NE'ER-BE-LICKIT

I'm a wreck-fish first and firstmost, ne'er-be-lickit, happy as a sandboy with a crop-eared velvet-runner. I dodge them witters and blubbring brother-brutes alike. The besomclean junk-wad is bedded amid the daughterlings of the yeast-bitten salt-wine. It knows none of sky's blashy, flisky giddiheads of storm, down here where the fan-nerved earthflies bear their fear-babes. The enchanter's-nightshades have the tidal fidgets while their weedy cradle-clothes gather to garnish the pricker-roach and the girt, besmottered hog's-lard of a glibbery funk-willie.

I, once witling and muttonmonger, now flit-fold of the sea-shades, tittertotter through the giffgaffs and bugling sea-sounds. I strip the cradle-clothes from the pricker-roach and tongue it askingly, then edge towards the glibbery funk-willie, swallowish and gulpswollen as I drift with the weedy sea. The funk-willie escapes, blubbring and besnuffed; it flees my eager ne'er-be-lickit tongue; it'd rather face the blashy giddiheads of the real sky than the dangers of the sea's shyfryngs and velvet runs...

To go peckish for another enchanter's-nightshade of the deep sea, there's only hog's-lard and fucus for a fan-nerved wreck-fish such as I. Enough to make me swallow my own body with the head and tail left on.


(published 'Psychopoetica' 1992)

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Variations On A Theme By Ezra Pound

(The only poem on 'Numinous Magazanthus')

1.
The roads of the sky knoweth my body,
Cradled child by a lamp
Lulling his mother to sleep.
White birds, gulls at the window,
To seek shelter from the storm
In the green lap of the domicile.
I peck the glass,
Wind-smashed bones
In detritus dreams.

2.
Even the child knoweth the sky
And its dark secret message.
His mother, green from death,
Stares glassily mad,
As the song of cancer
Croaks its last deep riddle.
Even the child, even he, knoweth
That his body exists.
His blood will change.
His horizons will disappear.
The lamp will flunk
In the last bitter chaos.

3.
Air and body
Share a body
Of sin and love.
Child and mother,
Each a lover,
Each a doll
Teach a gull
To enter
The centre
Of their solitude.

4.
The winds are rude,
I'm bitten, brushed,
Caught, returned,
On wings of bone,
Scattered bird-meat,
Whitening the centre
Of the sky
Where a cross
Towers over all who loved
Their mother for her child.


(written 1967, published 'Eavesdropper' 1990)

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The Faintest Breath

The magic of a moment is never sensed at the time.

The fleeting kiss on the cheek was indeed no more than a moment, and moments have no beginning, no end and, if the truth were known, no duration. She shivered as she recalled it, as if someone had walked over her grave. Memories of things that did not exist are dreams of dreams and shadows of shadows.

But in that golden moment, she had fallen in love with a ghost. And ghosts are easier to conjure in and out of existence. Magicians keep the wolf from the door with such slight sleights of the hand. Their audiences are ghosts and their tricks sweet nothings.

That brings the moment full circle to the kiss and the mere wordless breath upon her ear. But she becomes a dream of Sleeping Beauty…


(published 'Whispers From The Dark' 1995)

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Inside The Bud

I have dreams whilst dreams have me.

About this time every morning. I wake up with an ending, an indefinable air of having been through something utterly dreadful but equally beautiful. The room is stifling, the wife beside me snoring heavily into her chest as a soldier would in a trench. There is enough light, coming from the gap at the bottom of the bedroom door like bacon rind, to see that the wallpaper is slowly peeling back to reveal the plaster running with glistening sweat.

I sit up and I sit up again

And that is when I wake up as if from several dreams, folded within each other, their petals inextricable.

