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).

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