Four themed poems by David McLean

Four poems
by David McLean


the ash and the fig

if the mountain ash consoles the fig today
it is from happiness; for the sun that licks
the land like a clitoris prefigures, perhaps,
a forgiveness we never deserved,
a love we never earned

and one day even we shall be reach our Lethe,
after life has forgotten us and remitted
our torture for some naked oblivion, for a better
forever then, that God’s Mary remember you and me
dismembered, amnesia granted us love once,

since our childhoods were our purgatory already
that in part absolve anything a dream
commits by way of sin, the sea of forgiveness
is shallow enough that nothing hide
beneath its surface.

tomorrow we lay hope and memory away,
two puerile Pandora’s boxes with only rings
in, though we listen with one ear for the bells
that sing their already forgetful
song, the sunny Catholic bells that sing

that now love is comatose, God knows,
every sorrow sung, every gray day
done, sweet nothingness that comes
black as the sun, eternity’s ring that comes
is love

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

the moral walk

the moral walk is done
thus, flat-footed coppers
in corpse’s mouth,
waiting to hitch the bitch
Charon’s dingy dinghy here,
whose is that terrible rowing
towards God,

not our fingers whoring
with the oars,
clumsy as the cocks that love
nothing, crowing day-break again
when the crow caws for us his lust
and cow-like we shall lie there,
their bovine hope eternal
in the dust,

we come to our deaths
like cum on some stomach,
with dreams wrapped around us
and doff day’s daft druggy coats
where we buttoned lusts, in brazen
convention we loutishly flouted
once, placid retention of some
via media, but skinny Him we come to
via negativa forgets this;

days dressed in painstaking potential
like a deferential daisy that comes to
nothing in the end, the ineradicable
trace of faces erased like bad habits
wasted love; just moving about
terrible as an army with banners, or a gang of
terrapins in this fishy tank,
and we thank it like wankers - this earth
that replaces the meaningless flesh with words
equally absurd

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

de trop

cogitation should still be
co-agitare sometimes,
extending active
agitation again
to the adequation
that stole aletheia,
today, truth is not mystic
knowing but is
the mysticism of the
twisted minute
that fucks us up

the representation is
irrelevant and everything,
the levity is the light
that reflects
us, motherfucker, as it
dies in the evening like
life crucified without
patient an-aesthesis

and the kindness of Dog
fixes us while we are
still sleeping Kant's
dogmatic nightmare
where we remember that
Bertrand Russell, bitching
about this, was not only
sleeping, but actually
snoring, much further
out that he thought
and not waving but
wanking

everything for Descartes
was a cogitation, like Dudley
Moore putting his foot on
the pavement and getting an
erection. the horn that
the lips of God blew is
huge and hairy today and
mourns memory of is
morning when Greeks knew
the tree's pain under Panic's
slovenly sun, and mid-day
night was better than
heaven

all effecting is self-
effecting, and all
affection is auto
-affection, fourth fucking
stretched dimension that
counts us older holding
nothing

only re-praesentatio is
reality, and without our
seeing it is not true
that there are trees,
but in the heaven earth
is when we are dead
so many trees there
be

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

if there

if there is a god he shudders
with self hatred and disgust
and he hurts himself in us,
if he is supposed to be
posited there in this loveless
vessel we are, the frail arms
of a twelve year old who takes
the razor and drags its plough
through her unresisting
meat, for she refuses to
whore herself to his
stinking belief, the crime
of masturbatory faith, insanity
that blazes a comet of pain
she's rather proud of in
her dying sky, and singes
the sinful skin

the remarkably armed frolicsome
harm she does charms us, really,
the delicate tracery of blood is
quite lovely, better than night's
starry tapestry is the collage
she makes herself, her suffering
Sunday, the metal tastes sweet
injury and the resourceful souls
of children, one day she shall
grow to know the taste of mouthed
muzzle, and i say "good for her!" -

the world is a licentious faggot god's
logos that allows the shuddering
cowardice of whorish gods that
have forgotten us, lithely loathsome
rapists, Whitmanesque kiddy-
twiddlers and light's all night
sodomites, this girl she knows
where all the time goes -
more power to her elbow!


Author bio:

David McLean was born in Wales in 1960 though he's lived in Sweden since 1987. He's been submitting seriously for about a year and, as of the end of October 2007, has round 350 poems in, or accepted by, 159 magazines online or in print. A chapbook “a hunger for mourning” is available from Erbacce press and Lulu at http://www.lulu.com/content/1338495. More information at David McLean MySpace and in his blog at Mourning Abortion, where there are links to various online publications.