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more poems by jim bellamy

GOD, IN ITS BOOMING STATION by jim bellamy
(an extract)

i
God, in its booming station, threads the devil;
the babbles of the mind lay waste to eagled heirs.
Setting no law to the war of hero's revel,
serried in the graves of knowing, crime impairs.
Rushed in the seed of the word outside all loving,
love, in her trendless burning, pinions hate;
the babbles of the mind lay waste to hero's peril.
Setting no law to war, the way is rape.
Green in the fuse of herod's serial murder,
dark as the sun, the moon proclaims her spiel.
Slashed in the thigh-wide crater of red purdah,
serried in the graves of choosing, heaven's wheel,
rent in the vinegar shadow of breath's bruising,
spired by the seas of the all-too-grateful dead,
man in macadam spoils the roads with rusing,
the rose in the rogue of fearing, craned at head.
God, in its booming station, thumps the ocean;
the babbles of the mind lay waste to eagled spheres.
Setting no law to the wards inside emotion,
serried in the graves of growing, crime endears.
Flashed in the crash of the arbour outside hearing,
christ, in his oaken ship, inflames the veil;
the biblers in the brain shear down to zero.
Man in macadam, rucked, rips out the grail.

ii
Love, no peaceful mourner,
shended in the ark of truth,
shapes the oat inside the mortar.
Man to man is light uncouth.
Love, no peaceful maker,
shended in the ark of blood,
shapes the oat inside the water.
Man to man is bust in bud.
Love, no peaceful splendour,
shended in the ark of rain,
shapes the oat inside the render.
Man to man is bust in brain.
Love, no peaceful suitor,
shended in the arkless east,
shapes the oat inside the lover.
Man to man is hero's beast.

iii
God, in its booming station, forges nowhere;
babbling in the brine,
each wheated hill of wisdom comes to none;
the turning mill of christ,
each wheated will of fusion on the run,
endless as love's heist,
wharves away the seas to prove the sun.
God, in its booming station, forges nero;
bibling in the breath,
each wheated word of wisdom purges round;
the turning baptised dream,
each wheated wind of fission run aground,
endless as a scream,
wharves away the seas to prove its sound.
The wicked wish of kisses in the mansion,
bridling at the stone,
prove time as cruel and coiled as hero's fold;
the storming marrow's fist,
each wasping curve of scientific ransome,
bridling at the bone,
prove seas in sensate reeling, curled as gold.

iv
No man is endless;
endless as the rings of fire.
No man is endless;
endless as the crowns of wire.
No man is endless;
endless as the springs of burning.
No man is endless.
Man to man is razed in yearning.

v
The hand that rocks the cradle
shapes the grave.
The hand that rocks the cradle
shapes the seas.
The hand that rends the stable
shapes the nave.
The hand that rocks the cradle
shends away the bibled trees.
The hand that rocks the cradle
shapes the grave.
The hand that rocks the cradle
shapes the trees.
The hand that rends the stable
blackens heaven's fable.
The hand that rocks the cradle
shends away the bibled siege.
God, in its booming station,
shapes away the nation.
God, in its booming station,
shaves away the number.
God, in its booming station,
shapes away the nation.
God, in itss booming station,
starves away the thunder.

vi
The lordless god of summer breaks the shoot;
the bibling rooks of winter steal away.
No man upon the town
may stave away the sound
of the lordless god of autumn's searing way.
The lordless god of hearing breaks the shoot;
the bibling rooks of spearing storm the grave.
No man upon the town
may stave away the sound
of the lordless god of fearing's slaughtered nave.
The winnowed staves of seeing music under
each symphony of rape-becoming humour.
No man upon the town
may stave away the ground
of the lord above the chapel's appled rumour.
The lordless god of summer breaks the shoot;
the bibling rooks of winter steal away.
No man inside a mound
may stave away the drowned,
nor any oceaned dreamer save the day.

vii
The code that from the mortar shapes a dime
binds death to crime;
that serries with the graves of endless nothing,
binds to loving;
and ocean men who spire against the soul,
take endless role,
as real and red within as herod's coming.
The wax that from the halo sears to truth
must stream uncouth;
that serries with the graves of Mnethna's saunter,
binds to slaughter;
and endless ocean men who choose to cry
destroy the sky,
as real and red within as hero's daughter.
The rose that on the thral cleaves theft to call,
binds death to all;
that jacks the siren soul aside from water,
shears manslaughter;
and ocean men who know no female light,
rave from the night,
their winter follies, cold as hero's shoulder.
The cock that maims the tides with clocking ruin,
binds to sueing;
that whacks away the pulse of veinward number,
sears to thunder;
and all the waves of ocean-sealing theft
must sear the breath,
as real and red within as hero's slumber.

