VolVox

1.

Each eyeblink a
Magnesium snapshot; each footstep
A dark plaque set in frost:
3am moonwalk in a loosening gravity of Lysergic Acid Diethalymide, the mind’s meniscus
fattening with the light of inquiry.

Soundless
Microbial dot.

Disguised as a full-stop, it hunts.
It punctuates the Cogito Ergo Sum of Descartes the way a landmine punctuates a tank or tracer bullets a bird-of-paradise…

What does Eckhart mean
By the Now of eternity, Dogen by the Iron Bull?
I graffiti its cold ribs with my softening neon crayon, my big, Las Vegas signature!

Who am at root a cuttlefish.

2.

The creature arrested in a block of pearwood!
Mournful eyes locked in a striated armature of muscle, and beseeching, but the woodgrain
undertow still carries him onward.

We pound, flat-palmed, against the hyaloid silence,
Where the underbellies of words
Are revealed to us
In all of their fastidious complexity, autonomous and jewelled;
And it is, of course, possible that people who we could have loved died long before we were born.

Hayflick. Volvox. Empirical punctuation!
The click of our feetbones as we exit across an odourless, primary floor…

And the faint photography of stars,
Like cameras pointing elsewhere.

3.

Champagne evanescence of this world!
Oak trees detonating, civilisations sizzling like spit on a hot sidewalk, the hallucinatory blur of
the accelerated creature, of the experimental apocalypse!

Faster and faster, until what remains
Enters the silence: a bright
roving
dot
Under lenses.

He wakens in a sunlit chair,
A single housefly in frantic worship
At the window.
It flicks through each instant of time
As it intones from the Book of Detritus.

In the vernacular Sermon XII Eckhart says that a fly and an angel have equal status in God.
What are we to make of this assertion?

One senses an event horizon
Beyond which language, born of the meat of this world,
Cannot go.

To breakthrough, just once!
To return, whose shrunken language is the buzz of a housefly.

4.

Refigerated sunlight. The vista
Of years ventilated by a scent of ocean…
Telescopic recollection.
World-textures, magnified.
At the centre of the crosshairs: a boy,
Looseboned, who handles the air-chilled
Shell of a Horseshoe crab
And waves the viewer to ‘come closer, look!’

Shouldn’t one learn to let go, and detach?
Poised soul, of zero adherence
To the things of this world?
Equidistant
Droplet
Reflectant, tranquil.
Miniaturised gargantua, chastened
By a slight
Molecular tension.

‘Peace at the centre…’

5.

[remote toilings of the proton pump…]…
Mitochondrial cristae.
C6H12 O6 + 6O2 + 36 or 38 ADP’s + 36 or 38 p ~ 6CO2 + 6H2O = 36 or 38 ATP’s by which we
are driven forward on the crest of the shockwave!

What is it that lives us?

Epiphany of dog, snarling:
Tooth enamel, iris, under streetlights;
Communique
Of Siskin;
Croquelure of winter trees….specificity dazzling with enhancement, as if sealight was the ground of
being!

Wordless. Agape!

Lacunae
“ “ [“ “]
“ “
quoted by eyeblinks.

6.

Lit, an attic window. Suburbia. And on a formica table in front of him with it’s shallow upglare of chill light, a soul. He teases it apart with meta-linguistic tweazers.
Creation like a wheel of faces! As it says on the wrapper.
But on closer inspection:

· Fairy lights of DNA
· Lab coated test sentences of the Logical Behaviourists, like quality control engineers reporting on a crucifixion
· Substance P, our coarsest wiring

Analogue of the word, toothed
With chromium. Programmed to love, seeking the thing it needs to try to love, it
Advances,
Like a wind-up toy.

7.

Trying to heal the excision layer of his language, unable to grasp the root of himself, he examines, instead, a dried maple leaf:

The spiral staircase of it’s ontology

From it’s quantum shiveriness, up through it’s atoms and polysacharides, to an upraised, palmate gesture of blessing.

Fallen from between the pages of the Book of Job.

There it is.

Singularity at the centre of an accretion disk of language, dark lamp hung in the gateway to the Via Negativa.

Vulva of an ineluctable confounding.

8.

The Law an enigmatic fractal,
It’s judgements recombinant of consequences not intended: behold! My personal freedom, like a
chromosome octopus!
Or the fugal genealogies of fruitflies.

Mister, I know myself to be a better man than how I appear to you in this world, but there’s this difficulty I have in proving that, my sins of ommission like a wall of eyes.

Kissing babies on the Rhineplatz.

Game scenarios of the self.

The monstrous entelechy of grasping,
As if I was Boris Karloff’s shadow.

9.

Focus of mind, tracking
The wandering progress of a little star
A crystal
Of Volvox

Death’s erecting prism.

Together we compose
The eyepiece
And the objective
Of life’s most powerful telescope.

10.

Pressed below each sense
To the hardpacked Ground of Being, I moniter your departure, the diminishing signal of you.

