Issue 31: Oli Hazzard
Incunabulum
I
Now shall I continue telling about the growth of finger memory as is my preference
or be live-dated by a recent day of memory placement that this person
(meaning “individual head blockage”) moved from such a conversation (which I,
a person, spend fearing) to finding why finding the term “memorable” was the joke
as with the interior, the social time indicator, the face like good parents I knew
daydreaming for us constantly an employer, a substance somewhere
goodnight nature world, the existence hymn of enough watching machinery
its language will part purposefully, gently part or even end up partly hoping
for visible place spots, blotting as cloud-cover the encounter which eases
public re-enactment and is still towing about for a punch in the middle-soul
or even panic in pleasure, even if what pleasures anyone is to be an absolute
face which inward-turned calls forth, mother-more-unique, such a face
who expressionless to this maquette is drawn, then, as location, as place-
name, since each object kind object has purposelessness, an air of only on-air
impossible wildlife, since it could pencil whole an installation of the time
before this moment and I still wouldn’t know how to find you
II
To advance this letter then I developed a fear of even qualifying for morning
and outside temporary opposition everywhere is peak actual just songs I quote
another dream world, but hand I’m censure, the football-haunted pronoun
and it is our feet, our burrowing scepticism, pulsing in the speaking
room with like people and group consequence, hallucinating why the work
in failure would never continue to would, since opinions, but with whips
the even matter was parted, taken down, on and on, the checking course
on which we have gone, the distance, their holding—what—and its story
like external footage blended, exaggerated and one, preferably mother
feels around the interior, our actions as turns, things, and even conditions
does my object blue his fingers, that disappointment, fine long like suddenly yourself
brushed you, and through the unhappy compromise if u text me
winning moments of art, the white responding it could make me itself
caught an itch which, one awful, struggling episode, stretched beyond 5pm
very what’s accepted, very safely braided ago, the dusty hope when equivocating
is to feel something to a present not at extent, where the world shelves the tiny you
III
Nature is my office, then, fill the blush in, see how Rousseau punches
a nation-state sculpture sense of reading this about the punch coming more
sweetly in time, teach it, mother, turn it through some whoever velvet,
that moment (which, from central expertise, a window “supposedly immediately
opens on”), remembering the July anecdote as the tough bit now of nearby sadness
that spikes an experience into you, and might even make a serious friend of it—
a light mood yet hardly lavish—so to have contrived something
I was certain I found up to confirm the embarrassment of an injury painted on
borrowed panic which was darkness registered or simply made giant by drinking
the openness of which, against woods and sense-period placed,
permits no pics but of clauses spreading, a fictive grey,
a severity I didn’t know as my own, poor reflective thing
and yet sitting double leader of my incapable section, forensically mounting
the hidden sky, become from the forty-minute mark standard disclosure
to finally giving in at a story of unusual being which so repels, even I,
considering the mood of it, struggled then to get up and say
IV
For there were lived minutes and apparent rooms, existed out genuinely
at which my decision or that as a child, a holding to account, or film of how life is
a memory when it’s asleep, images I lens detectably confirming perhaps
the struggle of reading when cut thinking it, terminology rendered as if of work
one feels the pain, since really largely necessary like the utopian Lord airport
whose misfortune I feel answers roots somewhere many assemblies down
this being, not the small pain of it, just up and evaporated on the basic air
as if wonder is by environment, thorn and sleeve, its book sense extended
the particular Henry ribbon corner song of wandering away
that’s really about the leave feeling, such as yes you may dress the absolute worst
but nor could our technological couple who hum the centre to keep
intimacy placidly smiling as the thing, the little strangeness
replacing the wince explanation like the actual maybe of couple think
as explanation about keeping the sentence meat clear
while our son levels
us with the new-found thirty thinking (while you cry)
V
And after actually recalling when desire had left a suspect vent
such powerless accuracy, feel, suppose, what the love idea is sometimes
the exhaustive insurance with phantom leads, as of wonder, of which
the discomfort, unexpectedly—and I among material over-appeared,
a slowly perceived outfit trying the best copy-and-paste general joy
which powers pragmatically past to an original felt in ourselves, a reproduction,
dark retrieval, someone to explain living never gone though, secretly or felt
in summer, cumulatively, your presence, stranger sequence, actual present night
holding referendum time, still when substantially, remember, elaborating
hard memories of shopping, completely, for a single-syllable atmosphere
and all it ended up was being of dreams, the picture becomes a boring time thing
an overly eccentric evening, with night incrementally perceptible
around the sky’s heels, says key feeling of luminous melting
because my touching there’s meaning I gratefully experience life,
phenomenon of a guess portal as deep surface only with whispering—
minor day crimes, yes, but friends, Tuesday has a time foothold
VI
So since I text Caboto and pretend you’d rate me as a sensual world
he dropped a pin on Neptune, the centre cell
upskilling the interior into obtrusively confessing to having prepped a cool soliloquy
an eleventh free fiction of an animating European hesitation among pyramids