viii
God, in its booming station, spreads the devil;
the babbling wheys of mary know no source.
No rended stave of dreams is served to Babel,
as man in macadam speaks with endless force.
Five fingers come to those who know no prison;
five fingers, red at soul and strangling under.
God, in its booming station, threads the devil;
the babbling wheys of mary, green as thunder.
God, in its booming station, summons nowhere;
the biblers in the tower have sons to kill.
No truth is known to men who travel sun-where.
As much as man is tarry, so too must petra thrill;
and children in the course of jonah's sinking,
wealed in loving, flash the heart with moans.
God, in its booming station, spreads all thinking;
the biblers in the tower, as rent as bones.

ix
The lord, in his inchoate revel, builds the temple;
forged from molten manacles, the icy seas
lay mad waste to the devil:
with the rapes of this glib world dunged in a bubble,
half god and half mad angel
here conceive.
Received by the wombs of the world, the Word co-mettles:
lighted by the spindles of the old
that shirk within a seminary's troubles,
thread to thread, the casuistry unravels;
and raven as the man who treads the pedal,
creation here extols.
This is the curtain on the coffin's signals:
the satyred nature of this phantomed world
forces through the fusions in an anvil:
down rinking leaves, the loots of vision bevel;
and, as mortal as a martyr's medal,
flashes like glad gold.
God's tendril treads the trees and greets the tunnels;
no lud of war is 'His' to see appeased;
down founted footfalls flow the caning muscles
of rectored waste: the Lord works like a runnel:
and, in frames of state, the falcon pummels
and hatchets like a seed.
Inchoate heaven reigning, here's God's tendril
voyages the cockward streams of darksome day:
finding the waters rhinal and purportal,
on the destructive level, time is myrtled
and, raining on a gavel, chains to metal
each raider of the grave.

x
The love of light betrays the summer's tinkers;
deep in the grave,
each siren whirls away the sun;
the caul of the cruise inside the temple's thinkers,
serried down to zero,
weals aside the golden one.
The hearse of the moon betrays the summer's brothers;
deep in the grave,
each seal of searing rages on;
the maul of the cruise in the temple's underfakirs,
serried down to zero,
weals aside the shaman's drum.
No christ nor creator betrays the winter's number;
deep in the grave,
the saul of saving sears to nil;
the thral of the noose around the decks of thunder,
serried down to zero,
weals away the sinner's thrill.
This lordless life is dark as dreamward drifting;
deep in the grave,
as endless as the sires of death,
as much as man and child must ravage heaven's shifting,
serried down to zero,
the word of god is herod's theft.
Hero's fuse can only come to naveward burning;
deep in the grave,
the oils of lightning summon time;
the moll at the throat must suck the marrow's oozing;
serried down to zero,
the word of god is crime.

xi
Time climbs its rented miracle;
ten times the hedons, time is spined and slaved;
cornered by the mounted fields that strangle,
clockhands seek and find the graved:
the flailing seaman swims inside its stubble;
time itself lies mounted on the rocks;
a feral choir of weathers sprees and cudgels;
time and tide detain and storm the locks.
Death, the incidental, splits god's tendril;
the cadaver on its handle squints on high;
the skyroad to the temple splits the mental;
and now the arteries of rumour rise:
turning a rectal face against the menial,
here the eagled armies pace and pare;
death itself lies spurnt and occidental;
spurned and spurning by, time's riders flare.
But christ is hared and haloed! in the sides
of seasoned seas and samsoned slicks of light,
sweetly drive the diver's cells of fusing
that bring the living being from out the night;
and, clapped in water like a ruckling,
strung from harpsichords and haling lochs,
light astrides the breeders of the tearing
and sucks away the bosoms of the rocks.

xii
Loss, leagued under, strips the seven seas.
Life, leagued over, strips the light of breath.
Loss, leagued under, strips the seven seas.
Life, leagued over, rips apart the holy death.
Loss, leagued under, strips away the heroes
of the cortal christ in the transept's roar.
Life, leagued over, strips away its haloes,
shendless as the tides in the tithes of war.
Loss, leagued, delves the sun for nero.
Light, leagued, delves the moon for kith.
Christ, leagued, delves the womb for zero.
Life, leagued, delves the tomb for pith.

xiii
The hand that rocks the cradle shapes the grave,
that ties lynched talons
to the fathering trees,
does down all breath, as the templers rave.
The hand that rocks the cradle shapes the seas.
Though the trees be planed and spumed at birth,
though the angels as they groove
compose a parried breeze,
high with the hand that runnels through the earth,
the bastard heraldic murders as she weaves;
and where the tendant manna rises from its flirt
and sharpens the harp;
where haloed matter seethes,
cruel come the crones of beast and tare and wort;
cruel come the farriers of the cindered seed.
The hand that rocks the cradle shapes the grave,
that ties lynched talons
to the fathering trees,
does down all breath as the templers rave.
The hand that rocks the cradle shapes the seas.

