AFTERWORD

e – 11

But for the artifice of wanting to hold back
Recollected when the bell rings
The lip I bite
Presents like islands appearing on a calm sea
Unnatural guilt lies at the core
This was the cure
Giving a damn
A reading in a pile of leaves
Therapeutic but played like a game
No home in the world to find from home
The no-novel about this man and he just didn't
There's the tune I know
Return and regret of the fallen mind
The blank space of what comes next
A by-proxy poetic nekyia









e – 10

A third path that winds
There is no need to visit the cave on the peak
No system integrates certain matters read
To have some kind of existence beyond what might become
His new car bought by the coded line
Chipper he was I said
On posting back the results of the test
Grotesque carnival juxtapositions of clipped text
Having made so little of a tract of time
A year married and in Szeged
As if dead Sibyls would speak
If the wind was a dead wind or a lacking wind
With a monkish adherence to the caustic possibilities of broken words
Or a seductress in league with him and opening like a fan
Producing only labour









e – 9

Nothing needs saying in a vacuum
The rebellion wrote on the inside of its nest
Every shift left by default one shift ahead
Because he escaped to Graz and poverty
Is resignation or an insight that resolves
When he is always saying he could go
An unnatural preoccupation
Stirring sugar in
Isn't that it
The I'm-hoping of his father
Meaning by association
It happens when it's least expected
After the terrible miscalculation
My ill-fated inheritance of a misguided adventure
The location of potential innovation or the very idea









e – 8

Hearing a dictation already taken
The cure coming first before leaving
Being elsewhere
On another brink
A deck of cards
Habits acquired to promote that first cause
An early child
His ease moving back in
It automates by taking the labour out of production
The meaning of meaninglessness when acute
Not yet undone
Poetry I've produced
No claim here can
Stand unlocking the door of the car
Costing no time or effort and little of the day









e – 7

The end of that day
The time was
Blowing through and disturbing the leaves
Who will first lay them out
Or cut up the wind
In a mountain hideaway
To steal a glance at the future
The lack is my belief
Gradually tinted peach by early evening
On review turning out to be a meta-concept
Shifted into senseless patterns
Remembering not to be that person
Unworkable at present
Accruing business acumen and financial reward
If it isn't making any









e – 6

Spent but avoiding
The concept of speaking falling off
When I could walk out the same way and leave them
Light-headed and almost giddy
The autism of daily inventiveness
Here to give myself the chance
Being covered in soot by accident
Never acting out where heights endanger
Every experiment
Impossible proximity
The sky serenely darkening into violet
Labourless but functional
He was I said chipper
The same conversation
Perfect capability far exceeding actual exposition









e – 5

Writing and the stuff written
A relationship ends and knowing you'll wake up
From coffee or a hilltop walk in candlelight
A place in time the only ally
Fear that was a calling
The brink
Not a significantly achievable object with the way
It meant something then if you were precise
In working for the mediators
Now in Bar Centrale drinking coffee
A chain of command
On the back of a leaf
To leave and walk into the mountains naked
We say there's just this man and what he does
Not understanding we made the moves of understanding









e – 4

A consequence of the freedom that reveals and undoes
To occupy habitual fingers
Work and the movement
Entirely mechanised
Brief eruptions of ancient unthinking
What then found wanting
And everything made and cut to fit
When still in a swamp of conceptual starting points
Years of after-poetry coming
Sipped black treacle finds the corners of the tongue
Wait for the soft footfall of exposure
Smoking to fry the nerves in nicotine
On the terrace of Bar Centrale overlooking snow-capped peaks
Audience created speech
Sat with nothing to impinge









e – 3

He asked whether in it's place
No arrival or fitting into place
Not the work for would-be poets
I 'm thinking again of the hazy peak on a blanched day
Even an oracle needs to be sought
The complexes of psyche say it's born
What of serious
Déjà vu in lost enterprises
A line broken once in crazy worship
He can write There Was This Man
Home is not
Laying out new futures this way
The whole project is on a similar scale
Lost when the same identity makes no sense
Back when we believed it possible









e – 2

A tiny place on the lap of Circe
If you never tried but blamed what you missed
Realising you have made a terrible mistake
From the gloom of trunks witchery twisting
The fictive painfully leaking and the stop-gap non-story
Use of words like idea or story
Having collected leaves from the base of the oak
The misunderstanding of what it was
No not Zen
The peach sun dipping into serrations of mountain ice
Everything for him is marred by an attempt
His attempt passed off as a non-attempt
The long-discussed possibility of nothing
Waste because most of the time it was nothing
Planning for nothing to continue









e – 1

A denouement of similar conversations
Order of juxtapositions
It's an argument living on the fringes of actual investments
And the completion of these acts waits on
The chances that the assessment is based on those jitters
Broken futures cut to make them fit
I should not be looking out from these habitual thoughts
Above the parapet with half-edited low output
If you entered the cave uninvited
Chance is the tool used as a surrogate voice
Perhaps I think now anyway
Nowhere
Wind
The car tucked into a hairpin
Linguistic distress









e

I'm not ready to pay yet not yet
At the end of my caffè and the end of eleven years
The eleven years
An error that has cost me maybe eleven years