Robert Sheppard: Four poems

Beginning with a line from a Chinese poem in an English dream

C20 Blues 44

at last the lineated look that was me playing in a palace or a cage neither a musical instrument nor an ancient board game so beautiful we forgot the locked door though caricatures rushed through the bamboo gates

explode onto petrifying talk of freedom a mouth that hollows out allegory like apple blossom like the lamentable loss that was who

at least the line took me away to wrestlers in flame less to the threshold which bled my smarting eyes into a bowl extenuating my ear as identity's howl

just a fluffer to stiffen up the hero for the heroine who arrives so long the appetizer burns off across the polished codes or the skein across the keyhole mucal glue that stuck in our eyes

sticks in the grain of the throat the frozen limbs of the rivers after extensive searches through identical slats of bridges below where naked men bathe in the ladies' identikit confessions

pointing with his folded fan to the warm up act lest your liminal luck should run out to the rearing horses and be trampled to a thirst

to the leasehold of me again, O line invisible, I weave my mutest lip from the gloss

16 October 1997

Sonoluminescence For All

Dialogue 3

C20 Blues 45

cell deaths in our faintest bin users mismatching

no testicles pseudodecorate
regulates the cross reaction signalling (array)

bite faced drops evolutionarily open

germline Sefton coast phages
nearly face on binary turbulence corrects your frizzled family down

but I don't believe in wasting the mantle is shaking error

Cadaver! I'm not condoning execution

message detection kit off to the shatter of a redundant truth

rodents and Man. Subsoil

pinhole fantasies with wild bioethics

no noise free images resonate downstream

information cascade scaled individuals
your favoured site of Heineken bottles replicate one's body's own photo
cleavage misconduct

hypermutation game in the Name scooting ropes of signature

a just rapid changing temporal informing manipulated left hand lie

26 October 1997

Dialogue between Created Pleasure and the Resolvéd Soul

for Ben Watson

Dialogue 6

C20 Blues 48

Not you again, you big
girl's blouse! (cleaving twist and twain

Concretely uttered, may my light executive
dusting be considered as a form of life?

There's none in that body, all hooks
and spin, as PC as a veiny dildo
humiliating the inner voice, king of things

Dead systems twinned, halos
monumentalise the air

Speech, pure dictionary in double split
sides, inseminates the shifting
axioms of material in an outcry.
If you want
an interesting interior life get up
off your fat arse and get a
job you aphasic blank. Blink.

Fluid category fleshpots utopia.

Don't speak (to me) with a corpse between
your teeth, bumping into (and off)
yourself in fatal leather snapping
in twos and toes as I seduced you with picket
grace whims cross-dressing as a 39
inch bust in centimetres. Mutter
mutter mutter mutter falls into the social

come
dark
shot
grapple
hardcore
vice
versa
joint
stock
sublime
fudge
dog
organs
being chained to the fucking cosmos
tackle
the quest
to beget
better
sex guides lay back and think of the stars

"John is a man? Fido is a dog, etc."

Sample that bitch, a small
simulcrum of somebody else's else. No
code?

No ode - just the behaviorist's crystal.

Polyphonic ejaculation! Do you
want to handle my swollen gland; in
my language we have the same word
for "man" and "girl", for "love

"dream

"knots

"not equal

"objection

"size

"=". You can teach pork
to snout the spot

Pleasure as an idea is a
formula. Anarchy as a theme
is a juice derived from shot.
Spirit a bucket.
                        Diametricalism
as force to be reckoned is a
gang rove in tense invidious.
Matter is muttered all about
"you", you hoodlum of the lip.

I don't. She
discerned the hand of a man

decisive, dark, menacing,

on the envelope. I'm trying to
fill a thriller at the moment
with knowledge as human as death

Your tropes bellyache tripe
as trite bathing belles sharked by conscience,
etymology as any sighting?
Discourse on trees,

weed dust explored mistaken

                        uli.

ex
  -land
                  (wrack):

puritan shrug-offness meets bursts of
busting
statutes and ripe rips
cul-de-breach
and a whole bunch of jingle-lessnessness
(again)

category-collusive coughs between movements

Please God, don't erect me when
the doctor grabs my balls, situated,
endowed with meaning and hating it.

Let's get right inside the outside,
the neuro-ideological poem
that spits out its writer,
well no or yes
about four hundred times a year, its
responses corrected through liturgical
marginalisation.

You said it. No dialogue
without thinking with the solids.

No job too small, the will not
down the pan. Lift
the lid on the eye: chaos patterns
in the bloodshot rolling,
an ecstasy that shatters the bloom, showers
petals above the literal ground;
on a wet, black chop.

Bliss my chora! Tort my chorus,
Trot, whiz-sin pinkies fan the air

(O harmonicas in your little
plastic coffins, arise!)

Be inside everywhere; outside
the booby boom

that spot that get us hot, you and I.

The "metamorphosis of the materials", you mean?

13 November 1997

In the Room of a Thousand Mute Salutes

Dialogue 9

Mute Salutes 1

C20 Blues 51

Jewel up to trembling
hypotheses hybrids crown their brazen verses

sublime re-affirmations of all that can be said

just by watching men grunt the Earth. For example,
East facing behaviours and blank relics in the bedroom

mutate into a tradition you barely unmute

Earth is a colony of its own future. Sex
in verse: boy-slits strangle your testes, veiny friend

The soldiers fall on their booted-up whores
wrestle with an elaborate rhyme scheme

Earthen birds twitter
the anthem of some migratory Muse

(And her shadow

December 1997 - January 1998