Giles Goodland
CINNABAR MOTH
As I stared at it, it seemed to speak in a small piping voice, terrible small and thin, but terrible human.
An angry crowd is one. Also
Mussolini pupating from that lamppost:
all it is is in its tricky construction,
from its flatpack it struts itself out
with a tiny key for many hinged components.
Selfconstructs, eggs out limbs and
flappant offcuts of mannequin,
stalks the godark vivisages, collects
the baggages of adulthood
roughs the hotheaded gunslug
pumps into wing until nothing is faint
the ink is wet behind the trees
the capillary tongue reversengineered
to suck the U out of the mouth,
to eyestalk an unlettered sentuntense.
Fettered to the lettered wings it flattens
on alighting, gleants arguseyed like
a facetist. Stop poor sonnet and resemble
me my face is strangely notlike
swear the eyes to secrecy and implore
the planet to cascade sugars to
frostlace the lethereal flawflow
that felt the silkstrike counterfact
and the lost daughters of grass believe
the wind sleeps when no god
is without fire cremation is creation
otherwise, the words inside the meat come
lose the ears turn to the wrong language
so punctuate the ragworthy flowers
new metals gleam in a gloved hand, they
take on the forms of our unexpressed senses,
unalike their seamstressed chemisphere
insips the treeleave scentrance: touch
is nerve-ending. It leaves with the light.
HONEYBEE 2
Nightshape, what time are you running on when was poet the translator of things what seals the river inside us
Why on those potent flowers is a pocketful of moons who fanned the moonbeams
Did I say to Zeus Melissaios the animals crop their waxen thighs then make wing to thimbled harmsway
Am I a fact swarming together do the circles of the sun arrange things like this
Did I cram into the keyhole my tongue or cluster waiting to be born
Can you describe a flower to me will you let it be cold to the torch
Who saw the swaddling-bands of Venus upon which the dead hummed and rose upwards
Can you outthink the box beset with thought in a holding pattern what if looping the lupin is the flower stalked to its root did I navigate into a room like notes from distant brass
If shod would I swim in my hums and glade into a flow have nothing inside but love repullulating able at once to hive into brains and slide trombonelike or nest in cosmonautical hair points of punctuation holding courses across your head
Were their beards coarsening and emptying algorithms that work their way into what pluralization of the soul what finery and refinery what is the gold we are spun from
Did my tears take human form did flame-lipped flowers lend heat to her compound face how heavy is the signal if in speechspace is it called The New Scentdance who bring’st this Hony-bag from me
On her lip hast thou thy sweet dew placed
Who can dance the teller from cadence, who cancer the dance from the hotel can answer
Are we to paint what's on the face what's inside the face or what's behind it was thereason the sense of floss souldusts discorder on the dancecript when did the nostalgic dust-driven particle start for the kernel of the sun where thoracts the oracular flowerblast
Do you sneeze differently indoors to out what is a snail’s fury to us whose airmile shall we gather what does belongable mean when is love contractual
Who wrote a tensentence-long loveletter why while slily pilfering the sybillines
What do you demean by that who antiquated the sungalong organon when did you arc-hive the humansand blossoms into the filing cabinet of entrepreneural workers when did submachine of fullbellied harmlets fanwing the trombone-nosed orangetangle where does mythodology end who outshone ontiquity how much sagacity is in a spitiful which feelalike realmitten was bebearded
What telescrapes against by rewired zoomulation when is cadence resindense with velveldt who was beebeset with bulletic lullulations how ignorant is a flagon of cognome
What balled bumblebeed avertebrate what are the electronic-eyed enchancements
Did we make a love indescribable to pages and edges worked in their teeth a powder that forgives on contact
Is poetry language’s language
FRUITLY
Be fruitfly and multifly . illiterate . infringe the likelilly probabilities . count our
unconsciousnesses . blink away the thinginitself . helicopt a clutterly nonchance . thwick a
mininature fairmament . sup on admass . drool the genegleam . upside surgurge . centrail the
tonguelet . titleroll the rememberember and its entangibled ethergy . smutter pearpeelings .
mentangle the earvision mirror . chargeback the wordslips . distend the timecome sectlets .
reassemble the lines broken in the poem at night . cleanth the odors of perception . coincide
dream with opening a fridge door . colimb mould’s snowcap on an orange . break loose a
pixel . mindwindle the crudimentary malfruition . inconsist in singless secretasy . trill the
umpty slitsucked sentrail . godream the genaesthetic dustengine and nectarloving animulacra
. energeer the fridgelit pinheads . bedenizen the infintile senseorgan . jostle each punctum
indifferens . unwound the strangestar wingspams . force away gods . fell the light between the
page . circulate stories concerning the diminishing stories . reversengineer a posthastory
elsethere . empest the numberness pome . in a year smoke seven clouds and eat 2 newspapers
. print your lungs in all the colours of the television . hold the brutal taste of a chocolate bar .
starvarnish arvoparticles of brainverse . semicolonize vaguable corevalues to the tenth part of
the law . vary the syntax to disseminate fleshelf . inslide flitly the labbed phane . infestigate
the genomic olfactor . fword the postnatural godot . be futile and rooftile . always
particularize . firm earth wish itself back . tumelt the teleshoppers seriatim . nondrip the
godfilled nectarjar . make harms then charms . metaloskeletize the windrinsed shopsoil . take
hushness’ reality-claim home . phut phut at the speed of smell . particularise the air . stem the
assetrich incestral . nightrot the mucal bureaucrat . catch in an eye's wet socket and drown in
tears . loose ghosts . infringe . subsing a parasate sabredance . hangelide the emanational
windhove . manhand trancelater of machinetime . always particularize . subdivide the
semiintellected rotatarray . telether the frostrated ephemeride . riffle the tiarared gotether .
