Paper Sky, Blue moon Poems by Daniel Crockett
The Battle of Water and Land Samsara Interruptus Cracks Satisfying product names with warped applications I know your combination Evoluted Beneath Stepper Point Keeper of keys Delphinese Hailstone tetris K™ Muzzle Rotting in the green grass Tar swallows & Dunwich Black tide Austral symphony The colour of air The other side of almost
The battle of water and land Under darkling moon the dayblack sea Extended an arm to silence the sun Gold the residual glow and hiss As that disc, extinguished, fell Then the water jumped up to roar; I am leviathan, the sea is within me I declare war on this, mother land Then the peagreen water commands To drown the lichened rocks, the sand To smother To strangle all in a yawn of ice Rigor Mortis brung with dawn I am leviathan, the sea is within me Nothing but birds remain, pinwheeling Keening for their loss of perch Angry at the sea come stealing Tired beneath the church of sky Until at last, exhausted they fall And go under, evermore go under, evermore
Samsara Interruptus This poem is in ten parts and invents gory and complicated deaths for a single entity passing through the cycle of Samsara – reincarnation. We start with the barnacle and finish with the human, who discovers the key to eternal life. During the journey we participate in the deaths of a woodlouse, a musk-ox, a narwhal and more. By the way, rorqual means whale. Life one - the barnacle Harnessed first the rorqual muzzle, sudden breach through subcutaqua Cut adrift Tossed loose amongst the shoreline thrift to dodge the many bladed beaks And seized Borne crawwise cublike to seacliff nest Fumbled midflight chute to harbour brine HMS Barnacle At last hull-crunched on distant coral Steersmith drowning sorrow, Whisky-lidded, Simply misjudged the draw
Cracks This is about the city and the thin veil between harmony and horror. I wrote it after a conversation with an old homeless man, it imagines his life and suicide. The book ‘Alex – A Life Backwards’ was involved. Remark from the gutter: ‘How ‘bout, half past never?’ Downtrodden, trodden down with gunblack boots. Trampled into, Gum residue. Stiff like a good collar under a good suit. Hollow abscess horror. Rib sticking. Sucking flesh: Ersatz real. Broken like bad china skin peel. Frieze at the ministry This church, neglected church. Acid scars, cardboard bedheads for the gloom. Stuffed into, Dirty tins. Showered with the binjuice of the loom. Old Harry on his shoulder like a parrot stuffed. Acid scars. Eyes jagged like bust dodgem cars. Fingers light in poverty Fingered by silver, gold Sold flesh, hand of Harry chokes his neck like a collar. Blueblack horror, Paving cracks. The moralizer accompanies through cut throat. And the old goat steps in front of the number nine. Paving cracks. I never caught his name in time
Satisfying product names with warped applications (volume 1) Just try saying it slowly – Lapsang Souchong. I sewed a Lapsang Souchong Teabag To my ear, To filter Things I Need not Hear
I know your combination Air, gathered in fitful starts, leaks like tree sap, spotting our greatest wounds with a bosky crust I will grind you, between leather-capped tips scrape up the fragments and re-cast your form I know your combination, like the tree roots know the press of earth about their lumpen limbs
Evoluted This is about working a job you don’t care for. This automatic flesh Concomitant Endless limbs and limbs Concrete bodies Sagging seams Weighed down like weary sacks Mutely groping At the receding backs Of dreams Skin Drawn tight or Drained in Unparsed folds Ventricular prisons Elaborate Schisms of the corpse Wrapped wholesale In hope Leached, beached Soaked in the opaque Blood of the march Matchstick arms Snapped Utopia on trial The hell-lit face Of gravity's smile Grinning at The gate Those nimble eyes Fevered eyes Blinking Hate Rapid dilations Some symbolic rhythms Undulations In the gorepit Bowel of earth Sin songs Chanted Spat Rebirthed as law Toweled through the teeth Of chatelaines Horsewomen The walking, being dead
Then Routed morals Flee the farce This bloody fate This wretched dance And who now? To Ford this flooded world Parse these broken limbs Conjoin this weary flesh Wherein our Salvation? Youthful dreams A Hoax of freedom Tarrying amongst the Discarded The discordant Truth Damned to dally In endless toil And tally The spoil of commerce Free Trade A bountiful phrase This communocapitalist Hoodwink. Blink And you missed the gravy train Missed the chance To sit amongst the Free Engorged Brains The wisdom of the rich An insane, insane Joke Meanwhile We choke On pure intentions Salvation for My generation A departed hope
Beneath Stepper Point I wrote this in memory of my dear friend Jono Parr. It is about a place in Cornwall that I surfed with him often, and also where I scattered his ashes in the estuary for his parents. For a long time I would feel like he was surfing with me there and sometimes I would salute him. When I die I’d like to rest there in the water. The wane of springs refers to the dropping tide, a dangerous time to surf. The horizon goes black out there as the waves pass over the bar, touch the outside rocks of Greenaway (immortalised by Betjeman) and then run along the Fishing Cove field. The catch-rock is an unpleasant slab that has broken many boards and bodies, and the understudies are the best waves – the small ones that run for hundreds of meters across the sand to under Bree hill – the mound. The horizon painted sudden dark Beyond the hallows; Doom Bar The treachery a siren call To watch the wane of springs Teeth of Greenaway afright And tease the naïve mariner Then cast around the point itself The sweep of supple webs From end to end the Fishing Cove Cautious for the catch-rock sharp Understudies clutching estuary sand Salutes neath shadows of the mound
