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Infectious Disease and Cattle & other poems

By Dave Spittle.

Infectious Disease and Cattle

sin richter key ask her hand in marriage last leg of a larger race for anatomy me pointillism bled into everyone as horses describe a field and seconds a minute will pixelate bright catalogues of colour flatten out the bristling of incidents into a vast print of indistinguishable shapes as seen from space so that a metropolis is now a wayward smudge and the infidelity that tore his life from theirs is a stage direction like any other hovering above its own body and bored with the anonymity of such personal distress unfolding a chequered red and white tablecloth and greeting what is left of the family surrendered to boiled eggs too stern to yield but promising so much like a proverb worn in public to impress but beyond that not thought through as her car enters the tunnel and the sound changes

1024 Farben

turn might in twos and threes cobbled climb and eight as if Gaudi dribbled chimney in red dirt and dust commuting anonymously to wing drench of suited somebody next to cool simperings of outside air refreshing quench of pores night bound below 100% cotton and not forgetting Eleanor who had said if she was to be reincarnated as a Yellow Slug then a Chinese proverb might be applicable and yet we all suspected proverbs as laced ways of rewriting fear to market its corners and that her mottled olive back and hump raised saddle with faecal sheen were marbling home to wherever other reincarnations garaged nocturnally limp Limax flavus length-ways bunking blue feathered jays with lost children and haemophiliac remnants of Tudor-style building swamped in clustered rust and such but most schooled dice in eyes and tight rope trellised where 1024 Farben jets in Lego flatscapes surmised by inner opticians from outer as all the king’s horses and all the king’s men puzzled the painting of an egg shell into the learnt dimensions whereby slug or no slug d éjà vu dished up and my grand toiling happenstance was another’s passing face no more or less

The Rosetta Limerick

Life is leant an enema to scout out buried serving tips and deliver from a nest of stars ways to “laugh it off ” put another way we are peanuts in the lobby and some of us have been trodden in and impressed upon the patterned convolutions of infinite carpet which is to say the best analogy would be a small child lifted into the air by a swarm of bees after poking the hive with a stick conversely very few people can tell you what a calorie actually is and yet a large majority of those people live according to its shadow a phenomenon comparable to politics probably in some neatly convenient nutshell of which I know too little to justify or dispute which all equates to a concession that sex is best as a hypothetical proposition more fulfilling in the fantasies of its anticipation than in its happening and so this is my way of asking you to disprove that assertion and reveal a new way to tie tongues without losing face and both dive into the same zero thereby revealing that talking can stop and in its wake procure a space that elucidates nothing as more important than the scuttling need to fill our lives with reason but you are not so easily fooled –
                         What drives you to splutter? I know. You imagine that there is a correlation between speed and persuasion in language. Racing through is to you an experience of communication that asserts itself as urgent to the point of being imminent and so, despite cartwheeling, it blurs into a more arresting culmination than any pace comparatively more conscious of its own vigilance or caution. It is charged with conviction and beats into the words a coasting sensation of buoyancy and even, you hope, meaning. You are to words as the Jesus Lizard is to water. Skipping breathless surface lest you sink. We are all sinking, you need to know that. I think of quicksand, the less you struggle, the more of you that remains impervious to suction. I know that means nothing to you. You have become so used to associating a refraction of light, when water crowns up sliced fans in the instant of contact, with the marker of any and all value that this, this is too laborious to register. Trust me. The moment you pause to turn around, the gulp between brackets and the depth of the lake, neither will be so easily fooled. You will sink.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Spittle is currently completing a PhD on the poetry of John Ashbery in relation to Surrealism at Newcastle University. He has published reviews in Hix Eros and PN Review, and had poetry published in ‘Zone’ magazine, ‘the delinquent’ and ‘Haggard and Halloo’. David has also written the libretti to three operas, performed at various venues around Cardiff and at Hammersmith Studios in London.

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