Issue 18: Corey Wakeling
(Tom Raworth Memorial)
On the Glasgow Kiss
1.
Earning a rhythm of slaps, calm.
Brutal sovereigns the golden potato souvenirs.
And don’t forget the natural home cradled
at the crest of high street,
Kingdom of the Real Estate Agencies.
Do you know where we hail from;
soft financier investment capital of the planet,
where jarrah skirts laughing gas, waves,
and good money. You have Commonwealth
well enough, and it is well with you.
Fraudulence: a dream peddled in distress
stirred in the clutch of sweet air at the border.
The barques too were scared.
2.
Deceived by the connoisseurs of youth
and a brain browbeaten on excursion
from flesh, there has been
much cudgelling dandle from the glottal stop ham.
The actor, remember. We search for their girt floor.
Ash. Ash. Let’s not quote what Antigone would
do with the intercontinental commandment
by ballistic missile. A field of sun, the cave.
All the corpses get translated into votive offerings
to the lord of flies again. This isn’t an advent
of the twenty-first century. Ask the treasurer.
Palmistry of alighting from decisiveness.
There are no quotes here, except the network
of all your magazines and what they did for
3D vision of fascism. Otherwise, delay.
3.
There is a stocky finger frowning deep
in the curtained hotel. Nine-to-five
hovers bent over curtailed.
False doubt versus rocket doubt.
The satellite view of you during the pulse of five bells.
But there is no suicide. Not even accident.
The Sydney Harbour sloth, like saccharine barbiturate,
a blithe upriver glide enabling your desk
to levitate above the froth.
4.
First, your psychological hermeneutic.
Second, your dream analysis. Third,
that there is always a legible correspondence
between that first reaction to the lexeme
and text’s fruity lexia on the crabgrass searing
this tattoo on fat. The hind shivers to think
you believe you’ve assembled
the true motivation for this document
when superb enmity ties Hollywood
to an unsigned treaty. The kindest car,
not knowing where to turn, then,
takes the Golden Gate Bridge’s hottest exit.
The stories do give voluminous access
to the backroom ventriloquism for reading
words fallen to earth somewhat like this.
Our faces stir in the grout of the prison walls.
Yet, gracious reporter on the 1970s, we were
all distant from the shelving unit tossed
high in the etheric gloom of a corner bar
cornering us to you, night manager.
The gilt wainscoting already made a comment,
but refrains when you arrive, hibakusha.
5.
No reply from him, news of the Glasgow kiss.
This has nothing to do with the city of chill,
the expression arrived in stealth, but it’s still
a good aphorism for a famous fetish
for abrupt returns to equilibrium. Far away,
a canopy of gulls earning their bread and butter,
a bit of tobacco too. The hero didn’t always
die young, Dad. Sometimes his tragedy was old age.
Look at the solemn friendship of transatlantic demise.
This is too frank to dedicate to anybody,
of course, hence why we use this context
for a nō play which is also anti-Ulster.
Who wants the ancestors on the committee anyway.
6.
All those talents opposed to full abstraction
in the days of wrath and company had rabies, I think.
A soft jaw enjoys the hiding of an extended kiss
as it prolongs unlikely amorous confirmation.
Tanners don’t even exist as a union any longer.
This is hardly a question anyway; profession.
What he would have done had he seen
the bubonic circle of relent, or had Lenin lost,
so on and so forth, might have been
the nirvana panorama, robots fulfilling all roles
of the middle-class intermediary.
Meditation regime for every retinue. That said,
expertise now already funnels to the designers.
7.
Not a quote in sight. All design elements
open access anyway, not to mention
the publicity of our common occupation.
The patents get litigious about the fact of a lost
consensus regarding litigiousness.
Representing myself again. Supreme Court
chewing gum! Ingratiatingly, a hair curls on your wart.
How many small mouths of our solidarity
hide death growls. If an artillery gun were your
best friend, you’d still celebrate their birthday.
Were your state built upon exceptions to good will,
you’d eat Americans for dessert too.
That is the origin of this Antarctic lyric.
Our closed-circuit surveillance begins time travelling.
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Raworth
Corey Wakeling is a poet and critic living in Nishinomiya, Japan. His second full-length collection of poems, The Alarming Conservatory, appears with Giramondo Publishing in 2017. Corey co-edited Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land (Black Rider Press, 2013).
