The Drowner ~ by David Alcock

The Drowner

I cannot recount the facts: not the pythons
that clenched my feet in their bed of mud
nor the black-lab Anubis who rose with a gasp
and usurped a human face; nor the gaps
in the headfronts of the bystanders
as they skittered in a fairyland, then fled:

the hysteric with her doglead, whipping
the water's lips, jabbering excuses;
my children flitting above the clay and nettles
in brassy excitement at my vanishing;
the canoeists who jerk-stroked by, dumbfounded,
as absent and sordid as gaping carrion;

the foetus-form, tender in his clothes
slipping from the sun-beamed jangle
into brown murk and further murk, a dream
of sleep, vulnerable submariner, supine,
a serene vision that fouled the river
more insidiously than rot or sewage.

And I will not dare relate the fear,
for fear of fear, and fear of fear's evil;
the sense of our communal fugue revolted me -
none would think me less: the rulebooks say hold back -
I surrendered myself with shamed disgust:
better to risk the body's death than die.

The moment of redemption is unspeakable:
fingers seizing that corpse-scruff, surging,
the balloon-buoyed rise from the riverbed,
so glad he was gone and not drowning me;
and the moment I squeezed the life from him
and neck-deep still, cursed him into breathing.

Lentils and Insomniacs ~ by David Alcock

Lentils and Insomniacs

for J

inspire - -
	suspire - -
softening breathing
	sussurates below
shattering darkness.
	suspire - -
inspire - -
	are you sleeping there?
sucking in, pausing,
	blowing out again
together feigning
	slumbers of the hag
sleep who escapes us
	night by night by night
inspiration soft
	suspiration soft
soft is your rising
	soft your decline
then pff! tsk! twisting,
	muddle-out the sheets
a low giggle: 'Ssh!'
	- -
inspire - -
	suspire - -
oh no, it has to
	once again be done
inspire - -
	suspire - -
spread fingers raise a
	buttock and the legs
tense slightly, turning,
	raising to permit
pouting dilation
	susssssssprbbbb! - -
I believe I sense
	snuffing at the air;
it's ok it doesn't
	smell at all I'm sure
back to the breathing.
	suspire - -
inspire - -
	night phantasms whirl
green and dim russet,
	orange and pale blue,
monochrome portraits,
	fabulously thrawn
megrims and fancies,
	newsreel-very-same,
taking each spiral
	each in their own turn
always timbuctoo
	pastor eye's discern-
'Fuck this!' you hiss, and
	writhe angrily around.
'Why can't I sodding
	sleep again tonight?'
'Same here,' I mutter
	'I was nearly there.'
'Sorry,' your blind voice
	ruefully intones.
inspire - -
	suspire - -
clutching each other
	as if we were drowned,
or as if drowned well
	we would rather be,
fall on an instant
	cradling the scratch,
dreadlocked, kinky,
	irritating, nice,
shift again once itch
	rasps sommnolence out
inspire - -
	lock legs in new knot,
hand clasps a soft cheek
	breast, hip or shoulder,
breathe scent of warm skin
	bringing on attacks
Augustine would know,
	cellbound, explaining
nightlusts from his fault,
	suspire - -
taking lewd spoils
	justifying lust,
hypocrite, lecher...
	suspire - -
cotton is sweaty
	not like mine at home,
must be the napping
	for it's just my bare
carcass that perspires
	not my beshirted back,
why does it do that?
	and what is the point?
inspire - -
	suspire - -
thoughts wander fondly:
	what if all my kids
burning in the furnace
	of their house? Oh stop
what if this aching
	points me to my grave?
her ailments, she too?
	expire - -
What if a polar
	bear should somehow eat
both of us plus kids?
	suspire - -
inspire - -
	what if I subtract
twelve-thousand, seven
	hundred and a half...
- -
	suspire -
insp -
	susp -
usss -

The Conservator Dreams ~ by David Alcock

The Conservator Dreams

Stained-glass: a spider's web of cames and colour
brittle mosaics of the holy family;

suspended on my silks, I scuttled, penduled,
a hanged man dancing in a throat of song,

scraping the cancered frass from rotten mullions,
the clerestory, triforium and choir

light, dark and mystery surrounding me,
spinning slowly within my swirling sheets,

my dream-chaff clipped about my sleepless head,
as tears split the light - a thousand leaves

of bright grisaille rush past, their colour stripped,
kaleidoscopic, monochrome, exhaling

a turbulence of postage stamps awhirl
in frantic quest for tattered, unsent letters:

the dummy rings the chisel's striking tooth,
cutting back to stone that chimes the shank.