xiv
Tendril or temple, the hallowers blow out.
Man in manna parish, the sentinels heave.
Plashed in the stores of harvest and drought,
round the crossing splinter, the templers speed.
In the mangled daisy, inside the peal of bells,
up where martyrs bury the mortars of a spell;
in the mangled daisy, inside the peal of bells,
beside the routed lady, the proctorates swell.
Tendril or temple, the hallowers blow out.
Man in manna parish, the sentinels heave.
Plashed in the stores of harvest and drought,
round the crossing splinter, the templers speed.
God is neither locum nor primal convertor.
Christ is neither primate nor ignoble deed.
Gabriel is neither paragon nor deserter.
Time and tide alike dwell darkly in the seed.
Tendril or temple, the hallowers blow out.
Man in manna parish, the sentinels heave.
Plashed in the stores of harvest and drought,
round the crossing splinter, the templers speed.

xv
The halo's course is razed: the mystic tantrum
that drives the glowering rocks
is here perfused:
the rot that sires the clock, the heroed ransome,
is here destroyed, the fickle caste removed.
The halo's course lies buried in a mountain:
who comes to die
lies split by life to chime:
the anger drummed and drunk on cryptic stanchions
here rocks the roasting angels as they climb.
The lips of speech do no retell their summons:
love's gibbet, slain,
hangs wryly from the trees:
the force that makes the temples shend their sermons
lies dumbed and drained of all its spended seed.
The time that trips immortal and purportal
here sifts the docks of crime
into an eyes that pleas:
the rise of crime into a world aortal
here lies staved
and written on the trees.

xvi
God comes! In undead waters, angels wingle;
come unto seastruck towers, the furies fold;
the flight of spatial mortar girds its simples;
the tendrils of the godhead spear and mould.
Within the sun god, sphered, the pointed ferrule,
bright and brassy, blasts apart the grave;
star set for multicolour, jacob's angle
snips the sex of jonah and is saved.
Smoke in shippen hills and oaken valleys,
where the eagle's eyrie steers and rocks,
strides the holy tendril and its galleys;
where the gods are brazen, nature knocks.
One by one, the slash of vision chaffers;
in the sin green fables of the mind,
manstrung ancthers reach for holy masters;
in the stoving bone, the templers grind.
Love, like words on water, must fade gladly,
yet the heavens write against the tides.
Love and death assail on seas of parity;
death and love shall beat the holy ides.

xvii
The hand that rocks the cradle shapes the grave.
Ten skulled fingers
stub the humours down.
Death is the tomb of money and its bringers.
The hand that rocks the cradle rapes the town.
In the sallow spheres of bird and angel;
where the parson crows
and the holy boast conceives,
death is the tomb of money as it glows.
The hand that rocks the cradle rapes the seas.
The hand that rocks the cradle shapes the grave.
The hand that suffers christ
is the pall bay in the coves.
Death is the tomb that snaps alive the knife.
The hand that rocks the cradle rapes the rose.
The hand, the hand that does down death
parries and marries
to the infant in the deed;
death is the rumour that murders as it carries.
The hand that rocks the cradle rapes all need.
The hand that rocks the cradle shapes the grave.
The hand that rocks the cradle
shapes the angled seas.
The hand that rocks the cradle shapes the grave.
The sun that is young lies buried in the weeds.

xviii
God, in its booming station, knows no ending,
neither shall the templers spiel for none.
God, in its booming station, knows no rending,
neither do the curves of christ ennumb.
God, as friendless as the spheres of purdah,
wharve away the seas to prove their theft.
God, in his booming station, suckles murder,
endless as the foils of hero's weft.
God, as friendless as the tears of motion,
wharve away the seas to suffer light.
God, in his booming station, nations under,
breaks the moon to prove the endless night.
Either side of space is canan's wording;
hence the heart has hills no child may climb.
God, as friendless as the spheres in moving,
wharve away the seas to suffer time.
God is neither angel nor primal convertor,
neither is the womb as real as it becomes.
Frozen in the seal of the menstrual daughter,
God, in its booming station, suffers none.
Either side of space is Canan's worship;
hence the heart has rills no child may swim.
God, as endless as the tides of wordship,
frozen in the moon, is veiled as mother sin.

...

A CATECHISM OF LEONARDO

because
of the infinity
catechism of
Leonardo
we shall be capable of
vowed thought
and outside need
of the nude phrenology of 'dianetics'
of martian saviours
of the generic slaver
of kirlein 'problematics'
all the families
of
fotu-wide genitalists
with stiff lazuy natrons
with a body under
dippy diplomatic spies
has objects of supine slides
sensing after
crazy atoms
and
atomic danger laughter

for the hyper-sutured thought
of Leonardo
proves
that the phantasm of cannibalism
eats under
vinegar flowers
- already, the 'intellectual heebees'
that dangle in regional wine
slasherly moistens
the familial dirty flap
of the philophrengenitive carbonatics
of
a fazed future
that here exists extra-neurologically
shaping naked gods
and monetary exegesis
between
piss-sliding financial arithnatics
and consanguine biters of ergonomics
has a contact with 'depressing cold'
and the conductives of a 'moat soul'
remains
entirely exterior
to
kartian cave-crews
and
monetary idealists
remain
psychic yet aware
and a bodded structure
does not possess
dianetic means to press
tall human behaviour
and codal transmogrifications
and dunny hindrances
present themselves objectively
as
cutically deleterous
for
there does not co-exist
in love's time
as far as mowers know
a prism
of quango physics
or chemics of nude pathology
and a dripper of parabola minds
lops a linguid
hoed heel of psycho-neurology
as
the compartmented phirosophy
of a faked coming
has a flint-flown day of
philosophy of 'paranoic critical
entoscopic bath polemically
charged
baby of times
and we have inclination?