drown in a goblet of beaujolais . oppose nature . furcate the pseudocidal anonimosity of
enchaintress and anarchrist . connect as self between a lip sealed or healed shut . blackly
gloomily and darkly: ooze . empty the world into the eye . hubbub the vulgarulous brainworn
. unscript the secrutiny of a shamantic ladyrinth . interpret the world thus . applemine the
itemachine . blip the crumbustive plantasm . brushstrike with sandwidth soot . flitfight with
momentorn ephemera . never historicize. flow the unfulfrilled indelicacies . invalade the
visionedged entomons . sunset on the fumiform hermenauts the untrufuture . rollick the
kitchen percepts . sip the surgary goodstuffs . splodge with smutty utterspace . breach
language . only think . unfurlfil the fluantic animatom . datashadow shrinkarms . pixel-dance
. chimneysweep the wornamental sectrets . smutch such meltaphysical godfuckers . deify
gravity . whuffle in the flashclad cubicle . fork war tests . biomass the mantissal banana .
punctuate the irrelational gauze . imparticle in scapular poentropy . tristranslate the uppity
pestations . sugarsurge the smithereens . carpool the prynneval sunglight . godspeed the
salavage visionist . squiggle like subbirds . celebrate elaboration . shun the deathangel and
wind-sucker . be fluteful and ultiply .
DUNG BEETLE
When at eve the beetle behemoth
and the rain clots in the car’s genitals
the language in us turns into the road, the light as if
inside we drive uphevil with God as windshield
between us and the rest. These thoughts are
not words, but have the quality of being
understood. Irreconcile with shard-
beetle as it genghisses its heavesong. Oblique
motions, light-edged corners strum under-boulder.
At Uluburun call him Aksak, elsewhere square
urine-squirter, big rock beaver, humpbacked
flute player, earth-mover, bullshit-dozer,
turdevil, cowturd bob. Senses gather
him against the verduring dung. Flollop
the crowbarred scarabapple through
ozymandates and dunghills, scrunch
the matterhorn in complicates of inexhaust
apply the time-quench to clodclotted pelt
then write a merdchant for the duchy.
Sun leaks from a wound that must but
cannot be located. When cattle package
leaved grass behind them he
uprears, waves his tinny sensors and
Sisyphus-footed knocknees his fussball,
exits the hard-hat area to plantcross with
loadbearing carapacity: indefatigued the clayey
coprophage quakewalks the urnfield as outself
wormward upprearances dungfork our spilth.
We shall lift the starred urns from their earths.
Only nature can destroy the state.
Burly arablic replaces the cartouched
monhument’s scatalogue of hieroglyphed
pharaoph, uncentres the threadearth. Heel
the wound, drag the mudhood headbutter
the sixlegend golemgleam: narrow voices
plead for more time, stand guard while the female
excavates broodchambers. Under the soil,
a far-future adrifts from the soular
system and in free space we look for
a new star before the moon runs out.
The disapparition of these faeces in a cloud.
LOBSTER
(with appropriations from Whitman)
O the sweetness of the Fifth-month morning upon the water,
as I row, just before sunrise, toward the buoys;
The skin you lay down in hardens to glisten and
the spume around you shall be appropriated by symbol managers
who dissolve iron in tears so give voice to sleep like
cloud inhabits an eye, a five-haired beard
of wisdom trails from their jaw your notes have come out cold.
I insert wooden pegs in the joints of their pincers, I go
to all the places, one after another, and then row back to
the shore, there are cuttlebones washing in the downsurge, dragonsteeth
where the singing sea will bend the moon into talk,
ovenlovely sploosh of senseangle facecaged in the malchinery.
The veridical empire falls to a push from the laced hand.
Water pater your church is skin since your heels trembled
light back into the eye to recognise fracture, face the vision
inside the facet and resist the horse of reason, the dead appeals
of the living to machine against glass
to stem the acausal clastaway the kingthin waterbone
afterskin the ironmental schismasm
you threshole your sado-mechanistic
steamclots into the shell an animotion of dimortality
that attainted the misturned seasensations when
you pince your nez, the dead see scroll
for seaxchange fills the sand with seed
godsunk the ringfingery rocadrillian
to quantiquate the scrapmental snailvarnish
a densory barnacling of etymythology
is mirrored in musculocerebral inanimation
your lotted arms cast dice on the waves,
seacreating the sputum you pipedreamt
spokesmoons of rupturned notionalities in names of sunlets
loaded the toothed waves the sea by crook of arm
when Foucauldian beastmasks carried German gun-names
to Godardian incharchitects of maleglaze
around the edge of the green lake the waterlocks
spend the ghost of skin imprinting a book of Mechanical Sonnets,
they walk beyond our own graves, to
reenact the armsrace between U Boat and Q Ship.
Emperor of icemelt
the sea is glove to you:
this is dark
draining from your fists.
Copyright Giles Goodland 2014
Giles Goodland's collaboration with Alistair Noon, Surveyors' Riddles, part of which appeared in Molly Bloom 2, will shortly be published in book form. He is a lexicographer and poet who lives in London and works in Oxford. His most recent book was The Dumb Messengers (Salt 2012).