Thirteen poems.
Available from Holdfire Press (via Amazon UK).
Review by Charlottle Henson at Sabotage.
“…spritely, warm, but beneath that beguiling almost jaunty skill, there is a deep, searching engagement with the human condition.” – IAN POPLE
Hymn to Akhenaton
‘Every darkness…’ we get translating
bits of Akhen’s song finding their weary way
into Psalm 104. Every darkness,
of necessity, every lion slithers forth,
forth, pursing from each den the proteins
of our third realm, tertium quid, by Scylla & Charybdis,
young Tennyson’s kraken and the US Navy’s Bloop,
all in either half-abyss cloven just at grey horizons.
Scene: forest – day. The mind, he sings, fair androgyne,
regards itself a bare diestrus doe, stood inside
its bubble, casting out its salty snow.
Visum & sonitus, the flash of something dribbles!
Big seepage works to lop some Marfan forest limb
and our eyes cross in that pothole stew,
ruminant & me, rigid where our knees,
née heels, feel a force oncoming.
Tar reflection & reflection of the reflection eclipse,
his Amerind brown, ours penumbral.
To ward off any old humanism, I’ve reared
this face’s more hirsute than very ecstatic nares
back from the dried cat piss bathmat,
writhing upon which suddenly I’ve caught
his coronas by their glowless glow,
weird tapetum lucidum, in transit,
the slit-aperture, third eyelid, filming
the stunt with Cheshire chagrin,
fancied I prevail as the shit poet Nietzsche,
dangling unseemly from the carved throat
of a Torinesi workhorse, which is to say,
i.e., your star’s no more meant for sunness
than these little aqueducts for these little tears—
O.
J.T. Welsch 