Poetry by David McLean

Five poems
by David McLean


come evening

evening and night come now
and fall over us, their dark
we are, the dark star planted
in this factitious firmament
trembling ugly beauty like
those points of exoteric light

God gives His younger-souled children,
for man is old here and doleful wears
his years low-hung to ground,
ramming stallion that man am
where words come and seem to replace
this other “i” is, that they actually make

from nothing, the circle Hermes breaks into
bootstrapping us up to love and
auto-affective speech that touches us
with a touching trust in these lexically
elective affinities, raped cognates
that break the interpretative circle and chase mates

in turn, the mystic Wyrms eroding
poems. just as we do not see the sun
but with it, a father may not write of his
children, i do not know a mother’s love

never having encountered one uncoutered
with a deep need for vicarious replication

but i imagine that they are not different
or else terrible liars. Nunc dimittis.
i have never mentioned my child before
but almost just did in this. words
are strange things, God wot!
sometimes we understand, other times not.

+++++++++++++++++++

she’s lost control, again

she’s lost control
because love’s insistent kitchen
was inaccessible behind a sheer wall
of regret and frightened her father said

she’s lost control
today’s displacement meaning
tidy life uncoiled here a while
at least, devils feast

she’s lost control
of the rhythm blood beating neat
that her eyes are read and dead
as heaven’s letting, her eyes she said

she’s lost control
because the sun. because nothing
is, all of this, and panic remembers
her dismembering, because she’s young

she’s lost control
because God retreats today
and hides sly his face that Mary veiled
as Isis is, this cross too big for us as love

she’s lost control
because agnostos theos over us
demands her known gnosis
this worm-eaten crucifix is bliss

she’s lost control again
because this miss
just is

+++++++++++++++++++++

a line

i snorted a line of memory today
for us, oblivion,
the line i looked at with concupiscent eyes,
look, it’s gone and love,
oblivion i snorted a line of hope,
betimes, and it lied where it lay
luscious on the minds mirror
its meaning missing
the lovely drug a summer was
once, though now i leave it to the scum
and their scummy waters insolent as a dog’s
cum, scum-sucking fucks, no fun
i snorted a line of memory today,
seventies and eighties, the finest lines
chopped on the mindful mirror we loved then,
forgotten friends, for memory mistried me
in the courts of that seedy history –
i tried to snort memory today but my stash was gone
and this life is much too long

++++++++++++++++++++

engaging destiny

and everybody engages their dirty destiny
daily, hours you wander tactile meaning
groping love from some mother's cupboard
as were she this mourning travesty
painted puerile on the default face of day
faulting night's rings you laid on the water
defacing nothing that pristine lies
inside, our lack God nourishes
disabled the black sun
referred back to History's cowardice
living bitches' unlying why
day's derogation interrogated remains
a (piano) pain pissy placebo

unchanged

+++++++++++++++++++++

high windows revisited

and you were right
as always, they fuck a lot
but cut themselves, and think
Angst something other than mild anxiety

for paradise is earned, works with faith
not just the reluctant touch of God
in these unaesthetic little lives, the ties that bind
shit still hold them bondsmen outside the light.

and we who lived your imagined paradise,
deceived and self-deceiving, after three years
or so i heard, we say "that'll be the life
eternal" instead; for we sweat in the dark again

over hell, and suspicious resurrection
in brittle bodies, and will our cats come back
as well? free as birds we are and dark
starting heart

for the glass still imprisons that sun it understands
so well, casts us sudden into the welkin blue
unreflective, where nothing is and this everywhere,
the void air we breathe may it hold the endless night,
life


Author bio:

David McLean was born in Wales though he has lived Sweden since 1987. As of August 2007, he has poems in about eighty issues of 69 magazines and e-zines. In September 2007 he is "poet in residence" at Poet's Letter and in August 2008 "centre stage poet" in Decanto. Poems are online at such sites as Zygote in My Coffee, Erbacce, Sein und Werden, Venereal Kittens, Mad Swirl, Lit Circus and Gold Dust. More information is online at his MySpace page and at the Hecale portal.