It's always the same — the wife mops my brow and takes a ton of it to the water butt outside. She returns with an iced drink which I guggle down voraciously. She tells me to neaten up my tie whilst she brushes up the purple velvet ruff beneath her own chin like an eggcup. We need to be smart on occasions like this; even in bed, one should not have a devil-may-care attitude

The next time I wake up, I feel the bed rocking gently to and fro on its ill-suited legs. "I do tilt thy cot, to cully the fever in thy bloods," hisses a horned face, emerging monstrously from another bedroom door I did not know was there during the day. I sigh with relief seeing who it was and fall deeply asleep once more.

Now I meet H. P. Lovecraft. He seems to stare expressionlessly from between the holes in his narrow white skull, but I feel he wants to know if he can be of any help in my current troubles.

"I don't know exactly what troubles you mean," I say.

"They are self-evident, my good sir, behind your smart appearance. You have no imagination, no sense of wonder — and it is a blend of high outward standards (where there can be no complaints where you are concerned)" — he ran his spidery fingers lightly over the perfect knot in my tie — with an inner strength to dream: it is that which creates the man from those who only think themselves men."

He bent closer to me and I continued my rite of passage through his empty eyes into the cathedral dimensions of his skull. I journeyed for what seemed aeons between the hanging temples and well-drilled oxymorons of his mind. Sporadically, I pressed the flower of my ear to the ground and heard the seething whispers of pre-emergent Cthulhu. I knew instinctively that was the name of it, not arriving from the open stars, but from inside the Earth's own inner cores.

The moral was not lost on me: the Angel Monster and its dreams do come from inside.

"And without the within there can be no without," are his words which drift with me along the avenue of my return through dreams.

Each morning about this time, I finally wake up and know that tomorrow I can again return through yet more dreams to the deep wells of sight in his homely skull. I now try to remain awake till time for rising, pondering on the dark bliss inside the narrow carapace of his soul.

But, in the end, nearest dawn, I drift off again into lighter sleep, not before ensuring, however, that the knot in my tie is tight against my soft pyjama collar like a bud of involuted petals.


(published 'Crypt Of Cthulhu' 1991)

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The Faintest Lady

The Prince did not wonder what the lady was doing in the Palace courtyard. Yet why should he have wondered what the lady was doing there, when he did not usually even wonder about anything in life? Indeed, he did not wonder at the huge paving-slabs of the courtyard and how they could have been transported to the courtyard before they made that courtyard into a courtyard; nor did he wonder at the birds that did not seem too scared to perch in the courtyard at the sun-kissed fountain's edge; nor did he wonder at his mother the Queen's nettly insistence that he left his room regularly to cross potentially romantic paths with the ladies who were allowed, against all historic wisdom, to enter the courtyard for simply passing-through it as a short-cut as well as--in this particular lady's case today--for sedentary solitude.

But the Prince had stopped not-wondering, seeing the lady seemed to be sketching the bird-edged fountain with her sketching-pencil, sitting, as she was, astride a sketching-stool before a sketching-easel with a sketching-pad upon it. Indeed, the Prince was now so intrigued he did not need the Queen's encouragement to leave his viewing-seat in the Palace's viewing-balcony and to venture down the spiral slab steps to the slab-baked courtyard where he intended to tiptoe towards the sketching-lady and take a sneaky look at the sketch she was sketching with the longest sketching-arm imaginable. His toes stirred the sketching-lady's pencil-shavings with a crackly swish and she looked round, thus causing the arm's length pencil to skid skewedly across the sketching-pad's topmost sketching-sheet upon which she had been sketching. The lady straightways fainted and taken on a stretcher by the royal gardeners to the local well woman clinic. The Prince returned, through the pencil-shavings, smartly to the balcony simply to wonder at wonder.

The birds scattered to the four corners of the air as the fountains's faintest edges faded into the shimmering heat ... and the Queen, whose lot in life was not a lot she loved a lot, realised that she was at a loss for words and, upon later learning of the day's events, announced that pencil-shavings did not a match make.

(published 'End of the Millennium' 1999)

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