The Poems

The Tao Of Dining
Mabinogion Translations
St Davids Hall
Cover Blown - i m William Burroughs
I Chew My Gum & Think Of Rifles
Trying To Find Bela Bartok
The Miro Mini Bar
Starting The New Magazine
Fibrillation
The Problem Of Mathematics
Like Snickers
Watering Can
Trying For The Job
Me And The Lone Ranger
Recycled

 

 

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St David's Hall

After the concert they come out: Dafydd ap Gwilym,
William W. Williams, Williamstown, Sion a Sian, Ivor Emanuel,
Lloyd George, Gelert, Owain Glyn Dwr, Mrs Davies Plas Newydd,
Wyre Davies BBC so glad there's no one here to mangle his name.
Some bear programmes like souvenir flags.
Their souls have been enlivened by po-faced Elijah & enormous cymrectitude:
huge handbags, polyester shirts, those woollen celtic
drapes that make you look like an overweight bat, M&S ties.
They discuss school funding, where to go for supper,
death last week, look there's Alun Michael, disgrace,
that Ron didn't need Clapham we have our own parks,
chi wedi mynhau, the timpani especially.

And there are the kids, the ones who didn't bother to go in,
unworried about identity, sitting in the bar worse than Ceris,
Welsher than R.S., louder than Iwan Bala.
New Wales unselfishly immersed in the national pastime
alcohol alcohol antipathy antidote,
not mentioned anywhere in the Assembly agenda.
Dim pwnt see bachgen it's like breathing
you don't think you do it, pwy yw Saunders anyway?
Over the speakers gloriously come the Furrys

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Mabinogion Translations

Bendigeidfran overlooked the sea
from Ireland
they could see the ships

When they saw
the ships
near at hand
certainly they had
not seen them

The ships were
blessed by God
and prospered
with brocade
This was certain

God was near
was he not?

The brocade and the shields
were pointing upwards for peace

These are ships
said Manawydan
but we cannot see
them

It was an early Zen problem

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I Chew My Gum & Think Of Rifles

What we needed was a
great leader in a set of Castro fatigues
with a gun. He would have
stood on the balcony they'd have
erected hastily along the front of City Hall
and told us we were worth everything
in the world and the enemy,
rich with gum and nylons, could go to hell.
Imagine that.
Strutting up and down Queen Street in
our camouflage pants with the
crowds roaring. No planes, we
wouldn't have planes. Some rusty vans,
maybe. And a truck, with a whole
crowd of us, singing and dancing on the back.

But it was never like that. We got people who
hectored us, with their hands in the till
and some fake tongue in their mouths.
Not one of them wore a uniform.

I chew my gum and think of rifles.

Then I recall that we are a peace loving people.
If we'd had rifles then, by now,
we would have given them up.

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Trying To Find Bela Bartok

Top of the hill at Farkasrti Temeto in a mild rainstorm.
The mamoushka flower sellers
in sailing polythene squat by the road.
A Trabant has its front off.
There are bullet holes in the ferro tram stop
and there's a man with a dog.
The guard at the car-park has
the red fire face of a drinker
and no knowledge of this land's greatest son.
The paths like death itself are interminable.
I find him next to Solti
marked by a chisled bass clef
and overgrown with conifer.
There's a fragment of a red star
and no flowers.

Was your visit to Hungary: yes / no
Which of these: Concerto for Orchestra / Hungaroton / Race With The Devil
Rate democracy: 1- speech 2- obstinacy 3 - epic 4 - fiction
How: tin can / mixer deck / mini-bar / high-peak military cap (please circle)

Please hum 14 bagatelles into this microphone
koszonom

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The Miro Mini Bar

By the lift-shaft we find a plaque
telling us that Joan Miro was born
in the very room in which we are
staying seems so ordinary with its
minibar and shower-tray and Miroa damp
marks moving up the wall. On the
street we see him standing outside the shop
which sells figs. I thought he was
dead but he's in fine form testing the
splatter technique he's learned from the
Americans on the front of the tapas bar on the
other side of the street. Free Political
Prisoners read the smears in red and
when the Guardia arrive to take him off
no one appears surprised that the country's
greatest painter should be treated like
this. Later in the bar a man with a moustache
tells me that was not Miro but an impostor.
"Miro, he never use words, too precise."
In the park his giant mute statue of woman
with bird glows in the sunlight. At the
hotel I take a beer from the Miro minibar
and consider its beauty. It has much -
slender, upright, radical. I check the
price list. Traditional.
What would Miro have done?
I do a little sketch of it in the back of
my notebook. Then I put it back.
.

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Starting The New Magazine

Worn by drizzle and tired.

The radio like pandemonium
dragged through birch hedge,

Check the advice section

Dear Mavis
In the night all night the dream time and again the
hard nipple will these things ever cease?

Dear Peter
No Stay with it. The age is new.

God almighty, yes. Turn the radio down.

I start the magazine with a team of
tough grey fucks not yet wedded to all
day comatose.

