Matthew Caley will be reading at the Royal Wells Hotel, Tunbridge Wells on Tues 15 October. Joint online event for To Abandon Wizardry is on YouTube; new film poem...
Launch reading by Matthew Caley, MacGillivray and Abigail Parry
Matthew Caley, MacGillivray and Abigail Parry launched their new books on YouTube Live on Tuesday 21 November. Watch the recording on our YouTube channel now.
firstly if any angelic brat’s forehead
is red-pitted red-dotted
with pain points
it will be this forehead that thinks
two sisters
all firm fingers and fly girl nails
who lead him to the sill
of the ginormous bay window
above a terrace choked with cornflowers
so blue they dye the air
blue their tangle matching exactly the tangle of his hair
through which giggling fingers
force and find and
as they do he sees their breathing
goes deeper into that breath the garden exhaling
rose spores
and honey pollen [the cause
of the reddening?] low whispers
from lips as if offering
and withdrawing
a kiss simultaneously feels the beat
of eyelashes on his neck – a hummingbird out-
side an iris staying stalled mid-air opposite –
hears fingers which never tire or still
the thread of the nit comb
the fingers at the nits
the slim fingers dotted
with infinite little crushes
so this brat as if high on the blush
of wine seething with antihistamine
sighs in Auto-Tune
at their caresses
and under this tender head massage
sheds his first tears of rage
*
The Spill
time slows then accelerates then again slows
either side of your coffee
its centrifugal milk-swirl
centred on a white table everything else a peripheral blur
including Shadwell
it might look like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty
as seen from a high glider
if someone is up there
having shinned a filter-elm
to gain this aerial view
through a slit in the bowed striped awning
and is noting the pool of sugar in your palm
early morning mist as the smoke that comes off
of poured sugar
you both awake and yawning
the table so rickety you rickety also
just a microsecond before you propped one leg with
a novella or this half-written poem on folded A4
you spilt the coffee
the stain looking ‘somewhat like a salt lake in Utah’
or so says a passing stranger
apropos of nothing
*
Wispy Streamers
supposedly Willem de Kooning
steps through then beyond himself
through strip-door tassels
into an interior
of glare murk and yes more variegated strip-door tassels
or ticker tape shredding from a steamer
as it departs New York he’s engulfed
by cantankerous crowds on the quay
‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ they say
waving him away [the reverse of how he arrived]
themselves lost in thought
and mostly on mute popping
the odd champagne cork too aware
to lose it even after
he loses it mind blank but hand full of cunning
blood pumping through clueless vessels but
he never thinks
of stopping
*
Fusillade
‘the next fusillade
of catkins buckshot or slate
either windfall or
scattershot is expected
at any particular
second a wince of foresight
to pierce pin holes in the night
make of it a colander’
I said with all the
rigor of a QAnon influencer
on a blocked social media platform ‘God grant me peace or if not
at least an unruly truce’
as my shoulder burst
with exit wounds of blossom
as the sky bared its stars and said
‘waiting is tiresome
not for nothing do I dread
the next fusillade’
Contents List
11 prologue
13 The Vulnerable
14 The Archipelagos
16 Bagatelle
17 The Nit Pickers
18 Lynx Litter
19 Luxor
21 The Blunderbuss
23 The Leaf
25 Approaches to a Door
27 The Strop
29 The Spill
30 Wispy Streamers
31 Pabl Piccass
32 Aphid Says
34 Canton for the Stranded
35 The Tickle
36 I Conjured up a Horse
38 Lamantia Street
40 The Scarf
41 from Transmitter
63 Undescended Testicles
64 The Obligations
66 Double-hooped Earrings
67 The Unbalanced
68 Unicorn Street
70 The Confessional
71 from The Drifting Recidivist Says
74 Plume Travelling
76 The Bungalow
78 Horse in the Sea Mist
81 This Pure Child
82 The Height
83 Star-wheel
84 Fusillade
85 Canton for the Wastrel
86 Depot of the Aero-houses
88 The Weathervane
89 Bollo’s Brook
92 The Lynx
94 epilogue