Writed. Issue 13 Saturday, January 31, 2015 Feet. By B. King Opaque. By Kurt Moss Four P.M. By B. King Feet. A WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS lives and lives and lives and writes right through a right war of words. Pompous poets, cruel critics and preposterous professors battled for mastery of iamb, trochee, Anna Pest and dactyl marshalling the foot soldiers of a jack booted infantry into lines and lines and lines and lines on and on forever patriotically droning on Writed. 13 1 and on like a drum. Oh ducky ducky though, all the wee duckies around, all the George Lord Saintsburies, John C. Nimmos, Thomas Superfuous Omonds and poet laureate Robert bloody Bridges, all were men mighty and captains of po-industry, weren’t they little duckies. Just quack quack quacking little duckies fapping their paddled feet around. Sticking their ducky beaks in the water and their ducky little feet as well and making it into a white tower of ivory and hard diamonds impenetrable. Ol’ Willy Boy Yeats—not quite in another pond as the wee ducky generals though—lets his beak and even his feet fall and disappear beneath the surface of the murky water and lightly he cups a splash of it and pulls it out in his hands into the sidelong glance of late afternoon sunlight where it is beautiful and green and bright as his old blue eye. Later on, then, duckies, I want to tell you how he does it—it’s magic!—but all this muddy feld wants a rake over, here. It’s that old afternoon sunlight fsherman’s variability, says old Muldoon, which Dave Ben and Mary look at closely, disturbing a little bit the serious talk of serious forms in serious poems that has been chattered around lately in this feld by various jabbering birds, chirping harmlessly— making into a singing the old scourging of past potato picking rakers. These old boys are all dead now, thankfully, though they all seemed unendable and unscaleable in the years after our Billy Boy’s death, when they thundered their big manly good-at-remembering-things academicities with the logic of a strict formality in the plash assumed. Very Writed. 13 2 penetrating. But nowadays as I say there’s much more of singing in the feld and really the whole internal suffciency of the poem has been questioned. This is something of an illy determined reading here, it’s all a bit sloppy, wet and ploshy. Watery green and amorphous really. This ill determination oozes through the mud of old Yeats’s frst thinkings when he wants to know what popular poetry is. He stretches and strives and tries to fnd a style for all the reading, all the writing, the whole of it that he is trying to make and he thinks for two days of setting things right, though you might be forgiven for thinking perhaps by now at least he’d have fgured something out. Not as I should now by making my rhythms faint and nervous. Ah that’s good then. Because now really isn’t the time and remember we want a big manly man of a line still, it being nineteen 0 two. But by eating little and sleeping upon a board. And what in heaven or hell is the good that’ll do you? Well, what indeed. It is a simpler way of life, that much we’ll give you Willy, and it certainly does seem peaceful. Though it’s also a bit uncomfortable sounding to me. Yes, but I thought that one must write with a gusty spirit that would put all straight if it came out of a right heart. Right said, there Freddy it’s quite good. So ye tak’ away all your fat and cushions and ye’r left only with the stones of your bare bones and the dirt of the matter, so to speak, trim away all the fabby lace and shite and ye’ll be left with just the pure illy determined wind blowing through you. But it blows on through without stamping down into the Writed. 13 3 feet and where’s it come from anyway? What right heart? It’s a good start if you can fnd it but fewer have found than have sought. And if the heart ain’t right then what is it. It’s like voice of an Aran fsher-girl who sings somebody else’s poetry out there by the waves: You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me, You have taken what is before and what is behind me; You have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me, And my fear is great you have taken God from me! Right there in the waves, it was, right there where she said it. But old Billy-at-the-Pond puts it all in prose and takes the Lady writer away from the words and gives them to the girl from Aran fshing by the sea. Why? Well, she’s not a warring learned wanker of a poet and critic and a scholar anyway so she’s not. So old Willy Butler Yeats was looking for a whole of Words & shit. among the many and the indeterminate, answering his own question: How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men’s hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands upon men’s heartstrings again? Well surely that’s certain and simple old Bill, you just slap ‘em up in tart’s gowns and burn a job’s lot of incense to get the men’s stringy hearts playing fne tunes again! Without—and he emphasised the word, really a little too much—without becoming the garment of religion as in Writed. 