Issue 16: Matthew Carbery
from CHARLIE GIBBS FRACTURE ZONE
--
they carry change to a logical end
in sleeping in, a lengthy sequence
of missed meetings, misdirection
the key to the city, what feels like
eras waiting in lines a short
message sent on and ended us—
for which I paid, data roaming,
and, stubborn, fell away gathering
mosses on just the one side
--
blame the medication for the flat fall
the endurance sweat of cardiovascular
tension something like a howling of
blood, the body its own anechoic
chamber—still there is some thing
a subtle rumble letting applicants
down lightly, the brave soiling
themselves in the face of the face
of the rock, the sheer bulk of it,
this terror at deep vein thrombosis
a worry of donuts before departure
in a panic falling on the laps either side
to stretch into some space, ferried
thru cloud forms, an infantile longing
--
black mountain mettle, the peak
which staggers offward at a lean
wind’s dark poem no leeside shelter
any where is every where lost here
the tracks and the track’s tracks
beaconlike and suspended as ellipses
measured not in time in open fields
of current, of galvanisation at such
altitude, a shortness of breath given
as evidence of the lyric intervention,
his obituary against the grain of liquor
proof at least that livers are for living
and sclerotic at base camp, renal failure
at the summit, his brain flooded with
ammonia and so with her as a wolf,
her cubs each a difference ochre hue
chewing on bits of entrail he’d dropped
on the trek, his thinglike past
tracking him from station to station:
thin, white, coked up by real chill,
abandoned off stage, by a motley
of severe pals, given up—
--
periplaster
tear it off
before it sets
you & i
stuck to the seats
the heat wet yet
voltaic
the act of acting
making synonymous
we
with them
a life sentence
like “I lived.”
etched into
the marrow
the very narrow
sentiment
of self-improvement
aloft an accident
happening out
of or in its place
at a distance caught
in a spectrum
of disorders & change
vaulting
--
the gruff ontology of the radio
without waves too long static
the blood on the riser
someone flooded the cavity
with wrestled pet names
brought to bear lapses
of judgment we'd pay for
in steady cartographical steps
it must be in the dusts
in their shallow reliefs
where the line falls where the
hair parts when the bottom falls out
drawn over
steady hands
rough drafts
print palimpsests
in unison in the steam on interior windows
the closeness of writing which is the closeness of reading
the closets of meaning the cloisters where feeling reels off listing at great angles the pivots of sense slick with radically empirical sheen the newness of being immediate and actual no fact but it itself
the orbital grasp of organs
the first person to see
the first person periplum of living among
of amongness and the amongst as fact
the facticity not of places but of being placed
the drone anathema
--
“the mid-atlantic ridge
profoundly influences
the regional water circulation
system and separates the deep
seas of the eastern and western
atlantic ocean from pole
to pole. within the maritime
area, the mar extends
from the lomonosov ridge
in the arctic ocean through
iceland to the azores, and further
south. the mar is
a spreading zone
where new earth
crust is built, leading
to a slow separation
of continental plates.”
--
lighter fluids & a fresh loaf
shadows of clouds
mattressing the sound
we eloped in essence
prior to the fact of the swing
of discretion in the short form
my pot belly & sagging tits—
this loutish reader:
you reclined to me
inclined to be where
were you they who they
lay laid out there in the bay
supine like a question mark
--
one eye on the red brief case
tho long as it is its sleeplessness
and looks from here like weight
would it go in the hold, or could
you store it overhead, or do you
handcuff it to a wrist like some
pan-eastern-european muscle in a film
one of those vehicles for “hard men”?
not that the poetic voice wants any
trouble, mate, or wants itself to be
effete, answering the personal ad of
the opening notes of notes towards
a supreme fiction, but also failing to
have had the nerve to spit in public
in front of the aged, and glare
from beneath a hood sat exclusively at
the back of the bus, top floor if on
a double decker. the petty type writer
might sneer how stupid, empty, how damaged
but the penned in side parted poet
his own third person shucking fourth wall
for affect, he’s a thug, has a gang, leaves
tags in the form of symposium invites, incomprehensible
reading groups meeting twice monthly
with a view to unravelling the glory of
Tom Hardy’s minor verse
Matthew Carbery is a poet and associate lecturer of creative writing working at the University of Plymouth. Before this, he studied with poet-critic David Herd in Canterbury, where he completed his PhD on the post-Charles Olson long poem in America. He writes almost exclusively in the long poem form, and has recently completed work on Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone, a sequence set above and beneath the Atlantic ocean.
Copyright © 2016 by Matthew Carbery, 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.
