About Recovering Beauty
(after Philip Larkin’s ‘Ambulances’)
Proud and professional, these beds
thread proud blooms of mystery, give
back a long, lingering orb
to every schizoid smile. Bright,
glossy, fay, charms on their backs,
they come to rest on every ward:
all streeted slab minds are visited.
The nurses strewn midst warts and brogues
or children running from the trees
past cells and wimpled swingers seize
each wild and whitened face that tops
each champing blanket; momently,
as madness matters swathe and marry:
And sense now the rolling scentedness
that cries beneath all dreams made blue,
and for a second greet the high soul,
so healthful, mad and fucking true.
The patient wards conceive. ‘My, My’
they whisper at their own dismay.
For formed away in some deep wound
may flow the insane yell of lust
round lonely living so near death’s end,
and what was revered in its dead crust
amongst blind tears, the wrangled rend
of familial mummy dadas, there
At last time starts to heighten. Far
from the constraints of christs that lie
unreachable inside life’s tombs
the doctors fart and let sex fry
through closer things than what has come,
and thrill to mind-mess all men are?
Recusancy and After?
How recusant, the departure of good minds
down alleyways, or watching
the lean doors opening past the milk-white strain
of ashes, rising and falling.
Mad-man or soldier? both are fazed to dream;
and, oh, they simply get married
or content themselves with killers mourning…
Whipped beds of sex deem so explosive that
Men note melodeons appear praying, or
the tiny decks of water cloying and spraying,
or, on late evenings, watch
cross-hearted waders washed in lime?
Like new stored clothes,
the huge decisions spread out like feet
and invent a new way of treading;
this is the random wake of minds, the
Close call of the murderer running.
Here subventing each wade and rote,
the stolid brain suffuses
and closes right away.
We Cannot Hear the Sleep of Words
We cannot hear the sleep of words
Under the seas, under the flowers, under the tides of out lots
And the bustling over sheets in skies depleting
Or our infinite whispers unheard. How
Inevitable silence whisks us is the tune
That, like the spires of monks, grows tired with the trends
And, dreaming about the text,
Shies into the fire. Words
Are as remote as the stars and their staring dawn,
As perceived as God. Does
This quiet sleep of words hide schemes, hide fears?
Does the last lash of the wind and the failing wing
Outwardly spiel an end? Let us listen,
Open the mind and listen
For a sigh, a sign
Of speaking unadorned. There is
No cry, there is only
The one weathered night whose wakefulness stings and
Hoots the Word over and over
Until the speaking dies.
Through a Glass Darkly
And no-one can deny
That love is more tedious than lies
Seeing the mirror of the third
When fearing time’s cries
Creates behaviour a mind can’t stir
I have slowed in my swagger to find
That death cannot ever ride
The waves of its occidental sea
The nut-strewn road and its cavalry
Refine lust and its plans.
Coins in hands work for a life
And regal banks are sworn
Dead by a majesty of man-and-wife
This thurible holds intense
Incense; so too, starved tears
Weep from their command
A mute space sears the bent
Cities are altogether shent
And no-one can deny
That love is more tedious than lies
The blind fo’csle inside this brain
Must swear till death dies.
I Neglect Nothing
I neglect nothing –
Your furled scent, the bitter tea,
The merciless maxims spurting
Diamate into the fire.
I conclude us both, like a Will –
The one impressed is me,
And you are filigree wrought,
Your stare as kvetch as desire.
(Now you must own no friends –
With your head howled back,
Like a sightless toy, like
A figurine, you must seem closed.
Childless, your mouth is contorted,
Splintered, epileptic – mine
Is an ovum, disposed
As an idol on a grave).
You placed a cigar to my lips –
I, laughing, put out the fire,
Congruous and calm. Yes,
I recollect babies and flowers:
A slap about the face of death..
And then you quietly rocked
From side to walled side and moaned
Like a gale of sadness starting.
A Kind of Decalogue
Item, an animal, and how it changes shape,
Now a slick leopard, then a white air
Of tigress, ape or lemur. The forms won’t take
One simple pattern for long. Item, the crow
And then the simple blackbird, gathering up
Hunted petals. Item, a demesne of guns
Hotly presented to a potted face,
A shaft of holly leaves, darkness begun
And flapped astray. Item, motors without grace,
Churning the fair aside. Item, the bones
Of reservations, now Plot One, Plot Two
Purveyed by engineers.
The hunters are half-conscious of their Deeds
And cackle. Signs are made, sometimes honed,
And then the silent Blue?
Jim Bellamy was born in a storm in 1972. He studied hard and sat entrance exams for Oxford University. Jim has won three full awards for his poems. Jim has a fine frenzy for poetry and has written in excess of 22,000 poems. Jim adores the art of poetry. He lives for prosody.