Melomania
there's a new headline in the land of silver rain:
celestial body swallows train. Consider
how celluloid grain swells and rabbits
quest for hats to pass through
into the land of incoherent geography. They are pursued
these creatures of the cut. Louche luminaries of the painted set
plan a jaunt through inky space-time, perched
on the proverbial shoestring. Terrible telescoping
takes the new craft to the surface of the sun;
grease paint and gaseous mane greet the nauseous pill
a century of thrill and illusion
spills to the bottom of the seen
standard life crisis
I have no scream
yet must mouth at times
not altogether certain
mean little things
thick with obliquity
and the casual antiquity of the very small.
They lap, graze neural crest
fend, sate; matriculate in mind-phosphate, tho’
so little is known of their habitat.
All those things the head holds
without ever having them
chunks of mental masonry
from which to build life’s annex.
And “mean” seems
somehow underwritten to phase us
labouring under perpetual insistence
to fill out a form. Paper
breaks the fall
of this unstable incendiary device.
Scramble a life in ticking boxes. Write
a hand that might contemplate the wiring
this alien brain of ill-compute.
For chrissakes little book:
move!
These poeems are from Simon’s next collection, which concerns itself with the history of cinema. Do catch his Salt volume Hearing is Itself Suddenly a Kind of Singing, or his earlier anthology appearance in the Reality Street anthology New Tonal Language. Simon works at De Montford University, Leicester.
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