"autonomous gold"

Four poems by Rupert Loydell


Her Flesh Speaks True
after/from Helene Cixous

I want to allude
to a binary system
to similarities
to the couple
to domination

I want to be indebted
to language
to childhood
to the unknown
to a voice that doesn't know itself

I want to write
to the other
to question
to know why
toward song

*

Whatever one selects
there are repercussions.

Purity is only a dream
of uncentred discourse,

a strange object that
speaks in the masculine.

*

Because there is no longer
an object to interpret
I would suggest the wise
give way to delirium.

Between the object
and the subject
the unknown:
booby-trapped silence.

*

We need questioning.
We like uneasiness,
superabundance
and uselessness.

There is always (more
or less) a force that
consists of delights
and violences.

*

There are repercussions:
the divided look
the mirror economy
the sea's churning
the frantic descent

*

Begin to speak.


© Rupert M Loydell



The Greenhouse in Winter

residual subsidy
shaggy arrogate
chicory terminal

kosher cistern
inactive literacy
baldpate dogma

sedition elapse
glaucoma swordtail
adoptive trustee

hillcrest transduction
fallible costume
dihedral arcade

arcane reversion
incomprehension
personal fault

atlantic electorate
hidden bucolic
anthracite pain

orthicon stricture
diagram culture
penultimate glass

glossolalia hobby
mimetic envoy
autonomous gold

electoral purgation
crematory hideout
wanting to kiss your neck


© Rupert M Loydell



Running Away From the Clock
for Alan West

"You wouldn't
like it here. Go elsewhere. One person's
Torrola is another's Sadness-by-the-Sea."
     -- Stephen Dunn, 'Postcard from Torrola' 

Diaries of forgotten happiness,
photographs of the past,
offer presences and dimensions.

Strange world. Because of me
rivers burn and run backwards
shaping our unconscious.

My body is a landscape
of social realities and carbon footprints.
Breathe in the beautiful smog.

Distant relations are my inheritance,
tomorrow's forecast is strikingly clear:
a collaborative elegy until we meet again.

Hundred-year-old trees are in bloom.
Don't give up the ghost, the life or work,
try and stay under the influence.

New galaxies form like droplets,
mirror universe pulls back the shade
(enjambment from heat to sub-zero).

Nomad words, spiral lands:
an oath between trees & rocks,
empires and environments,

a bottleneck of evolution
sewn together with sinew and string,
a project of total fiction.

The many-voiced powers of song
toe the line between irony and piety,
an intimation of divine retribution

at the point where ice meets water.
The machine version of death
is the forgotten language of light.

The opposite of the body is the world.
Here come the young and digital;
sleep is running away from the clock.

© Rupert M Loydell



The Hard Sell
for & from Peter Dent

Narrative is made from melted moments,
broken glass from forgotten windows.
If you join today, confusion and striation
will be the mind's snowstorm. More cursing
and you will render time null and void,
without story or semblance of a future;
it will be difficult to set off down the road.

If you associate misconduct with discovery,
we will include a ready reckoner with
the chance to leap from a high place
of our choice. Your life may depend on it,
so tell us if you have a nomadic tendency
or ever go out looking for intensity.
Don't forget to let the reader imagine

and forget about total system failure.
Just stay in touch and try to remember
how great the boom in nostalgia was.
The last time grace erupted, it was
only a draft version, so make sure
you always have a drink in hand
and send us all your money now.


© Rupert M Loydell