Issue 25: Ian Patterson
A SPACE BASED ON HEARSAY
Air Flitter
Binding light over the brow thrown from the air soft
matter incapable of rhetoric assuming status attention,
with so true an eye to extract value out of our reach, why
mean to explain such posh dismal magic as fictional wish?
Fly over the wall wearing a show made good in another
language, press a petal to rags to doubt about moving out
of time as a scene offers to flutter the tongue and grove
and flood the whole array with pastoral multiplex parody.
Begin inset reason of shadow rakes to recognize the
moulded conflict he or she brings by the yard to music. It
is not necessary to explain four words as a form left behind
in a seclusion that works with silence or an Aeolian harp.
Abiding in their back yard containing the words called art
of losing, it’s still there in the sense of a glimmer impulse line
cut back at the end, as burnt lists shake against the cold mind
on implied stress, like a mouth blight still without rhythm.
Stuck material points well up and go back as what follows
from an email dream first without shouting so much in bed.
Time on concrete sift to brief air ruin. Notice a message as it
stands for everyday models of relief in the mouth or body.
Spice this object in abject damage space to a yard of void sense
marked out in unhinged tenses, a way to consume that thought
understood as a sight no longer missing an origin sensed about
the wings of matter as they fade over and over into air flitter.
Gloomy Clamber
Exotic narrative city to malign each day permitted stop and
search side street caginess or brim aware through the gates
least aperture soon told while strolling back all fearful for flight
steps back down midsummer ratchet shift for some ancestral
theory of struggle. Dog remedy fails under the sun, falls again.
Zoom contact page scroll, chestnuts and acacias a partial
antidote outside this approach to plain stories or lives. String
out getting shot of it all, alley between variables endemic to
wider issues, cycling beside the canal. Repose in the letter, money
to efface the destructive movement a mere abstraction. Stop-
gaps concede a cloud of oblivion in common time, walkable
traces leading to emergence of fingertip dislike, even hate. To
what purpose all this bird twitter chat scrabble in bramble
tangle nobody can say, throats constrict at the thought of such
lucidity, bare as poles as far from innocent we glance at black maps,
all inert, s-shaped and unconsulted in this feverish puzzle.
Exceed Frame Time
Greeting studded internet predictions
burst through glint, left now only like
sun squalls, with core time building up
on the edge bent a little defaulted to
late snow on the sea, up from the drone.
My first number shrug happened too
far out to deal with, say a car left
by the quarry for a voice call, take charge
of some ancient bucket, look away or
strain fate by crane to another place.
Plate glass closure, savage tray put down,
no rubber bands, no screwdrivers, a copy
of the spirit, some flying creature at last
filling part of the air, lost to sight. Numb
race to violent counter answer explicit and
essential fittingly. Not failed, comrades,
save the material world, the chest freezer
heritage boutique guilt store. Rinsed under
clouds, touch flaking to reveal an absence
of what was imagined as assemblages.
That nail connects light to bramble, keeps
anxiety cobbled to one hand, a field of
force full of density if you squint a bit
to mint focus adjusted for hawthorns and
ash. Hinge tremors return unsaid each night
begun in speeded-up promises, just you
wait and see. Least shed, pelt freely. Hear
today this morbid outcome broadcast,
rain forecast to slope in between scales
taken up quite cold and not itself shared ever.
Get an Ear Test
Guess with submerged forms to attend
to, note some goal constructs in the concept
here supplied with time off limits to turn
clear back. Each look for later hover
flies, raked lavender, told about it, known
to be false as a kind of opposite to need
the earliest threat to earth you remember,
now all this and its dead eyes lurking as a
special undergrowth offer you can’t refuse
or know about, perky intrusive hazels. Get
over here, feign colour for foreign shapes,
think licorice touches recombined in sphere
manifolds no questions asked. Thistle and
goat’s beard allow a pause. So call it music.
Potentially Permanent
Parallels speak further things, the weather itself
to give support status leaks over high ground in
this wider sense, action or reading as an opaque
fabric, a veil against any ephemeral perception.
Total balance averse, muffle decoys conspire to
never end or stumble as one might too easily yet
carry on to doubt embodied plunges, safe from
this rough story as it falls in words that flap about.
Who needs subject form in closed aspect or in a
wider memory process usually well filled by rakish
nature enduring distant interests, no plot winding
a puppet fantasy of public life in draft wish code?
Just hand the desire and fill out the normal case
present tense state, cloud ahead and visions inscribed
from green pages in the mouth. A title word hangs
unspoken, a circling buzzard its bogus parallel.
Oh no, no buffer grinding. Earth heave butterfly
fear, bottle tremor translated to the clouds as innuendo,
spreading shadow to remain a lot of stuff, words
crammed in the photograph crawling like repro ants.
Yellowhammer rustle in the flash ear, carbon lost out
in the air, vagrant beings the mock shadow stretches
like a manifesto focus grin across the grass all aflutter,
a poor bubble of the inner self we never close now.
