Mark Waldron

When I was young there was nothing exactly stupid
about the world; In fact, in the good ol' days

there was the thump and the tug of it, the way it heaved itself
like a stone, yanked so to speak in glory;

the way it fell up, crushed up, and then crushed up again,
getting newer and newer, louder and sweeter;

the way it watched its own face fall between its fingers
as though its face were a handful of gold coins.

I think I might have known the whole drag of everything
going upwards, a tide that pulled me with it.

Actually, I know I did. (You were part of all this by the way.)
And the sky, well, where to begin?

The sky was so adult, not imbecilic or thin or so-so or girlish.
Did I outgrow it?

Did I drink it, shoot it, find a way round it?
Did I get inside it and drive off in it?

Forgive me, but on my way to work this morning,
even though the sun was on fire and the trees were up,

I was in the apocalypse. Death is not what you think it is.
It's actually what I think it is.
...

No Wonder


we're miserable, seeing as we don't know what's happening.
Plants tick,

and the neutered soup of dust
dinders in between sweet jester.

Harrumph and again the earth offers up its rough parchment of hunger
and insisting on it ad infinitum.

(No, I don't know either.)

Silly blown earth with its trivial
import and the tracks we left in it. I love your tracks btw,

that are so brim-full of emptiness. Where did you go exactly?

I have taken to
following myself because I'm imitable. I don't know what more to say.
...

I really do wish I did. Because if I loved
lawnmowers I could go

to the lawnmower museum I just heard
about on the radio in a piece

about small museums.
It's in Southport apparently -

a seaside town ‘fringed to the north by
the Ribble Estuary', according to Wikipedia.

It would be quite a trip to go up there,
and I'd almost certainly

have to stay the night. I think I might stay
in the Prince of Wales Hotel which looks

conveniently situated for the station
and the museum too. I can hardly bear

to think how much I'd be looking forward
to making that trip if I loved lawnmowers.

On the radio they said they have all sorts
of models from Victorian ones all the way

through to a state-of-the-art robot one
that's powered by solar energy.

If I was planning the visit I'd probably
have a bit of a virtual walk-round

on Street View, and in fact I've just done
exactly that in an effort to capture the feeling

I'd have if I was actually anticipating
a trip to the lawnmower museum.

Exploring the area I discovered
that Southport looks very much like

Weston-Super-Mare, where, as it happens,
I stayed in a halfway-house many

years ago, after doing a stint in rehab.
Now heroin - that I loved.
...

if not what they seem?

Take a lemony bird.
Have it.

An up-down nestling tree,
a sudden impromptu rumba,

an old sky,
a bare wind. Have it and have it.

The sounding line,
its sleepy plummet.

The boom, boom of calling.
Have it.
...

The mood is polite, facetious.
Manning himself, disordered, facticious.
The average colour, purpley-beige

except when it's dark. (Forgive me,
but all of us, we did look up at the
night sky. We saw behind the day's

blue curtain - saw the terrible workings.
It seemed so bored with us!)
According to the intro (and why not?),

the average temperature is coldish,
depending. The sky, humdinging.
Geography, nice, alien,

peninsularic. Penguins, erroneous.
The sea, blank, made quite crispy
with say-so. Manning, popped,

avoidant. Marcie, ghosted, jizzed, lit.
I could go on. Beasts don't even
glance at a smashed moon.
...

Existence trumps nonexistence every time. It has
all the colors and all the shapes and all the moves,

it is rude in its bounty and its grotesque reach that
overcomes all before it. This bit of stick I found in

the park was showing off because the dead can't have it.
They can't have any of it. It was sticky and prickled

with a showy, dazzling presence, though it's quietened
a little now, now that I've taken it home

and have it here on the mantelpiece. It has dressed
in purple robes and carried its being like a chalice

with such disarming mock-solemnity down and down
the pale carved steps into its candlelit depths.

Its being rests inside it now and purrs quite inaudibly
with a sound like the most exclusive refrigerator,

or a sound you might take for your own sovereign
wheels spinning. Little stick. Wait for me. I'm coming.
...

are our spirits, these loquacious silver gods who glide at
some safe distance above their rank and proletarian bodies.

Foul though fascinating landscapes they are that they
traverse, besmirched with armpits and fruity genitalia

and belching gobs and those impulsive blurting sphincters
in whose hot updrafts they might ascend and soar.

O, but our spirits are so lustrous, so hairless, so advanced
in their glass-bottomed flying machines which run on

just about nothing! What quick and icy notions they have
that slot into one another like the tightest clocks, and how

they lick their lips as they gaze down in anticipatory glee,
for though they would not themselves wish to rough it,

they certainly will peep through their bedroom
windows, each a jiggling voyeur of its own ardent body

when that body has chanced upon another, and the pair
of them have knuckled down to their immersive work.
...

I really do wish I did. Because if I loved
lawnmowers I could go

to the lawnmower museum I just heard
about on the radio in a piece

about small museums.
It's in Southport apparently — 

a seaside town "fringed to the north by
the Ribble Estuary," according to Wikipedia.

It would be quite a trip to go up there,
and I'd almost certainly

have to stay the night. I think I might stay
in the Prince of Wales Hotel, which looks

conveniently situated for the station
and the museum too. I can hardly bear

to think how much I'd be looking forward
to making that trip if I loved lawnmowers.

On the radio they said they have all sorts
of models from Victorian ones all the way

through to a state-of-the-art robot one
that's powered by solar energy.

If I was planning the visit I'd probably
have a bit of a virtual walk-round

on Street View, and in fact I've just done
exactly that in an effort to capture

the feeling I'd have if I was actually
anticipating a trip to the lawnmower museum.

Exploring the area I discovered
that Southport looks very much like

Weston-super-Mare, where, as it happens,
I stayed in a halfway house many

years ago after doing a stint in rehab.
Now crack cocaine — that I loved.
...

It's summer, and just the sunniest
of afternoons.

Outside the sanatorium,
in the arboretum, the attendees

are served their teas.
The strudel is toothsome

when Herr Stumpf, from the lectern,
contradicts the consensus

that I is for ice cream. No, now
he's proposing that I's for spaghetti,

all spaghetti, he avers,
being once alphabetti,

all spaghetti being once that capital I
that it is when it's dry,

not the maddening doodle that it is
when it's done and awry.

His audience listen,
but once he has spoken,

then beneath their applause
that's not fulsome but token,

they don't soften, no rather, they stiffen.
...

All the new birds
are made of nothing.

They have nothing inside
(for anti-ballast)

and those insides
are surrounded

in an outside nothing
that has its own

flibberti hole.
The birds,

they're nothinging
up there

in the nothing trees,
or on nothing roofs

under a nothing sky.
They fly of course,

but what is flying
if not nothing?
...

what a saint you are, shining on everything,
drawn to the world like flames are to moths,
like honey to bees. So readily do you dole
yourself out, and in such abundance so that
we might operate our otherwise redundant eyes.
For they'd be useless even as shiny bibelots
that studded the otherwise dull surfaces of faces.

No, in your absence, in that total darkness
the eyes wouldn't see or even be seen. And they
would soon shrivel up and desiccate, die out
from pointlessness like the little toe will
(unless we can find a way to reverse its long
decline). Hey, plump eyes! Isn't it time you put
your tiny wet hands together for the light!
...