How to cope with weight. How not to be mistaken in pubs. Not
catching the eyes of old, almost-lovers now it's too late. Strategy for
hair loss, scalp condition, whiteness, regress, dryness, falling and
fading. Avoiding stoop, shoulder bend, wrist thinness, ankle shake.
Not running. Less sex. Living with artificial parts. Realigning.
Degouging. Crop rotation. Gum buggering. De-calcification of
breath. Article on how to remember what you just said. Article on
how to convey this to others. Ads for fast cars. No poems.

Dear Maldwyn
In the night I see most of it. Stars and rattling. I understand
what there is to and that isn't much. I no longer sleep
the dreamless never wake bright and glowing. The chest is a shaking
drain. I'm up all night tending the prostate and thinking
about winter radish. Are there ways to improve things?

Dear Peter
No.

Issue One sells out in a week.

 

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Fibrillation

You go to a mosquito at midnight and give him a certain number of photons. That particularly well- timed jolt turns off the mosquito's clock. He doesn't sleep. Insomniac insect beast. But after that he'll doze and wake and buzz a bit. It is what he does, all at random. Like always. This perpetual jet lag you've stuffed in his head it doesn't alter the middle of things, just their beginnings and then their ends.

The mosquito's narrative does not use sequential syntax but darts rather in bursts of talk and then long stretches of silence riddled with the ghost fragments of that which went before. Can. There is an acceleration here which leaves nds ds nnn ds s s s ss e llll ll.

The narrative never. Point different from all the other points. Point pl. Point ll l. The point law point can of worm. s. Cycle both non-wake tsss. R. ll ll llll l. The sleep-wake cy. The narrative ten to twemnt. ty. l. Even pl. Seems about resetting even. Erratic bot ll ss kys hg. But the buzz a buzz z. The cy slop ll h.

Even fibrillation chao. Wrm. l ssss. Start how stud why when nds. This mend and the mos.

Quito o.

Secret strt (somewher). Please pl.

 

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The Problem Of Mathematics

Mathematical talent often develops at an early age. Normal psychological development of a person stops at precisely the time when mathematical talent sets in. This is the gricer phenomenon which, in an urban environment, relates transport number collection to (largely) male identity function. I have colleagues in this category with a mental age of something like six and this creates practical problems. They operate like silk in an academic environment but do not survive well in the harsh world of love, pain and evolving language.

Try this simple test. Start with a chosen set of basic assertions. Substitute, say, a set of artists's biographies for their actual work. Relegate the marks they have made on canvas and substitute the chronicles of their daily lives. Proceed now to construct chains of further assertions based on your original model until one is generated that looks particularly nice. If you were a talented mathematician you would now invite your colleagues who would admire your work and suggest its beauty. The chain of intermediate assertion would constitute its proof. An assertion that can be stated simply and concisely - shoulders, temples and breasts are always points of crisis in cubist paintings for example - often requires an extraordinarily long proof. You should know intuitively which definitions to introduce and should construct your path as convolutedly as possible.

The length of proofs is what makes mathematics interesting. Mistakes here are death. One has to see the future.

proba("non A") = 1 - proba("A")
A = the whole lifestyle
non A = product. Both independent.
Then proba("A and B") = proba("A") x proba("B")

This is intuitively reasonable. The purpose of mathematics is to make sense out of the world. It says train-spotting is as relevant as cubism's cones, cylinders and spheres. Cross this out. Construct a further chain of assertion.

 

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Like Snickers

I am so afraid of radioactivity. I live too near nuclear power - ten miles across the channel like pit- bulls - and there are trains holding flasked-waste like huge zingy hot-dogs going past me on the local line. I want to do without this. Not stand on some Porthcawl beach in my 50s sun-glasses and the yellow glare looking manly but pack it somehow putting polystyrene between the nucleons and cementing the protons into things like giant SNICKERS and sinking them in trenches in another ocean. I am so afraid of the way these things deposit energy as they pass through our bodies. Ivan and Zorica Draganic advise that just holding up a hand ought to be enough to stop alpha waves. I've been out the back and I can tell you it works there are none on the bricks at 19 Southminster.

Fisher says the topographical analysis of a breaking window should be plan enough for anything. He was thinking of a poem. I'm concerned with skin. 50s poets lived in a world where the fear was cold but only surface. Aluminium 0.12cm would stop beta rad but only 3.00cm plus could hold gamma. The trains then glinted of this mock silver. People rode them. Now the shit is unstable and de- regulated. Mad Checken h-bomber stows on Aeroflot. Republic emulsion coming through cracks. We hold up our hands in horror at the unpredictability of nuclei decay. A billion years and then it's fine. No worry. Furioso change the world. I know the poets are with me on this. The politicians too. They all know we can't.

 

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Cover Blown

IM William Burroughs

William Burroughs goes to Rio

for a new face. It’s a brilliant piece of
plastic surgery, makes him look
like a taller JFK. He’s so proud getting
off the airliner at New York’s Dextromorphine
that the bullet coming at him
smiles a little itself before going in.
It makes shotgun art on the 747’s side.
Could have been anyone
Burrough’s mouth says while
his Brooks’ suit body slumps el
hombre invisible cover blown.
In Lawrence, Kansas when John F
finally slides into the earth the West
thinks it’s lost a city in the red night.
And it has.

 

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