13 4 old times. Ah now, Billy, boy! now we see. But this old Paterine wasn’t going to degenerate like others into the ways of the Babylonian, buying buying buying up some surrogate soul. How to lay our hands upon men’s heartstrings again, how to grab them by the balls, as it were, of their feet and walk them wholly out of their slow dying progress of swipescreen evenings and the fecking X-Factor, how to wake ‘em up again if you catch my drift, how to arrest their eyes for just a second and hold their fecking twittering tongues for fve bloody minutes is the question, how to save them, that’s the question. Well, it may be rhythm: The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols. Ah to be liberated, then. To be free. What was it, unmistakeably free? Piss-takingly really I would say now but still, free. Alright then. In that state of perhaps real trance. Yes yes, a trance, rather like yoga wouldn’t you say. Rather like seaswimming, if you’ll permit me. A meditation. And then, and there, in the trance, in that ever elusive and ever present moment, in the moment of contemplation, in the moment then we are lured, so he says, to the threshold of sleep, and it may be far beyond it, without knowing that we have Writed. 13 5 ever set our feet upon the steps of horn or ivory. Jesus H. William Yeats. There it is, isn’t it just? Tread softly, here, and here where his steps have fallen, tread softly, leave a light foot in this place, upon these steps of horn or ivory. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams. And who’re you talking to now at the pond old Bill? That’s right, you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me, an Aran fsher-girl sings. All a wee bit nice there at the end, that little story wasn’t it, about the trance and the dreams and all that. The other old Bill, the old old Bill later on in his old life he talks about this again, and do ye ken he fnds his right heart at last. We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Or the wrong one anyway. It’s having the right heart and the wrong heart within that makes the poetry. Both. It’s the simultaneous hushing us with an alluring monotony and holding us waking by variety, hushing and waking, which frees us from all that comes of councils and committees, from the world as it is seen from universities and populous towns. Frees us again, and that’s all Yeats that is, all that talk of liberating minds and freeing our hearts and all that, that’s him. So at the other end of your universities and populous towns, councils and committees, slow dying of your hearts that you call progress, at the other end of your manly marching feet, at the other end of all this is a wee Aran fsher-girl, she can’t read, can’t write, but the whole of literature is supposed to come from her, and in her is combined the past and Writed. 13 6 present, almost subconsciously, in the style or the rhythm or the not so serious form of the pondwater, which she scoops up and holds up green like magic. And good old fshing William Butler Yeats gets up off his arse and he’s gone. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree. And off I go. By B. King Opaque. “BRUSHES IN THE BUSH, in the night time. Wriggles of mice noses, whiskers skip along a sleepy thigh and a twitchhey-hitch, the owl has her eyes shut. Problems at sea, in the night time. Finger tips trickle, the fckle spoon's bent under a leg over then pulls tightly, unshaken as the tabby shrouds gaze from shed roof plateaus—watching bushy tailed scavengers scrummage through their waste bins. And they scream. You wake up from the sea, from the Braeburning, returned from the primal squeeze wriggles and twitches, turned about and kisses tips of a snoring sows snout, snorting, snoozing. A drop of rain falls upon the pond and submerges, is drowned, is consumed into sleep again, in the night time. Pondskeets in the tumble, tracing straight Writed. 