i attach a crowler to a sea
for
the hyper-materialist knowledge of
holy picasso
must devour the 'intellectual hyperion'
already, chokey crumbs
strip acids bare from
crowlers of nancy spider fawns
for
a locus under mien rocks porn
and we heap 'structural sun-warned'
monetary diadems of
'obsessing crows' and the dined
imaginative gold-grease
of intermediary glasses and
pissers unfound between sand
and
gestalt-families of permitting
psychic pickers of optical hands
.
the blue eagle of a diamate demon
is caught between skies and drams-
o, we await the beggars schools
o lost souls puff up like rules
.
the biological
and dynastic phenoms of
rolled Leonardo
has been
the first great ingenitive catachism
of modal odal psi-thought
and the rites of Picasso
will form the duelled neuretics
of a minster of pigeon cardioms
..
as yet misunderstood, a cartal bone
falls to swept
vineyard tails

...

I Know the Site of that Hidden Mind

I know the site of that hidden mind
It is sidling and empty, a farcical bent
Sliding up the clock. I ride minds behind
The towers, the towering wheel and flowers
Dropped in a vase of the heroine's smile.

My hypnotic illusion is not cowed.
Aligning my head, the skies, the one
Bay of the evening chorus, above
The serviette of gears I make my single
Shimmering of hand into hand. The
Sun moves below the eye, a
Beautiful rivering
Of a beautiful consternation.

Resentful of the world, the underglassed
Tauntening of jade, the mind
Tightens its grip on the reprobate
And moves sloanes out to sea.

Most beautiful is the singlet, the
Wondrous land of films and spheres;
Next, the spider spinning
Its gossamer voyage of praise.

The eye is unperfected; lies
Days deep beneath the dial. I
Kiss my girl, yet here the sense
is no-one's, nobody's, vile.

...

I Neglect Nothing

I neglect nothing -
Your furled scent, the bitter tea,
The merciless maxims spurting
Diamante into the fire.

I conclude us both, like a Will -
The one impressed is me,
And you are filigree wrought,
Your stare as kvetch as desire.

(Now you must own no friends -
With your head howled back,
Like a sightless toy, like
A figurine, you must seem closed.

Childless, your mouth is contorted,
Splintered, epileptic - mine
Is an ovum, disposed
As an idol on a grave).

You placed a cigar to my lips -
I, laughing, put out the fire,
Congruous and calm. Yes,
I recollect babies and flowers:

A slap about the face of death.
And then you quietly rocked
From side to walled side and moaned
Like a gale of sadness starting.

....

I Could Spend Most of my Times

            I could spend all of my times
            Laughing at the shattered lies
            Of life; but living bears
            A strangeness man may never
            Share. The softness of love
            Aims to slumber where sex
            Denotes no dreams, and time
            Lives for its own self-gain.

            My home has no facade
            To own. The quietus made
            By the colours of razed
            Light bricks in the whole
            Boiling of discontented lusts.
            I could spend all of my times
            Guffawing at the tamed
            Trips of pitied women.

            Windmills trip inside
            The minds of the sullen
            Solemnity of the dawn.
            The softness of love
            Aims to slumber as sex
            Ignites the dance of death.
            Awaiting veins, this soul
            Trips the floor then dies.

…
LUNAR LUSTRE (after Philip Larkin)

At death, you shatter: the bits that you are
Start wheedling away, and
Life means oblivion: true, you've had it all but
Where the dream lies smashed, you learn
That death is the all of you. Or else
Is it something bitten in obfuscation which
Snaps the long photos of a killed mind?

Life appears whole: you've made it good
At least, in a spiritual sense, or else, obscured,
Murder delves the seas of liveliness, tried
by a circus of a killed mind which out-cries
Soft skirts and pigs. O, the moon speaks out
Aside all mad fools;- a gibbeting shout
Layers Life and Sex with a family of spies.

At death, you matter: hot tides that shape you
Appear crashed by a continuity of hot souls.
Yet Love moves oblivion: sure, you had it made
And stone seems scattered- there is no space for
The fractionated but a real life and true soul
Signals swaggered stars as bum-rolled musk
Hits four winds of dust. Loud Dying reaps trust?

IN FACT?

-in fact, we've a lot in common,- if one inquires.
One can't put off true being till retired.
I learn from truth as the bank I opt to screw
Saves madam-money and buys a regal nude.

