Y.

There is a certain dignity
A subtle solace
In sadness
A quiet quaintness
In the tomb
That poisons even this shut up shut u
My face is rocks
My face is rocks
A stony silence
To shunt out the day
To shrug off the possibility
That I might be incorrect
That I might have drawn a conclusion
More erroneous than I can believe

It is the separation from possibility
That is what kills

If the greatest feeling
(and it is)
Is knowing and embracing
The myriad possibilities
And chances
And lives in tiny universes folded up into
And exploding out of
A single choice or moment
Then the worst
Is seeing it unreachable
And never knowing if you'll unfold

I rise from the air
My love
Mein herr
And push delight in all directions but my own

Ferrous.

Ferrous
Ferrous is what I feel when

When flesh is made
Caustic and rough
By the windchill and the carbon
Toxic smoke
Ferrous is what I feel

When I look down
Cycling through
A life left on the pavement and
A moisture-lost leaf reaches
Up and through my pupils
Takes my brain
In its metallic undying and deathly hand
Ferrous is what I see

When flesh is made
Permeable
Prickly, spiky
By the windchill and the tobacco
Ferrous is what I feel
Ferrous is what I taste
The ions on us tingle
Depriving you of water
And we're sour in each others' arms
Like running your tongue along a lamp-post
Or your keys

Ferrous
And toxic and tingly
Exchanging ions all the while

.

At some point in the future, Ollie, you're going to feel like shit.

It'll happen, that's an immutable fact. You'll feel worthless, like any effort you make to go in any direction is doomed to failure and all your endeavours inevitably spiral towards some sticky end yada yada yada life is tough deal with it etc.

I'm not here to tell you not to do that. Do just that. It's important. Lord knows your psyche can't run on arrogance alone. Just remember this:

You made people cry.

You, through force of will and artistic interpretation, shunted people into a state of raw emotion.

You didn't do it alone, sure, but that doesn't cheapen the fact that you managed to connect to people. Somehow.

So, just remember that.

You're never worthless.

Get Up.

It's probably
Unhealthy
Wrong
Self-destructive
But I have things
I plan to take
To the
Grave

Edit: And some lucky people might get to be those things.

Make It Mine.

It was perfect
It burned and it burns still
By way of some elemental precision
(Or maybe it was the drugs)
Temporal obligation has yielded to this moment
An anchor in time that won't sweep away

The downhill slide
We'd all resigned to the night by then
You tried to push on
Because you're just like that

Your feet were bare
Because, damn it
You were grounded
I sometimes wonder if you feel the earth like I do

Your eyes were wild
Or just more open than they should have been
And your pupils were so trained on something
Not bewilderment, not panic
A need to know something
I don't know, it doesn't matter

Your eyes were wild and your chest was bare
That green hoodie that suited your bleach blonde hair
And the zipper lined your white flat chest
And your stomach
And the curve of the collar around your neck

Against your chest
It beat and beat
Banging on your heart
That polygon dice
That twenty-fold cast infused in fate
At perfect angles to the hoodie
And your chin
And your waist

Your chest was bare and your eyes were wild
And lining your cheekbones
And staining your stubble
Distorting the light off your two-week growth
Left, blue
Right, pink

Back, green
Hair, white

And I told you the next day
How beautiful it was
And far away it was

What have you done?
Why won't it leave me?
Maybe it will now that I've
Made it mine

Malk Life.

I never wrote about us, did I?

No matter

Small wonder though

You latched right onto the obvious

I am your father

And I know you're content to rest

In your father's eyes

Because nothing is real

Least of all you

You learned that a hundred times

One day I will too

You were to me

What you sought in him

And the layers of your brain are still trapped in mine

Will you ever unravel?

