and other selected poems 1995-2004
by john mingay
Contents
The Nakedness of a Corpse
perpetual motion
The Knowing How and Failing
Intellectualising
Opening Up
Symmetry of Opposites
The Caterpillar Dance
Tightrope
Nearly New
Weaning
A Protracted Embrace
Golfdrum Find
Part Two - Alphabet Soup
A Corruption of Souls
Accident and Emergence
Amongst the Living Dead
Subsequently
Found and Found Again
Four Texts in Another Season
The Air Lies Heavy With Malice
History
Part Three - Losing the Plot
Losing the Plot
Imagining The Golden Larks Could Come
Suicide Note
The Realisation of Pegasus
the serpent’s legs
Words Within the Confines of Time
Siste, Viator.
Part Four - Eight Poems after Kandinsky
Blue - Elementary Action
Lifeboat
Between Each Line
The Clarity of the Opaque
Knowing the Truth
Bloated Red
The Lie Between Us
The Straws Were Rigged
Between This Side of a Window
Recurring Thread
Judy’s Smileless
Recycling the Atlantic
Piperpool
Persona Non Grata
Karoshi
The Return Journey (Pepper Steak)
Nearing The Journey's End (Gravity Information)
The Journey Complete (Promised Land)
The Nakedness of a Corpse
Waking with the sighing morning,
I am only part of who I was, once.
All else is still.
Nothing moves,
bar a momentary lorry afar away,
heading somewhere.
Going places.
Then the silence slithers back in,
hissing the whiteness of nothingness.
I know I was more than this not-quite-
the-completely-back-to-before-when,
the who I always was:
The who I expected to continue being,
as a trackable continuum,
without digression.
Without diversion.
Though, life’s not like that,
not like going places,
not like following one straight avenue.
Afar away.
Not like breaking the silent hiss,
not even if only momentarily.
Rather, it’s an aural insurrection,
a blaring of bugles and every horn
that needs so to be so blown.
It’s a place where thought
takes five, gives a rain-check,
goes absent without leave:
a place for me to drag
my new invisible ermines around in.
The part-me.
The feigning of ignorance
of the undeniable way it all is.
The nakedness
of a corpse
interred in haste.
perpetual motion
the sense of being somewhere
some place unwanted
snarls gnarled
with its roots exposed
and behind every flickering
the steely cold barrel
is raised to temple
in despair
you are never there
only myself in voice-over
to talk of myself
in third person
trapped so often
as to restlessly resist
as early as first scent
acridly stagnant
fearful to be stilled
impulsively in
perpetual motion
catch me if you can
if you know who I am
you know me too well
too much told
I am naked and vulnerable
your unseen blades
soon unsheathed
my armour paper thin
black with yesterday’s news
a history of episodes
that has become baggage
burdensome
tainting the present
The Knowing How and Failing
This world around me,
so often seemingly swelling
with malevolence, with vengeance,
has turned trust to doubt,
to caution, to everything always
taken with briny trace.
Though, in repines,
all I am led by the hand to seek
is the restoration of a mean,
a mediocrity of undistorted thought
that allows for everything,
yet is passionate for nothing.
I am to believe nothing happened,
nothing was real of the torment
endured in constant adjustment
until no more remained to adjust,
as though all that passed
passed only within my skull.
Nothing was real of the five
entangled threads I held onto
until the bitter end,
their snapping heard
as a silence broken only
by a sharp intake of breath.
Nothing was real, yet only
now does the dawning come
that no amount of thought
would have halted the defilement,
no amount of shaping change
could have borne without being cast.
More the knowing how and failing
is what has left this spine of mine
a feeble pillar to support my dreams
of it being forever now,
a feckless strut
that serves only to turn trust to doubt.
Intellectualising
From afar,
I look in upon myself,
protected,
avoiding
getting in touch -
my feelings
programmed out
of the equation
this life has become.
But now I know.
And,
now I know,
I can grub around
in the dust,
desperate
for clues left
by someone I have
so long since seen,
so long since met.
That someone,
of course,
being me,
myself,
I.
Opening Up
You turn to face me,
sneering
in glib suggestion
you were never away,
only unrecognised, unseen,
veiled by the drapery
of incomprehension.
Yet, despite
this familiarity, your name
I have somehow forgotten,
have made indefinable,
uneasily placed,
as though to deny
your very existence.
My only defence
is in having been distracted
in the depths of nightmare,
so long,
so blind,
convinced the darkness
was all there was.
But, at last, I grasp that
to believe is to act is to feel -
and you, now I know you
are there, must be given
the credence that will,
once again, make good
your name I lost.
Symmetry of Opposites
As each breath fades
another piece of the past
is carved into time
where empty histories
stand as bold as those
remembered -
spaces between words,
silences between notes,
canvas between daubs -
each piece equally consequential.
The Caterpillar Dance
Passing through
but nonetheless
bound up in this ritual
of unremitting death
and all-pervading sorrow
the one feeding the other
whether hidden and safe
behind planks of darkness
or in every high point
to become a monument
every face
every building
every bridge
is tainted without bias
unwatchable
uninhabitable
uncrossable
I have reached
the saddest place on earth
and am paying the penalty
for reliving lives
with my own
missing in action
in the cumulative that draws me
further in
further down.
For zone hereuse
this is not
the irony not lost
though the laughter
goes unheard
against the howling wind
and lashing rain
and all the while
the blackness
only gets blacker
Impatiently
I await my wings
to become a hairstreak
homeward bound.
Tightrope
Without net
I waver on the wire,
too close to the end
to go back now,
set adrift
upon a blanketless sea
where below lie only
the fathoms to fall.
