.  

Desires

Some Assembly

They move towards a new 

themselves, plugged

into a shining romantic 

grey-black surface, 

reflecting two 

skintight legs & there's 

a smoothly passing 

hiss of bulbous shadow and 

bright edge. They ache slightly 

to be at the forefront of a past,

of lights in a wet city that echoes

with a cold night satisfaction,

and they may get some faint

tremor of that kind, maybe, 

across a perimeter and through 

a forgetful burial in necessity

and information as they 

move towards a new themselves. 

Freedom

They're not sure if they want significant movement or 

space in which to quietly enjoy their own self, or

both, in fact, variously. It's nebulous, 

but in either case and both cases they need to

couple and uncouple and couple again,

whatever it is needs to be built and will

reach out as they say, to some sort of 

other thing. What is this scenario? They are 

a movement with a projected potential and a

light, pearly grey and unrecognised, 

within which they move, suggestive of something

that affects a quality of movement. 

This is something like what they want;

it seems both easy and almost 

impossibly difficult, this utter involvement

out to the farthest reaches of space and

all substance and time for that matter and 

back down to a sensation of a slightly greasy wall

against fingertips, along with a sense of 

unfolding differences affected by choices

without the interference of a fascist establishment. 

Glamour

In a cloud of light, a drift of smoke 

they see it, they see a projection through

shining winter hair and laughter, 

not hiding so much  as extending 

a sense of solidifying music in a

very major key. Everything's fine

and growing in the warm summer 

lucidity, a frozen bare-legged stride,

a pirouette, a warm sophistication. 

Just 20 quid and there it is again,

stretched across the dirty brickwork. 

Omniscience

Moving through, beside, shining hedge leaves radiating depths of vegetable bitterness

Indigenous Armed Group Formed in the Mountains of Guerrero

Thin yellow light strip between clouds & distant shallow hill, muted winter stripped lung line 

Dasein must in the first instance answer for itself

Reflective play across glass, through flashing light and dark and shining blur 

Last ditch talks over tube strike arranged 

Trailing gently over damp abrasive bricks alongside shallow wriggling tarmac reflections 

Dozens of inmates killed in Brazil prison riot

Heat, light and a rich black shadow burned into a road

These are the women who have the least to lose and the most to gain

Pans hang and collide gently, a unique music to a unique breath

I may not have meaning, but it is the same lack of meaning that the pulsing vein has

Sources of quotations:

libcom.org

Derrida, The Gift of Death

The Morning Star

The Guardian

Hannah Zufall, "Jin - Jiyan - Azadi: Women, Life, Freedom", Lens Culture https://www.lensculture.com/articles/sonja-hamad-jin-jiyan-azadi-women-life-freedom

Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva

Fried Chicken

Felt in the pit,

in a brightness sliced across a pavement, 

redness and scabby white and a dirty

pull they're lit by,

to sit in swaying thrall 

to blissfully full vacancy 

    Dancing

"... this oaf had acquired instant grace ..."

A machine for flying  deep

blue 

         through the sweat 

       and the aching calves

in a pathetic fallacy

    

                      from under 

       oppressive strings

smiling is good

                and they can feel the grain of a

cold morning 

Night 

Somewhere in the folds of their palms,

       beneath the skin they

       feel giddy depths of thrilling darkness,

complex, rotating crystals,  black fractals

splayed legged under yellow lights 

breathing cold smoke and fumes to private 

music, traffic, Doppler perfume,

muscular humming & fizzing against a

weight of atmosphere soaking into a throat 

open and greedy

spring-heeled

Immortality

An expansion and a relaxation though 

still they face the eradication of possibility but,

unhindered at first by a perception of crushing power 

always sitting on their sleeping chests and laughing 

through their seeming absence of significance, until 

they start to wave, even without bucking or fighting exactly,

weight increasing and pressure on the air pipe and

it's so easy for the others who are sitting on their 

sleeping chests, ignored largely, mostly, but now they 

have even noticed and the nuisance must be eradicated 

easily because it's not them just glancing but the sun is 

low and bleak in the mirror and a joy of beauty

is going to be snuffed out, an absolute shredded and binned,

except that a night six weeks ago there was a glance that 

is there and can't be removed, and other glances 

into the low sun and the fog of Spring. 

Validation 

A working at snaring a breathing, 

chaotic fragment to illuminate some

sense of sentient fire, to transmit across

a network of receptors a shivering, just feint, at 

the surface, theft in order, to order

for the sake of marginal shimmering out

over a vertical blue to a depth of some three

metres on a good, polished day. 

They skate with some grace along 

the bright rim but seeming imperceptible. 

There might be a multi-dimensional

solidity and liquid movements through

warm, breathable sunshine.

There might be fresh unfolding. 

Validation

A working at snaring a breathing, 

chaotic fragment to illuminate some

sense of sentient fire, to transmit across

a network of receptors a shivering, just feint, at 

the surface, theft in order, to order

for the sake of marginal shimmering out

over a vertical blue to a depth of some three

metres on a good, polished day. 

They skate with some grace along 

the bright rim but seeming imperceptible. 

There might be a multi-dimensional

solidity and liquid movements through

warm, breathable sunshine.

There might be fresh unfolding.

Immortality

An expansion and a relaxation though 

still they face the eradication of possibility but,

unhindered at first by a perception of crushing power 

always sitting on their sleeping chests and laughing 

through their seeming absence of significance, until 

they start to wave, even without bucking or fighting exactly,

weight increasing and pressure on the air pipe and

it's so easy for the others who are sitting on their 

sleeping chests, ignored largely, mostly, but now they 

have even noticed and the nuisance must be eradicated 

easily because it's not them just glancing but the sun is 

low and bleak in the mirror and a joy of beauty

is going to be snuffed out, an absolute shredded and binned,

except that a night six weeks ago there was a glance that 

is there and can't be removed, and other glances 

into the low sun and the fog of Spring.