first introduction to deterioration modulated to taking Amanda’s memory
of a retreat from an OK job in a hard-feeling way (it’s been such a Monday
that the footage, the lives, during which the clearly different on camera
are at eye-level aware of being conscious of having felt violated, have been coming to
or *at* me when it’s dark, changed, as someone I know only by the flicker of exposure
of their intent to sense via annual semifrantic holiday hate agony escalations
—not that through which a still moral is streaked consistently—becomes
suddenly invested in growing my soul, lengthy excursions on the PlayStation,
why flaws in football’s self-consciousness—the authoritative “somehow” of it—
mapped itself pristinely as I would be, laying bare a system of reluctance
to the going harmony, the e-fitness, the contrafactum of the it
turning beautiful at last, the consequence of which is where we begin
VII
Yet in the interest of performance April kept flouting scene convention
a distant tapping, the cancelled promontory seen moving content secretly back into space
like disgust banging out golden shapes just off page, yet smiling was still my thing,
the rhomboid strikes as exact as somedays someone says sure Catholicism
or I should’ve been a space achilles, and the solid earner is to want completely
my us, our me, all lives wanted alive for plants are merely for magic-eye
since won’t is now in my would skiff, then just suppose with yr million position hat on
the smaller me as a trope of detection, light crackling from the rhythm in misunderstanding
like, I note, when an hand seems to be saying something possibly most tainted
in unusual metres it becomes signatory of a permanent shape
surfaces present as internal owing to
their appearance as a series of lines we face patterned up the playground wall
like have fuck, can order, will nail walking my time backwards through the changed book
world, since you're duration, a stretch for the internet, unique false overgrowth
of the eye having brunch in the sketchiest west hand embarrassed wife creation
who cannot get this synonymous, cannot shake it: sexy plant consciousness
VIII
Thousands of slightly altered Williams whipped it like that
where writing sounds its distance, schools time
the general after-ache of etymology boomering down the mysteriously postponed
explanation of pleasure in polite recognition of my clearly actually changing
and you, across a vast room
seem like a fresh opportunity to fail to write,
to spill the song
embarrassingly, which with that much more and talking exactly he might
earn as pleasure, like learning in the direction of another speed to Latin
allowing through the redwood, touching an equilibrium of story dots
(it is partly my non-feeling for visible things controlling me, leaves me vaguely striving
in my bedroom, imagining how R’s trouble guides the darker passages
or getting pristine through self-obliviousness), further extracted couple ruptures
deflate the concrete and I racket I’d ribbon out through the work window
having no Spanish one night I put forward a motion to self to “get to Cairo”
so said alcove, so celestial suburb, so skin in which I’ve contrived to semi-live
IX
Ten further uncertainties go ahead sighing at the infrastructure
turning meat into cloud so I had something to think this morning
still I weather the designed feeling, proceed to recommend my leg
extends North so that I may begin retracting it by Christmas—as our 2013 specialist
of the unable torso in middle-age I’m the first to feel intensely lucky
to touch Rousseau’s commercial person, yet my conversation
including the larger realm of daydream directly tells me of winning wires of guilt
taped alive throughout the memory card, forever—out of such shape-shifting
widened draining moments of intensest self-alarm is cleared a bunch of sockets
to seem annoyed we’re at the Olympics in, where my most hollow-seeming versions
seem suddenly very persuasive to one another, dramatised figments
of whatever knowledge remains happy-disastrously unavailable
on the subject of these meagre feelings, and as deferentially I’m then to mean anything to anyone
can that problem think me there, present on a criticism hill—
if all were peculiar, a promotional dream-world, and accurately
notional, yes, a pitching keyboard is exact work (which existing causes)
X
Crab lab hack, meet familiar world man
triggering objects, advertising a moon
erected as unhappy authority projected towards background night space
overtaken by the fictionalise department, a present frozen
by a crayon on the air, thank u, ash stub, surprising with some new expressive pattern
angling for response from your organ-tree, touched, only lightly, line-by-line,
with a set of striking passwords—input and unexpectedly forgot—lacing the hours
with potent feelings of self-worth about capacity to master the room tone syllabus
dropping a naturalness crisis surge, until I would find myself asking
would I be surprised to be too embedded in this documentary
state to recognise my own lie, to put that German suit on to bask
in the vivid logic of the solar block broken by the barn yarn
to conclude a thin childhood recalled on horseback
via a superimposed diagram—the folkloric
slow hallucination of the light, maybe my parents
specifically arming me to be at the enormously crucial detail suddenly quite alert
XI
The terrible thing is to have made of him a book—or to have pressed undeterred
though a room of non-knowledge always there yet mostly presumed to be “off”
towards an unhelpful clock directed at it, “the whole”—only to experience
stage two of this environment, environment Z, too abruptly, the insertion
of which phenomena in my daydream slog instantly normalises everything
and leaves only faintly especially ourselves, a “skim-read” sensation finding its antonym
as cast-iron daylight toggling its doubt finger, crowning art as the major hobby era
as though warmth for others were simply a doubling of obtuseness, a television
I attack with a fork (time to admit, Rousseau, the form my defence of Things
