The Book Of Ting-Yin

First Stirrings

The trick I failed to pull tonight
Is caring about you less,
Like petroleum to gelignite,
I couldn't let love rest.

You are so much,
I have a hunch,
It's more than mutual.

Ear to conch,
A foreign conch,
They say we're beautiful.

Oh this fidgety, mundane life,
Who's my guarantor?
Surely not the pecking, hybrid damsels at my wings,
In whose musk I bathe, in whose cheap toiletries
I rustle for precious stones.

Lesson One:

I'm allowed to love. I'm allowed to be loved.
The tips of stalactites and stalagmites may meet,
Tongues on the night, erogenous, supple, flexing,
Absence making self-murder out of might.

How love blinds one to the borders of our illusory island.
How, in love, death seems a continent away to a blight-stricken landlocked naif.
How invective seems softened and stifled and sentences stray
As the beacon of his being orphans all agenda.

How, infatuated, I, brigadier, spaniel, squadron, collapse aghast at my capacity
To feel such splendour in such ways and nooks and gullies and slaughter such I've never glimpsed.
How insular have been my angled utterances prior to this ablution of my sweetened dereliction.
How I love him. Break the meter. I love him. Measure the breath. How do I love him?
Wholly, Holy, Hold me, Fix me like charcoal on a board.
I take flight from bald stasis when gifted, festooned with the grace-lit feathers of your love.

You stir, stiffen, steal and sustain.
Always.



The Wise Wind Within

Venus is bursting through mesmerized hearts who once grave may confessions of love now impart,
With scars on their hands, suckers lambasting plans, faith abound,
Angels with wounds that were wrought in the womb offer vigils, sobering, sure,
Down empty corridors And I know who they're...

Four knackered horses make pace along the prom, draw a chariot of chance with a reckless aplomb,
In search for the elder whom, untimely snatched, makes no sound.
Demons make bed in the absent one's head, coaxing visions, rabid, raw,
Of geldings, Squires and Whores and I know which they...

Are you my lover, my half-that-is-other, my steed, or none of the above?
Are you just there, to reciprocate care, which may sometimes just constitute love
In the eyes of one who desires it so...

Much has been said of the books that I've read, of the songs that I write, that I sing.
Less has been uttered of the mutterings and mumblings within.
Loneliness, crippling loneliness makes the mirror vomit hordes
Of arbitrary laws, and I know they're no

Goodness prevails over all of these ails, and I feel no remorse about words,
But where is the horse that inspired the rampage of the herd?
Angels and demons I pray that thee leave us to marry our resolve,
As one we may evolve to transcend what we

Aren't I bemoaning an abstracted loneliness? Aren't I forgetting to smile?
Are you and aren't you and can and can't I awhile,
Be content in the love that we've lent,
In the knowledge that it's far from spent,

I'll endeavour forever to lie amongst the heather, my heart beating sturdy and sure,
The ground at my feet I can weather the sleet in my eyes,
And this vow now demands a reprise...
...As I know the wind within is wise.


Statement of Intent in His Absence

I

Oh ye sick-lobbing seraphim of squalor, tossing roulette for crabs at the slaughterhouse,
Pushing desire around a cartographer's dumb thorax, like butter 'round a wok,
Drag me through the sieve of time and rinse me through the pores into now, where I throw
A shape-defining sheet over my neuroses, like an interrupted hard-on through teen duvet.

Oh grievous reticule of the eye, whose gizzard, drunk on idiocy spat blood into a porcelain sink,
Will my appetites lay caesura to my death sentence with any more surety than a machete's hack?
My chest an antiquarian cage whose captives stammer in tinfoil corsets, crepe paper caskets,
Tracing the outline of a real, beating heart, pumping, with relief, my genetic code, once more.

II

Oh my self! - murderer of mystique with a swine's scent for the truffle 'neath the tautest twilights,
Kicking this bitch called 'love', like blotting paper across a vast lake, elastoplast-ing the ozone hole.
Still, be sure, be sure, my wingspan is your rope bridge. What I love about loving is how uncertain
That I've always loved through such blistered vistas I am and remain.

Oh shit-kicking fibres of need, coiled into this coppiced font of craving: the brush of corpuscle,
Upon corpuscle, sweat's montage of marrow and this marriage of electrodes, fierce-burning.
I'll wrestle the Osmotic Bleed to the floor and seize back the crinkled aunts of my fingertips,
So as I may be the charming and cretinous fuck-up for whom you fell, instead of a different one.


Song For a Rainy Day

For six days full the Death Grimace tore at my skull,
With the fervour of barnacles goring a sullen hull,
And on the seventh day,
I either lifted the veil or,
Jilted the jailor, and quick-
Wilted, the bloomed onyx death-eater, my heart full.

Ah, the Death Grimace, for no poor cunt a smile,
The heart a four-chambered anchor,
North, dismay, East, dissent, South, despondency, East,
Distended self-import,
The gut-ego of a psychical eating disorder,
Flayed to marinate in the guilt of piteous introspection.

The Death Grimace, an ally when ailing inside,
No fucker wants on the street to intervene
With a face set like that of the lumen at the bed of the Styx.
Where once buoyant, beaming, a pith-less head-sheath rides
Like a yolk, on vine-strangulated shoulders,
An unabashed parody of pain's proud prowess.

Death Grimace, mercifully, has fucked off,
But in his wake, an opiate senselessness,
A gushing absence; the pallbearer's mask
Put coyly away in the emotional toy-chest
Until another incident masquerading as an event
Worthy of a response, occurs.


In the Conference Hall.

Sirens swimming about my head,
Making a voodoo doll from wine and bread.
High-time I got a razor to my head, like a monk.

Taking the wafer of shame upon my tongue,
Chirruping idly an arbitrary song,
Of cardboard guilt, choke it back, move along, how punk.

In dream, contrive essential vows with zephyrs, fauns,
In sweat is dislodged fever come the dawn,
So as my shackles shrunken in the morn, I rise, unsunk.


Station Gates

And slam-dunked into this tube of flesh like canned tuna,
I feel like I'm condescending to a severed neck stump,
Patting the cauterized stump-end in onanistic strokes
Like one would nurse awkwardly a grieving relative.

It'll be an OBE if I don't rape you at the station gates.



Schizoneiric

Last night in the fever cubicle I witnessed...
My childhood face for the first time since I wore it,
The same smile, the same hair, the same eyes,
Last glimpsed in the mirror when I bore them.

A high-five across decades -
'When sporting this tiny, unrefined mask,
Did I ever chance upon an oracular glance into
The face I now purport to call my own?' I ask.

In the fever cubicle, a dialogue entranced,
Amassing decades of enquiry in that glance -
Harbouring the same hopes and hypochondria? Check.
Ditto the constancy of craving for clarity.

Lucidity wears a nightgown in my dream,
Is this maturity thing a linear steal,
Or a Russian doll structure whose seams,
Are relinquished only in dreams' parochial heal?

Lucy stalks the corridors, hanging,
Her gown of night-spun muslin,
Loosely. White light crackles,
In the waking mist – her husband.

Seams peeled back like tape,
Onto whose history my boy face is etched.
Dreams engorge the plight of rape
Conferred upon the adult form. Is it not wretched?

Last night in the fever cubicle I clasped hands
With my acromealgious claw, in pact of union
Time's dissolved, but hangs all saline in the glands,
Secreted shyly not to breach the new communion.