the children are insufficiently proficient at always
happy, thus accused of ingratitude
for obligatory existence
they carry a yoke on their shoulders
binding them tight to diverse
expectations they themselves
never as such expected yet. getting married,
getting happy, getting dead; they have absences
and homeless ghosts instead
Lares and Penates are often frightful
liars, children are inclined to have time
inside them, that's their existential
predicament, they do not need
mythologies or any compulsory
sexualities, all the obvious ontological
deviancies, incorrect attributions of being
or non-being; they know things
by the natural light, they have instincts
and an index to assess what bliss is;
they are competent actors and already
independent living things. if they slice
their own skinny juvenile skin then i say
more power to their elbows. there are huge holes
in all your stories and they really show:
these children know
we left memories in a womb
like fingers in a coffin, confined
their obstinate eternity in gone
god's coffers, the excessive
expense of death
before this exiguous body;
absences, madness and poverty
just a ghoul dropping his fingers
in the honest dust, memories
and wombs and love,
nothing is too much
this was the song of the presumptive suicides,
a reedy wind under a pine tree
whispering the secrets of life
but lying about time,
because time lies outside the heart of life.
they waited with a forgotten sense of memory,
and they tried to be blind when joy jumped
sudden in a spring sky. they said
“now it is nighttime, now we are not alive.”
this was the song of the presumptive suicides,
they had forgotten to live, and now
they forget to die
here the island stands
shrouded in gray monastic
rectitude, like a madman
whipped by a wind
to cure him
the storm touches us
with busy fingers
pushing suns
to oblivion,
and tying down
the children in us
that breezes once
loved. Pan is insanity
but he lives in sun's heat
and dreams
under Mediterranean trees.
this wind that whips
us here is rage, hate and pain,
swallowed shallow inhumanity
coming again
but here this island stands,
a lucky stoic monk indifferent
to suffering and water
and clothes or other adiaphora,
he is alone
and he is our home
this is the madness just behind the face of a day,
like a frantic body confined in a coffin
mistaken for a corpse,
for something missing;
though this is not wood but exiguous
skin at which the fingers of memory
tickle. childish suicide
is seldom tidy,
they tend to leave great crates of falling
and false assumptions stacked inside them,
so here it comes again,
anxiety in us ascending to the flesh
it considers heaven, bruised and
connective hearts
breaking down. here within potent
Pan screams need because it is summer
somewhere and minds are cooking
behind blind eyes in the sun, because
eternity is terribly temporary, and it must be
somewhere that madness starts.
how about skin that's not lost often enough,
how about anxiously permanent hearts
in forgotten coffins?
how about nothing?
David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there on an island in a large lake called Mälaren, very near to Stockholm, with a woman, cats, kittens, and a couple of dogs. He has a BA in History from Balliol, Oxford, and an MA in philosophy (taken much later and much more seriously studied for) from Stockholm. This is just one of the things that makes him so boring. Up to date details of many zine publications and several available books and chapbooks, including three print full lengths, a few print chapbooks, and a free electronic chapbook, are at his blog at http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com.
ISSUE:
S P R I N G
2011
THE NEW
RULES OF
W R I T I N G
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