[Dedicated to Austin Osman Spare]

Have pity ! show no pity !
Those eyes that send such shivers
Into my brain and spine : oh let them
Flame like the ancient city
Swallowed up by the sulphurous rivers
When men let angels fret them !

Yea ! let the south wind blow,
And the Turkish banner advance,
And the word go out : No quarter !
But I shall hod thee -so !
While the boys and maidens dance
About the shambles of slaughter !

I know thee who thou art,
The inmost fiend that curlest
Thy vampire tounge about
Earth's corybantic heart,
Hell's warrior that whirlest
The darts of horror and doubt !

Thou knowest me who I am
The inmost soul and saviour
Of man ; what hieroglyph
Of the dragon and the lamb
Shall thou and I engrave here
On Time's inscandescable cliff ?

Look ! in the plished granite,
Black as thy cartouche is with sins,
I read the searing sentence
That blasts the eyes that scan it :
"**** and SET be TWINS."
A fico for repentance !

Ay ! O Son of my mother
That snarled and clawed in her womb
As now we rave in our rapture,
I know thee, I love thee, brother !
Incestuous males that consumes
The light and the life that we capture.

Starve thou the soul of the world,
Brother, as I the body !
Shall we not glut our lust
On these wretches whom Fate hath hurled
To a hell of jesus and shoddy,
Dung and ethics and dust ?

Thou as I art Fate.
Coe then, conquer and kiss me !
Come ! what hinders? Believe me :
This is the thought we await.
The mark is fair ; can you miss me ?

See, how subtly I writhe !
Strange runes and unknown sigils
I trace in the trance that thrills us.
Death ! how lithe, how blithe
Are these male incestuous vigils !
Ah ! this is the spasm that kills us !

Wherefore I solemnly affirm
This twofold Oneness at the term.
Asar on Asi did beget
Horus twin brother unto Set.
Now Set and Horus kiss, to call
The Soul of the Unnatural
Forth from the dusk ; then nature slain
Lets the Beyond be born again.

This weird is of the tongue of Khem,
The Conjuration used of them.
Whoso shall speak it, let him die,
His bowels rotting inwardly,
Save he uncover and caress
The God that lighteth his liesse.

By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
     has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
     it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
     poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
     valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
     out all day that give the building a soul of dreams
     and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care
     for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman
     the way to it?)

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and
     parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and
     sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,
     and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men
     grappling plans of business and questions of women
     in plots of love.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
     earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
     hold together the stone walls and floors.

Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the
     mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an
     architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
     and the press of time running into centuries, play
     on the building inside and out and use it.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid
     in graves where the wind whistles a wild song
     without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes
     and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging
     at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
     layer who went to state's prison for shooting another
     man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the
     end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has
     gone into the stones of the building.)

On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names
     and each name standing for a face written across
     with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving
     ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's
     ease of life.

Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls
     tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from
     corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,
     and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all
     ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of
     the building just the same as the master-men who
     rule the building.

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor
     empties its men and women who go away and eat
     and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and
     all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on
     them.
One by one the floors are emptied... The uniformed
     elevator men are gone. Pails clang... Scrubbers
     work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water
     and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,
     and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling
     miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for
     money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence
     holds... Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor
     and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip
     pockets... Steel safes stand in corners. Money
     is stacked in them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights
     of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of
     red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span
     of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of
     crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars
     and has a soul.

Magical and inspiring
All my heart lies in the tips of my fingers

The memories of where they've been
The hearts they've traced
The skins they've ached to dance against

The language in which they speak
A language in which they are fluent
A language that is foreign and ever adaptive

So much sensory intake
So much motor output
All in the most neglected place

Finger tips left neglected
For actions of rushed intentions

All that is needed is to hod my hand
All that is wanted is a warmth
A fire that won't die when the night gets too cold

I don't need the wind through my hair
I don't to be exhausted by emotion
I just need to feel that my heart can still race

I just want a circulatory high
I want something no money can buy
I want the euphoria that no drug can provide

This poem is about a night out on the beer which almost went horribly
wrong



I put out my hand and touched the face of God,
. . .bit of a surprise, really, I was expecting my Hod.
Lying on the floor, thinking it was my bed,
Coated in *****, face down, arms spread.
I've ****** my trousers, shat my keks,
A natural reaction, to twenty three pints of Becks.
Stumbling through Cambridge, I can't find the Site,
I know it's around here, first left or third right. . .
Crashing through hedges, I've forgot how to walk,
I can't ask for directions, I'm unable to talk.
So, I'll go no further, here I'll sit tight,
Sneak back to the caravan, when dawn sheds her light.

I didn't feel the cold, the damp creeping through,
Best shirt, Purple Chino's and I'm missing a shoe.
It's my dancing outfit, for impressing and posing,
Ideal for the Nightclub, not alfresco dozing.
The temperature plummets, I'm giving it "Big Zeds"
Dreams of warm women and petal-strewn beds,
Breathing gets shorter, body starts to shut down,
I'm sweating buckets, beginning to drown.

Ronnie, the Night-watchman, knows I must be in trouble,
In an hour and a half, I'm due back on the shovel,
To keep the lads happy, with bricks and fresh Pug
And barrows of concrete, poured into trenches I dug.
Under an Elm Tree, thirty yards from the job,
Ronnie catches sight of this prone Northern yob.
He doesn't panic, just yet, he knows what to do,
He's seen it before, when a body turns blue.
Those First-Aid Classes, when he told us he was fishing. . .
Vital signs are checked, I'm in the Recovery Position.
Ron holds my nose, lifts my head off the floor,
. . .then he kissed me , in a way , that I'd never been kissed before.

