Blackbox Manifold

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.