(from the “This is Not Yet Hell/And Sing Do the Ghosts of New Amsterdam” poetry cycle, 2012-2014)

(this is a collection of some of the less embarrassing poems published in the lead-up to the release of Lillian Gish’s final full-length studio album, And Sing Do the Ghosts of New Amsterdam – this is an act of documentation with mind to posterity over dignity)

 

re-entry of marksman’s hip
a coercion of nails
biting point, closed – folk, coming on strong, now
grizzling unction,

vicious escape of Haddo / tick-tock-tick-tock
the clippety-clop of dust-tousled granite-gun endchild foresight

foresworn, foresaken

lenticular pattern-patronage, summon hollow spirits
juice of the otherest meat

forgive, forgive

---

 

Double-You-Are
Mariana clutches thirteen
balloons in hand – black, silver, ruby gold

Clandestine bubbles reach the surface
the long neck holds ambrosia and gold flakes
Piano chords swing in the water melodies
But tribal rhythms cannot mask the gunshot rage

Break
black Saxophone
Brushkit symphony

A man with no moustache died tonight,
but not the right one – a wor/l/d of silence

For one signed in crossed-I-s never broken
but believed
Foliage of precious streams and metal
bind the corpse to gastric revolt

In Louisiana, a blind girl blows out a scarlet candle

Waxen wings
and Flaxen hair

Silver Nitrate Explosion Beat

---

 

twenty-three deadbirds
flock to empirical stone,
shattered and lost like rotten marble.

a young woman’s voice crawls out from a human wreckage;
my eyes blinded from the pale amber shadow.

all death is parallel
all junkies use alone

---

 

thirteen million points of view
from a singular moment in aggressive expression.

expansion of green to night vision and back into
a voice’s cry from the vault of “lost cause”

losing the battle, setting sun

some settled themselves and ran into sedimentation, meditation,
focal. official. doubt.

rumination, fumigated lust
and copious pleading; loss of blood,
spilling the virgin’s milk.

I woke up; straining my eyes to complete the pathetic silhouette of a man
unformed, a whisper of breath and tears of vapour

synapse connection,
wailing collapse

riding the wake / the wall is over

The cold air carried with it an uncanny, distant fragrance of vanilla ice cream. Not an invocation of nostalgic reverie, but echoes of Wallace Stevens, though all concupiscent, kinetic phantasy of wenches and curds was dampened by the intolerable stillness of the night. Her breath formed a cloud, distinguished by a perversely even formation, seen from above, as though each atom were pressed down upon by innumerable microscopic planes of glass. With a low hum, the moon turned and flickered, and someone somewhere slowly broke a glass.

Elemental Babel
Through which interstitial nigredo
Cultivates loss

Aufheben, squandered mitosis
Miosis
Cyclopecian depth
Cleaving

Intravenous administration always registered atomic
Piercing flesh like water
Metal parallel to bone in a basilic river
The swell of degeneration
I am a word of God
I am a word of God
I am held by the hand that erases

I am unknowing

 

“Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than “The Animal” or “Animal Life” there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or more precisely (since to say “the living” is already to say too much or not enough), a multiplicity of organisations of relations between living and dead, relations of organisation or lack of organisation among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death. These relations are at once intertwined and abyssal, and they can never be totally objectified. They do not leave room for any simple exteriority of one term with respect to another.”

 

– Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am”