Wax Originals
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1.
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My hoop encloses both a cat and a jackal;
its breadth, how is that, longed-for child,
clasps in one expression next to kitschy
pink walls, the genes of its feral hostages;
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but held too in the circle of its fierce event,
summons up Ramallah, its bazaar, Lhasa,
kids with machine guns, cursive alphabets
confined to their ghetto – tightens a scroll
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to only nanometres’ tolerance, obliterates
my verses, soaks in high-grade aero fuel.
My heart fills with flesh gagging on itself.
For it to settle flush I have to be cleansed.
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A platform blade shunts this scenery off-
limits like a ploughshare would, squirrel
teeth chatter with excitement as its walls
collapse, no more than a stack of siding;
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behind, sodium lights dim like East Berlin
behind the Wall before the Wall crumbled,
little casements tile a throwback scenario
where gracious elderly women took tea.
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Now on the cleared site I watch merchants
busy about their stock, inlaying skulls
in turquoise, plugging vacant sockets with
obsidian. A smoking mirror finds a signal,
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and in a pool of bitumen dim stars dangle.
Where are you, blasted from black skies,
final residents, shivering in puffer coats,
buried under brick rubble, turned inward?
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2.
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Consciousness exudes from a wax head
its carriers, paragraphing out of forms
stacked to compose its termite brainpan:
fine margins between cavities, sustained,
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ensure a message noiselessly transmits
the lines of cold code once assembled.
Gouge inserts from their beds, syringe
error, strip away their flaps and spillage,
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let their wax solidify under hot stamps,
their pus ooze, congeal a face you know
now unmasking what had lurked behind.
Wax firms up for null cells, home base
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for paper wasps’ formation; its thinking
chews through title deeds and securities,
hardening the pulp to welts of duress
curled on flagstones in a future far court,
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bloody but their lines look neat enough.
Flame leaps in sockets, guncotton wicks
gutter melting wax; sculpted forerunners
lording it from plinths, acclaim brands
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above slavers, fur traders, tea merchants,
ship-shape and Bristol-fashion navigators.
This is ground truth for such as long
enjoy a free ride in a sweet disavowal
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spattered over screens of insect dolour;
solenoid shock treatment, knife’s edge,
shunts the coders off camera but active,
deathly white crawling over a wax tablet.
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3.
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Into the horizon hoop starlight spits in,
contorted below the pressing sky, carriers,
like a struggling wasp flees my brain,
transmit blight to bloom, the blemishes
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to fruit that swing in a windless orchard;
not here will flies foot their mute poison,
but tangle in their miscreance, false-
flag addresses snarl them in the web, by-
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pass those ovaries alert for dabs of genetic
uptake. Pick out the proxy serried combs,
internal switches, track rendition paths
off-radar, root a heat sump for memory;
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surrendered to the moment, bodies waste,
wretchedly cold, any warmth not sold
for food and drugs, stinks in shell suits.
Tattoos on brittle skin rolled in cylinders
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retreat to the caves where they will leak
retained love; like rods of unspent fuel
set in lead, their emanations leave no trace
across the sky, no trace but invisible scars –
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no neat metaphor to offer a legible path,
but actual scars. In their tortuous furrows,
dibbled seeds mutate, at once in motion
and confined to lines that now suppurate
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excess information. The point of all this,
tips fitted onto heat-seeking missiles,
reaches for the heights; then the linguistic
archive chewed over, plunges into ruin.
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4.
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Plunging, the orb drains a status colour,
blanking out. Its backwash scatters the full
spectrum in this asphalt pond, where I
take my time reflected, a target for code
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worming through the skynet. Supplied
personnel flare and fade, none either lives
or perishes. Our circle of light has failed,
O imagined child, its splinters stinging
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the unhomed; once the lamp is shattered,
surface oil swirls threads of colour, laps
at my ankles, its mirror shows no heights
to shave a scalp on, I’m pastured in tar.
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Amidst hissing stars, an outline flickers,
reassembles, taunts all seekers after God;
their kisses will erase enamelled icons,
bulbs of wax clump randomly. Devotees
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pass headless plinths on disfigured feet,
there is laughter at the base as nails pierce;
in trees’ thinning stands, each naked tree
weeps capsules, each a single specimen
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whose shoots split the hoops of memory.
I will re-fledge in fans of finger bones,
nails that outlive. With one climactic blow,
trumpet of a thigh bone proclaims my
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immune wastage, fated self-absorption.
But feel my arm flex, hear its joints rattle,
find humanity to cling to, in this amber
sheet of vellum, thick as a mummy’s hand.
John Wilkinson’s most recent books of poetry are Wood Circle (The Last Books) and Fugue State (Shearsman). His lacunal memoir/poetics Colours Nailed to the Mast will be published by Shearsman in 2024. Thanks are due to Clare Hall, Cambridge, for a visiting fellowship when ‘Wax Originals’ was written.
Copyright © 2023 by John Wilkinson, 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