Five themed poems by David McLean

Five poems
by David McLean
Theme: Death, dust, nothing

opium, ancient heaven

the taste of opium was Iran in your mouth
for real, though you only saw Persia
on the television, seeing from far away
in two languages, as though grammar

were fundamentally wrong, though we vomit
it effortlessly, Tellus vomit cadavera and all
that, words were here, dead and absurd as the
world that worlds around us, the whirl of earth,

of absurd words in the head better than tripping,
really, so casual, the poppies were dreaming in their
dreamless breeze when they grew these drops
of heaven, dripping their tarry darkness

that tore us apart and smashed the sickness
i carried, and carry like a corpse of love
inside me, smashed it apart to drops of heaven
again, to stars, smashed me to darkness

and smashed the darkness apart, to sullen fucking stars
like the asterisk of sadness is the womb that writhes expulsion,
the feisty fetus thriving on the drugs, the oblivion
the meanness of the median good, good God, and all the fucking,

all the fucking love, just an everyday heaven,
just a drug we love.

#####################

the dust that

the dust that flows through time’s ancient flue
is the desolate smoke that shall grow feverish

over her pyre, the absence we desire in the sought
suffering, crashing through the gray layers

time flows thus over us, Herculaneum’s
pornograffiti graphic as the love of
that unclipped someone worn like an

overcoat. and nobody knows how the dead
centurion’s fingers felt or whether

he sang as he pissed, though i
assume he did and steam was his

dead reflection, that the love is the streaming
meaning that emanates from the one,

in some Plotinian sublimation,
where the diseased ugliness crumbles

faces to nothing, intoxicating wait
that weighs our cold shoulders

and stumbles us through our loves and
nothing.

the grayness of days effacing us, they are
coming, drumming fingers lust us

to the coming, nothing thus,
not even love, not even loveless

dust

====================

his shorn morning reborn

and time is this shoddy glory
that recapitulates the seeming

reasons and the propulsion through
nothing that a man is, the dance

of fingers playing us as instruments,
broken reeds that dream ourselves

and the health that is death,
when we are ourselves and dead,

the same as everyone else

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

requiem for nothing

night is a requiem for nothing,
and nature’s indifference arouses me.
in a cosmos so cold and lovely that nothing is
significant, one chooses distractedly the
meaning to write each night over the thin
and unwanted skin, where anything
can be traced to waste another
day, we are just another lover that falls dead
to history and deaf to memory,
pissy mistress memory, the whore who
screams nothing to me,
for all that matters is the sacrifice
and the blood, the darkness
and the night, not the god, or his hire-purchase wife
the pain and not the life, the prayer
from nothing
to nothing
by no one

absence rapes a day
ticklish as a tumor,
ungainly potato,
and cocaine tastes as pointless
as cough lozenges

the nonentity and oblivion
round cancer’s coming corner
is what gets me going,
not to give a flying fuck
about the death and the
silence, that sort of stuff, death’s slimy silence and
the dead silenced life that shall rot in the eternal
night, just like tonight. for stained glass windows
rim a fish tank for cowards and
hypocrites. the sun under which i stand
is black, black as the heart of a perfectly
normal man, and it cares nothing nor does it not
care, the question has never arisen in its insentient
oblivion. nature is not a whore,
just boring in her whoredom, and the death
that erects us, choking
our loves, is not worth mourning, a man is a
sad boring story and words are
cripples, they do not matter, they are not
the sort of things that possess more than
token significance, what matters is mostly
gloatingly sexually inflected, amusing
infections and drugs (are fun while it lasts)
and needles and flaming razors and nipples,
just clits and pricks and beer and shit –
just that sort of thing is significant,
Miss

--------------------

hungry as a mirror

the mirror is famished,
and its ugly muzzle bloodied
round the razor's teeth
that reach for me.

it is memory and a death
where it waits,
there are no flowers cremated
on its stinking funereal breath.

it reflects nothing from this
vacuum we live in. the plenum that
fills it is its fucking torture
eternal, plenary pain

today playing over its surface,
like stones standing still
while waves move like slatterns
dirtying a world with motion's absurdity.

the mirror's murder is rejection.
its worlds fall from my clumsy
fingers. love could not retain
them, and no face remains

over my fleshless core,
my whorish skull that mocks
the blood that washes and feeds it,
its futile love

just dust

Author bio:


David McLean has an e-chapbook at Why Vandalism?, and a chapbook on sale at Erbacce Press at Erbacce Press. He has a full length poetry collection forthcoming at Whistling Shade Press out in May 2008. He has a second full length due out from d/e/a/d/b/e/a/t/ press later this year. Their details are at Deadbeat Press. There are round 500 poems now in, or forthcoming in, just over 210 magazines online and/or in print. Details are at his blog at Mourning Abortion.

Author announcement:

News for poetry lovers is that a new press has opened in the USA called d/e/a/db/e/a/t press. It's masterminded by Jack Henry, poet, who has a chapbook available there, and reviewed in this issue of Clockwise Cat by our astute and sexy contributor David McLean, who himself has a collection of poetry forthcoming with them later this year, called he knows not what as yet. Rob Plath, who has also featured in these pages and tried to touch angels inappropriately in a vision of heaven, has a memoir forthcoming later. Details of their whole schedule are at Deadbeat Press.