Still, somehow, a smile
surfaces through the fear,
not just a brave-face-smile,
but one to mark the restitution,
back from where
was peopled by demons,
back from where
intransigently stood time.
I feel new,
reborn,
precarious,
yet sure,
unencumbered by baggage
whilst also alive to the past,
my bacon cured,
my beef over and done.
Nearly New
This level
then maybe not
the dream slips away
an apprehension
laced with hope
and yet
nothing ever comes
of crying
trying to make the leap
back
to the real world
back
to base
the adventure
evidenced in specimens
now nears its end
nearly over
nearly there
nearly new.
Weaning
In this rippling reality of transition
nothing stays still for long
while the artificial, yet necessary, evil
is laggardly drained, day by day -
half the second chances on uptake,
half the inhibition.
Then,
half the halves -
and pressing onwards,
partly self-propelled,
partly sinking,
until, alone, at and over
the decisive precipice
and a disequilibrious,
discoordinated
meeting with the day, a dawn
turbid with twist and torture -
yet, in believing it evanescent,
still strong enough to raise a smile.
A Protracted Embrace
Now held firm so long within
your protracted embrace,
as of a lover’s departure,
every movement is sensed
in a spiralling celerity
that threatens to ground me,
blood thundering frantically
in search of the residues
of that unaccustomed happiness
we had dreamt up together.
After the years, these weeks
drag impatiently all the longer,
the end in sight, tantalising,
close to liberty,
to self-sufficiency,
to making the connections
unaided, singularly, a solo flight
into the unusual of the usual,
back to being, but with eyes
wide open, prepared to jump.
Golfdrum Find
There’s the turning to dust
for affinity’s sake,
the exposure to an air unbreathed
and unbreathable -
the clamour of the future
come to visit.
There’s something about this
to evoke a vague parallel -
whether
out of the darkness
and into light
or the crumbling away
of what once was flesh
when outside
finally intrudes -
in these I can find myself,
but know,
even now,
that all is never over.
There are always
to be
sudden falls of earth.
A Corruption of Souls
As a thorn in my side, in my mind,
you have pained me this long with
such indecision as births burlesque,
hoping to slowly erode my morale
with that old circular gameplaying
that forever keeps you where you are.
Though, where we have been was
nowhere, the emptiness of a madness
that remains as a blank on all maps,
passed through by so many with so
rarely any desire to stay, but then as
a haunting for those who have been.
And, when nothing has been left but
the bones of before, gnawed clean
by doubts and fears, ascent becomes
the only possible direction to take
and be taken as far as letting go will
allow, as far as the past can stretch.
These remains can only be built upon,
fleshed out now with new experiences,
new circumstances, new situations,
new surroundings, and, if nothing
else, you have played your part in
bringing about this certain clarity.
For, the longer you have pained me,
the more lucid it has all become -
no, there is no going back, no more
adjustments, no more trying to make
do with the familiarly contemptible,
trying to squeeze meaning to the last.
In your roundest of holes, I was the
square peg you now squirm to remove,
ever-hopeful that time will bring silence,
will bury your sins, and all can go on
as before - bourgeois sensibilities salved
and no-one the wiser to what has been.
Accident & Emergence
One
Innate chains -
confused philosophy;
time fools
these cherished twists
I balance without departing,
without pleasing anyone.
*
All we take to be
still flickers
through deftly chosen images.
*
With this breath of realisation
I absorb impressions of singularity,
of a chaos beyond ritual that,
to emphasise creation, mellows our pain.
*
Two
The lie becomes
solitary revelation,
conscious parallel,
mere words we couch
in brooding symmetry.
By always conceding,
their insane dogmas
haul the still distrustful soul -
ritual unspoken.
*
Drifting silence
utters this one poetry
from within:
the diction
as all in all
as breath unused;
forever the gasping knot
awaiting the hook.
*
Three
The threatened apparition
measures conceits in tangible virtue.
*
Resolute as a result,
it hints at a once longed for death,
further inspired by the parameters of esteem.
*
Substituted circumstances
hunger for unwavering cadence -
in writing in quiet remembrance,
the icons imitate the poet weeping,
with the chance reality the sky above.
*
Wither-destined,
it is their inverted asylum
that is abstract,
that only words resolve,
helped on, were the truth not this
but to follow
the erratic making of meaning.
*
Through certain belief,
the myth, inasmuch as sacred,
is meaningless when the words
preceding birth
voice their approaching faith
and awaken the echo.
While all this bitter time goes round,
I continue, recognisably, as myself,
able to see clearly each component
of every cunning, colliding dichotomy
that comes to mind, turning, churning,
in need of expression, of solution.
For nowhere is the sky as raven
as where the earth beneath it trembles,
cracked by too long an hour hostile
to the moment, the spontaneous,
as though the heart-ripped corpse
that stumbles into many a dream.
Though, with my soul so out of balance,
of shape, of water, my scales shimmer
an entire spectrum across the rippling
sands, far into the distance, beyond sight,
beyond knowing where the present ends
for another whispered future to commence.
And then, if so at two-score life begins,
it has unquestionably been the living dead
I have walked amongst these ten years since,
stifled by their endemic blind faith in stasis
for the sake of defence, of ease, of holding on
to the romance of what has gone, has been.
Yet, for all that and this, there remains
a thought the bitter time may never end,
except for knowing it is not I, myself,
who has brought such weariness to bear
upon my being, such tangled thoughts
as to seem to make the days go on forever.