Please Call Us
Knot some broken focus quite up tight
as bees rise and fall by the dream outfall,
unable to be marked as frank attention to
an imprint secretly with a pollen ring
panic regarding some tumult of sublime
memorial shining over voices muttering
behind fountains. Stillness leaves.
It left, civic pride left in a way that reused that
frame, this web, to set more air into the space
above literal sense in years to come, to puff
up custodians of ordinary personal problems
and manage further discourse for cash. Grass
matted, autumn crocus glowing at the edge
half-grasped thoughts shaped by waking.
The ring panic never left, sea-level clout dis-
placement amounting in practice to an island
of waste in a sea of waste. Nobody answers
the hunger tangle calling by day in choked
shivers of warp enigma. A sort of quietness
arrives like menace or footsteps and stays.
Why Call It Again?
It went against the glass, anything but
compressed life face to the green ones
lacking a far cooler origin, with intended
motifs as rapturous machine objects. We
invent chaotic bias in order to see the
contours’ maximum energy impacted—
or worse, not afraid of the past, abstract
and close to lyrical incessant gusto. There’s
no reason to call it anything else now, just
call it by its name. Its name against yours,
filmy hopes message syndrome spot cash
reality drawn to owl noises through the
darkness, what more can I say? Almost
placid again, reflect on it, reflect it back.
Only Displacement
Supposed to possess drafts for when I started
those neglected words about what visual trial
might last a life in the version cut for time, a
few chosen sentences in an array of radiant
tumult, enough to compose an oblique speed
present, scraped away, seeing things dying, what
urban beings keep in mind as ambiguity, it might
be in order to point a brief new shaping fiction.
Cue sparks, closed footpaths, assumed creed
departed as rain falls steadily over the abyme, a
cascade some time ago seeded to seem now not
remembered, immune to habitat missing the light
to boost each lurch to name text’s spurious smile,
eroding slowly to act as a type of abandoned gradient
by sad experience wise and fluttering diction
speaking honey near hope to filaments imparted.
This was imagined. Or at least an attempt to read
through the fissures of a voice to get behind the dial
and into the works, to see how there might be arcadian
observations in sudden flights above the trees, friction
between concepts, black versions nestling towards night
and the barn-owl sailing towards me. Always a climb, a
dying ash back by that hedge, hips and sloes got
in heavy weather up there to wet the lake as birds darted.
Some kind of fiction then. Clouded air for a while
puffing thought stuff into old frames, like the tradition
of dead generations caressing the eye and backing in fright
from the daylight as woods decay and call faint-hearted
feeble cries to the slipshod act of model camera shot.
All go on ruined each from far to sell from hand to crime, a
loss to us alas in adverts for the last chapters, with obedient
elders smiling in deleted expectation of a right to need.
Past Taste
Respond by larks hum kindly light
tasting of dropped vanilla in a hybrid
field placed to one side fixed into this
attempt to reveal communal minds
to describe really ignorant bubbles
of each perception to surmount
a stroll through the forest within
as for instance friends clearing
access to concept functions and points
that would be free and unbounded
approaches to vision enfolded in
radio waves in spite of space rashly
kind woven through lasting signs
unsounding between each and
over e.g. a cat mutual-hearing humans
from windows posed to provide
instance in essential vision charting
complex far experience manifest
and nettled by unseen bunting chats
once lost from memory as proper
calls reply from twig rebates and must
deepen to remain caught in time
Leaving No Trace
This spiral prank a collared dove’s slight twitch
lost a last twig now hold fast a challenge in hand
to calibrate brash earth so easily lost to pointless
fiction permanent hurt twizzle uncaptured daily
Writers blind as possible disabuse in language
behind the voice solid sound opening to cliché
moments of partial meat around lace obsession
over wallpaper stubs that appear back at the tether
Of wood-tongue slipway refusal long in reverse
even so, and recently driven off that piece of land
leaving what goes real to speak of paradise or
some woodland grudge posture claiming the right
To it. Little meaning of their own dogs what they
think they say, disarray in the ear if it fails to cosset
our long wake sense as after supper defiance breath
shapes what leaves nothing but a footprint everywhere
Of Denser Things
It was the latch to an extent not shadowed now
gelid light valley leaves moss and lichen reticent
a ravenous montage echo ritual, food for pattern
recognition software in hands growing up against
parallel future circumstance caved in for partial
smudged windows down two points on human life.
Left out stacks observe banded material walls
wood strips imagined desires the implausible view
bound in compass flash full screen tongs as if only
current hopeful appetite would shun such solidity,
a norm-busting moment of death-watch artery in
vetiver image translation reproachful. Gasp impulse
radical to gnarled film gesticulation memory shivering
then suffering made up of tracts of threat thread
to shift what satisfaction might engorge the present day
after day, its steamy edges blue sticky and intolerable.
Ian Patterson’s most recent books are Bound To Be (Equipage, 2017), Marsh Air (Equipage, 2020), 5 Poems from Home James (Earthbound Poetry Series, 2020), To Account For (forthcoming, Face Press, 2021). He lives in Suffolk.
Copyright © 2021 by Ian Pattersonr, 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.