13 7 lines through shock-water-waves, ways to cut through vague rounded memories; lines consumed then, swallowed up the sleepers glug, toads and lilies pads. Some strange image in the night time, some amphibian drooling and webbed fngers gluing against one another, infated throats muffe drones, whistling two hunched backs recovering, in the night time.” What is inside in the night time? 2 never studies metonymy, takes instead a spying glass out to the allotted garden in dreams of fnding some things big R-omantic: Lucid Lucy wound in the grass roots and seeds awaiting. Barren nothing and barrelled news. A romantic for bed time a n d 2 should know so. 1 said 2 never learns. Ne'er progressed did 2? Spoiled. Arvo', Pataca princely. Let 1 take reign for the next parts, presumably something linear along the line of waking, maybe walking through something straight or better winding. That always helps 2 keep those hefty word counts ticking over. Winding, meandering, some pun about wandering and wondering—the wright writing process. Hold, If 2 could acquiesce. Learned a new word, is this evening? 1 learnt, 2 is not learned. What if 1 only a different notion to 2? What if 2 only struggles with aspect. Perspectives vanish but 2 can not. 1 has Asbestos soars. Does 2? Writed. 13 8 1 and 1: “Fine, necks contort down in the night time. Fuck. Duck beams throttled with mottled dank indicatives. Shimmy through a corridors Lidl'd with whisky smithereens and cut feet. The septic sceptic, pick it out later. Find the king asleep on his throne, two lame mongrels huddled at feet, licking bunions and salty onion crust. Pay the mongrels for tending to the car accident. More smithereens. Fuck this rubble. Kick Roaul in the fucking throat for snoozing over the banister and head to the shower room. Bath is absent without reason. Toiletry burnt holes in the panels, fammable tiles are drooping like the lids of a four day old methamphetaminite. Spit on the foor, shower in cold water, shave my pussy. Pull the light chord out by accident. Blame Roaul. Walk downstairs looking for a shag to dry off, wave Good Morning to the Milkman's son, who is wearing a blaze orange girdle, supine on my bed. We have sex, thumb-strum-coming, but do not take much else from it. I put Eponymy by the Provenance spinning and his voice rubs up against me. We chase our pleasure, I swing arms side to side, day to day, weak too weak: funk akhbar there is nothing malt or sacred left. It is almost time to take my brothers to the institutions.” Out of in the night time and into superfcial heaps and tarry piles. 1 has a style. 1 drags feet and mind-sights through Styx-cement-mix, droopy death. 2 says yet crueller s t i l l 1 cannot the most common release—death never features. Too much complexity, too much in the realm, in Writed. 13 9 the night time. You cannot mediate the tone, even 1 with all the clever brush strokes; enmitnous, acriment, cantankery, sturgidity, collusioules, insidity. Fine blemishes, 2 o n 1's chiaroscuro. Oh, no that is 2 in the night time, 1 prefers to prime a copper sheet and let zippy oxidation loose. 2 is suffocated in all this ammonia. No thing again. By-the-bile 2 thinks 2 can fx the mishap 1 took this unto. Lend 1 similar ears then, will 2? Steal them. 1 pinched 2's thunder. 2 broke 1's radio transmitter. Hardtacks. Please. Laden those longer waves then, tusk me. 1 middling, 2 is a closer. 1 is insensate. 2 has a shoal. “I have my shawl, the responsibility waits, the room clears—silent harmony, eventually. They are gone off to their business now. As of now and I cleared them out with a klaxon. It was more of a bugle actually and its faint history, the frst note sent them spraying with regards to death. And bursting through the plasterboard, resisting with concertina ease. Quiet now as their skipping is left skipping, a peddled miss-blip on that rotation and the warble of uneven vinyl, the tapered edge in here is dirty, misshapen. I want to pull at the edges and lay down on the foorboards, listen to the woodworm—rustles of life in the plinths, I'd take them for a treat to the pedestals. Lest those crumble like myself. I wish this wall was my-gentle, the magnolia has freeze enough to Writed. 13 10 refect myself back with the twitching simmered attempt. Arms repose together-turned palms to the blotched ceiling mixture, sunned, as if to catch the trickles that stream down with witherers and excuses. I catch two eyes darting beyond, in the magno-mirror from her palms to just under her brow. The two failing steels, waning horizontals, baffed by all these verticals of existence. They draw now, the repose hinges until both fgures drown into the dark uprights that stretch taught sockets, for one another, we cease in the night time.” 2 sees, this is the problem. Does 2 have to fall in love with every proxy? 