You are the demon

Drenched in irony

That guides too much of my thought

BANG

-

And just below that another explosion another big boom big bang black brain bent behind boring banal bitch father mother lover weren't you and together duality isn't a lie I've seen it for myself and together we might just make something beautiful because you are beautiful you have a machete a rocket in three dimensions that pierces the veil of two I am knife and you are cake black forest shedding losing a layer did you run stupid boy did you run little coward wunderkind and fall into a rabbit-hole and into that cake made of strychnine it's okay we have antidotes here it's called inheritance you inherit an antidote purer than a thousand brains and I know you've killed before because you're a good boy beautiful boy and that's what good boys do I bet you killed your father aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand right into the neck BANG.

Parable.

Walking through the woods

One night

I saw a man who'd made a noose

Out of his tattered tartan scarf

He'd expertly tied the knot

Just right

Perfectly tight, perfectly loose

I said hello

He only laughed

He only laughed at me

He only laughed at me

And said

"Your words mean nothing on the whole

I can't take them to the grave!"

I said back "If you're to

Be dead

Why bother speaking if your soul

Will never now be saved?"

Upon the tree from which

He hung

He scratched a simple 'x' to mark

His place of suicide

Inhaling he then jumped

And swung

Smashing straight into the bark

Breaking his neck

The man had died

The inhalation flew right out

Upon the man's untimely death

Yet the scratching in the bark remained

Thursday the Fifteenth.

Sickly undulating valves and pipes encircle
And cull the morale of the landscape
The shatterings of the trees displayed in impossible pattern
In unlikely concordance with the ephemeral air
Am I mad to listen to the branches?

I pull wonder out of the thin air
And arrange the world so that I may see
And interpret on my terms
While the wind gently suggests a direction
And time taps his wrist
In late-afternoon and it's time to dive
Into a purple resolver, fragrant and full
In readiness to pour down a deluge of suffering
And hope, burying the mass
And thickening the air
Black spirits remake this radial plane

And somewhere
Someone
Sheds their meek tears

Liam Irvine.

Down go the masts

And the rigging and the deck

As if the ship went down in mutiny

There'll be no more complaining

I don't think it will stop raining

Rain us right down to the bottom of the sea

The wood did not catch fire

It was our upward facing ire

That set us against our good Captain Dee

It wasn't meant to go

So badly, how could he have known

This idea would sink to the bottom of the sea

He turned to the rafts

Though they thought he was daft

He said "No storm is stopping me!"

There'll be ideas for later days

He can mutiny so many different ways

While they sink to the bottom of the sea

Hay Foot, Straw Foot.

Left foot clamp down on the ground

Feel the tremors that shudder and moan

Right foot, wand of straw wrapped round

Marching off it makes no sound

No timbre in the air, no tone

Left foot clamp down on the ground

Red hot breath like some Hell hound

We go in the cave one by one, alone

Right foot, wand of straw wrapped round

When bugs and rattlesnakes abound

Through grinding noise, the sole road home

Left foot clamp down on the ground

We don't even stop by the lake we found

No respite for the weary bones

Right foot, wand of straw wrapped round

The horizon is punctured by crucifixed mounds

We left so eager, but no longer condone

Left foot clamp down on the ground

Right foot, wand of straw wrapped round

Aurality.

I grew my first ear in my
Childhood
It carved itself of flesh
And shot out a path that
Went straight to my brain
It still goes there sometimes but
The signals get confused
The signals get diffused
When I was young all that I knew
Was simple melody
The music was little more than a pleasing piece
Of produced sound
A song that rises from the ground
My aural faculties
My brain
And my intellectualities
Grew from those sweet
Sweet harmonies
From the soil of sweet harmony

My second ear came into being
When I was adolescent
I had begun to grow a heart
It fluttered in my chest
And it demanded sustenance
My second ear grew out of my own necessity
And it carved a lonesome highway
Down into my new-born heart
I gave to it those harmonies
I starved my brain of melody
The sound had to be shared
Between objective thought
And new found feelings
Feedback grew and grew
And grew and when the sound
Came back I knew
That my heart had changed it just a bit
I found there something new
From the foundations of my brain
And heart working as one
The music changed and changed

