police station stands with ache on shallow
rise beside the bakery they knead
bread with balls and heels we call it
toenail loaf eat with
chopped potato fried
in steel tins and borrowed oil
stored unspoken words erode the mouth to an oxbow lake
a tongue stained black by gobbet back
home mothers spot the change
a tongue stained black by gobbet back
home mothers spot the change
like some sound
entered the ears in isolation like
like the rip of metal
chipping walls like
like the sound of shaken
lego he liked
as a child like soldiers
running like
he scratched his platitudes
into blue issue paper like
To Mum,
A note on poetics:
The future is, by its very nature, imprecise. The modality
present in the grammarian’s ‘if conditional’ offers an apt tool with which to
articulate the disoriented nature of the former soldier’s efforts to
re-integrate into a society happy to accept his/her existence as necessary, but
ignorable.
I cannot detach or disassociate poetry from the intricacies
of grammar, of sentence structure, clause types, of subordination. There is
inherent in the structure of words on a page an infinite poetic nature. It is
from this amalgamation of the poetic and linguistic where, as a root, as a
hypothesis, the very premise of my current poetry derives.
Could it be that a poem (is it a poem?) can be written with
only a consideration of the macro structure? The current poetics explores this
question.