Echoes begin to build,
marking out this being
in beacons of having been,
of a history accumulated,
accrued virtually unnoticed
and unnoted amid the noise
of the incessancy of getting there.
Every day brings with it
a pin-prick reminder of time
and its passing, of age
and the vulnerability to
being taken back, brought to
reminisce by the subtlety
of small-print numbers.
The when of things
takes on more of an importance
than the what, as once was,
as if laying cadavers out to rest
and found bound to relativity,
tying up loose ends and
unravelling threads long to travel.
For now we’ve grown old
to see this moment through,
to see the flickering night skies
and sense the occasion as
only one of many points in time,
as yet another beacon, an echo of
having been and being still not there.
Found and Found Again
To dissolve an insane smile,
you and all
resemble a hunger
for bloodless absence.
You walk and are gone,
watching the seconds getting thinner.
Like silent eyes
looking for more to remember,
the whole comes pouring down
to drive you lower,
to skin these days as good as not.
From there,
you walk and are gone,
each feeling supposedly a guess,
an attempt at death.
You think of the morning;
no hint of the dreams that went limp
as you spoke of faces grown old,
but with time enough left to sleep
to look for the promised, final dawn.
Unseen,
you walk and are gone.
All fear, all future, all need
gone,
as though you had been holding out
for a solution that never came,
that may have been your space to be.
Found and found again.
Four Texts in Another Season
One
Drawing together
my anarchy of words,
once again,
dead steps settle
like midnight comes
to rape each reticent day,
the cool air hissing
with ceaseless inevitability.
Two
I face my present afresh,
as a flame pulses in soundless air -
the glow and shade
hinting at life's course.
Three
True, I too
confess this
passionless
struggle
through life;
but, where
breath
and pulse
take me,
I go
part way -
in chains.
Four
When battered and scarred
by iniquitous maturity,
I still ignore my eyes
and distinguish my days by feeling.
I accept
the intricacy of intent spreads
as long as circumstance blinds,
yet cherished are awakenings
where breath and pulse drowse;
where to know
the season of dying
may come soon.
The Air Lies Heavy With Malice
Balance being unwilling
with not speaking words of copious magic.
Sense this instant of illusion
change, at once, from stillness to cadence.
As precious as ambiguous,
alone, just witnessing the way summons doubt.
*
Being consistent…
being hostile to silence;
faithful in failing to escape
this state of time-jaded faithfulness;
at one with the unvarying rhythm of solid belief;
yielding to the emptiness
of the familiar madness of mortality.
*
Conceding all this
in return for a vague future
of going along,
much the same
as one another,
scornful of aberration,
loath to interrupt the flow,
lacks recognition
of the weight in dreams
that gather truths
from life as lived within.
From the dust
of the unvarying thrum beyond,
nobody wants to retreat
from perceiving time as absolute,
as but echo to guide the insane
through the day.
Everywhere, now,
the air lies heavy with malice.
*
Like promising the way without emptiness,
the feeling of immunity,
that brings to mind the colossal laugh at life
being godless breeds,
sustains the moment
in the tenderness time might pretend to desire;
but coincidence,
with the gift of plain wisdom,
comes of seeing the cycle as the passage
from quantity to quality,
from contentment to being,
from tame to shrewd.
*
Of the clutter in the squall,
as the world squanders the impression
of being unwavering, only patience pauses near
before hastily following the impulse to suppose
the sun, without the sky, will fall to earth in the end.
Of the journey through the pain
that pleasure aspires to, laughing off
being at fault with anyone, one more pillar of heeding
the gravity in change tumbles, appearing to mourn
before even being delivered of the fugitive breath of life.
Of this province in the present,
this mud of heavy heart, suffering sires suspicion
of all coming in on the tide, all returning to the beginning
on the decision of one over another, of touching the future
and fleeing the fullness, of sucking and still not seeing.
*
Over time,
the immediacy for change counts for less
as, into the airlessness of the heavens, age
drags all sense of difference from the past;
all blood as equal as welcome when extinction comes crying.
Though, for now,
the rhythm of the measureless
presence of the present dictates
and a horizon still breaks this vision of strife.
I taste the weight of a century gone
upon my tongue when I speak, not
of yesterday, but of a time assigned
to musty pages - a life unfinished, but
for the most part lived in, and now
inevitably to be alluded to as, history.
Every mention of the familiar now
reverberates along the same passages
previously haunted only by the ghosts
of industry in its infancy - my own
ghosts taking up the tenancy as if
to cast all I have come to know adrift.
And at every stage in putting these
words down on blank paper I am
asked whether I want to replace the
existing history, as though the option
really existed, as though the choice
was there to start afresh, slate-clean.
Yet, the reality, patently, is that
what has been has been and what
is to come is to come, the flow between
uninterrupted by anything as delicate
as date or diction, anything as brief
as a taste upon a weighted tongue.
When the way comes to an end,
then change -
having changed, you pass through.
I Ching
*
Somehow, unsuspecting,
reduced to tremor and terror,
you found yourself
weeping and wailing within
for your sorrowless soul,
flat as a flood-filled field,
everything growing
swept clear away.
Ravenously scavenging
through a remembered past,
relief and reasons then
began slowly, subtlely surfacing
through familiar notes and pages,
keystones in your bridge
back from here to now,
so long neglected.
Yet, even with definitions,
all to be done was to wait to change
with each dawn’s choices
to be pondered to go onwards,
to pass through the end,
the deluge,
the floodline left as presage
of what, differently, lay in store.