Keeper of keys I wrote this living on the road in California. The character in this poem is The Tuke, who appears in my first book, Tin Can Odyssey. The old fugitive Holder Of road tales And Now forgotten Songs of the wayside A teller Tinker of the wildland Drummer Of the free forest Composer of The Unpublished, unheard Roadsongs Scum they tag him Waster, freak Softly he Speaks Without prompt or inhibition A crisp memory Of snow-fed streams Brittle dreams Of mountain passes Threaded seams This Lunar man Ascendant Thinker of little No-mind explorer Gleaner of much Walker of blacktop Before that Untracked Knower of forest heights Silent plateaus Of the mind And uplands Outcast they call him And vagabond Straggler Another that fell Through the cracks Was damned
Bather in Klamath Labelled inclement Yet The keeper knows death In complicated dreams He arrives To prompt a shudder On remote sand Under bridges Beyond Somehow youth Refuses to abscond Mazed in by Forest thickets A believer That this Is not it Confuddled by cars The logic of money Elusive This, spread sheets Pocket change The sum of evolution? Instead he departs Once more for The path Holder of knowledge Keeper of keys Dreamtime scholar Bagman they call him Vagrant Bum Desert the Sacred holder Of birdsong Plant lore Ancient structures Now hogtied By strictures Butterfly Stitches across The brow of the earth Decorations garish All our manifold Baubles of Destruction To beautify? To improve? The keeper
In disgust Rubs polluted soil through Worn palms Then gone Dissipated with the wind Disintegrated under light Evaporated into air Come nothing And with his loss Goes ours With his loss goes ours
Delphinese For Heathcote Williams, author of Whale Nation, this poem is written about our attempts to master the language of dolphins. Did we manage to frame One hundred words, One thousand words, A single syllable? Cracked and garbled renditions Imprecision our flippant Butchery of dolphin tongue Can you jump through a hoop? Can you balance a ball? Can you chatter a phrase For the delight of Sweaty assed tourists? Trigger-happy impressions A tragedy in 0s and 1s Yet forgiveness for innumerable atrocities (and do not think these are Buried - there is a capacity For pain And sorrow far greater than our renditions of the earth can measure) Is instant Wild they bask about us bahamut, bahamut delighted in the company Of our awkward frames For we are bound As they are free And yet the strands of our web Encircle their ocean In a slender noose Could we pronounce a sentence In delphinese? Nay, a white noise death knell
Hailstone Tetris I know evil, I know good I know fever, and fevered love I know passion, I know pain I know surrender, I know blame I know hurt and I know fury I know judgement with no jury I know stress and I know beauty I know the burdens of my duty I know fear, I know squalor I know what it is to dwell in horror I know dread and I know dreams I know lives open at the seams I know chaos and I know peace I know the traps, I know release I know the know, I know the why I know I can't and I know I try I know the desperate desire to belong I know the singer, I know the song I know what it is to kill something I know the take, I know the bring I know I know, I know nothing I know I know I know nothing
K™ The room inhales Like some flimsy Pop culture reference to cocaine Gelid gloom under Rose glow And stardom dreams Fractured brains entrained to desecrate The vanity of names Vice reams, echoed coughs Of hollow laughter Impregnate the stagnant air And, in answer Glaucomic eyes but stare To empty blind spots Distant Catatonic Unreachable
The Meat factory This is about karma, with a large nod to Roald Dahl who no doubt would have approved. Moments before demise An intervention, surprise The transposition swift Chickenman Man chicken An alchemical Interchange of souls The chicken, suspended by claws On the abattoir line Suddenly heads a boardroom Trapped in a fat Pre-corpse Shades away from A heart attack Eyeballs become beady All-perceptive Shrunk Meanwhile, floors below The startled CEO Is bound Ahead, a rack of Products And death Behind, a still-live Battery line
Muzzle This is about wanting to tell someone how you feel and failing to do so. I wrote it at Andrew Molera State Park in Big Sur. Muzzle, what is it that locks your jaws? Dismantles heart cornices, paws about the midden Would I find you at Pfeiffer, wearing leopard skin cuffs? Laughing to the wind another lullaby soft Is it then my doom to check each woman's face in the hope of you? And if I found you, Mary, would you still laugh me off? Your injunction permanent, unspoken, non-specific For is it not the world you keep at bay? Hidden behind your wry, collected, invincible smile Muzzle, why must you protect me always?
