zafusy

On each statement the weight of
language rusting in books,
under a light. I shall come down bearing
the prints of a clay city on
friable earth, a bed among
rippling structures, where
an outlet pipe snuffles
particles of us shifted some dust
inside this skin to pick from
the floor a broken syntax
and set it on edge as one does when
we know it is beyond repair, not the
language but the idea that there
was something suspended that
might fit the silence. Inside
the marble feels only stone
and reoccurs in night’s catalogue.
The children sleep on the rafts we
made for them out of words
as stars realize their shapes.
O god of finding the word
for the elusive picture screened
in nameless cinemas, each one
the size of a cell: languages
will speak to you in your sleep.

Giles Goodland

The I of the poem
moves its lips into mine
like pale reflections of a word
too drunk for work
it pushes some bones
into a leather pouch
and bids them dance
they cast you as a shadow
playing a small part behind
the printed ruins of
the child in her cloth urn.

We felt our tongues at the root,
the head filling with
human words that become harder,
they grind in geological time

perhaps in a playground the child
overheard something I said
as I turned the clock to the wall
a worm confirmed silence, verbs
clustered against the face.

Giles Goodland

Road was spent fuel, smelled like cherries
from dead mouths
into the nets of the rain
we drove, the doors of the city
unhinging behind.

I can piece together what it means
to pursue a road to conclusion.
We were blue light and striped
distance, I held a stumped wheel
a chewing-gum gummed map.

There was delirium in the way
and into the air’s void
a sense of passing, trees cried
turn this into language later.

We arranged a barrier against dream
called being awake
but never held up for long.
A lake lunged at us, it was full of dark
the shape of a full stop

puddles will still break when we are old

under the tongues’ tip was a word so
powerful it could unplug the past.
The weather never said a word
as storms can’t be measured,
the broken-free chassis moved us apart.

Giles Goodland

Hey what made so hectic the light
pulse on the pond after the thrown stone
when we stood in the bodies of children
counting on the banks holding, there
still being a glass that both
contains frogspawn and us, we were after
a container to hold only as much
as could be thought, no more

when called on by our
living parents to make pronouncements
about our far future, what could we say
but the kind of blankness we would
later discover daily at work, and rub ourselves

out, the pond erases itself
or is it that just like an eye
it needs to close
from too much world, from the falling
of nights, the way objects
keep looking and carry
a few ideas at a time, until emptiness
comes as clear as next day.

Giles Goodland

Suddenly we can be erased
out of a tunnel like a sun sung
someone implants the wrong cornea
to see cities of coins
where eyes should be, each notion
indexed to a corresponding
night-bus with its moving
waiting-room filled with loose words.

A car we are lost in is
as if it is in the same place we
believe it to be. Later
on the phone but coincident
you motion the school we drove past.
A sense of a word ended,
here, and nothing marks this.

Surrounded by stuff we cannot name,
miles of air where
harassed newspapers spread their wings
and the colours run behind.

We slow the car to listen to the rotten song
and work as interpreters of capital.

I turn to the wheel and I say but
my tongue was not in I tell the car radio
to fuck off twice on the way home.

Giles Goodland