Issue 9: Paul Green

Shadow Time (1 - 4)

1.

First thought: in a greenish room sleeping under the sculptor’s shelves. This is Cat’s Home where the little mogs scratch against the door like Lovecraftian intruders. On the sill a crumbly plaster statuette of Diana dances among her deer against the plate glass of night. A brass angel extends elongated arms to define his/her spaces amid the cardboard boxes. I draped my clothes on a plinth. The night hums in my ears. I’m boxed in the box room.

Poetry makes a come-back:

back-story bytes of roughage

slippage and clips out-taken

at the liminal, my outer limits

so words buzz through the airway

like giant bumble bees as fantasised by the blind

dancing sigils of terror

The Dear Reader

stumbles all over my idiolect

So we’re making a royal retreat into memoirs:

            Walking down the steep curved hill

            into the Edinburgh night

            I’m the sound of ’65

            going crazy with James Brown

            Liverpool girl on my arm

            Pete Brown shooting it out with retreating urchins

            on our way to the great gig

            Way on down the West Coast ’68

            Under the Tiffany lamp

            The Round Table gathers

            a coven of young testosterone poets

            Old Yates growling around his cigar

            briefing our global  campaign

            Paul Buck smiling down Camden High Street ‘89

            reassuring me all over again

            of my tiny fame

those were good engrams

but where to get them stuffed

alongside the daily transcription:

TERRIBLY SIMPLE SHOUTS OF THE UNFED

2.           

Fragments of a day. What were the active sub-texts? My ‘unconscious’ is possibly an astral hangover. It’s my smoky shroud. The narrowing bed in the box room will be recollected in tranquillity but in the historic present it’s bumpy. Writing gets easier as you develop grey hair and the internal NAND-gates break down. The riots go loop de loop. You voice over the footie until you run out of throat. It’s a talking cure you sell yourself. Quack, quark, kwik...

Grow your business in pots of our shit

is the prolonged mantra

Your experience has been thoroughly granulated

Seven billion vortices seeking attention

and public oxygen

as a forest smoulders here and there

            “One who has no god as he walks along the street

             — head-ache envelops him like a cloud,”

            saith the old hieroglyph

The totalled fug of an omniverse

pushes right down

flames crawl up a balcony

the graphics of raging

crazing the sliding glass

on that pixellated window on the world

as hooded zombies source bling

cocky as Bullingdons

survivors and the tortured old

scramble for the rooftops

3.           

The room tonight is un-boxed, re-assembling as a vast laboratory of empty benches. My nose points to the apex of a dunce’s time-cone and my hot body stuck in the calorimeter. The time-acceleration is alarming. Can’t you feel it? The old scenarios blip in and out, the succubi are fading fast...

Howl-round, screech-head antiphonies

skull musics, a shout going out

of all your hundred large tunes

at my topography of the hours

my prong stung me out of a sleepy-time flux

before I went narcoleptic

the macrocosm was walking on by

fusing its hydrogen and helium

seven billion screaming the name of god in adjacent keys

crack on the desert to release its guck

only tourists and civilians

will buy our Earthlet souvenirs

 so talk up the surplus stock

the arse-beads  and monogrammed tee-shirts

your royal mugs and cartridges

the enormous mushrooming cock

collectively dreamed each Friday

right here on Planet of the Nebuloids

4.          

A cat interrupts the written word.  Here it is Cat’s Home all over again. The silver- sculptor, Lord of the Cats, hammers away in his cellar, forging another cross, grinding a goblet for blood and wine to be raised during a jolly good lunch in grand stone forest-hangars, the doomed cathedrals. He’s just about up for it, all night.  He has to sustain the business plan, keep the candles burning as the hearse of dreams crawls towards me.  I tell myself that the fluttering planes of time can be controlled briefly by acts of introspection or insurrection, not sure which.

The phosphorescent haze

remix of shady times

I never quite ventriloquised

only went live

in nightly installations

my dreamy ghostbooks

that rewrite themselves under closer inspection

the words all pouring out like insects

decaying echo of the poetry buzz

susurrations of millions in shadow

hiss and babble of the unborn

we are such animals stuffed with memory...

Shearsman Books recently published Paul A. Green’s collection The Gestaltbunker. Paul also writes fiction (The Qliphoth [Libros Libertad, 2007]) and plays for radio and  live performance, most notoriously Babalon (Travesty Theatre, 2005), a celebration of occultist/rocket scientist Jack Parsons. Short stories include ‘The Poets of Radial City’  in Unthology 2 (Unthank Books). In the last twelve months he’s appeared at the Hay Poetry Jamboree, Swedenborg Hall and Arte: an Elemental Happening. He used to teach media to blind people in Hereford until 2011 but now lives in Hastings where he concentrates on writing.

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