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A BOOK OF COMMONPLACES
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There is a way that seems right unto a man - but the way thereof is the way of death
39 people died while you read this short poem. Every hour 5417 go to meet thr maker.
You shd have been among them.
decentered people are fedup – people say they write & write, & the same thing happens all over again
we are all part of the ocean slime
since they crawled out millions of years ago, the tortoise evolved into the most awesomely efficient sex machine
uses the patchwork of symbolist thinking,
Commensal: "the tube is v. frequently inhabited by commensal decapod crustacean"
Its like coming out of a long tunnel into green sunlight – its been so long, you didn't know it was a tunnel
"Oh its just a simple exchange – red corpuscles exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen from the other side...
the only reason men, as other organisms, can live here, salt deserts, is because of the concept of economy
marketing is the key to the future of salmon
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Rosicrucian, make me think of babies nipples
that glitters in the sea, it is the bodies of millions of dead creatures – a phospher of putrescence
A bus sets out from A. In the world of the subatom we can never measure its track, but only observe its destination. but, insanely, we choose that destination by looking for it.
an Irish nun in mufti...covered in frightening hieroglyphics. In front stood people w/ foreheads so large they cd not have been wealthy....a nest of Newtonian reaction.
20 years of reductionism has not entirely eliminated the smell of cheap monkish tobacco....Here the brothers had proved Allah, leathered the kufr.
Her experience is exactly similar to yrs. There is a feeling of clarity, a memory of recent events, a knowledge of where the subject is, realistic colour & an awareness of how the subject got there. What is seen is an altogether convincing replica of the world, until you look for details.
....No new material is ever seen in them & it is impossible to relate accurate details of a room or a place that y/ might not have noticed in life.
To my distant shouts of encouragement she rose to the ceiling of St Hildas College to see her body some 20 feet below on a couch. She got there down a tunnel of trees in horsedrawn carriage. She kept hearing the future Social Security Fraud Inspector shouting, Where are you. I cd see my mouth opening & shutting, & I cd see the President
listening to the cold echoes of the birth of the universe
all the bodies were compressed in the point of a pin: we think of that pin fr the outside, space is in the pin point.
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the difference between a Research Fellow filling in the Pools coupon (affective magic)
its indistinguishable squiggle –
spectacular tabulations by shorttrousered prodigies, the operations of juggling midgets & artists:
a breakthru in mathematical symmetry bumscratching at a blackboard chalking the sighs; consign another Hungarian as follower of Haydn,
They are beaten up by delusive autochthons. You might see the development of the novel as explanation
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w/out yr musicians, where wd yr name be, where is yr deeds of of renown w/out our memory –
the replete slaves stolen fr neighbouring nests in rituals of economy
the amazon ants penetrate the formica nests – here the amazons end w/ thr kidnapped formicas, the stolen pupae tended by an earlier generation of slave formica raided fr the same nest
a fight breaks out, the slavemaker breaks out a propaganda scent wch turns the slaves against each other:
thr continual survival depends on stealing larvae who will eventually service thr own colony
we are all aphids – hoverflys inject eggs into aphid bodies, the larva slowly sucks it into a mummified case and breaks out, but we are all aphids
ants making a beautiful network bridge of thr bodies for the rest to pass over; honeydew passed from the anus of some
if someone muddles thr life, they affect everyone else
even Gaughin absconds to Tahiti w/ secondrate Gaugins syphilitic maidens & my rheumatism, even Brahms is on Lake Toumi
In the dream the band of raiders ride into the interior of the hacienda. Doors in the courtyds are banded shut just as the rebels run to each one. One door is not shut quickly enough by the children; they are brought out & a Clint Eastwood figure is going to ransom them to get at whatever they are hiding. But the little boy has determined he is not to break. But the parents behind the shutters never budge.
as the earths crust moves over volcanic activity
the crickets sucking on flies, beautiful snails hunted down by even stranger pronghead snails swimming over leaves on thr slime, & sucked in its soft vice terrible ingestions convulse the shell, & lets it dropping
caterpillars stick up on twigs, turned carnivore striking more flies triggering hairs; all this ambush predation, the flies on thr back wriggling legs,
the mind starts feeding on itself
Handsworth 1987
Khaled Hakim published sparingly in the 1990s before disappearing from poetry. The story of ‘A Book of Commonplaces’ is he unearthed this sequence and the ‘Second Book of Commonplaces’ in a box after 15 years away, reading them with no idea he'd written them and deciding he should return to poetry. Letters from the Takeaway (Shearsman 2019) and The Routines: 1985-2000 (Contraband 2020) collected his previously published or performed work. The Book of Naseeb (Penned in the Margin 2021) is an epical poem but marketed as a novel. His most recent book is To the Hitchhiking Dead (Shearsman 2022), a book-length sequence that writes into an unpublished poem of 35 years ago.
Copyright © 2024 by Khaled Hakim, 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
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