The third is still not quite complete
It pushes its way out of pre-natal space
In the middle of my head
Somewhere below my brain
And yet it manifests
And skips a block of space
It folds back into reality
And it is all around me
It doesn't hear as such
It feels the sound another way
The music becomes tangible
My synaesthetic plight
It unpacks a note
A whole harmony
And the vibration then unfolds
Into something hard and skeletal
A block of space that permeates
Every space I see
But I don't hear or see it
I feel the space unfold around me
Expand into a prism
That somehow encompasses
Everything
I think my third ear might not be in my head at all
But another place completely
My third ear is another sense
To occupy another plane

Council.

A possum scratches on my windows
Likely eyeing himself
Some new phantom sizing up
Pulling up the concrete carpet and
Scattering the dirt like tea leaves and splinters
And bark-bound clouds
And homeless Irishmen
Shrouds and coffins and mockingbirds
A colder
Bluer winter
Than I might have known

An hour might do
An hour might do
How long will it take to reach the bottom?
Will this golem let me down?
And the hand around my neck
That spits fire from its mouth
And thinks in tongues
And falls in tons of bricks
While the flesh aggregates
And crawls into the jungle
And crawls into my windpipe
And speaks for me
Hovering in horror
Speaking platitudes in sign
And slowly tightening a dexterous finger
Around my Adam's apple
If the golem would let me down
Just to sink back into dust
If the flesh might fall apart
Just to rot
As old flesh must
We might find ourselves in iron
Or a giant tortoise shell
While tree frogs talk to
Spitting bugs
And conspire against the whims of man

Folding away.

A lot of the time you're the warrior-king
But you're also the black and the white of the moon
Punching into the rafters
And making a new mind
From the shattered planks of many

I'd like to write a thousand words
A thousand metaphors
For your lovely white body
For the collapsible veins that make you up
The hackneyed mess that you are
That takes in the world and does something different
To me

But sometimes you're the mouse I made
The wandering gypsy-Jew
Harridan harpy singed-hairs all around your tarpaulin chest
And you scream your crystal death rattle
To the end of us both

And sometimes I can't reach you
Just like I'm trying to do
I'll tread the corners of my mind
The back alleys of my brain
And one day I hope to find you

Capital Something.

But he was always in the room
Clawing at the final curls of my shirt
And darting down back to the corner

A furtive eye uncoils
Through a crack in the door
And peaks at the doomed and wandering
Laughing from the corner of the room

Avatar.

I tried to do it with my eyes
But it just would not do
I tried to do it with my fingers
I tried to say 'I do'
I tried and tried with eyes of mine
I tried to crack the world in two
And found inside my own damn ears
The answer I'd fought to
I could hear one thousand things
More than you ever could do
And away into another way
Away it flew and flew
And you
Fly farther than the farthest of two
I'm not allowed to say
That one rhyme I want to
My Jew
My Jew
It's you
My Jew
I'm happy to grant that metaphor to you

And I, the lonely prophet Jew
Sitting on the top held by a red screw
Proselytising to you and you
How to go about it anew
Through and through
Come shattering through
The lonely wandering
Scorned and wisened
Burnt to bitter blackness through
The tiny wandering Jew

Tripping and slipping
And falling in through
Flipping and skipping
And calling to you
All I have is words
For you

What proud diction
What predilection
What manifestation is going to lead me through
The calmest
Reddest
Bloodiest waters
Pushing right on through to you

Webway.

Flat against the floor
Walls
Roof
I'm not sure
Flat against the wall
And spiking in the wrong direction
Spiking into my cranium
Skull
I'm not sure of anything anymore

Flat against the floor
Walls, roof
Right out the door

Defunct.

I keep catching myself thinking
The wrong way around
Not because I want to

And saying things
Not naturally
But because I know that
It's what you're supposed to say

Like every tiny action
And suspect affectation
Is part of some larger
Stifling
Social obligation

Although now that I have anchors
On the surface of the world
I have a stake in the world
I feel it much less often