FANZINE

AUBADE

for Tom Raworth

Split light, densely unequivocal
Some sick in the cereal

Puffy in the cot
Fat in the artery

Eyeless we bevel 
Our own extraction pads

Against the spleens
Strewn in the corridor

Some would wish
For less all the time.




Love Poem

O! To be in it so in it that throughout
The curvature of the body each of each
Cell trembles within an immaculate breath.
Dirtied fingers pulse their own tips
Sweet to lack these unsavoury thoughts
Slip through the trellis of palms, arms
Necks and unassailable dreams of
Momentary happiness, fragmentary
Air of that snatched and stolen,
Dig the thrown irreverent garden,
Ciphered ink of the pang scratch
Return trinket of criminal excess
Fictive granted to the bound
Less limits so love’s law the transgress
Hot buttock in pinker truck
In love’s work the genitive oblates 
That this particular reinscribes
As the capture of fantasy’s own
Demarcation of property rites
I’ve been half in love with love
Tethered to half this death
But every possession is marked
By its own undoing, this giving
Without being given that within
We stand in love to fall so trying
To fall whilst slipping not to stand
The complications of having and giving
Of being had to the given:
Love’s gerundial at the interim of ethics
& the imago, we capture our best
For the worst, trying to untie the making
Of better from the forbidden, so biding,
A tryst in neuter of the fantasy of genitalia
A currency of bitter failure and damage,
It’s the idea of the you that must breach
To you through what it makes in the I, 
If everyone in the world could give me
What I wanted, I would no longer be 
That pitted against the every one, so nulled, 
The ligative loosens against the tightening
So refuse cuffing against yr wish, 
In sprung the new season now
Throw all the jailor’s keys in the lake,
Dream to breach the dream’s versus
Of un-conditioning the conditional 
So excess as a stem of what is (im)possible
Now flowered so crushed to real   
And burst open the cell walls against 
This auto-immunology of common feeling.




Four Short Lyrics

I

The unfurling assonance
Of verbiage,
Impossible solace
In the age of
Tender gardening,
Trowel furrows 
A knot wedded
Fingers in disarray
We clamour pains
Don’t open I want
You just     on hold
A fire licking the
Edges of foreclosure

II

It is warm on the porch. 
The sun sets, and I, 
Having little else,
An addiction to 
intensity, a spark thrown 
Out, denying its own,
Imagine a desire 
Scatter it around. 
O words, 
Is that to be, a man 
These garlands of feelings, thought Vesuvius, 
But rather more a belch. 
Small birds 
Fly out our wounds.

III

Readily, to will to unfreeze the blood
	I set myself a side and lay next to it
Sleeping in somewhat of a ditch full of shit and potpourri
	smell the drains 
And the requisite legwork
Of crawling up the leaky pipe of the heart
Burdened by a fantasy that begets itself.


IV

I am out of love with time
Its joints lay heavily on mine
There are threads, bows, stitches
That carry it
Straining at the seams,
When they swing
Which way
	       do they break?

——————–

_{Ed Luker is a poet and writer based in London. He is finishing a PhD on the poetry of JH Prynne. He organises the sporadic reading series RIVET. He is currently seeking a publisher for his latest chapbook ‘Compound Out the Fractured World’. You can see his work at www.edluker.co.uk.}