There’s a reason
I’ve come down here to search for you:
Like an American in Prague, a tourist, I leaf through my copy of the Cloud of Unknowing

And ask directions:

Please, sir, what way is the bridge
Over which all things must cross?

I need to wave someone back.
He left the pain on in our house when he left, now we see right through our eyelids.

11.

Querulous perplexity of the self-seeking voice, threading the mirrored intestines of itself!
Like Freud in a beanbag: the fattening analyses;

The mind feeding
On cholesterol echoes…

But whatever it is, an infinite regress of heat signatures in the compound eye of a mosquito, an inchoate bellow for love filtered and analysed by the syntax of a maze, it encounters itself most luminously in tabloid mosaics of shame:

The Iron Bull,
It’s dazzled irises like pink tinfoil

As it clutches the bedclothes to itself
In the mirrored ceiling of a cheap motel room.

I feel I should say something about this at the outset. I write, because I’m a fan of those who I read. I want to be in their gang, and writing lets me tag along, like a tolerated runt. The fact that I write allows me to read, as an insider. I feel I stand in a relationship of confidentiality toward the poet and his or her work, and this encourages a reading that is more vertical, a listening in, like tip-toeing down a spiral staircase at night [when really your supposed to be in your bed]. Some poets I have been reading closely, over and over, again and again, for years. It took 10 years of reading Yeats before I started to gain a sense of incipience in his work. Whereas, if you read Plath, very quickly you gain a sense of the origin of the poem, because the distance it travels from conception to completion is so much less, is traversed so quickly, and is usually enacted right there in front of you, in wide-eyed surprise. If I didn’t write, I believe I would lose the sense of dialogue I have with various poets. I’m a painfully minor poet attempting to engage major themes, but this shortfall does not dismay me, as long as my efforts allow me to keep such excellent company.

A while back I was a student of Zen. Specifically, of Soto Zen, and a perplexed reader of Dogen. I practised, and still do, fitfully, Shikantaza, which is Japanese for ‘to just sit’. This simple instruction I soon realised, conceals a depth of nuance that gradually worked on my curiousity and determination. However, as I continued to practise, and to read, I became worried by a tension between Zen, and my writing poems. It is a tension that probably doesn’t exist in a practical way, as evinced by Basho, who was trained by a Soto Zen priest, and by Shinkichi Takahashi, for example, who was in fact a Zen monk as well as a poet, but the apparent conflict between the two in theory preoccupied me for a long time. Despite it’s literature, Zen characterises itself as a transmission of teaching outside of scriptures, and the experience that it points to is essentially beyond language. Now, being utterly enamoured of poems since the day I discovered Dylan Thomas, I am something of a Platonic Realist when it comes to language: what makes the word apple to be about the thing it denotes is the fact that it encodes the essence of the thing it refers to. Somewhere in the word apple is the essence of apple. In addition, I instinctively assent to Heidegger’s notion that language is an objective force with it’s own economy, and that we only speak insofar as we concur with it’s energies. These two features, the Platonic and the Heideggerian, are what, I think, allow for that sense of discovery that sometimes accompanies a poem’s ‘composition’. Now, the worry I had was that the practise of Zen would destroy my attempts to write poems, or at the very least undermine the faith in language that underpinned my attempts to write. On a basic materialist level, I worried about neurological consequences arising from the practise of Shikantaza, a ‘reprogramming’ towards silence. On the other hand, what Zen proffers as a reward is very tempting, and I am also somewhat of the belief that the self, in lower case, is a bloody nuisance at times and that it can obscure the view, the bigger picture. It is a conflict I have never been able to resolve, and one which ultimately has diminished my initial zeal for Zen. I have written about it intermittantly in my poetry, and the fruitfly emerged spontaneously as a miniscule sign of the poet’s necessary engagement in multiplicity. All poets are fruitflies, and hopefully prone to fortuitous mutation. So, that is the explanation, for what it’s worth. I’ve posted some of my poems below.

Micrography

In a splinter of glass
the shining
impersonality of light.

Go towards the light
fruitfly! Towards
the light!

Fruitfly, his
madness deepening
in the mirror.

Floor of the mind. Survivors
signal
through the Foraminifera.

Snowfall. Fat world
haunted
by famished clerks.

Blackbird. Peering
through his microscope,
making notes.

Snow-silence…angry
car-faces
drive past in the directlon I just came from.

There! My face reflected
in the glass
of a passing car!

Marshmallow slo-mo
dreamslide
towards a very hard tree!

How real the World
with its
hands of bone.

Leaf-storm! Laughing,
I shadow-box
dead trees.

I read the final
bone, and
try to make an answer.

Look at me, in
my Volkswagen
monster-mask!

My shadow
is
the evidence.

He tries to think microscopically,
to be free
of his own mass.

The point
hungers
towards ignition.

Creature. Out
of what?
From where?

Ego blooms,
like
a bruise.

Gather weapons,
and brood
on your restoration.

Frosty morning.
Cows
fart steam.

Silence…yet still this background fizz:
the effervesence
of mystical chemicals.