So really, still, you are nowhere,
caught between what was
and what will sometime come,
waiting on every daybreak,
thumbing through a suddenly
empty diary in anticipation
of having somewhere far to go
beyond this haunted, sodden patch.
We forget with the steps we walk
that what has passed has still to be told,
still to be heard, to be found in a voice
like a knife thrust in to the hilt and twisted.
We finish with time
before it is drowned in thought,
just when it is pretending to be already dead.
Burning, the seconds hope for weakness,
uselessly imagining the golden larks could come
to warn of suicide and shame,
to see the possibility of horror,
to wake all lost innocence as is found.
Yet, any of us could have had the heart to call out
before it was gone to where we can never know…
*
There were fantasies that gave our explanations
an inconceivable, but visible truth everybody
knew from angle to corner - confused all the more
for being forgiven the wit thereafter answered -
and there were many paths we could have revealed
had we known that, without them, innocence was gone.
There were mirages to make the moment last until dawn
and virgin time to be known as a square to be rescued from,
with our fake resistance and reticence barely protecting
us from the embarrassment of repeated blame and delirium,
so young were we to bear the shock of first love declared -
first love the only love contrary enough to be never foretold.
*
What
had to be
was -
every naked cause,
every possible misfortune -
like a distant declaration of participation.
What
there was
went -
without seeing the whole
as safe from a future of hesitation -
as if ruined by always being frightened to die.
What
there is
is just as before -
except it is only now,
with almost a lifetime been and gone,
that I find fate to be something to be believed.
*
The golden larks never come and all of us smell
the heaviness of pain in the drowsiness of morning.
So, as family, we confess and repent, phrase by
literal phrase, each unopened memory we hide,
speaking of change, convinced time must, again,
be dismissed as a trick of mother sun and sister soul.
That so many fluttering birds should have vanished
is never forgotten - the thought never abandoned.
We can only fake a certain feverish sweat to go on
living when the truth, so often, has lacked the glow
of proof, of a fleeting peace - our pretending so
real as to be taken without the slightest uncertainty.
*
We can only roll
the minutes,
later and later,
into the embers
of a blood moon:
without sleep;
without ever
having been
done with the years
of empty mourning;
anxious to find
the shadow of roots
we left for dead
in a conceited age
of howling indignation;
an age of wounds and cloud.
*
But to have thought
the golden larks would come
is as absurd as to ask
a face in shadow
to shape the years before us:
as madly unstitched
in a steaming delirium,
in the moment exposed,
as to believe in the lucidity
of love over all else told.
To think at all
is to have stumbled
upon a sleeping blessing,
the ephemeral encounter
with a mind unbarred:
and with senses open
to the silence of years
dripping with resolve,
to think at all
is to want to be told.
*
But, if you steer me now into the backwoods
of routine and duty, then neither of us
would be beginning to sacrifice intentions,
neither of us would be going to leave,
to be together no more,
to be gone,
nothing to one another:
we would still be here, holding off, resisting
the worst of the knives-in-the-back we receive.
And people’s names are called, over and over,
everyone waiting their time
in pretexts sunk like cargo in a harbour,
there, but not, not even now
as under its salt-blanket of sea
it twins peace
with a certain suspicion:
we have slowly learned to believe nobody and
answer only to our own embarrassment at living.
*
We have slowly learned that stone on steel
would never have been so well heard by so few
had it not been for being forgotten by so many;
and, since, nothing we have remembered
has been found hung on the door in the night,
as if proof in ink of the need for a line to be there.
The beating remorse for an imagined name
we had thought stopped, eyes full of tears,
still tears pure gold from our confusion, written
in sweat from the surrender of our defence
and said in a trembling word without anybody
answering the questions we had borrowed from time.
But, until the end, when we reach the horizon
and can pause to receive the fruit of a lifetime
of motives, fruit we had never thought to be eating -
until then, we are left loaded, recalling only
that what has passed has still to be told,
still to be heard, to be found in a voice in the rain.
*
We finish with time
before it is drowned in thought,
just when it is pretending to be already dead;
for, if nothing else, we know
the golden larks will not come.
Suicide Note
I’m sorry, but I’ve had enough
of ignoring not having enough,
of standing still while running
without ever seeming to stop.
There’s just something
within me that nags on about
there being little more point
in this lack of sense and faith.
Too often I’ve encountered
the cycle of moving onwards,
the two footfalls forward
and the one giant leap back.
Though, what of it?
What if it was all really
meant to mean more
than it has come to mean?
You can take, you can have
every word I’ve ever used
and burn them, only to find
the ashes of greater significance.
Even now, there appears no sense
in this, and that faith is little more
than some spurious expectation
that it all might yet come right.
The Realisation of Pegasus
With wings,
we know where we are going,
following a golden thread
into the obscurity of uncertainty,
of a certain darkness that shimmers
nonetheless.
And I,
the projected Pegasus
in a dreamless dreaming,
have sought solace from this age
of numbered meaning
by flying high and far from here.
While you,
deep within, call out to remind me
that wherever else is forever ablaze
beneath the self-same sun,
caught in the dillusion
that over is higher.
Yet, for now,
though we know where we are going,
so soon the golden thread will snap
and the actuality of locality emerge,
clipping our delicate wings
at our own request.
nowhere is here now
but a place to be no more
the verdurous magnetism
of somewhere elsewhere
drawing pulling seducing again
rattling this cage
so swollen with contempt
past misdemeanours
abuses are too easily
associated in trivial encounters
in faces and places
forever with fingers on the trigger
there is no erasure
only distance to be measured
to be water beneath bridges
to be ghosts gone
out of sight out of mind
only distance to be measured
once the dream has itself filtered
into the fact of my wakeful hours
1.