2 would not even be if it were not for 1. Always this dredge den angel, weeping, 2 is just as in love with rubble as 1. In that at least they are the same. Decay and collapse or distance and darkness, a rather limited menú para dos, always a pair or a better one. Less voices for 2 to navigate. 1 proposes a shift in position, 2 strangle it back into stasis, 1 desires something visceral, 2 blends it into sado-soup, splinter writter, the character crusher. Let's have something a little more robust a few more for being, not 2 beating putty pity people. 1 believes in vigour, prime digits and gritted ground gums. 2 has never been able to catch those sacred micro-moments any who which where, and they leave 2 with no crux, or crutch in fact. But 1 still sympathises with the sanctity, this is all a sacred history and like marrow it is vital agony to extract, tissue as easy to bruise as something straight from the heart. Image or not, it can make 2 spit: Writed. 13 11 Mimicry! 2 has no marbles left to loosen. Draw something, Mimesis then—another note hook. Can 1 imagine 1 was raw, Or when 2 was told there was another's strung Alphabet: Lily, B, Ghe, Bleed, Aye, He. Can 2 create? That single unifying trait, The sum of their words: “You can get lost in shutters, or pagodas and the Noh— commission the fresh carpet and Junk, (drops the jay-to-why by the seaside) then sail off into your own mind or night. But there's a busy scene at the smithereens, we are loading up for a voyage to fnd some kind of hollow boat—or was it hallowed? It's not particularly relevant anyway. The crew is motley, red, yellow and magenta caricatures and the three of us that are able bodied. The Boatswain is the bloodlust, prognosis an axe wound gush-gong-he, hiding and spitting furore at the modern burgling games. Quartermaster's always under-weight and we'll slit her fucking throat pointone day for it, itchy hep, but she'll never miss a step to con a light one on rigging or fastening deals. And then there is he, the Cap'n acclaimed for ought but missing teeth, knuckles on his fsts that read SPIT and SUCK or SUCK and SPIT—depending on the show he's offering. One of those infated faces blown out from nitrogen cocktails, two swollen pantomime Pinheads grinning on either turn of his Writed. 13 12 neck. Or microephaly today. He was bartering in the dock when Alluvium was one hundred for a farthing so we blued up and hit up Sailed Oceans, wrapped ourselves around a beacon bollard: It's hard to live in the city, what a pity, that sirens interrupt the Sea's song. Wreckage and restraints left the able bodied spitting, gasping that some nobody dynamo could convert us, induce amnesia, angelheaded cunts.” Hold. Hold again, there is no need to become so enraged, 1 cannot change the fact we have no paper to writ on. If the middle is just a riddle how can it be the sum of their words? They were simpler—they were straight forward references: In Utero, The Going, Daddy or When She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach. 2 remembers the best, but come out the least clear—1 lumped grapeshot in cannon sights and made all this web about 2. But 2 will hold, hold a wager once again for 1 always needed hands in closing or going, still stuck in the night time. Nonetheless. 1 has for all the stories been bashing at the braces and tugging, clamouring. 2 has been the restraints and that mimicry but it did not make 1 under 2, only more consistent and those choices made when: 2 only twitches when 1, Struggle with minutes. 2 is timeless; 1 does not exist. 2 not alone longer Than 1 alone a loner. Writed. 13 13 Shifted perspectives are pretty The aspects can combine, And end. “He rubbed the temple rouged and rubbled by truncheon riders and saloon saddled siren-machines. It made a screech at the cheek but slid at the wound and clotted on white—a magno-mirror replaced, made manmetal. The riot confrmed they had been close in fight but fell shorter, stayed by mixed feelings. Written off in shackles sailors met the makers enemy also, whose stock-man authority and Marshall's stars overrode their gallantry, he swashbuckled a last rye from the backhand of a friend, a miniature one. It famed inside over vacant enamel, oozed right inside the fesh. The rabble reclined, most of them behind cavities of control, pockets of authority. The one with the battered eyes went frst under, then the one with the shattered nose, the grazed knees the luckiest, later split sunder at a soiree, for having the greatest grinning mouth. Able bodies had their roles relinquished and the others Bee and Blee had scurried back under the woodwork to their plinths and protections. He however caught his face in the metal mirror in the night time, just before the dawn so sirens spun a red or a blue impression. He saw his brothers pinned over his neck, the dry matter stuck to one another other's face. He grinned as amber broke the whitewash metal and knew that he was free now, the other and his brothers that were staring at himself. Their eyes did not waver, there was no repose, the hinges of the bonnet were Writed. 