Joe Luna: Two Songs
Faith / Star
Turpentine on star court
phasing like
a stuck gazelle
the lyrical venn particular
to my song
of wanton pulse,
the blessed mark
I ask for this each
morning
a cigarette
for breakfast
Clapped in wondrous neo
sincerity trills
my darling goes
outside at night & goes
to sleep my
baby shocked &
awed by death
that’s firm abated
selfhood
happy that
relays survival
Vigorous the period
of ex existence
then would fall
towards me song of arse of beauty
fashioned on
the sly emotional
ataxia
security the great
and landlocked
portal stands
accomplished
Night for now so gorgeous
as I track
relentlessly
a cheap faith sectioned by
its moral quiver
ruthless beating
heart’s
desire to, tending
every parcel
pucker safely
at a snip
Erato
Most of all I want to be
a different person
more like you
said beneath the brand flopping
newly precious
archetypal bitch-slap
fassy muse-shaped
error you: final level
headed love
spills out
of all my ears
We deafeningly need to be chorus
in love, with, you
finessed the world in
imitable life retains a brazen
moonlit cunt
from which derives
the human a
capella broadway
asterisk
we must
of bullshit light
be furiously fond
De-natured to the same mass bracket
to ascend reversed
Goldstein hold
still I, hold, still I got you down
following bilateral
hypoplastic
Cupid’s bar
coded fires lunge at grace
full reason
to repair
cleft lips
The best truth which from the window
slips unaccompanied
obvious night
strangely now inhabit me for real;
collecting songs
of wild pulse
to counteract
what yet aligning tries,
like the universe,
to keep
us in tandem
reel-to-reel
Three Poems from Some Questions on the Cultural Revolution
Alistair Noon
Some Questions on the Cultural Revolution
Which way up should I hold
this tube of clear liquid, red stars,
and tumbling, miniature tinsel?
Photons alter their patterns,
like auras about a Great Pilot’s head.
If I shake this fuselage,
the stars disperse. In the crash
that brought down the traitor
did the cabin door wrench loose,
or was it left unlatched?
Particles chorus and dance:
a touch, they reform; a tap
and the statue’s face is smashed
on the teenagers’ own Long March.
Made in France. The stars
remingle and flash.
Conversation with Professor Smirnitsky
Face me across our compartment and feed me
your cold potatoes and pickled eggs.
The landscape’s a Tolstoy, best read at speed.
To talk with you is to exercise my legs.
I have used your 55,000 entries
to understand poets, post and prose,
to follow Bulgakov up to the sentence
It was the severed head of Berlioz.
In the exploration of new minerals,
I have used you for The Truth surrounding
the sale of communal flats in Kaliningrad.
As the headwords fly from your mouth,
they dangle a string of chemical phrases,
the atoms adhering into molecules.
Your gold lettering fades and fades,
but the black binding somehow stays glued.
How is the work on the editorial commission
where you pluck double bass in a black quartet
of my two notebooks and Mandelstam’s fission
of words, those instruments with no frets?
I think I can hear my language changing,
along the iron framework of the bridge
across the Volga that the team start repainting
before they have even finished.
The Written Complaint
Oh Lord, now let thy servant depart
As I wait for the train to leave
from Frankfurt’s giant iron arches
where bright green letters hallow insurance,
as I wait for the towers to recede –
those bar charts of metal and stone,
copse pumped up with growth hormones,
the treetops high above the forest floor
where small creatures urinate, and the injured
fumble the pavement for syringes –
as the delay grows ever longer,
the announcements ever sorrier,
as my emails breed, and I think
of my to-do lists left alone at home,
oh may some round of croissants come
that I might leave on a full stomach.
Some Questions on the Cultural Revolution
Which way up should I hold
this tube of clear liquid, red stars,
and tumbling, miniature tinsel?
Photons alter their patterns,
like auras about a Great Pilot’s head.
If I shake this fuselage,
the stars disperse. In the crash
that brought down the traitor
did the cabin door wrench loose,
or was it left unlatched?
Particles chorus and dance:
a touch, they reform; a tap
and the statue’s face is smashed
on the teenagers’ own Long March.
Made in France. The stars
remingle and flash.
Conversation with Professor Smirnitsky
Face me across our compartment and feed me
your cold potatoes and pickled eggs.
The landscape’s a Tolstoy, best read at speed.
To talk with you is to exercise my legs.
I have used your 55,000 entries
to understand poets, post and prose,
to follow Bulgakov up to the sentence
It was the severed head of Berlioz.
In the exploration of new minerals,
I have used you for The Truth surrounding
the sale of communal flats in Kaliningrad.
As the headwords fly from your mouth,
they dangle a string of chemical phrases,
the atoms adhering into molecules.
Your gold lettering fades and fades,
but the black binding somehow stays glued.
How is the work on the editorial commission
where you pluck double bass in a black quartet
of my two notebooks and Mandelstam’s fission
of words, those instruments with no frets?
I think I can hear my language changing,
along the iron framework of the bridge
across the Volga that the team start repainting
before they have even finished.
The Written Complaint
Oh Lord, now let thy servant depart
As I wait for the train to leave
from Frankfurt’s giant iron arches
where bright green letters hallow insurance,
as I wait for the towers to recede –
those bar charts of metal and stone,
copse pumped up with growth hormones,
the treetops high above the forest floor
where small creatures urinate, and the injured
fumble the pavement for syringes –
as the delay grows ever longer,
the announcements ever sorrier,
as my emails breed, and I think
of my to-do lists left alone at home,
oh may some round of croissants come
that I might leave on a full stomach.