Poems. By David McLean.
a dead calf in the vile Isis
i punted sometimes
on the Isis, like everyone else,
that's what you did then
when you were drunk
and summer. obviously there were swans
coloured like clayish shit, and ducks
and all that sort of happy
stuff
but what i remember best is
the corpse of a calf, or small cow,
floating as were it now
on the rain-swollen flood
behind my eyes, one leg raised silent
accusation to sighing heaven, the
indeterminate summer sky, and flailed
painfully slow, its dead resolved
motion in the faceless waters. so we
punted clumsily over, obviously, to
poke it, (nineteen year olds are children
too) and we just wanted to watch it
roll its stretched sorrow, a memory
the agony of its life in the green meaning
under the dreaming trees, but the
fucker just sort of fell apart,
and the disparate bits of the dismemberment
rolled slow back to the darkness of the
waters and to life's blind eye
that never saw the dying.
the dead calf turned its painful way
again to the future, and the fate that
awaited it, conceivably
a kebab in London,
conceivably gaily decaying nothing.
and even we shall be that calf someday -
falling slowly apart to mud and
amnesiac meaning, thus.
we shall be him or her,
death's son or daughter,
however studiously we avoid
the touch of our natures -
though death is painless,
our meaty erasure
that waits us
may not be evaded
nor should it -
basically,
we're fucked
* * * * *
homework
love scattered day
fragmentary lesson
a text is a bidet
to wash the arse of time
and memory, the sun has piles
today, and awaits
Nothing, its love a statue
and a statutory drug
that replaces us.
it is fun
and torture. night is done
already, and history
is love and meaning
and the Other’s fumbling touch
is incest and God’s black sun
is done
* * * * *
mourning pyjamas
you wear mourning like pyjamas
already, and history is a ribbon in your hair
where ghosts go, uncaring
there, the fragile protention that projects us
nothing. light clutters this pavement
dusty as love,
the cast plaster that holds us
whole and memory
daily
remains. the remainder that copes
with copious coffins, the departed therein
filled with duty
and duty’s dereliction. depiction
if truth. nights come
and days go lonely
their callous replacements
in this hallowed ground
loud the shallow coffin
that lies us. inside are dreams
and obscene reason, meaning
the moon is lonely as a star
tonight one where rats are
evil. fantasies replicate ruthless
dirges here
where elegies are cripples
for crippled Man
though God understands.
He lives happiest in kittens
his belief, and is a fish. His Son loves Him
and us.
night is pain today and day
is silent night, black as a sun if a sun were
white, darkness visible and bright.
so what is this, the fish
that records our blisses, missing kisses
“antinomy” she answers me.
* * * * *
matutinal ablution
we wash ourselves in light tonight
that cursory ablution, mourning
matutinal, a God-box with dreams in
obscure as reason, a nipple
listens, dialectics qua truth deceptively lenient
its leniently deceptive shit
waters our weakness, insolent to dream belief
the placatory lie that is the
missive God has given us, Miss,
his bow coloured sluttish with hopeful lust
for we are full of needy meat
and the grave is full of dust
the veins are full of godding drugs
and the heart full of Nothing
and love
* * * * *
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