Wanted to know if the leather was real.

Dead horses everywhere this is what

the rapscallions send, a picture of the desert.

We ordered thirst!  A constant banging,

we ordered bonafide torture!

Naked children stumble about the courtyard

stinking of plastic.

A train broken and steaming on bent tracks.

Sixteen drops of quicksilver

like blood on the outstretched tongue.

That music...

what sort of world is this,

whose love makes the heart organ ache?

 

(c) 2007 JL Williams

 

Electric, into the centre

the metal pole rides a bolt

slid down wet pipes, waste water,

lightning shimmies the finger

through the arm to the fillings in teeth,

bone crumbles.  Smoking singed ends

of wilder threats.  Misdemeanor,

spelled wrong - the punishment is

exclusion from modernity.

To find heaven in the web

was outdated the minute writ,

machines laughing, machines

with dour faces.  Not cute.

Electricity flying out the black wire

leaping about the snow-bandaged landscape -

bright shocks!  Carriages tipped over,

running figures.  Bell tower (ringing) in flames!

 

(c) 2007 JL Williams

 

Last night though Sunday with a half full moon

water held boats, boats' reflection.

 

Lost were the keys, the lovers, the pride,

sun over the roof of a building.

 

Bad memories dredged up by friends seemed far off

now that the landscape has changed and the light.

 

A long walk home filled with laughter and stories,

windows dark in rooms where people were sleeping.

 

(c) 2007 JL Williams

Behind the wall is another wall.

This hand shows many paths,

where is the key, alignment?

 

Behind the curtain is a dusty curtain.

A man, a man at the piano,

a man behind the bar, a man

in a business suit, a man with a microphone,

a man with a gun, a man

with a chequebook and a pen, a man...

 

At the door, with one foot raised,

Destiny pauses for one last

drag of her Lucky Strike and

smiles.

 

(c) 2007 JL Williams

time and love are the same.
In your face when you smile
I see light shine out.
Gears and faces fall out of the sky.
Puddles of time catch folk up in the street.

A stinging blush at a party confession,
a stranger who suddenly knows too much,
this honesty like a wooden goat's bell.

Time falls out of the sky.
Light shines out of your face.
With time will come love,
the monkey who mourns his dead son,
the cat that cries in the empty flat,
the trees in the forest
surrounded by light and the flash of wings
falling, falling...


(c) 2007 JL Williams

Isn't it peculiar how the music keeps playing
after he left the room?

All the girls
dancing in white blouses and
leather trousers, collection of miniature
ceramic animals on the bookshelf.

You call this experimental, she
is afraid of being typecast I
don't mind at all except for
this shade in my peripheral vision...

he was the one who made the music so
so much for vinyl, plastic, glass, metal, silver,
hollow wood bent by cat gut strings,
his heart is where it came from,
keeps coming from,

illegal grass, movie stars, French doors,
footsteps, long white curtains.

(c) 2007 JL Williams

She closes her eyes.
A taste issues from the unsealed mine,
the skin of a man covered in ash before washing.

Down the back path
a silver lizard hides beneath a shivering leaf.
On an old desk, the glass flower.

What relents today is pressure from below,
books come at once telling
it's not death that's original.

All around eyes closed,
fingers laid on eyelids where pennies will go.
We call it waking the dead.

A well I drop whispers into like pennies,
your face on my eyelids,
waiting, not hoping, to hear your voice rise up.


(c) 2007 JL Williams

"In short, the work in progress is DeLillo's metaphor for slowness--the only thing more subversive than speed,"  GEORGE DE MAN

 

Now when bombs are historical,

language where I grew up was

the weapon, language now is

historical, I have no child, he is

historical, my bomb child in the shape of

the hole heart - who invented

the heart bomb, two dogs kissing

over a string of spaghetti, that's

a new kind of bomb from the past still exploding.

 

Fall, a seagull fed an Alka-Seltzer

tablet wrapped in dog or bread

explodes - what comes out of the salt pocked sky is

feathers, flesh, shock lack of blood, air gusts

might be from bones.

 

Fall, gun cases, fractals of metal

glint in red globe, confetti

blusters down on florescent gases.

 

Fall, a sense of shame like

so many blood-stained nightgowns,

to come, to come, to come,

this naked wasteland:

Whose Memory & Whose Experience?

 

Wake light,

remember death (again),

and titles for chapters:

Fiction,

The Enemy,

Personal Conflagration (The Flings),

Teabag Advices,

E-Porno On Rope,

Why Being Hasty can be a Problem,

If you knew now what you'll know then (and

is it possible to deduce and implement this now?)

 

The man who makes poems out of The Human Machine,

a book left him by his grandfather with one arm...

 

Selfish, flesh-heavy westerner humanoid bomb,

 

(Do you mourn for the bomb?

Did they predict

this?)

 

you who blind yourself

with looking

for the architecture of the sky,

 

(No bomb,

no words etched in cloud against dead blue...)

 

"And slowly, like the first sunrise,

or the retinal impression

created by the detonation of a bomb,"

 

when you come out of hiding

what will you explode?

 

(c) 2007 JL Williams

A dress with polka dots in muted rainbow shades,

like her showy pants in the film you loved.

Old queen's first time again,

'30s glamour that looked good on us,

and innocence, and how much better now

are we aged and broken, repaired lovingly like

brocade, gossamer silk, hand-knotted lace.

 

(c) 2007 JL Williams