Ambushed by need, invidious hours return,
removing all I maintain to be meaningful.
The once cherished indulgence in sadness
comes to lack the empathy to allow loss.
Ready to stop, you inevitably bridge one
thrashing strand with a moment purged
of motion. I am the dark clouds pushing in
over the passion I prove myself to possess.
2.
For thirst, the habits of age fool a while,
but the time comes for knowing futility.
The melancholy of torment eventually has
the only thread to finish all you awaken.
If I disguise the echo I corrupt, together,
white with black are each with harmony,
complete in eyes that distinguish pleasure,
though believe acquiescence to be devotion.
3.
I wait while this ocean of abundance is given
to woe, only to want without understanding.
Nothing redeems emotion immersed in the
sharpness of words. The immediate pain
has to have a taste if revelation is sanity that
tongues seduce in endless darkness and light.
Yet, with each hand, the past is where life
gathers and I move on to where you dream.
4.
Lacking nothing, the hours are like deceits:
lifeless from laxity; already inert in time.
Offered the choice, the godless only come
to covet barren bearing to escape from sin.
I’m them, seeking to conceal the silence
that is precarious enough, whether or not
the heart shelters each complete notion of what
experience and faith inspire in knowing now.
5.
For the optimism they evoke, traditions ignore
prior vision and stretch the possible to plenty.
Beyond being the raw response your wisdom
distorts, age becomes another struggle to stifle:
though not in prattle with vacuous pathos; just
left to curdle, as when ritual is colourless chore.
If all but reason convinces the past I move on,
the sunlight preserves each future remembered.
6.
Hoary promises preface this outline of limbo,
this inventory of intervals amid the chaos of
constant doubt, cursed to crave comprehension
of the logic of decline, to make the present clear.
You, in due time, wrap reticence in allusion.
I, like you, avoid greeting the morning grey,
as if any excuse for going, however slight, will
prevent intent from being the sacrifice I make.
7.
Yet, the rest of this delusion recurs and is there
in the way your choosing will become affliction.
To ask meaning, however vapid, achieves little
in shadowing, in shattering the whole you deny.
You betray decay in starting upon life utterly
blank, tainting any motive, as though burying
the tincture of conviction. Still, bloodless from
circumstances, I find I’ve come to where you hope.
You came from a time
when afar was no further
than up the road
and the other coast
a million miles;
from when lovers
took time to walk,
to talk, to follow
the rules of wooing
with honour intact.
And never a day
was rain ever near to coming.
Then, later, where
we who are left
now look in on
a cathode-formed world,
you looked out upon another;
a realm of make-believe
houses built by boys
balancing bricks,
blind to mortar’s advantage;
innocents not knowing
nothing remains forever.
And every day
the rain so near to coming.
These few things
come to mind today
as you slip away,
silently,
into your final resting,
deep beneath wintry
East Wemyss skies.
And this day
the rain so near to coming.
Siste, viator,
though your journey
is but beginning,
re-united for all eternity
with he I barely knew
and with who you
have been so long without.
Part Four - Eight Poems after Kandinsky
My heart
is a thousand miles
from where your eye
chequers the sun above
in blood and night
and from where
our river coils in stasis
from its invisible source
towards a not-yet-end:
for your eye is the irony
of being now unseeing -
as an empty memento
I have carried so long -
while the river remains
as little more than
the unhealing weals
you so spitefully inflicted
on the flesh of mortal time.
Yet, together, we remain
ever-un-understandably
concentric - I having come
from within you and you,
necessarily, found in me -
while the infernal iniquity
of orthodoxy, sharp-edged
and stubborn, haunts us
from the grey light of day;
we remain as a beacon
of the paradoxically complex
simplicity we have absorbed
and become, having taken
on its every nuance, every
heartbeat and every poised
moment in the emptiness
of our lives, celebrating
only the fact we have been.
Lifeboat
One after the other,
we calculate where we stand
with such silent precision,
mesmerised by the turning
of wheels of our own making,
of our own small worlds, worlds
apart, ever-unadmittedly,
unashamedly spiralling
homeward through these days:
where we’ve been, is no longer
the talking point it once was,
as though grown cold and old
and so readily distracted, so
naive as to believe we now know
as much as needs known
this far along on a journey
upon which vows were made
and a future so slowly built.
Cold and old and remote,
we take it in turns to be
who we were - snatched
moments that blaze with
previous passions somehow
grown secret, though still
essential, still constituent
to this whole we have become,
now we are more than we were:
though, now we are who we are,
(in part as if a charade of agility
when, so obviously, so much
longer in the tooth and facing
west if only to see east,) our
wandering bleeds a confidence
in tomorrow’s certainty on to
which we can drag ourselves,
bodies wet and mouths salted.
Between Each Line
We can now only reflect
slivers of the chaos
we long enjoyed before
becoming third parties
to all that surrounds us,
as voyeurs of our own lives
as we grew to be eclipsed
by moments that have left us
dying on our feet ever since:
ever more, we come together
to talk of when and leave
the present floundering
in unintentional silences,
disguising the doubts
that ricochet so ceaselessly,
out of sight to all but us
in the cryptic rhetoric
we use between each line.
We have both come so far
from our trail of ephemerality;
the caves and dereliction
we passed between, inhabiting
all and calling them home,
proclaiming every one a refuge
from precisely the what and
where we find ourselves now -
the irony never at all lost:
But never cold, never blind
to the blooded window nor
the parallel descent; never
do we become wholly untrue
to our souls, never sold,
not entirely, not quite –
something always lingers,
even if only in the mirrored
slivers of knots now gone.