Published in Antiphon, Winter 2012

ob hop ~ by David Alcock

Thrush tugging on a worm, pale

worm pulling from the sparse meadow

of my self-shaven sack, buttercup-

hued with yellow iodine (fake-tanned

groin: I must have dozed in the sun

wearing unseasonable crotchless chaps).

Golden genitalia, gilded in the figleaf zone,

prone statue (no Apollo, I) pillow-propped,

curious, 'insouciant', absurdly 'amused'

as the benign decorator glorioles my balls,

cock, thighs; (I catch your synaesthete's eye,

wondering what sound this colour tastes;

you smile as if caught in a naughtiness),

and then I'm quite intent on the ball-

ache: deep, disturbing, as the nagging

needle shoots its load, intent to see and feel

fully this closing-off of futures. Chirrip.

Jet-eyed turdus. The beak-tipped clamps nip,

and the knife-tip scoops off the cream:

two tiny u-bends, vermicular segments

gobbled down the crop of the cul-de-sac bird.

It's a one-way-stream now to that pond, my love,

and all the tadpoles mass and granulate,

and sunnily self-digest their demi-lives.

Spiders weave and threads are tied, nimble

knots are thrown and pulled quite taut;

these sutures seal potentialities (and

later we toast the ghosts of my tubes

with milky pastis. "You've had more than your

fair share," you'll say. And I'm still greedy.)

Odysseus' Trench ~ by David Alcock

Odysseus' Trench

(i)

A slot in the ground. Black blood.
Shade between shades.
My shadow, moon-fringed.

Bloody trench, honeyed
milk and wine and barley,
that black of wet oblong.

Birth passage, fluvial snapshot
silent between earthen bridges,
where the greedy dead drink.

(ii)

A river of water and fire and trembling air,
a burning ripple of light across the world,
sand-ripples sighted through sun-rippled water,
every soft-tipped bud or tender leaf or splitting calyx
a sheaf of scalpels, spears, a stook of shimmering swords,
these clashing truths glimpsed through tear-fringed eyes,
all promising harvest, plenitudinous eruption.

These fairy tales, the book has boundaries
each plate has a border: - concentrate!
don't look beyond the edges, nothing else -

Once there was a happiness; we called it innocence,
it was written in our book of fable, the colours were pure,
the text was breezily simple, the moral was knowingly apt.

You ripped some secret pages, self-scrawled,
you hid them in your knickers for safekeeping.

Innocence is eventually superseded.
Happiness follows suit. The fairy tale,
scattered, is trod into the mud.
Our wider landscapes threaten us,
the bird-screaming flats of mud, the blasted trees,
the knowledge of galloping tides, the sun.

(iii)

I speak to the dead at your trench
of blood and honey, Penelope;
to your trench, Circe, of blood and honey
wine and milk you showed me the way;
I stand here in talk with the twittering dead.

That oblong, like a page of black ink
impenetrable with its frame of white stones,
firing step for the crouching dead
their mouths are wet as they speak of life,
aiming their words along their clogged muzzles,
their feet rotting in the mud, their eyes desperate.

The sun shimmers on that ancient cocktail,
that katabasal slammer, and though we enfold
our eyes in that enclosure, from the edge
come the drifting, too-wise, insistent dead.

Just pick up the book: a fairytale is no good
for now, not since, not now, for ever -
Yet the pages can be used, tear, glue, snip, snip,
to adorn this grimy mess; to collage, decorate
contingency with subtlety, lend such scraps
of colour and remembered simplicity
to punctuate the broader miry world.