So, I looked at others. They certainly didn't
Keep their faiths upstairs. A car and a sharp wife
Clears sex. No man may ever learn to move
Death's mind, or else a bended thought must slight

Electric fished kissing with a modern vogue
Of woman-child, rasping at the chapel-doors.
O the slums, the canals, the loud churches seem
Sun-toppled under air, and air must breathe delight?

As if fact had truly stabbed watery tears, then Life
Leads men and girl and child from Christs. It is

Intensely sad........

MUSICAL WHORL (after Philip Larkin)

Still going, all of it, still crowing!
(Ears to speakers, that sound of
The sky when it meets the sea!)
Tamed by noise, enormous airs
Grasp at a strangled voce machine.
A final tune, rigidly bangs where
The pleasures of music burn.
Still going, all of it, still flowing-.

The groups, the skiffling hands!
I search for sand and find a
Seaside pearled with purple tones.
The clear water smooths pebbles
With proud tunes roving from
The tunes of a dune-moon. Is it
Sense to find a radio attuned
To the shriekings of jazz-rain?

Still going, all of it, still going!
(Ears to tweeters, the woofers
Of a sky which sings for clothing.)
Raised by tongue-fire, gigantic strains
Drum aside drakes and break
Opened opuses at fragrant drains
O the pleasure of music storms
The buttons of pure pain. Ahh!!!

PIT-HEAD (after Philip Larkin)

At noon, there is a tremor; birds
Cease singing as the sun stirs
A heat-haze from the dimmed

Moon. Men cry at the pit-head.

Brothers, sisters, children, bent
On scarring from a sound

The explosion of life defined
By the madness of love's

Implosion, dance against the

Shores of a sea that meets
The darkness of a smoothed
Pebble, smashed into the

Teeth of the void, constrained
Inside the fences of death's
Cornucopia. In the clouds

Life creeps into salience

Unborn. The pit-head burns.
A heat-haze redoubles and

The silence of thought cracks
The bones of a mind brought

Queasily into the beaches of

The muteness formed from
Lips pared back by these
Words, refined to change.

Penitent, the children gaze
Out at a strangled town.
Innocence lies bastardised

By eggs, broken in the

Hands of a cock, cut up
Where its hands weep.

The pit-head is frozen.
Lust weeps from its chill.
The villagers are opened.

THE SUN IS ASH (after Philip Larkin)

The sun is ash: the early morning fire
Retails its solder on the curtains, drawn
The day before. The milk's been on the breast,
The baby in the letter-box, since dawn.

Inside, the thieves have not been touched, and so
Bibbed mysteries and mental clots are seen,
With Governors, newspapers, rented hopes,
And cots of lettuces set in between.

But the waiting room is closed: thereby
Patients from Green Gables die and take,
About the floor, a cell of smoke and wine
And sit in seances of sight and rape.

They stare about them: through the regent walls
(The living lost, their pale gold locks mauled down)
Read books and cartoons: 'Ulysses'; 'Hard Times';
Tom and Jerry, Asterix and the Clown.

Retched out beside them, doctors whirl and weave,
Thighs and lips apart, their chances rilled
With matrial dichotomy; they smile,
As beasts smile on the praise of doctors killed.

The marvelous watch has stopped. The curtained fire
Burns on: the womb goes pop. There, it grows queer,
A cast of thousands spills, and spurts away.
The only sound remaining is the tears.
...

jdb 1998
...
THE GIFT (after Philip Larkin)

My wife was delivered to my home
thoroughly boxed-in, like a baby....
i bare my love for the gift-wrapped note
(please care for me: I am one for saving)
then roll my fists into contradictory angles.
A seashore snaps at my feet and eyes;
like virginal plaster, it depletes and foams.
I blow my nose on a silk night-gown.
My wife asks to kiss me - but to kiss is
to pull the world awry. Raising my arms, I
tease her about her addictional charms
till she makes her excuses to leave and
burrows into her box once again.
I lay my head on my shoulder
and step back to see the world's design-
wintry shades of black and blue
cleave my vision forwards into darkness.
Then alarm clocks ring and circuits are
made in the rooms about me. Soon,
dizzier than a rumour, i shall know
just whose wife i am betrothed to...
My eyes sting as I fall. Just behind the mind,
amidst the pubis, the venusian whey,
nineteen fingernails dig deep into the bone.
Should i set my lover free, or should i wait?
But then, the gift lies broken, like a tree.

….

..

A SCHIZOID AWAKENING?

Weeping for madness, while time sat in prayer,
I looked down at the foaming and cortal shards
Once meant for thinking. Lithium lay thick,
But sent no light back through my guard,
Slunk as it was in mists and mimes.
Slain sites and wired mistakes climbed up
Past tombs still gurning midst corrective rites:
I thought: 'I am mad, I am wrought in lost night?'