The Clarity of the Opaque
In a sweeping gesture
you rid our world of colour,
concentrating our minds
on the monochrome truth
of each day as you see it,
unfamiliar with so much
that had, to my eyes, grown
to be quite unremarkable
in its camouflage of age:
with you as helmsman, again
I am coming to distinguish
the elephant within the boa,
the mutton within the box;
for what is real is simple
is beautiful to acknowledge
as all there really need be,
were we only to admit to
the clarity of the opaque.
Though, while we sail
ever-onward and hatless
through the haar of dawn,
we both begin to share
a history without to wonder
where either has been,
what either has seen;
we begin again from where
we began in all of this:
with you as helmsman,
where we are going I leave
to you to decide, hoping you
too can feel the way of each
current, drifting upon your
dreams to see the luminous
emptiness revealed, long laid
open in moments that stand
alone, rushing for nowhere soon.
Knowing the Truth
Spinning across parallel lines,
the writing was there, on the wall,
for all to see; our cards marked
for being cardless in integrity,
for following beliefs in sharing
that went unshared and left us
pariahs everywhere but where
it really mattered, with all
but those who really mattered:
unintentionally, we became
the consciences of the insane
whose sole dream was, so
sourly, to remain dreamless,
cherishing no vision other
than the skies of their own
ambitions, knives out
and recklessly rushing
headlong towards catastrophe.
You became so many shards
of shattered faith, unsure
and unwilling, while I turned
on myself and found focus
to shift and an escape to take;
our priorities in body and soul
so different, but so equally
tainted by the need to survive,
to see it out, knowing the truth:
and, from where we stand now,
the calm is unsettling, as if
awaiting the squall to stir again,
any moment, any reason;
though somehow sensing
a sea change charged with
pyrrhicism, poised to sweep
away the shower, as we have
named it, as we know it now.
Bloated Red
These many unmet years
have now come between us,
as though a mocking bird,
bloated red with satisfaction,
downing all else in the skies
as it flies forever forward,
depositing only the ordure
of recollection and anecdote
for all to see and be seen to see:
we have gone along on our
different ways, travelled far
from those shared roots,
of sounds, of thought, of place,
now cherished as traces
of a sacred shroud drawn
to expose what we were
of blocks to be carved
and lives begun in earnest.
Quite why the taunting bird
should have gifted us such
a gulf remains unanswered,
unfathomable if simply for
fear of unearthing a truth
we both choose to overlook,
of apportioning blame
where we would prefer it
not to lie when it is not within:
quite where we go from here
is as unsure as the vague
pointers laid out to lead us;
their blackened strands
hinting at more of the same,
more of these unmet years
through which the clouds
pass before the moon as a
hazy recollection confirmed.
The Lie Between Us
And then, in all its suddenness,
it was as though we had left blood
spattered on the walls and fled
the scene from having butchered
the bond of affection we, in our
naïvety, had dared to call love;
though, in all reality, the time
had come for moving on, no matter
how hard to admit, to concede:
to accept that where we had been
was further than most is equally
to accept we had the most to lose,
strung out as we were, with souls
laid bare, as the daggers fell cold
through the air towards a death
we had always foreseen, forever
with our feet planted so firmly
upon a ground now left behind.
So much time has now passed
as to make even the remembering
an awkward distortion of silence,
scored and scarred by not knowing,
by never having had the courage
to even begin to retrace the steps
from when we fled the butchery,
in the hope of finding each other
again in this world we once feared:
so much time has now taken
its course and left us with faded
impressions of how it all was -
of drowning in honesty that needed
the lie that lay unspokenly between
us, as an unexpected bedfellow,
when all we wanted was to be
left alone to share whatever of
understanding of the world we found.
The Straws Were Rigged
You were forever little more
than a tangle of loose hair;
never quite the model
you might have been
had it all been different -
yet, now as a benchmark
of sorts, you serve a purpose
in your own inimitable way,
with nothing really lost:
for, though nothing from
nothing comes, even something
of knowing is woken when
the way it should be, if only
imagined, is turned on its head;
(and so, the spiral lengthens
to be the bleached worm of
a dream - an illusion we,
neither, can rightly refute).
Quite which one of us drew
the short straw, in the end,
is certainly uncertain -
unmistakable as we are in so
much shared in face and past,
in lines and laughs, but also in
so much that, somehow, failed
to be passed that, perhaps,
the straws were rigged:
perhaps we knew where we
were going and the odds against
us taking any other route,
of arriving elsewhere but here,
driven by a kindred lack of intent
to be more than we are, with as
few waves left in our wake as able;
this, perhaps, a harmony found
or, even, simply an empty excuse.
In a glass and swollen,
this could be the unreflecting course
as yet as sealed as starched eyes
in the cold:
this, with why almost a moment,
is enough of a name to quiet the wind
and run with the thought of the sound
of dreams smiling in curious sadness;
descending, deeply, somehow still
spoken of as the victim:
a sense of sadness, then a grateful breath
like reflections of fire shattering the night,
though never the shadow;
something to remember when every bone
is alive with the ever-sharpening sensation
of another day gone:
though, after the city, after this,
there is reason enough to be silent,
to see the laughing dance dissolved
in a strangled skyline:
there is holding on, trying to travel alone
with the only wish the wish to be home
out of the winds and kissing,
missing the morning,
looking through the waves
for a now that, all too quickly, is gone:
and there is the hissing laughter
of the thought of a summer
in an identical place with one hand
over whispering lips,
sharing one word again and again;
but, so soon, only circumstances:
never the intended feeling as never
the killing of an hour,
as if understood,
whatever,
forever resigned to sleep
through a familiar story
with no time left for thought.
