Jun 9, 2022

Poems by Paul A. Green

TRUTH’S BODY COUNT

Well I’m drifting
slow and frowsy

crawling into a brood
or a small steamy doze

cue: sleepy radio spokesmen
make grave pontifications

their words whistling like cooked insects -
natter then flip/slip off stage

then everything’s coming through raw
in bell-shaped lights floating down beyond hedges

white-faced beings from another sky
are threatening to jelly us softly


until the picture straggles/dribbles
into a crashing soundscape

high blood tide/terror zero
this moment almost an uttering

get the names out
out of the way

who are the men of power
beyond the grand slam of tombs

Artaud unshaven barking
rising like a fire-eater?

Huysman at prayer
in the marbled caves of brothels?

Nietzche tightening his muffler
while the pox raged across Europe?

the growing parataxis goes on and on
the rolling catalogue

stop de-clutching fetishes of ink and wood fibre
disconnect from your sleepy heroes

let their flying tombs vanish
light into light

stop this brain fatigue loop
I’m living here and now mutating at a pen-point

let the magi live on/in
the buzz tones of the larynx

the old habits die
like street boys in cross fire

in fused clumps of these connections
the brain is reversed engineered in a Martian capsule

the structure is hyper active fragile
too many neural interconnections

a war between atoms
insect bodies burning

in locked cells
exhaustion intervenes

I wanted strong literature
interplanetary bliss for all - a transubstantiation!

but I’m pushing shoving
at knuckle sandwiches of history

devastating melodies from a world next door
the shrill silences of evasion

silence after violence
in the glassy rubble


BOUND HEAT

coils of fire
whip up a brain

hips swerve to trigger pheromones
but I was in the wrong body

all lead and feathers
in free fall

into the hands of a beast with five fingers
groping in a hutch of bones

girls might kiss in a castle
huddling in delight

but this old dreamer can’t catch them out
the ghosts on the screens can’t help it

our inner egg of fire
cracks us into a craze of dead jokes

keep on running
straight out of infotainment


FULL BLOODED MOON

‘wait for the full blooded moon
to slit up your raw mysteries

keep your limbs moist
as you lie in the shattered woods

hold your body still in the blackness
be a handful of light for me’

ancient menageries live in the spinal cells
throughout me

wait dear dearer dearest mascot
like a small china bird in a forest of plants

epistemology hagiography eschatology
all got problems now I’ve got started

Poem by Stephen Bett

Novel Lines 101:  101 alphabetical poems, each riffing on the opening line of a postmodern novel or metafiction. Antonio Lobo Antunes, Act o...