13 14 fxed shut and his arms bound, but the noble shimmer-he was free. As dawn split the avenue, a runic bell rang in libertine antithesis—calling the Marshalled to prayer. They leaving, forgot his body, forgot his essence, which evaporated into the cold strangely, as if he were mercurial or rather insubstantial. He was whipped into a gale and swept away into the setting, among the Ashes in the forest, among the extras in a flm.” —You, two found and freed one me fnally, —While that softer voice is mine, one that winds out with modest imitations, —Yes, mine is instead pounding at its binds, bursting out of its breeches. —My eye's sight wound down from half-dreams half the days, —And my the other's eye, squinted shot rusty red and thirsty from too many verbal hallucinations. —The machinations that have beaten verticals of sight into a bamboo puzzle, —Left this parchment milky, impossible to navigate now, without recourse with Herself, —Or Himself, the tug is a throttling act, an embrace is a vent and breath. —Breathe, silence is the sentence for separation—the crooked fngered shush of Death, —The woodworm that gnaw the structures that you build, these hesitations. —Sloth, stiller than the temper or tempest that erupts Writed. 13 15 and obliterates, still shook or overlooked. —Cracked glass and pinholes. —The same solitary struggles. —Sanctity is the unity then, harmony and melody found nesting in a Hemlock, —Evergreen, an everlasting host of voices in a room, asymmetry interrupts like the whistling kettle. —A pile of histories wound into lifeline tapestries, hung to soak or dry in the violence and piss. —Of peaceful idylls, ideals retreating and combining in a trance endued with fresh and buoyant life. —Summoned from the nether never, shouting alone with no one to spot those rage shaped veins and shackles; —Whispers fall unlooked, mossed heaps unchecked for being trite and unremarkable, —As Spite's limits rumble through with blind, indignant and with dull punctuality. —But the peep-cheep-screech is only guttural enough at its end, when all the rivets are lost, —Our aspects are sabotaged by instabilities, the misapprehensions, the fall of blinkered perspectives, —Half skittering and uttering half reaved and further enraging —When brought together are readied, rallied, frayed fngers fused: —To plunge into the sea, to perish or renew Writed. 13 16 —In the night time. By Kurt Moss Four P.M. JOHN C. NIMMO AWOKE from an unusually restful sleep one morning rather early and sprang full and lissome out of bed. He immediately hit his head on the skirting board, an eventuality that was only made possible by Nimmo’s recently acquired habit of standing his bed on end with the headboard touching the wall. Rubbing the knot of skin that forms at the point of one’s nose and eyebrows when frowning to think or to try to placate a sore head, Nimmo looked about him to remind him why he had sprung so hopefully out of bed just now. The predictable lie of the room in magnolia gave no notion of abnormal to Nimmo, and when he glanced out of the window he was greeted by the same as always grey sky threatening patches of rain. It wasn’t a very large view from the window, the square of grey being cut down by walls and rooftops and even another window so that it was only a small irregular shape of grey. Through opposition Nimmo understood what had Writed. 13 17 burst him out of bed earlier, it was his dream. There he had imagined a combination of red ochre, of green saddened with grey, of black lines that defned outlines which had given rise in his sleeping subconscious to a feeling of familiar though intensifed anxiety from which all his companions in misfortune must often suffer. This was the view from the other side of the house in which Nimmo kept his lodgings, a view he had never seen outside of his dreams which was impossible to him. Nimmo of course never thought of the ochre and sad green away on the other side of the house there, never once in his waking day except for just upon waking, of course. Now that he had recovered from hitting