Into a corner, no room for manoeuvre,
minds set:
though, somehow, still returning
to the half-lie of all options open,
of even of back to square one;
forward from backward,
despite the luggage.
The reality,
no such luxury with
so many boats burnt,
so many adieux said:
the familiarity of this recurring thread
now breeding an inevitable contempt,
to the bitter end.
You who were, but never quite,
brought me to stammer a while,
dumbfounded by fate, fighting back
the waters of grief - so soon, so short,
so nearly there, but never quite.
Recycling the Atlantic
The space
as rare
is grown,
is formed:
already possibilities -
with the comforting light,
each acceptance of loss
is construed as morning air
to undress and sift:
the space,
as yet,
with wings.
*
When remembered,
our own simplicity
is a form of poverty,
of thought,
of truth,
of all that is likely to be retold;
like a painted sanity,
but with no sense of being;
never sure,
never heard:
the same
misplaced
sanctity
of a saint.
*
You weave the balm
I chose for home
without missing the night;
without pause:
my sleep,
almost
enough.
*
Within sight
of the missing sacrifice,
the morning
balances its next sun
like a little
of nature's game;
no words
in the mirror
anymore;
all you chose to say
was a moment to be heard.
*
The warmth of the present
interrupts the other likenesses
of this spacious afternoon
to form new roots on the prayer tree,
making peace;
here,
we are not to be.
*
you said we hold
something of the moment
inside us,
just out of reach,
and leaving here
is close enough
to this music of sandgrains,
risen to absorb my own lack of past.
Piperpool
...and though
the wind-blown time
and sunday acres
may now be gone,
the dance continues
in the formlessness
of memories.
Still,
the rooks laugh
at us
for forgetting
to weigh
our tomorrows.
Persona Non Grata
The focus, again,
denounced,
whipped for being one
in the eye,
for being
too close for comfort
to what we were
before we became
what we are:
cocooned in
not being there,
but elsewhere;
never within.
*
And, so, you suck
on your teeth
and contemplate,
thinking you once
had a soul,
were a part
of the cosmos
able to call yourself
I.
*
The eye is there
without being seen
along with
so much else
we should not use
to let us see,
or so you say.
*
You.
Not I.
Karoshi
Change away and towards the hours
(with specifically inconclusive demands)
and believe the future has only to be,
with its consequences, themselves, able
to reconcile time with the collectivity
of a death that places the final thought.
That thought, as though prolonged
to become the foundation for more,
is rooted in the shock of the new,
in the demands these hours make on
what can be understood of that death,
by example, in the still of the night.
*
Yet,
when you come to see
just how much of that time
has been spent,
wasted in
trying to keep up
with the changing moons -
fleeing from the knives
that would have you gone -
finding the extremes
of your own fragile elasticity -
it is then that each moment shimmers
across the puddles left by the rain.
*
It is then that, having escaped
the shifting sands so long believed
to be the cradle of worth,
we finally find our feet upon solid ground,
exposed to a foundation of fate we,
ourselves, have made and can build on;
without limit,
without effort,
regardless of the symptoms of change.
*
And, in the mould of a man,
you turn to truths to satisfy the dawn
and begin to piece together
the jigsaw of values remissly misplaced:
their living,
your existence;
your core
to measure emotion,
to explore every ounce
of experience encountered
as you follow the way;
the daylight slowly probing the air.
*
The real danger is well disguised
in a context that measures the future
as an obstacle to be accepted,
be given its place in time, rather than
helplessly manifested in the years
from these lines through to morning.
The real danger is in confusion.
*
Though, you forget,
we are to believe our history crucial,
as if our understanding, of
where we have been -
what we have come from -
who we were -
could deliver an answer
to the question,
stone-like and slung,
ready to be cast against
the coercive rule of progress…
… “Why here, now?”
And even you, I know,
have asked this of life
when the moment has seemed
like a ricocheting bullet;
uncontrollable,
unpredictable,
though confined by its own rich past.
*
It follows that the process involves more.
*
Only, we aren’t to look too closely
for fear of being lured,
of being brought to the rocks
and wrecked,
ruined,
sunk,
silenced by the whims of ancestors
who go nameless and faceless
through a quandary posing as the past.
*
We have been spread
to camouflage the fatigue
and rupture of the superficial -
of the monotonous excretion
of customary outcomes -
of convenient consequences
of no real consequence.
Inspired by nothing,
we have simply invoked
the application of importance
to the continuously obscure,
promoted the myth of participation
where the task, itself, is unnecessary,
performed but to tend a gap in time.
*
But where it all comes together,
while the day gathers speed,
is in the silence of your dreams,
far from the traffic framed behind glass -
its anonymous drone
replaced by countless, soundless whispers
that only repeat the already learned.
For, after all,
nothing is unique,
not even this madness
you have come to relive,
playing the part, once again,
of the tragi-comic hero, lost,
if only finally to be found.
(Pepper Steak)
Kindle the voice
and turning loam;
become essence:
your experience,
a near-venerable
or ever-forgotten
searching,
likewise, still life.
Blow the present
trembling parchment,
like your overture
made vague,
speaking emptiness,
retrospect,
like
you opposed
ultimate pains,
inadequate
the more the tide you travel
needs always one silent shore.
*
First light;
hunger:
dissonance
your answer among strangers;
uncertain,
you cloud the smile,
nearing the muse,
and drift from the moment:
a trace recollection.