Misconception: for my bones slept, and my wrists
Swaggered up their hands, absolving and touched,
And hung like a starved breath; the mind burned on,
A thin point of incitement; beneath its shards
The pallorless dial of day flamingly spilled
My virtual world into the actual, my mad bad world
Like a dropping tear, slammed at my heels again,
Entombing my schizophrenic clutch. Turning, I wished for
Another time so easy, for a further happy time?

But, rendered pivoting,
Buttoned as a coat of a mindless girl,
How could madness meet and lock and race like rivers,
But never, never choose. Am I jealous of it?
Will I forever confuse its rumours and ends
With sanity, with sane things? This important life
Is at once part invalid, part rebel, part saint -
Sadness is purely ethereal?
..

jdb 2001

...

THRU A GLASS DARKLY

And no-one can deny
That love is more tedious than lies
Seeing the mirror of the third
When fearing time's cries
Creates behaviour a mind can't stir

I have slowed in my swagger to find
That death cannot ever ride
The waves of its occidental sea
The nut-strewn road and its cavalry
Refine lust and its plans.

Coins in hands work for a life
And regal banks are sworn
Dead by a majesty of man-and-wife
This thurible holds intense
Incense; so too, starved tears

Weep from their command
A mute space sears the bent
Cities are altogether shent
And no-one can deny
That love is more tedious than lies

The blind fo'csle inside this brain
Must swear till death dies?..

jdb 2009

LINES ON A HOT SEX RECORD

At last she yielded up the hot sex-record which
once deflected, went into a yawn. All
rages, mad and glossy, all raves
were here constrained in one forced flit:
i must choke on such abrasive muses...

Your wicked eye hankers after a wicked pose-
in ponytail, hatching out of sight and mind,
o for a fury, some sweet soft graduate girl,
or some heady, steely weight

beneath deep and breasted terraces, or
(Quaintly sucked aside, disturbed and cold)
you wish for control over rubric and coil,
not in the least disquietened by the loll
of DVD, tape, and trap moreover,
the turning disc in its cunt-moil..

But, o, red discography! as no art is,-
Madness here anoints and burns! each
vinyl cracks (like minds) and holds us
quietly in sucked dismay, and when,
like fishing-lines, our schizoid rumpus
Shows the rear to wangling terms, or
gives a wag to the old-aged murmur
of music itself, we then shall learn

how needle and crackle are so much more
than simple, maddening things, but
Are in every sense empirically rude?

or is it just the past that speaks, the
misty parks and motor cavalcades;
the grief of Eden; the old-time trike;
the reef and sheath of cock and slave;
No. True, we go mad slowly, but,
sure of a present tense, we shan't
live in the passing of minds. This
is our seclusion - we must be crossed
with ageless manners as we ail
And fuck into deadness. Without

a chance of consequence, we must go
and, balanced entirely, preach our doubts
against life's sleaze, against all odds:
if our one and only tune fills the time,
We must, cut short, be passed on surely,
no matter what, to whose future beckons,

palmed and dry and holding our voracities
and listening to the hot sex-record again,
that we may learn the truths behind felicity
And thereby thrill all our friends?

.,.

ABOUT MR. SLINGBACK (after TS Eliot)

When Mr. Slingback travelled through the western way
His trousers paddled in the slink of their turn-ups
I met him at Tombstone, that wry place amidst the flowers,
Taking off my clothes by the sea.
In the palace of promenades, at the place of many pieces,
He paddled like an old-time toad.--
His paddling was pitted, skulled and unfound
Like the cowboy under the sea, or
Like the tea-boy in blue waves
Whence parried babies freeze yet drift
Far into Old Quay.

I looked for a bed in Mr Slingback's hair -
Under the rushes, his earrings cried
Like prostitutes and then felt the cold.
I found the heaps of his trousers midst the sun
As his wry and rotten paddling rolled on
'This must be Tombstone' - 'But what of His game?' -
'His eerie face is unbalanced.' -
'There is something to Him which seems insane.'

Through palace and pit and penny-eyed gourdes,
I remember nothing but a Human Penance.

...

PSYCHOS DREAM OF NURSES (after Philip Larkin)

Psychos dream of nurses bearing needles,
Whatever their scars,
As idylls of the schizophrenic stradling
Timeless stars:
This makes the joins in the mind abrupt;
Jives at the Centre, uses words, and
On weekdays squires the voices out of luck
In recusant, heated public.

Such lingering long incisions end in
Hostel room or spar:
A raw and semi-comal lurch
Into God's seminar;
The Church; the hospice chapel; the
One and lasting Game; the
Mindwarp-factor-nine; the Apple
Crunching for a brain.

...

....

Side by Side, their Mindscapes Stirred

(after Philip Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb')

Side by side, their mindscapes stirred,
The doctors and the nurses lie atoned,
Their doctored habits vainly shown
As pointed grinning, stylised leap
And that mad glint of birds
The minute tablets underneath rude sleep.