Rotting in the green grass I always feel the same in the Hebrides, a kind of satisfaction of the rural longing I constantly feel. It’s to understand yourself as animal. I can’t cling to it long. Let my flesh Rot in the green grass Of a Hebridean spring Until blades Protrude from navel, mouth And purple flowers Garnish my skull Will island sheep forever graze Under shifting skies From Eoropie to Barvas Their endless chewing A parallel With our consumption Better to lie in the long grass Remember sweet music And real laughter Forever Immune to wind and slaughter For of what other purpose is this earth?
Tar Swallows & Dunwich These two poems are about Suffolk, where I grew up. I have a very strange, almost tense relationship with the place. It was the scene of so much beauty and so much strife and both feelings pervade my time there. I wrote these poems several years apart and yet both reference drowning in the mud. Tar Swallows Back again and not diverted To Bognor, or the Pontin’s at Benacre Glad you found your way across The acres of shingle And Orford Ness Now teach me how to take wing Because down here I’m drowning in the tar Dunwich Shrike girdled the Slit eyed Marsh hallows, the feather beaten call to gallows Worth a deft pass Enshruddled mist Lickered craw, now the tendons stick To Thumps of silence raw Slinking moon permits An autopsy Revealing sin, Rotted planks tarred Long seaborne scarred Through marram threads The noose Permits, flightless mud dweller skips And under slips
Black Tide For Mänfred Gnadinger aka 'O Alemán' aka Man Man was a hermit and sculptor who lived in a small hut on the beach in Camelle on the Costa Del Morte, Galicia. He was German, hence his nickname – 'O Alemán', shortened to simply Man. With the shipwreck of The Prestige in 2002 and the environmental disaster that followed, a black tide of oil overwhelmed his home and the sculptures of his open-air museum. He died shortly afterwards, it is thought from melancholy. Hull cracked A flowing black Message Man waits, unknowing In the fixity of Stone - his safety belt Appreciable Stillness of time To wander alone Sand and air His home Closer it comes At dawn he finds a bird A struggling Messenger Obsidian dragmarks Are you sick? He asks He stoops to help Withdraws his Coated fingers What is this? I have no need for This sand-staining Bird-hobbling Blackness He carries the Cormorant Bathes it Strokes its feathers Clean Plumage de-oiled It sits Serene The portent bird Lungs blocked Then dies
Man cries Amongst his art The silent Smashing Of a heart That day dissolves Morning next The slick spreads And hits Headlong The earth is vexed The tide is death Then sunrise At the shoreline Man regards His changeling view Purity recast anew Sullied sea Licking blighted Beach At the tidemark Halfdead Harbingers Flop and flutter In the ooze Toxic matter Yellow suits appear and chatter Man takes uneasy Footsteps through the surf Little body At his heart His precious stone Covered World apart He kneels in the oil Invokes a prayer A saline song To implore Respite There is no Answer Only poisonous Chemical Night
Austral Symphony Upon hearing the sounds of the birds as I woke up at my cousin’s house in Australia. What gauche sounds they make, This reptilian flock A crescendo, part cheese-grater sharp Part mellifluous They knock, drone on my supine head Caving lesions in And challenging The notion of sweet birdsong For now, do dada Becomes a harsh caw-caw and the boundary between tone and raking claw eroded, splits
The colour of air Is it worthwhile to wish the world To be less nefarious, less abrupt? To call up some cradle Some garish blanket Under which to hunker Genuflecting to the dust Is it futile to call for peace To ask for less perversion, less crime? To climb some multifoliate bough Some blessed trunk From which to gesture Idle handshapes at the fog Is it wrong to make an inquiry To outline our vile hypocrisy? To conjure up some silken veil Some obdurate cloak Behind which to linger Glorious corpses in denial Is it habit now to abrogate the truth To deal in misnomers, outright lies? To weave some slippery rope Double noose the knot Dangle twitching by the throat Last words hyperbole Are we too soft to rot in comfort? To eat maggoty meat, offal rich To build some fecund palace Some place of reckoning From high windows to pass Our judgement upon the earth
The other side of almost I am Become shaky ground Sewn through with fault lines Earthquake prone I could have been But never was I am No longer a rock Set about with fractures At risk of collapse I almost was But never quite I am A house of cards Built on poor foundations Liable to fall I wanted to But never did