Rod Mengham

I have this feeling for poetry that it will give away my position.
It is one small step for you and me one giant leap for librarians, in sore need of boarding this craft whose sails can never be trimmed.
We have picked them out of the identity parade which assembles in silence out of breath; up and down the artist prowls wearing the wrong collar size: “J’accuse!”
What makes you shudder is beyond all measure: let’s start with the froth on this beer, with the disused sickle and hammer neglected in the attic where fluff collects. It is mantling the entire earth long before sunrise. There is just one twinkle where clouds are drooping, they are reading the instructions for indoor blood sports. 

It has all been thought of before but nothing is in the right place and every swerve is fatal the park gates are closing for good.
The first tendrils of unhappiness are poking through the bars but something is unlocking somewhere a something that has been keeping for this.
Let us meet unforeseeably or never find each other again.
We have heard the waters rising in the Bay of Naples. We have seen the founding fathers falling in.

this paper does not catch fire I want the air from your lungs breathing of what is to come but the groundswell of opinion bursts on the present moment wherever the wind is blowing let there be an acacia let there be thistle down floating past the gun emplacement, beyond poems that are screwed up, beyond the net mended for the last time as slowly as possible where the sky is upside down and so close you step from the Gallo-Roman baths and the tears just come tears of anger, tears without number Zazie outside the Metro is all skin and bone her little sisters turn out in force most at home in the open answering the summons of restless forms do you want to see the body rented by the hour and endlessly rearranged yes as quickly as possible dipping your fingers in blood a little water clears us of for a few feverish moments your glance falls to the bottom of this Sargasso manuscript thrown in the dustbin at one stroke we are parted the ruination of art a theory of escapology tightening and loosening the bonds

It was the start of the great fire, we were listing the minutiae the chair he died in, the trees, the neglected vines clawing at the window. I could not rid myself of the sounds. This is the cancelling-out, the striking of the work-house clock. Resign your place among the mannequins, he said out of breath in the crowd of lenders. Cut the engine now and everyone is in step. The scalpel finds its own way to the core, and its protege, the tomb is the rival of his master. We cannot go in the fields that flash in the rear-view mirror, to the throngs of the dead drifting apart. They sleep on fetid straw. The audience is now invisible, the reading committee suspended, and so we meet again, monsieur moliere, and the leaves drop away like notes falling from the ATM, in rock-shelter middens. We were always going to part here the lullabies that come between us. Where is it written the train stops dead in winter dark, because we have eaten our words. It was the impudence of a moment to stare you out, brushing away shards. This is unbreakable glass and the nearest running water is far away, bound for a circlet of pines and the invisible emptiness of the Irish Sea.

like an imbecile I think I belong to one
where a rope hangs from the tower I’ve seen this blindfold before when words collide or lunge your lips pass among them in the aisles of the milking shed I don’t mean it when I say the torches burn down on the dying shores of the Caspian you cannot read by them but seen in another light caught by an absent-minded wave this occurred to me long ago whoever you are it must be me writing this rational seance of consonants this conflagration of vowels and digging in the wrong place all I have ever found is the formless beauty of the dunes always embroider the unthinkable put a face to the voice come out dead or alive from the dark galleries Berlin is a mound of bricks I imagine you entombed at the heart of your revolution a stubborn gate-keeper all day on the moving staircase not far from heaven where there is no consent crossed by the floating clouds shirt torn in several places

what do you see in me apart from panic

They dream continually of enriched uranium. Only the words are irreplaceable: fixed languor and tardy dolour.
While you were listening and not paying attention Ulysses lashed himself to the mist.
Show me your scar again, Ulysses those volutes and the reappearing numbness. That was your great discovery
an unreasonable desire for poetry while swallowing blood. Now you find me shaking something
Penelope ‘s chevril glove, unharmed in the debris on a worn-out carpet.
Just as the larks lose all sense of their bodies so you are wearing your skirts much higher every night in my bed. But my flight of bemusement will not add up. The occasion demands flight with its opposite number.

And I am on the verge of a steel vice with a grief that spares nothing.
If and only if in twenty years time I have no one else to write for
death will be borrowed and never returned death will be flitting in the silence.