Such glibness of the mental lock
Barely rolls an eye, until
It turns their laughing gauntlet, still
Rasped about mind-ether; and
One sees, with a gasp of schizoid shock,
Their fans outdrawn, raping through sand.

They do not think to live too long.
Such wakefulness in litany
Is just a detail pity sees:
A mad-man's massed and melted face
Shrugged off in helping to prolong
The cocking veins amidst old lace.

They do not guess how early on
In our tortured, wasted life-voyages
The prayers must change, or come to damage,
And burn the gold patients away;
How soon those giddy pleading eyes begin
To flit, but not see. Childishly, they

Resist, blink, through kicking kinkered breaths
Of time. Crows fly, berate. Night
Each winter, hordes the past. A bright
Pittance of healing screws slaps the insane
Groan-gridded ground; and up from masks,
Grey friendless maddened pupils flame,

Washing true identity away.
O, now, crawling in the gallows of
An emptied, endless grave, blue laughs
Star-sadden the eyries of a busted brain;
Above these traps of misery,
Only rectiude remains.

Minds have transposed sin into
Closed coops. Their aimless impropriety
Has barely come to mean anything;
And our most manic, utmost wish is
What will survive us is purely dust.

*

Mockery and Son (after Philip Larkin's 'Dockery and Son')

The doctors were senior to you
Weren't they?', said the girl. 'They qualify for politeness!'
Bad-booted, mad within, I nod. 'And do
You pray for them or how?' I remember when
Pram-mounted, breast-buckled, and still entirely bright
I used to hang upon the desks, to give
'My Vision' of those 'Adults in the chairs.'
I try the tablets, take things down and 'live' then

Swallow..The dawn spreads mentally above.
A bone bell chimes. I lie straight above
Annals of carers, pass along and glide
Madly from my view. But the doctors, my God.
Any churl'd think they made the Earth
In '93, when god fell ill.
If they be senior, did they get their charms
At the beginning, when...? But I am that withdrawn,

Sly in my blinking, public gaze, sharing tombs
With madder men, mad boys. Well, it just shows
How nobody...How no-one...Screaming, I suppose
I was asleep, retching on the croons
And the hospice-glares of London, where, deranged,
I made a filthy sign, and chugged along
My mind to see self's end and then, the strange
Purloining and departing of my innocent song.

Unscented by mamma moon. To have no sanity, no life,
No love or lust still seemed completely right.
Only a dud humerus registered the knock
Of finding out how much had gone of mind-time
How spryly from my mothers. Massed doctors now:
Only children, they must have wanted, and played rude
Enough to.. No, that's not so: rather, how

Convinced they were of what my mind must do!
Why did they think that thinking meant release?
To me, a mind means confusion. Where did these
Manic mindscapes come from? Not from what
We think cruelest, or most want us to be:
These steel-shut eyes, like Wards. They've all the style
Our tiny lives give to them: well, just for a while,
Then suddenly, completely shut away, and,

How we die here; look back on them, run
Like vesicles, thick and gross, embodies none
For Doctors, for medications, nothing,
Nothing with all a Doctor's promise of a gloat.
This mind is first factual, then entirely mad.
Whether or not we use it, it dies,
And leaves behind what little something may,
And rage, and then the only plural of that rage.

About a Schizoid Going (after Philip Larkin's 'Going, Going')

I thought I would pass through time -
A sense that, against the crowds,
There would still be sanity in body-and-mind,
Where the nurses shout and climb
Such flowers as freedom shrouds;
I thought I would pass through time

Mid deaths and desks and side streets
And mind-revelled cloisters, but suns
Have always split Man's thoughts so far;
And when the sane mind retreats
And when the bleak insiders come
I can only rethink every easy car.

The mad are fuller than we are, just
As birth will always be gone
However we kiss it about;
Wrap the brain around trees, if you wish:
The foam will be smothered beyond.
- But, what should I think now? That

The sane are freed? Or that minds thrill?
Easy it is to be too young, but
This mind must seen aged, and doubt
Must cede away all sanity and Love -
More times, more bad rages filled,
More sadnesses, more mental cuts. These

Are the drafted spectacles of us all
That we, at odds with Life, will collate
As five per cent of our thoughts (and nine
Per cent more in the inner mind) move
Our grave works into spoiling veils
(More, contusions!) For minds

Are criers; o, to get nearby the hot sea
Interns a mad sail...
It seems, just here and now,
To be maddening all too fast;
Despite all the flexed thoughts left teased
At this teetering instant i feel somehow
That sense shall never really last,

That, before minds snuff it, wholeness
Will think aside a gallows in the heart -
First truths, then surely blind gurus:
This roll in minds is all to hard to win,
Now that thought is a softly foaming art.

And this is certainly our sanity gone,
The meadows, the spheres, hot veins,
Our furling and uncurling, the
Scented and sensibly cleaned. There shall
Be sane looks; but all that now remains
Shall be for all time shot and laid bare.

