Issue 11: John Regan
Be Thou My Vision
I.
The forefinger expresses the jaw; the blind wakens at the sill.
The road is subsequent to the noise, sound is a continuum of glass.
The room understands the child in aggregating penitence,
Nothing uncouples, unpriors. In abeyance the dissembling.
Now re-call a nimbus as upturned foam belly in shallow
Pink sky. Closeness all, no vista, all inching: how round was it?
The question vowel-ripe in the mouth, for something prior needs
It. Something prior is in every question, and the nimbus
Feeds that. All asking is a remove from the settled surface
Of the full minute. We can no more live in minutes than in
Sound: a shallow posterity.
Consequence
II.
Lush techno, orange as a ceiling, the resonant charge; depth
Out depth after out depth, a surface tension of bass stretched warm
Across the underness of it. Under Jamaica Street, I
Must comprehend how credit, meaning belief, can draw pallets
Through tolls and over bridges. I’ll not unvision cupidity,
In short, musn’t lose the thinking buttress of the night visions,
Sighting in darkness something of credit’s desperations in
Energy declensions and disaggregations; nonetheless
The only coherence that’s for everyone. Oh my god please,
No phrasing supports the kind of faith needed for the above
Sound is a shallow posterity.
Oh my kind dissembler
III.
We are a long means from the room in its painted diligence;
The child is long from us now, the dissemblance having interposed,
Toxic unmediator, breastburst for a day that won’t cease.
Hours are blasting shills, subverters for sense. If the room won’t yield
Its equanimity, nothing will. And so the day retains
Error of complete continuity, a summative fuck
Of shallowness and depth, irresolvable as a voice.
But breath you’re a two-way dream for me don’t quit me now, come voice
Unquiet peripatetic for the temporal laving a
Means for function and for song and never one without other
Sound realises itself in shallowness after all.
I’ll not unvision
IV.
One is never a single point of light, pixel for the white
That stands for reconciliation, probity and depth, nor
Is one ever divested of the sheaths of thinking that force
Pallets under rivers and tear shops open onto streets, nor
Am I forsaken. There is something in nothing the minute
Nodes of a borrowed light have mass for me in the nonetheless.
The hospital glows in the blown field far from the painted room.
The drip stands penitent and the line to Liverpool Street runs
Synchronous to cupidity, wheel grinding, fast,
Through inchoateness and past the wards, over desperate stanchions.
Sound takes the quality of a thought.
Don’t leave this here
V.
And all this while the stock ships are subsumed by bland arterial
Remove. Cities are nowhere; even the throbbing hospital,
Like Vegas in the outskirts, is a place more than I can feel.
If everything inchoate is everything and all time is
Telescoping for a surface vista, what’s this event in
Sound? Can sound withstand or forbear to collapse, or realise
Like a more-than-usually-complete integer? Ringing
True like peals of field-effect transistors, verse like an uptake
Condition for history. Verse’s ringing fields some felt
Make allowance for the only space that logic leaves
Shallow the sound that leaves.
I can no more—
Light Through a Glass Table
my skin is in deliberate redress-
how discomfiting skin is-
how unflowing, how unlike
light through a glass table
in a class, through air, in January.
clearly, god is banging in the garden
the door of the shed,
in the wind. thoughts are plashing,
thought against thought
friction of skin and the selfness.
what’s life done to you?
what’s better, sound or light or
what? you can’t hear light
passing through the table,
but hear it though. i suppose
light vibrates better than a simile.
reader pay attend and attending
and add, an added ending, addending
gerunding plashing, proceeds
those proceeds nil, nilled, nilling
progress of the shed doornoise
through glass, through night.
nil night. that’s it. that’s it.
Leaving
By the trees, by the line to Liverpool Street
There happens leaving. Something left
Between the wind and the want;
Flitting trivia against bark. Whether
Or not choice, decisions whether come to,
Leaves are not votives, nor instructive,
Choice voluntaries in sacrament.
Laving at the bark, rather, whether
Or precisely no coherence. No economy,
But valuable unconcert and unfaction.
Leaving energy against arrangement
Nor system, nor volition. I know these,
Nor can leave thus. Who can,
By the trees, by the line to Liverpool Street.
John Regan is from Glasgow, Scotland. He is now a researcher at the University of Cambridge. He asks that you read the above aloud.