Petrification hides within a cock's egg.

(iv)

I, Odysseus, the cocktail prince, wily shaker,
took apprenticeship at Circe's Bar:
most of the clientele were pigs; I brought
a certain style, gave the place a makeover,
was rewarded with a placement to gain
experience by the hostess herself, she deemed a dose
of professional development desirable; I was unsure,
as I mindlessly rubbed my rag along the counter,
my heart seeking outwards always under pretence
of return. The bell on the door rings in the breeze,
the drinkers sipping beer beside the oleanders
glance up, of a sudden dazzled, and the dust settles.

(v)

The love that springs from closed-eyes
pains the heart of the clear-sighted;
and the shut-eyed pragmatist mourns
the keen whisper of slicing vision;
between them their pages turn to confetti.

We trample our dirty pages into the trench.
Here, O Dead, feast on these: all our lives
that have passed, self-consume yourselves,
regrow into the present-tense of the spring,
the time to stop is not yet. The flowers are coming.
Crocus and primrose, narcissus, hyacynth, rose.

We scorch and freeze a plant, it dies,
or puts forth in flower. The eyes of men
polarize under pain; vision splits the world.
The two halves of a walnut make the body,
the truth is in their sameness, pairedness.
Until we realise black and white are both grey
and shifting always, we'll be at odds.

(vi)

You cannot weave the same tapestry twice;
so says I, wily Odysseus, self-deceiver.
As if in a mirror I find myself
questioning the dead
green with terror, directed by
the goddess of the gorgeous hair,
and understand it is the dead
who eternally question me, Odysseus,
on my bright notion better to travel
hopefully than to return for good.

Indeed my motives spring more from pride
and the mangerly assertion of my rights
than any true impulse, or if a motive hides
beneath the seduction of my honeyed song,
it is the sailor's itch to put things shipshape,
Bristol fashion, before the endless movement
of my voyage, which as ever only ends
at this delineated sea, this wine-sozzled bloody
grave in which at my mirrored image gazes,
blackened, sunlit, waiting for a breeze.

(vii)

Where the greedy dead drink,
silent between earthen bridges,
fluvial snapshot, birth passage.

That black of wet oblong,
milk and wine and barley,
honeyed, bloody trench.

Moon-fringed, my shadow,
shade between shades.
Black blood. A slot in the ground.

Two Ekphrases from Collages ~ by David Alcock

So all the cat-women
stroking their pussies
gaze with wide-open eyes
at those fulsome hips.

Priscilla, triphallic feline,
can do it three ways:
body, mind, soul; eats
the gasping tatters.

Her teeth, so sharp they
puncture skulls and pierce
the patience of the brain:
with a yowl of lol-cat

frenzy, she surveys
the still, shuttered room,
and the half-eaten
carcass scattered over

the enamel-caged chintz,
blue-lit by plasma,
flickering as the witch-
doctor, trephinned

like a colander, brain-sieved
to leave only a mince
of professionalism,
wearily rubs his asbestos hair,

consults the twitterings
of his iPads and sterile
iMosses, iRags, programmed
to sponge up loneliness.

-----------------------------

Ganesh, nondescriptly stitched
to a dolphin's stem, swimming

in the fundamental darkness:
the bargain basement

of the body's seven floors;
upstairs, the girl self-inserts

herself within her circus-
cannon of an applicatory tube,

hunting out the black inverted
teardrop of the womb, intense

and glossy sealed aubergine
that pulses just beneath

the poisoned plexus,
choleric with hellebore;

heading up: the heart, falling
over it's own halting beat;

the unconfessed lump in the throat,
densely sleek and firm as a plum;

the inward sprouting of lost
bulbs, blind with compost;

and the disregardful target
of the open fontanelle.

Against The Ivory Gate ~ by David Alcock

Against The Ivory Gate

Her forehead domed, wise elephant:
within her skull, two reversed tusks
tickle her brain, one cheerful, gleaming,

the other amok, in must, and a trunk
that caresses the frontal lobes,
parts and massages hemispheres:

pachydermal bliss, no need for
headfuck trepannation, pineal
cockhole rendered obsolete - yet

an astral projection floats from the face:
trunk, tusks, thrust out, detach, waft
tenderness through the jungles of dream.

