fingerprint


echo ordains the lines of tomorrow
our equal and our souvenir

spring a nativity
rimed with derision

fire ages us
the flicker
fading to uncertainty

the simplest question
is without an ear

and always the crow arrives
at so precise an hour

the unseen strands
arranging semblances
like flowers

replace moments that never move
beyond themselves

a calcium in the formal
underlining

to the glass where water bubbles
carbonated faces
ascending to dissolve



Critical mass

‘stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it’

- Bob Dylan

                           1


‘Dylan for me’s the catalyst and the clown,
a reactionary revolutionary with a vision.’

She crosses her nyloned legs with a rasp
and tugs her skirt inches towards the knee.

(An inauspicious start, signalling, unless I‘m mistaken,
precisely the wrong kind of intercourse.)

Paradigm of the simplistic belief
of where there’s a word there’s a way,

I sit forward eagerly to engage her eyes.
I say: ‘To me, it’s like driving into the past

with broken headlights and no fuel.’
Her brow’s knotted, knees become tight.
   
Silence. She nods, then slowly shakes her head.
‘It worries me it’s all a confidence trick

and that few of his messages semantically cohere.
That all he offers is a shifting metaphysic.’

My turn now to nod sagely. ‘Surely,
you’re looking for that final scenario,

but when the architects change
what becomes of the building?’

‘Okay, the old intentionalist fallacy trap
and I’ve trod in it with both feet blazing.’

Smiling, she relaxes now and smoothes her hair.
‘In the end, you’ve got to embrace the invention.’



                            2


(or
for the Persian poet
who having listened
to the great ideas of the world
abandons the room
to its cacophony
through the same dull door
he’d entered)



Noir


Dust of drizzle
has me squinting
at a grainy day -
a reel of old film
projected to a blur.
Then a funeral
in a black & white Bayonne
old drinking friend
never-say-no
whose epitaph
came in circles on the bar.
Last days of February
before the resurrection
and the blight
and the dull
optimistic drift
of inevitable descent
the grim faced evening
into numbness and deceit.

What makes grief
orgiastic?
The double indemnity?
The service?
The burial?
Hollowness of earth
on wood?
Totem
for the pointless dead?

Communion renewed
we sway
towards epithets of nothing
mes amis du rugby
two Basques
carved from wire and stone
broken smiles
to melt an icecap
songs hallowings
from the recessed soil.
Onward
to our altars of excess
and we spiral
angels sick with sin
into the slurry
of our own deliverance
into that big sleep
where puking
nor the fatality of stars
can ever purge us
or disgust.

Copyright © Jack Alun, 2008

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