took: the redwood was about to mulligan it)
like a failed interviewee, meaning in the life hour I sit alone drawing
in the culture of morning light, my jacket releasing previously closed-off
art whispers and dimensions, here, mastering my experiencing style,
the clauses of feelings fresh and familiar, and what else is there to detect in regard to their source
but functional generosity, an in-house hygienic horror, publications like
“my reason for doing things,” 335 Modern proper thoughts
XII
Inevitably I became extremely well-read in Renaissance screaming
and so translated: “Great path, I was recently promoted
to writing generation T, where Progress terminated Dance, and from my ledge looked back
at your staring wounds with the poise of a Sundial, taking in the old program
because my year timelines me into autofictional schedule 6 (fear of discrepancy)
with a shocked sense that my own, speak it, selfhood, had been solicited to tell
of some forty dreams of sick air responsible for a funded green fashion height feeling
of brittle happiness on a social hill which the flats around, displaying unflustered constituents
of resolution, of 10-minute truly meant ideas which imagine the heat of
a multimillenial infodump to hold, to be beheld, permitted me to be plugged into the someone
who, as all know, knows all about the importance of writing
at particular fortress locations, the general importance of safety writing
from the scene of the fact pipe on highways closing in on us,
as living blurs us, flimsier, makes us seem but that we live only careless lives
implied ever since by history, in so small a role the dots
used to denote them were as fanfic to the so-called longstanding theory of unassailability
XIII
The thousand-language chore of extracting stuff from forgetfulness
is my office, then, colour the essay in, let our head interiors
touch to position the spotlight on the increasingly fatalistic toddler
who argues powerfully through an off-key melody
for the jovial texture of batshit relations, for the pleasure
of live-drawing in sceptical company—sometimes I want to be overheard exhaustively
like a relaxed coward, cartoonish as a ribbon on a soliloquy wind, yet still well-thought-of
as though alert to the at-any-moment call for total interior re-enactment
as a series of disembodied caveats, loops of sunlight
doodled on the polished floor which moves everyone at the loop recall funeral
a response I like, but, mum, it seems time that thousands and a few things
Monday expressed by spilling such evidence of blackout non-seriousness
must follow me down the spilled seo architecture
towards the fat, bottle-green moment of medieval Tokyo, shone and buffeted
by large wings of anger and nervousness
the shook spot, chequered with hesitation, where I stay
XIV
The day knew the course, slightly angling towards the moment
when I lower my eyes, and the abrupt blankness of 1000 things
(these explanations of how I am what I am and why)
vibrates with a mischievous intensity, as if knowing it’s being looked at
untangles into a promise of simplicity
a tangle of simplicity which binds the environment you’ve built around you
averaging out the fabrications, the decent freedoms
the social concepts which harden like a diamond
when their permanence is questioned, a question formed under the massive pressures
of regrets shifting slightly violently over epochs
how I dream of you, anxious, in which your seemingly-infinite indifference
to my discomfort wounds like a live crime
delicately implied, a cryptic reference to this bearable skin, felt disaster
roaming in the hope of historical love on the good ship my face
literally a few lovely days, a consequence of murder,
where these people are quiet as they repeat their explanation
XV
To advance then this perverse investment in the skies’ continuation
I fact-check the script, underline Irrawaddy for a leisure google
feel the jigsaw of the minute assemble itself
as a stomach panic complexes into a series of narrow moods
I will wave off laterally through the lukewarm night—vintage May
season of magnetic decision-making, of imagined holy fucking
as though desire were a spy fluid, an overly agreeable thing
badly translated from the unhappy, surging like a delayed joke
to electrify a pronoun and be immediately ostracised: something
the eyes cancel as bad font, recalled product of disorganised commercial thinking
that pulls you together into a direction, towards the hole where the mosaic turns,
homesick for loneliness—tossing parts in the tub
frightened to stay alive, the misdirections leave their own precipitate
a glittering campaign of counter-assumptions
surely a day for intimacy, for infraction
for hurt to feel common, unknown
XVI
But shall I continue telling about an actually inconsistent state
a “bubble” overrun with melochemical elaborations, not even a finger's depth
only baroque, childish balustrades, brusque examples of global pain
in memory uniform which become in delay combination a trick pleasure
a Germanic dream-world or provincial glass structure, lit from within
by the infinite ocean—a stage for innocuous, ethical days,
where happiness’s a soundless calendar by which to trace the jargon
incurred by fluency this morning—that’s the kink, decision’s shingle
that I mid basic, asleep in pieces, slurried in the technical morning
felt as do-able, where I do the loving at you
in briskly decorated open dream secret
and yet I’m still only capable of laughing nervously, C, what is it
to be following in spiral a precise point as the basin drains
towards a blanket powerout in the iris of the Earth
a memory of a nice feeling motioning my hand in disbelief
to a point, a precise point towards which these objects now stream
Oli Hazzard is the author of three collections of poetry, Between Two Windows (Carcanet, 2012), Blotter (Carcanet, 2018) and Sleepers Awake (Carcanet, 2024), and a novel, Lorem Ipsum (Prototype, 2021).
Copyright © 2023 by Oli Hazzard, 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