Portents at the Fountain Inn, 8th of April, 2010 ~ by David Alcock

Saucy Circe, reversed Isis,
daughter of Helios,
stared torus-eyed
from the doughnut of the sun,
into the bright disk of her pint,

fresh from the mud of a hundred
buried ships, silver-grained, oozing;
and the chill dew of the cloisters
on a razor Spring day,
and a warning of cows and calves
and dogs off leads to be shot.

He approached, and told us:

    (skin like a brine-soft olive
    off a place like Aeaea,
    or of a little green man,
    witnessed dropping
    from the sphincter
    of a flying saucer over Cardiff;
    something to do with Jesus too,
    that thorny crown, (behold the hole!)
    and was he gay, and bagels)

We smiled politely at our magnetism
(there must be a hidden mark on us),
swirled our beer, and indulgently
our amicability shone, until:

    "to be or not to be:
    would you forgive me
    if I stabbed thee?"

Little knew we
of that hour's liminality.

Sundew ~ by David Alcock

Sundew

You lean, arms clasped behind you, hands at the elastic
of your knickers, ankle deep in the warm bog, regarding
sundews, and you reveal to me how they eat flies.

Wordy woman, lexical lover, who rides a spear of wit:
we slowly screw while reading Hegel for the challenge;
St Paul too, to cock a snook, and conjure a stink of hell.

Our bed flowers around us: fed by sweat, spilled coffee,
toastcrumbs, ash; the nervous sheets rumple into petals;
our thrown-off duvet curls a nest for us screwloose birds.

I peer at the pink glands, dew-primped stalks, deadly aureoles:
endangered, modest, contained... easy to condemn a predator;
a fly might sketch death so; we admire the tricks of beauty.

Allotment ~ by David Alcock

Our garden was dug years ago:
I forked the ground; you fed.
In muck our mattock chopped.

All it took was one ripe seed,
the quick trance of flowering.
A vital plant, upright, true.

For months I've raised my scythe:
your stems have spread elsewhere.
My children burgeon brightly.

There's a wanton joy in growth;
clipped only by low convention.
I'm done with pruning nature.

'Memories, memories' ~ by David Alcock

Stardust all tossed across the frosty night
at Chapman's Cross, as I pull in, tears suddenly
blinding, ignition slain with fingers bloodied
still from the birth just heartbeats since, the quiet
entirely gulps - cathedral of moon-ice -
the other boy asleep, car-swaddled, wrapped,
warm-lit, mouth open in a jealous snore,
tied in his law-forced, lonely throne now tumbled.

An owl honks wearily, a coney rips
the heaven's frozen gleam asunder,
caught by the throat by weasel or starved fox,
as Louis croons across this Cotswold night:
witching-time. So I cry for you confined
in flagrant disinfection, and my eyes brim.

Read Write Be

Read Write Be

(i)

The ambiguity precipitates
A simultaneous interpretation:
Venomous row, or smiling mutuality -
Both coexist.
                                             One chooses how to read:
Creates the text.
                                             A “fuck off” may be said
With hate, love, laughter, boredom, charity -
Who cares? it's the ultimate facility
In selfish discourse:
                                             Final text is all

             Me Me Me
             Not too healthy,
             If you ask me,
             Which you won't,
                         C'est la vie.

I feel demeaned beneath your recognition.
There is no recognition. Anomie
Is solace, anguish, comfort and brutality.

I wander down the sunny avenue
Delimited by breezy cypresses:
It's tedious to be unrecognised.


(ii)

             Think I'm on your hook again?
             You're quite mistaken.
             I'm sitting above the river
             Looking down at
             You, fishing,
             Looking down at
             The seething water
             The fictitious fish
             Banal bloodsport.

