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.

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