Private Language In / creasing thought, the self doubles / folds inwards, suppose a private language against the world’s shared grammar — self-authored, a book written for no . one. A page torn away, stains in the margins, a footnote wrongly numbered, the letter ‘i’ faintly printed. Such is the pain of the man who yearns for his whole self between the covers of biography and meets only estrangement.

Speaking of England Who dares speak of England unless he has first swallowed a coal from Albion’s fire? It is the world above our sight, The visible in sovereign light, Set ever against the world below Where shadows come and spirits go. It is the land that Albion won, A giant, Neptune’s wandering son; He held the realm for his own fame And gave to poetry his own name. It is the words the dead bequeath, Rhyming couplets between their teeth; A land where time and

Pillars of Ash In the beginning Nature had no voice. Then the gods threw a pest Of fire called language Upon the world And are watching it as it blazes. Now fire clings to the palate, Burns the throat. The smoke of rhetoric smarts our eyes. Tongues of fire consume the page — Paper curling into ash, Perusing fingers sifting to ash, Bodies stiffening into ash, Pillars of ash that’ll topple and disperse In the coming wind and rain.

A Brief Pataphysical Study of the Word ‘and’ in Poetic Titles When viewed under the lens of Alfred Jarry’s 'pataphysics — the so-called science of imaginary solutions that “symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments” — the humble conjunction ‘and’ occupies a liminal space in poetic titles. Easily dismissed as a mere linguistic connector, ‘and’ here acts as a non-identical operator that defies conventional logic. Lon

A Ghost As If I am not your keeper O ghost who crouches At the grave of my father. The body is dead; it is in the shade. A pale figure with a sheet for a robe rises from the earth (His hair black as ravens' feet). With cold-clay fingers, He could quell the soul’s fire. As if. A seagull cries In the salted air Like a baby Calling for its parents. There is blood on the land, Blood in the rivers too. You are not what you appear To thi

By the Sound of a Voice After a long silence that seemed An eternity, There came a turbulent noise, A spirited noise. No, it was a voice, A loud voice Lashing up a storm, Singing intense, singing hot. And in the violence Of that voice, Whirled seeds of sound, Fragments of sense, Half-words, Commas & accents, Rhythm & image, Inclining towards poetry. And the LORD bent His ear To hear spoken The moon & sun & stars – & there was a dark saying too, Sung by

# LanguageSpeaks ! A man carrying a voice recorder pauses at the door, enters. He looks a lot like Kafka but has the eyes of Tennyson. He possesses a picture of Saturn, and you don’t. It is green. If you like you can say the same. You can’t blame me for this. I am merely the host. The party has just begun. Enjoy yourself. He should have brought wine instead. Some people like voice recorders, some don’t. It’s not an issue. ‘Turn it down,’ he shouts. ‘I can’t

A Story so Untrue You Have to Believe It’s Real A Story so Untrue You Have to Believe It’s Real On foot from Edinburgh to Canterbury for a once-in-a-decade conference on "What It Means to Be a High-Functioning Humanzee in a Mythological World", we are discussing the cultural fallout of "phase-three scholasticism", which has rocked the academic world and the Catholic Church in Ireland, and is responsible for the suicide of at least five university deans and three bishops, as w

Words like mosquitoes swarming / Around me, pestering

What is language? Where does it come from and what does it want (from us)?

A tool for imitating movement, For the small things that penetrate, For the breath's expulsion ...

Words II Having material weight, a poem can be shaped, sculptured and refined; erected as units, structures, factories, bridges, outhouses and T O W E R S Or miraculously sus- pended in the air, b u o y a n t black crafts in the milky void. Or else bolted upright at the base of the world, and supported by its own true and deep foundations

Irked Like a sacred text folded in on itself, a page half torn away, stains in the margins, a footnote wrongly numbered, the letter ‘i’ faintly printed. A little extra work to do.

A Code of Nature with a Subject Once a code of nature without a subject. Now: language tongue, la, signifying Illness, la, a foreign verb linked to other verbs, Other selves. Larynx a tool of ancient Life-form's unearthly rhetoric. I cannot Speak! Ancient virus speak! with alien joy About control& replication& money. Lalangue is master to my slave. The pest Clings to me, through me. I am overcoded& Yet the words I use are not the things I want to talk about

Cryptic The scent of a foreign newspaper in the morning: New ink on old investments and trades. While down in Berlin, the autobus returns to the depot. The driver wraps himself in a scene of noise and oil. The last of the rain is falling in spores, another plague. The bailiff, off duty, knows that trees take time. No ordinary articles in the universe's inventory. Get rid of more, of it all, he says. This is a career, Not a hobby. Have a snack, an apple, it's a hard fruit. No

Yehudah, I Make You Mine From out of the banks of the muddy Jordan River, I make you Mine. Into shape I press the grit, into shape I knead the clay And your body clings to my fingers. I knead and a verb puts you in motion. I cut and I layer and an adjective fleshes out your shape. I slap and I roll and a rhyme gives you weight. I model and I sculpt and a noun marks you as a thing. With a name, I form you in my image (Your name is on my tongue). With a name, I firm you

Wyrd In the beginning was the Wyrd. A story of weirding words and the poet fluttered his pen over the ink. What comes to pass has passed and is passing. We owe a debt of guilt. Go ever has he shall, he has. I shall.

A Poem Is a cluster of black atoms, of varied shapes and connections, configured with an inclination towards sense and suspended in a white and finite void

Mast/Tree The piling up of words into units, struc- tures, towers, is what might be termed the phallic unity of lang- uage. It was Hulme who said words ought to ‘stand up’ so that a poem is like a tree when the leaves are cut off -- it ‘be- comes a mast’.

A Poem Is a Picture Environed by varying degrees of space, (depending on where you draw the line), a poem is a picture of the artist's mind on a pagewhite canvas.