P-Pacifying storms with a soothing balm
E-Ever subduing the tempest's hod of harm
A-Allaying our minds of the raging alarm
C-Ceasing thunderous sounds with a palm
E-Earth dwellers seek a road to tranquil calm

What is Fetch?
Instinct.
What is Instinct?
Need, desire, want.
To eat, to sleep, to drink, to dance.
To protect, to run, to hide, to fight.
***, Self, Passion, Pride, Power.
To create, to destroy.

What is Fetch?
Memory.
What is Memory?
Past, future, now.
What was known before it was lost.
What will be learned again.
Connections, links, guesses.
The womb.

What is Fetch?
Belief.
What is Belief?
Unconscious, not logical, faith.
Love, hate, desire, repulsion.
We know but we don’t know.
What do we know?

What is Fetch?
Victory.
What is Victory?
Netzach.
Overcoming, conquering, destroying.
Emotions, strong and weak.
Masculine, warrior, fighting.
Protecting, defending, overcoming.

What is Fetch?
Glory.
What is Glory?
Hod.
Embracing, surrendering, comforting.
Rational, understanding.
Feminine, lover, loving.
Overcoming by embracing.
Nurturing, mother, child.

What is Fetch?
Foundation.
What is Foundation?
Yesod.
***, ******, release.
Union, giving, receiving.
Masculine, feminine, together.
One, at one, united.
To fix, to establish, to lay a foundation.
To begin, to appoint, to ordain, to constitute.
To support oneself, to lean, to rest on one's arm.
Heaven and earth, crown and kingdom.
One, at one, united.
***.

What is Fetch?
***.
What is ***?
Power flowing, always changing.
Union, coming together.
Two become one, one is found in two.
Giving and receiving, receiving and giving.
Release.

What is Fetch?
Self.
What is Self?
Looking inward.
Loving who you are.
Standing firm, standing tall.
Self-contained, self-constrained.
Who am I?
Who are you?

What is Fetch?
Passion.
What is Passion?
What you love, what you do.
Giving all to what you love.
Emotions, feelings, strong and weak.
Embrace your feelings, embrace your loves.

What is Fetch?
Pride.
What is Pride?
Confidence, strengths and weaknesses.
Standing tall, standing firm.
Inner strength.
I know who I am.
I know my value.
I am valuable.
You are valuable.

What is Fetch?
Power.
What is Power?
Mana.
Energy pulsing, ever pulsing.
Change, power to change, power to be changed.
Be the change, be changed.
Power flowing, ever changing.
Be the change you want to see in the world.

What is Fetch?
Instinct.
Memory.
Belief.
Victory.
Glory.
Foundation.
***.­
Self.
Passion.
Pride.
Power.

What is Fetch?
Fetch.

“See all those workers digging through that hill?”
The carter asked, there pointing with his whip
While two mismatched old horses lumbered on
Jerking carter and prisoners along the ruts.

An empty church, its now skeletal dome
Open to the dusk, lay somewhat in the way
Of where the rails would lay, just there among
Stray stalks of wheat, from lost and windblown seeds.

One prisoner yawning through his sorrows said
“I wonder why the Czar didn’t send me there
To carve with pick and shovel and barrow and hod
His new technology across the steppes.”

“Too close to Petersburg, and Moscow too,
My lad.  The Czar wants you to labor far,
Far off.  No mischief from you and your books,
Your poems, your nasty little magazines.”

“Oh, carter, is Pushkin unknown to you?
Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoyevsky too?
What stories do you tell your children, then?
Do you teach them to love their Russian letters?”

The carter laughed; he lit his pipe and said
“You intellectuals!  Living in the past!
Education for the 19th century -
That’s what our children need, not your old books.”

“Someday,” the carter mused, “railways everywhere,
And steel will take you where you will be sent.
Electric light will make midday of night
And Russia’s soul will be great big machines!”

“Machines, and louder guns, and better clocks -
All these will make for better men, you’ll see.
You young fellows will live to see it; I won’t,
But what a happy land your Russia will be!”

And the cart rattled on, the horses tired,
Longing for the day’s end, and hay, and rest;
The prisoners made old jokes in laughing rhymes,
Begged ‘baccy from the carter, and wondered.

My thanks to James Stephen for his input on this work.


on the other side
of the path
one yellow flower



early, the crowd came to see the famous arch . laburnum. i came to see the kitchen garden, seeds growing



old words
for things once common
when the things disappeared
the words went with them



some words remain remembered;
scullery, coal scuttle, hod,
broom.

that is yellow.



have a vacuum for
most things
broom is for incidentals,
crevices, or when I'm lazy
'bout getting vacuum out

broom is red
with matching dustpan



i have a vacuum
there is nothing there.

the broom is for

the garden
mainly

or elsewhere for smelling like coconut



sweep your garden ?



slate bits

came from gloddfa ganol....quarry in blaenau.

front yard. leaves fall.





leaves here falling too
a tree here a tree there
so far
soon it will be
all of them together

a collective shed

next 6 months
nothing but bare branches

**

these are the falling days.

when i get older
i will have a small flat
on Rashi pinat Chernichovsky,
with a ******* dog
in a red bandanna,
named Sabaka.
on hot August nights
we will walk to the beach,
i will watch the waves
and Sabaka will watch me,
smiling.

Or may be
I will buy a house in Ein Hod
With a stone fence
And a forged gate
And neglected garden.
I will feed four cats
Three mine and one
That always refuses to come in.
I will water my two roses
One red one white of course.
And take aimless walks
Every morning.

in October and January
i will scavenge through the little shops
for peculiar things
that i will bring
to faraway countries
where i'm needed.

and in March and September
i will take a taxi to the airport
to hug that special person
i will be listening to
and talking to
over a cup of coffee
that will last a week.

but the rest of the year
is silence.

some words remain remembered;

scullery, coal scuttle, hod,

broom.

that is yellow.



sbm.