I'm sure everyone is trying to act sprightly right now, so we can't have Wyatt as our latest in artistic decoration. Instead, here's a re-worked form of an earlier poem.
/scar
0.
Near a night-club,
The way the stars were,
and the palm trees sketching outlines along their spectre,
was almost
a song over
the loud blare of a wordless noise
repeating itself.
**
As the long night went on
a word appeared in the clouds,
and it said,
the plait of flat lights in the sky
was an illumination,
a painting.
**
The people did not stir,
but kept hopefully to their dance
hoping wildly that it might be
something else entirely –
the plaintive, detached glimmer they ignored
and shunned.
**
They liked loudness, yet not the silence
in which you may observe the glimmer
of a hopeful stone.
The chaos of a wild
evening ploughed through the music they heard -
meaning removed for dance beats,
hollowed.
And this dance was their only heartfelt art.
**
A quaint evening’s chorus
was made of plain choirboys
with nothing to say, and too many
ways to say it. They were lying.
But so it was, for they praised God,
but only looked to the crowd.
One might think them deceptive.
The exultantly ordinary laity never would.
Some people would be bored when you first
decried Valentine’s Day.
**
Yet, the stars
rung on with a clear hope, if you looked,
while the clouds almost whispered:
"Silence, stillness,
coldness,
strife is the noise of others
making senseless noise:
it is not your demesne,"
slowly, quietly.
the stars sung something like, 'Holy, Holy, Holy,'
starlit trees held in their light near the street,
walking down a pavement staring apart, and hoping to get seen.
The stars had a music of their own,
quite different from that of others,
yet it was no classical music,
it was real.
The light of
Valentine’s Day moons is like a strange ode,
where the day's halo rings on indefinitely
after the clock strikes, for the night is
all its denizens care for. The moon as if to say,
“Is it a chore of constancy, or the rush
for love without a face? The palest shade of night
shall not shine tonight.”
And so it never did.
There was no such special night.
It was a forgery.
And there were no stars, either, not
even of the vulgar, media kind.
The only truth was in the music of stars and of the spheres
that stared at them as out of a window,
But in capital, ordinarily, people moved closer
to capital, and thus attained some success,
and anything else was alternative, detached and rude.
The way past the open gazes
led to a secluded lilt of leaves and sky,
almost transmuted
seen at night.
We may hold the world to account if they did not listen.
In a decentred system, no-one else could ever be law.
Yet perhaps the moonlight sings, far away.
2. Half-light
Quiet oaks
of a Swindonian garden might render
in opal when in focus, yet
the sky still reflects itself in a distant pond.
The sun is a shadowed eye.
It is silent. It is like abandoned factories,
which call out, ghost-like, in a dour town,
as if to display a way out of this.
3. Creep Song.
Wait! Is there a sweeter slumber in the grave below,
or in the light of thine eyes? Mistress, tell me,
I need to know. Somebody told me. If I were
more perjured I should cry, ‘Calumny!’ and
no doubt be met with sympathy. What, then,
should leave your creep so isolated and serious?
For Hoxha is oft hated, I have seen in most encounters,
I have had with those who were not creeps,
And if I were to hope with a hope
that formed bunkers, would I not
then be called rogue? Aye, this occupies me.
But what else occupies me? Well, the Bible and God.
I am alike all of my kind,
a kin to all of my cause.
When people
decried Tarquin's treatment of Lucrece, then truly
could I say, “I am the table.” In feminism, I am the aggressor.
Yet am I not the victim of a label? Fie, fie,
as even Shakespeare may have said, indicating by it their feminism,
it is victim blaming, to hold against this creep
the rape culture of an age, which admittedly
might just involve me. Yet if a creep likes something,
no doubt its ‘friends’ must separate it from the creep.
In this way creeps are like all subversives.
Their claims are false, for in light we are
and may play with light.
But shall I
give my view on light, or would this not
rather offend the respectable religions
that you have held to?
So I must get your reply,
if I am to go on in this light.
To seek radically is to go to the root of the matter,
and the root of the person,
the person without embellishment.
Let your vision free,
that it may improve your paintings,
and further your illustrative economic diagrams.
Let not your diagrams remain uncared for.
Though it is not a fashion. Some say it is
a fashion to sigh, but it is rather plain.
One must rather detach, and seek another thing,
and then not sigh for what is left behind. But
to enjoy it is another thing. Where is the love
to shelter creeps?
**
So, you see,
Brunei was a function of Tokyo,
Canada was a function of the USA,
Britain was also.
So far as you are concerned,
they must all blur to one thing,
to something empty, a flag pinned
to sanctify the profane.
A narrow path
would not have looked good on a priest’s
credit card.
If drugs are a function of peer pressure,
then people liked them in saying so.
Brooding,
half-realised shapes - hopes for escape - were strewn on the walls
of the no-doubt asylum where a creep grows up,
condemned there for punishment. But do not
most ‘jocks’ and Biebers resemble Creep’s detractors?
So we are circled around,
by wardens in many shapes and sizes,
teachers or boy bands,
all these are the same.
Selena Gomez
may claim to have lost their virginity. I don’t consider it worth it.
Yet trysts are made on a whim, and value. To be a creep is to be revolutionary.
4. Year Zero. (ZeroNowhere.)
What need have we for the sound
of contented words, lacking content?
Our words must hang like silence, in darkness:
mysterious and obscure, yet sublime.
The years pass as a hollow pantomime.
Five years of 'Ellie Goulding' planted
the seeds for 'Sia,' and by that point
people may well have clamoured for
more obscure screeds on reds and 1984,
instead they got a Taylor Swift record,
which might well not tell them anything.
That’s where we come in - if anywhere at all.
Like the stillness of long-empty hallways, and quiet speculation,
socialism is most certain in silent contemplation.
5. Savage (unedited.)
The promises of
yesterday are like a glassed-off
garden’s grey shadow.
If you wish, you may
never be seen again, but shush
before you’re tortured.
It is a brief note
that the day is wan or in spring,
but a quiet gaze.