             Listen, the sun's out and
             I've brought a picnic:
             Damask picnic cloth
             Laid with exquisite delicacies,
             An ice-bucket woven from spiders' webs,
             A basket of glass shards to cut meaning with -

             The bluebells are ringing
             The beeches shout with green fire
             The harpies roost
                                             click clack click
             In their branches. With their
             Typewriter eyes
             They are out-staring the sun.

             Has he got his hands, that man,
             On his whole loaf again?
             Use it then, rustic pain.

             Here is no river, just slow streams of words
             The digits, fingers, bytes, teeth,
             Ones, noughts, and naughts, are null and void.
             The chablis and the strawberries are fake.


(iii)

I'd give my right bra-cup, said Penthesilia
For seven endless, hot, wet cups of tea -

                         There is
             Yellow sulphur flowering
             In the samovar.
             Incorporate idiocies,
             Phantom gestures,
             Obscene absences -
                         Fumigate.
                         Fumigate.

Odysseus unstrings the washing line
Limply adorned with sullen, empty dresses.


(iv)

We've used up all the air, I'm going to step
Outside. Perhaps you'd care to join me? No?
We yellow cowards do not dare reality.
Have it your own way; if so, fare thee well.

             Articulating the sour
             Disconsolation is dull too.
             Enough, enough, enough.

             The world is click-clacking shut,
             The sun is out. The spring is here.

             Completed.
                                             Is this a mercy? 

Rub a Dub Dub - by David Alcock

Rub a Dub Dub

[La Poete feels he is a pie to be consumed,
or a sex-machine operating in anonymity,
or dead in his coffin.]

Rub a dub dub. Dub a rub rub. Three men.

That ancient tub. Slaughterman, pastryman,
Purveyor of waxen illuminations,
They all conclude with the disposalman,
Whose parlour is papered with liver-pate
And filo, carpeted with trippa and tunge.

Four candles spit and hiss at quarters, melted
From cawl fat, stuck in cornets for candlesticks.
This pie perhaps for eating: a casket
On puff pastry stand - stale coffin,
Cover, discrepancy of a tumid
Sausage ballooning from snug access hole
In a lid that's shone to warm glaze by thighs,
A one-horned croissant on a coffin lid, finger
Wrought handle of flesh, manipulable,
Solemn church candle with the fiery wick,
Handled one by one by an endless column
Of deathscrewing girls spreading round the corner.

Screwed in, in the dark, blinking at the dark
Plush in pitch black, who perceives what he thinks
As he dawdles, back arched by the adjustable
Pad of velvet keeps his electric loins forced up.

For a price, pastry can be carved so client
Can indulge curiosity - fear not
His face: a one way mirror means he can't
See you, that gravyman, cannot sense your
Ecstasy of rut, apart from randy clench
Of muscle deep within your bellyspasm.

Does he sleep in there? Do you think he knows
We're here? Or is he just a stew of giblets
Organs, aslosh within the box, dumplings,
A sauce of curdled thoughts and images?

Brute sensation is all that men need, save
Empathy for the girls, that's what women's
Magazines reveal in sex pages sandwiched
Between cookery tips and gardening.

So why then is he still delaying? Ok,
Sweetie, DIY number 69,
Your turn. What have you brought the screwdriver for?

Toad by David Alcock

The stinking toad that croaks his fart-warm music,
the bellows of his throat puff in, puff out.
His jaundiced eyes, drink-hooded, blink and blink:
he is far younger than he looks, yet far
too old to creep and clutch on this fresh earth.

O creeping toad, so scrawny, warty, pop-eyed,
crepuscular and crawling thing, who croaks
vile crepitations, belches, eructations:
your dissipation years your face, your guile
and falseness squirm behind your beaming gape.

That tailless wretch, he crept his two-faced way
into my bed while I had turned my back 
and settled there, before my warmth had cooled:
he wastes his joy, though can't believe his luck,
to take at his age this warm nest to clutch.

Skin-shedder, self-devourer, witch's mark,
wart-giver, gobbler of spleen, liver-death, 
convulsive, spasm-twitcher, sphiggener,
blinking toad, stinking toad, old crevice-creeper -
I ask: would you jump in my grave as quick?