All Sanity is Purple (after Philip Larkin)

The hash-pipe breathes, the cedars dourly sway
And so 'Dear schizoid darling, I am afraid?'.

Funny how bad the madness roams.
I could wend half of my brains, if I wanted,
Rolling in the bones unburied, canted
Over to catch the ribald of a fix
Which is bred and fled from a petri-dish;
Just think of all the rare minds that have flown

Direct into madness just by being drilled
With hawks and stasis, rather the fast thrills
of lamplight, or the noise of the moon
Looking up and up through the floes of the womb
Thinned to a prayer-harked praise.
This life, unspun, is madly instilled.

'All sanity is selfish.' No-one just now
Believes in the mind or the mental stash
Talking to God (who's mad too); the big lash
Is the maddening of people who are nice to you,
Which means doing nothing, but somehow
Saying, 'All sanity is purple.' Are

these bad lines, then, vying for madness?
Vying for steeples and chapels that dig
Deeply for the 'devil' (who's a mad bad ass)?
'But try to feel, because, however sanely
Madness tries to show us how we should be
Appear infectious. A chuckle, too. Oh!

Only the young can be sanely strewn.
Their minds are shorter, shall be tamed;
Theirs is a floatless time. Now, see!
Sitting on the Ward brings us no light,
Brings us instead to darkest night.
Beyond the bones stand sadness and remorse.

'This is the fucking truth, of course?..'

....

...

'I see a boy dragged by the fists' (after Philip Larkin's 'I see a girl dragged by the wrists'))
(the split infinitive in this poem
is intentional) ….

'I see a boy dragged by the fists
Across a stuttering field of sloes;
And there is nothing in me that risks
A thing for life or woes.

There are sloes everywhere;
Sloes in one defining light
Even sloes sludged in his hair
As passion screams across the night.

But I walk on. Perhaps what I
Needed from this death was truth -
That little something that espies
A morning at time's root.

A noble brick of shit is laid
Across my streaming mouth:
Where once there grew a lip, there raves
No dissembling doubt.

And beauty dries inside my throat
And expresses deeds of hate;
Regales a lime of pitied soaps
That lather with the late

Examples of these teeth inside
That rise from furies carved
From out the beads of duty sighed
Where murder seals the halved

And carries down a spit of crowns
In foetal serum trothed
Where nothing gives but pits and frowns
Of fated sharing loathed.

Damn all conclusive spearing rhymes!
To be that boy! - to live to see
The plight of life cast off as mime!
That would be history.

For, to live where others care
Is just to fast a spirit dead:
Better off to be dragged off by the fists
Than to drink the sloe-gin red.'

….jdb 1998

...

VOWEL
(AFTER ALLEN GINSBERG'S
HOWL)

I saw the best poets of a lifetime
cruelly crushed
in one vast envelope of rejection.

There was Matthew,
who could spit out poems;
spit them out as if
nobody could stop him chanting;
and there was Mark,
who developed a new mode
of global punk literature
without even sharpening his pencil;
then there was Luke,
who, through reading
the entire history of poetry
in one brief evening,
inculcated a brand new
Joycean mode of thinking;
and, of course, there was John,
who, after an afternoon nap,
reconstituted Xanadu
Into an ever-expanding literary picture.

I saw all the real poets destroyed;
saw them send verse away
just to be turned away themselves,
saw them try and try again
to prove the romance wasn't over;
saw them try, only to see
their creative synergies killed
And left on dusty doormats
over and over again.

By God! they were real apostles;
more real than any poet
before or since-
they were geniuses, I tell you,
geniuses who never knew quite how
nepotistic and infantile the literati had become;
ingenious living, breathing men,
who, with vision in their veins
and futurescapes for minds,
could only fall foul
of the pop-art editors;
the scum-n-sucre madmen
who, born out of sobriety,
are testimony
to a dark and artless world;
testimony to the post-Dylan, post-wonder, post-creative
superstate.

They were our futures, I tell you;
our one and only optimistic legacy;
the men who, if only discovered,
would have spun the world
into an ever-rolling renaissance;
apostles of a greater God
than ever graced existence;
apostles with guts, spunk, stamina,
grace, wisdom, even noble blood;
men born to take the earth
and meld it with the heavens
through the use of words
and the use of words alone;
men who, because they were bards,
could only face destruction
at the hands of life's monsters;
those monsters, with lifeless, endlessly prosaic verses,
who had possessed and beaten the poet's cause
into nothing but a self-possessed waste of ink and paper.

I knew them, damn it,
I knew the true followers of the written word;
knew Matthew, Mark, Luke and John;
knew the spirit beings within;
Knew the kiss, the kin, the kith
of the first resurrection of Poesy
from the base metals of the heart.

I saw them all destroyed.
I saw them all rejected.
I saw my own love for living
being crushed into an upturned box
and left to rot away.

I saw all of them die.
I saw all of them fade away.

I saw the best poets of a generation
driven into the sea.

more poems by jim bellamy

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