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.

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.

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

Words like mosquitoes swarming / Around me, pestering

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

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

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.

Words What are these things before me That come into shape? Do not ask And I will not have to answer. Weird creatures that run amok Inside their cages. Little flowers Of poison and honey. Potent as blood-drops, They scatter and return like ants, Dissolve faster than puffs of smoke. Words, I push you out And you take me where you want to go.

Uncommitted You can hardly say that I abide by the rules of political commitment or that I affect the diction of the dispossessed. Just like you I can walk away from the on-the-dole youths and make it back home at the end of the day to bed and to sleep, unperturbed though quietly appalled by the ugly obscenities scribbled and sprayed on the underpass walls.