Issue 29: Tim Allen
The Drunken Boaot – for Geraldine Monk
Here Cherub kisses Ghoul where Ghoul kisses Cherub speaking through Ghoul. Cherub rubs rubs rubs rubs brass Ghoul shine to reflect Cherub via the moon. The reflection borrows an elbow from dirt dancing on a tongue speaking throughout the march that rubs rubs rubs. It won’t shut her up much as she marches towards the University of Night. It’s not so much a march more an elbow first shouldering through Cherub and Ghoul first-footing into…..
the forge.
A night off for elbow shifts the rub rub rubbing through a hill of geese. Where Cherub kisses Ghoul the hill rises through reflections of an earlier hill already steep with sickness that sunk there from pits in the air. Fire multiplies ripe apples inside the hill’s pipes where hidden Cherub greasily kisses Ghoul’s treasure that once shone and will sin again when Ghoul’s treasure kisses earth because where Earth kisses Universe speaks…
through a word witch.
There is no universe here just a suspicion of one. All stars are bound to fields of nebula bound for silver mine cathedrals. This silver cathedral is the church of shining mud she wants to see as the rising sun in the morning marching on silver stones of last night’s soil where Gargoyle talked to Gargoyle via the loyal ear to the phone of long-distance feline sleep creeping past fear of the stages of stage-fright rubbing out dancefloors without spitting a word walking out…
of the foundry.
Where Cherub hisses Ghoul tries to spark. Where Ghoul pisses Cherub tries to hide inside the hill that has no top. All of hill is at the bottom brushed clean by a stone combe through hair grown from bruises and nebulitic architecture blowing an elbow off the cathedral roof. No Earth here for language to shock into life’s brass necks munching into the silver cathedral with the mud of love caked on drunken boots whose spurs were forged in last night’s hill climb towards pub windows…
embroidered with distant lights
It still doesn’t shut her up much as she marches towards the University of Night with the stride pattern of a hare. Nocturnal mischief keeps in step even through the marsh of dumplings and spiked pools of shrunken water. Splash and polish. Laugh and demolish. Rebellion clambers amidst cross-hatching curses of linguistic joy embroidered with the blurring of rising Lancashire. The continent of mist climbs through pub windows into…
South Yorkshire
[Tim Allen lives in Lancashire and helps run the Peter Barlow’s Cigarette events in Manchester. Used to live in Plymouth where he ran the Language Club and edited the magazine Terrible Work. Most recent books are A Democracy of Poisons (Shearsman 2021) and Peasant Tower (Disengagement Books 2021). Very Rare Poems Upon the Earth is due out from Aquifer in January 2023 and two other books are planned for publication in 2023 from Contraband and Leaf.]
Copyright © 2022 by Tim Allen, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
