Peter Manson: Four Poems from ‘self-avoiding space-filling curve’

only horses cry

blinking arm rasher than intelligent scissors cup

bleeding out on proposed thumbnail skitters in the pink

liminal flow reduced acetaminophen ears

less bulbous ox concentrate gang of the rule of three

thigh hiatus in lurid ego desolder pump

walk it to mark and whine petals ovary over

also vary overs as if i could challenge fact

are you ready for the beach bodies aching on time

in a pulse for crocus sold on the rising moodswing

back to deferral of sentence rewilding the sign

and repeat while home burns nightly restored unbalance

knocking the fumes we were simply past embarrassment

you and i know the calamitous cop for silence

 

 

more fun with is

my most extreme self-consciousness has a leg in it

and is structured like a second language understood

in parts when spoken slowly and more fully in print

o companionable absence of a second leg

from my inane flap now i am a kind of trousers

wearing at all times an n95 stocking mask

i rob the past confusing it and the leg with me

above my head is much that would interest my leg

my brow is still red from the kiss of the queen mother

in my new i don’t do this i don’t do that poems

shaking a loss-leader thigh gap to the sound of one

high heel treading softly on my human ball my cock

is in my pocket it is poems by iggy pop

 

 

willy’s lyke-wake

i bought a soap dish that smells of condom lubricant

with a hey the cuddie o’er the kye et cetera

and in that soap dish there was literally nothing

fegs to the barn owl wrongly identified as such

i sold a side plate with no inherent qualities

the putative barn owl has carried my snood awa

the buyer claimed it was blue and ebay sanctioned me

i inherited a trivet and left it to you

o bury my body in sussex my bi goshawk

to bequeath unheated in its original box

cremate my soul in red chernobyl mither mither

as i sense you already did though what is unclear

is the will to clarity contested this plague year

 

 

a protestant with no mitochondria has been discovered living in the intestines of a chinchilla

in the unlikely event of landing in a glass

of water outside stevenage you will not have died

so early and often as in our impatient dreams

to be alone without you in the vantablack stage

of grief is the true beginning of marketable

my pea-green uninterruptible selling point blank

as a magic tablet set up on a molehill crest

to command the half-time chiasmus of our pronouns

the socialised distance is going in for a hug

you pull out of the hug too soon but it’s still going

every pressure point a prayer a station of the hug

bent on convincing itself you’re real afraid it won’t

get to hug you again and eventually it can’t

 

Peter Manson lives in Glasgow. His books include Poems of Frank Rupture (Sancho Panza Press), English in Mallarmé (Blart Books), Adjunct: an Undigest and For the Good of Liars (both from Barque) and Between Cup and Lip (Miami University Press, Ohio). Miami UP also publish his book of translations, Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse. Most recent pamphlets are Factitious airs (Zarf Books) and Windsuckers & Onsetters: SONNOTS for Griffiths, a collaborative book written with the poet Mendoza (Materials Press). petermanson.wordpress.com for more.

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