his head, Nimmo brushed himself off, dressed, and went to work. On workdays, Nimmo always skipped breakfast. To get to work he had frst to walk downstairs to the tube, exiting his room frst down through a trapdoor next to his bed, then across an incredibly low and narrow passageway, then down two steps, then through a large stone archway which nobody ever noticed the masonry beauty of, which was always caving in on him, and fnally into an elevator which took him to the top of the stairs leading down to the platform, where he boarded a train and waited three stops. At the fourth stop, Nimmo got off the train, alone, and walked to the farthest end of the platform, back towards the tunnel he had just emerged from when on board the train. At this end of the platform was a dirty steel door, unlit and bearing no sign, which Nimmo instinctively pushed and kicked sharply Writed. 13 18 at the bottom, so that it opened with a muted boom and creak, and Nimmo slipped through it. He emerged as usual beneath the bypass, out of a door in one of the concrete supports, and immediately turned around so as to go through another door adjacent to this one. Through this other door, his working day begins. Following his commute Nimmo sits at his desk and opens his company issued Dell laptop. Double-clicking on the Internet Explorer icon springs the screen to life and Nimmo’s shoulders slope down the side of his back, to their usual position. At the beginning of each day Nimmo devotes at least an hour to his email account. He checks all folders, ensures all incoming mail has been fagged appropriately. Then, certain of this, he deletes all of the messages in the spam folder after scanning through the list of subject and sender for any errors in the algorithm. Next, he selects any irrelevant mass mail shots, press releases, newsletters, or corporate messages and moves them to trash. Then, he empties the trash bin by clicking the link, Empty trash bin, after scanning its list of subject and sender for any errors in his own operation. Then for the rest of the day he browses the internet, battling through fash animation and ducking and weaving around music playing ads, avoiding ads that disguise themselves as content. He has to navigate tricky cross buttons that don’t actually close the thing, but fing a pop-up window before him. He also has to scan through multiple lists of jobsites, mentally correcting each spelling mistake, Writed. 13 19 missing punctuation, unnecessarily capitalised word. This is very tiring. Before lunch, Nimmo’s eyes are almost always twitching slightly and unable to rest on anything. Worse than that, after lunch, which is always a damp brown sandwich from Tesco’s and a can of energy drink, Nimmo begins to notice the disgusting stench of worry in his stomach. This feeling of worry may be attributed to the fact that every day at around four in the afternoon there is a chance for Nimmo, brief though it is, to break the trap of his laptop and burst its potential with his own creative impetus. Every day at four Nimmo half scribbles some vaguely connected words together before sloping his head into the keyboard under the almighty weight of his failed ambitions. Then at four ffteen, the executive accounts vice president of the business enters Nimmo’s offce, plugs her iPhone into the Dell laptop on Nimmo’s desk, using her own USB cable, and uploads his daily data into an app. That is all Nimmo knows about it. Then twenty minutes later, she returns to Nimmo’s offce and orders him to stand and lean over his chair. Once he has done this, she savagely thrashes him with an old fashioned riding crop, the sort used by dominatrices, and then cracks him hard on the head with the steel toe cap hidden in her patent leather stiletto. John C. Nimmo usually leaves work after this, it being late enough in the day for him to give up on the day’s work, early enough to fll his evening with regret for the day’s missed opportunity. He left through another door which he reached by standing on a step ladder in the Writed. 13 20 farthest end of his offce, climbing through a door in the ceiling, and sliding down a tunnel which opened up above his upturned bed. He wrapped himself in his sheets, masturbated in the warmth of them, and fell asleep. When he slept he dreamt of green-gold, yellow-gold, pink-gold, all the way to a dull, dark yellow colour like a heap of threshed corn, combined with blue from the deepest royal blue of the water to the blue of the forget-me-nots, cobalt. By B. King 31st January 2015 Writed. 13 21
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