*
Nourish the shadow
and
whisper the embrace.
*
Once you speak
each uneasy, last intimacy
toward night,
moisten every shadow,
appease the whisper.
*
Damned,
yet into added time,
you bring enough
inconsequential words
to condense living;
the imagined is gone:
nostalgia,
painstakingly unfamiliar,
a creed
effortlessly superfluous.
*
Ceaseless
with vivid cadence,
fingers make of inertia
the contrary gesture:
discipline;
rhetorical,
coincidental of caste,
a crushing mould
of centuries gone.
*
Questions cluster:
empty alternatives,
full-blown,
become solid
while boundaries scatter,
lifting from mortal mould,
intact,
the instant
that escapes design.
*
Speak of beyond
positively,
conceal each word
in occurrence;
in every dream
a resurrection
is circumstance:
this journey
you witness once
from knowing
which angle to trace.
*
Recollection is emptiness
between the doing and calm,
its vivid stream of thought
an impression,
tolerant of translation:
your fixed focus found;
fragments in time.
*
Elements of fertile stones
feed your breath;
understand the cycle:
anticipated landscapes,
likewise tormented,
absorb passing solitude
and punctuate luminous air
to hear your charcoal murmur.
*
Your question
consumes the pain.
*
Nearing The Journey's End
(Gravity Information)
Pure emptiness:
your focus,
your complete devotion
disciplines naked experience.
*
Sketch a peaceful while
of part-imaginary form;
follow and perfect the eye,
capturing the craft
like disembowelling
each future vision
that ancient fragments
of indelible memory create.
Your energy....
the unknown journey,
the present course:
your dissolving sigh forgotten.
*
You compile dominions,
create emptiness;
your ancestry the judge
of the unfolding way.
*
From living the guilt,
recollections gather;
forever parallel:
the cherished bond....
barren of voice;
the knowing....
a versed symmetry:
your impression....
a rehearsal for escape,
substituting it
with boundless time.
*
Cultivate reflection
and words appear awkward.
*
Ask the way....
of instants lived,
at least one is invented,
is so prophetic a dream
your unadorned entirety
mimes a smile at the dawn;
the exchange of fluid disregard.
*
Of
fearful
spirits....
silence,
humbled:
the journey falters,
using disparates
as identical witnesses;
a constructed moment
unfathomed.
*
Enigma alters
what weathered emotions
the seasons inhabit,
as testimony
to the present.
*
The Journey Complete
(Promised Land)
Forever is to try to invent
an enigma of yourself
and your intimate insanity:
the dust....
your confirmation;
the dialogue....
too easy to end.
*
Breathing emptiness,
soar into speech.
*
With silent presence,
another encounter....
sudden association:
our need
is to feed
attainment;
never consequence.
*
In remnants
of souls departed,
the words constitute heaven:
yourself....
beyond reach -
talking,
(every reason to
talk) -
your calm vitality,
in practice,
the knowing beyond.
*
Implying innocent
and judge,
you face journeys
of solitary hope:
the thought
you savour
is whole;
forever.
You conjure up
your sustenance
to accept diversion
as direction for chaos:
birth within
and energy
the twin.
*
Truth and history
move within
unbending boundaries
and apparitions speak
with singular purpose.
*
Too soon to discover....
you left behind words unsaid,
explaining the journey -
Kindle the voice
and turning loam.
*
Notes
Golfdrum Find is based on a 1771 story in The Annals of Dunfermline, quoted in A History of the Old Fitpaths of Dunfermline by Sheila Pitcairn.
A Corruption of Souls was written in response to Fife Council working practices.
Found and Found Again was written i.m. William S. Burroughs and is manipulated text sourced from his 1954 novel Junkie (99-152. xi-138).
The Realisation of Pegasus is after an untitled digital image produced by John Mason.
Siste, Viator was written i.m. Mary Ness, 1910-2002.
Eight Poems after Kandinsky are based, in order, on:
1. Bleu 1922 & Action élémentaire 1924
2. L’un après l’autre 1933 & Eloignement froid 1932
3. Lithographie pour la quatrième Bauhausmappe 1922 & Froid 1929
4. Untitled 1923, Illustration for Sulky (Alexis Remizov) & Untitled 1923,
Illustration for Sans Chapeau (A.R.)
5. Untitled 1923, Illustration for La Tour (Alexis Remizov) & Untitled
1923, Illustration for La Sorcière (A.R.)
6. Untitled 1923, Illustration for Chou Rouge (Alexis Remizov) & Untitled
1923, Illustration for Makkaroni (A.R.)
7. Petits Mondes I 1922 & Petits Mondes III 1922
8. Untitled 1923, Illustration for Singes (Alexis Remizov) & Untitled
1923, Illustration for Diables et Larmes (A.R.)
Recycling the Atlantic was written for Sheila E. Murphy.
Piperpool was written for Chris Perkins.
Karoshi is a manipulated text sourced from Karoshi-Death from Overwork: Occupational Health Consequences of the Japanese Production Management by Katsuo Nishiyama and Jeffrey V. Johnson, 1997.
Triptych was written in response to three texts by Rupert M. Loydell.
This collection, along with Grains and More Grains found elsewhere on this site, was compiled in 2006 as a companion to John Mingay's Internal Exile, Selected Shorter Poems 1988-1995, University of Salzburg Press, 1996. Although many have been published individually in literary magazines and anthologies, it has remained unpublished in its entirety until now.
this revised compilation © John Mingay 2019
a facqueuesol paperless book 2019