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.

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.)

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?