Brian
Hinton Against Deconstruction Discourse decays. I sometimes think the telephone's parody of beyond the grave - your distant, disembodied voice - and it is bodily contact we crave; my letters are more serious of course (and one-sided). Semantically, a good read can be endlessly rehearsed and recast our choice of what emotion to dare, which here stutters to the raw. Passion's out of favour in this cool new world, sex is a function of language, parole of your particular body from the langue of my undifferentiated delight in woman. The last adventure is playing Adam and Eve, our text reads ecstasy as a night from heaven, so why do I cry to God in orgasm, popping your clitoris like a panic button? A fatal difference of body and mind -1 rehearse theory, loose ends that deconstruct the whole. Speech courts negation but still we joke, skin to skin, at the ridiculousness of desire. In bodies, like books, I refute Lacan's divide of Imaginary and Symbolic, our selves forged by experience, the titillations of late capitalism my deepest beliefs, for which I'd open fire. State functionaries state the obvious- that we create meaning from a vicious stew of desires, needs, opposites unravelling curtained darkness from the merest loose thread, Well, I'll knit together open and closed, innocence and fate, to summon those spectres self and soul, attempt the politics merely of man and wife, seek gross particularities in bed. When you left, you left yourself - my room is all the lonelier for your disembodied clothes, your detritus of life, a pair of discarded knickers patterned with a rose. I sleep with them underneath my pillow, rehearse the small comforts of memory and long in limbo for your sweetness to return, clinging like a drowned man to the telephone. Angela Carter MY CAT IN HER FIRST SPRING With the spring coming, my cat is beginning to bud. sprouting nipples all along her long white breast, this long-legged, adolescent she. And in the strange country fitfully lit by the inward-turning suns of her yellow eyes, such alien trees shake out moist leaf and the seed-crusted ferns uncoil with a slow blindness in the rich fruit-cake of her dark recesses where the wrinkled intuitions her summer roses stir and tremble in their sleep for spring is coming, and the fat buds bulge. |
Daisy
Abey Running With the Wind As silence begins to echo Moonless nights are alive My garden a fox path Beneath the conifer hedges. Every sense alert they pounce Airborne black jets Peewits raise the alarmdogs bark. Their noses quiver, ears prick They twitch their brown brushes Territorial instinct,recognition posts Smell sour rusty steel. They prowl the hen-runs fruitlessly Moving eyes listening ears Dance with hind legs up in the air ‘Foxes carry no keys’. Peering nocturnal green glow Lightning flashes oscillating They live with the wind, run with the wind And leap unchallenged the shadowed dark. My Own Prison Cell Steel sashes grind grooves, Weighted walls, dead air, my trembling heart A world of silence, solitary yet With the odour of molten metal. I make my bed, hours turn and return And roll into its hot sweat pool The phone still, isolated reinforced iron door In vain my eyes travel from corner to floor. My terror sinks between green curtains No escape route to the enticing blue A book opens, shuffles and settles beneath My obscure mind’s empty drifting arc. I invade round the narrowing inches Winter shaking the bare birch body Packed within wind, cold shutters My breath fades, revives and fades again. I wonder and wander my limbs fail, Amazed at my staggering existence I force the lock with a rusty metal key Struggling again to set me free. |
Simon Jenner
Radio Dawn
If memory's fretted and tightened home
its distorted intervals can sing.
An all night Indian Prom;
eleven years back, Radio 3's first 3 a.m. interval
first flickerings into wolf hour lives
the quietest of insomniac cultures
shuffling the sweet dry-twanged thought
of such permanence
as the raga wound to that time
the player's hair tight turbaned
this mensuration of eternity
a flattened fifth, augmented decade;
in the way leaves - mine, the broadcaster's -
flitter open at that hour, cascadin
hair, notes, unlooked-for words
that showed these all diminishing
on a ground where trance is burned away
as the intervalic life collapses
my chromatic years lack a sounding board;
he breaks with a young, academic apology
for his shaven head
that lost its glitter home
as it inched back to slow-curled luxury:
"I once vowed saffron, silence".
Radio Dawn
If memory's fretted and tightened home
its distorted intervals can sing.
An all night Indian Prom;
eleven years back, Radio 3's first 3 a.m. interval
first flickerings into wolf hour lives
the quietest of insomniac cultures
shuffling the sweet dry-twanged thought
of such permanence
as the raga wound to that time
the player's hair tight turbaned
this mensuration of eternity
a flattened fifth, augmented decade;
in the way leaves - mine, the broadcaster's -
flitter open at that hour, cascadin
hair, notes, unlooked-for words
that showed these all diminishing
on a ground where trance is burned away
as the intervalic life collapses
my chromatic years lack a sounding board;
he breaks with a young, academic apology
for his shaven head
that lost its glitter home
as it inched back to slow-curled luxury:
"I once vowed saffron, silence".