Three Poems from ‘Discourse’
Except
No one sees them now except as a memory made of words, similar to the regular view except drawn in pieces, except this time we are living in a house not a campsite except there is no separation of bodies except through language except through law, we are all the same being, the same organism to an extent in a gang a bit like an early punk group except we aren’t doing music and we brush against the steep flanks of the Dining Room, empty except for a claustrophobically grand dining-room table, and so past the allotments, except the allotments have now been replaced by a furniture; the place I come to rest at finally is a version of the Lloyd Thomas Building in which I stayed my first year at Lampeter except it is much higher and in a square forming a huge inner courtyard and I alight on the top of the building and all the kids flee in panic, except looking back now I realise no monster appeared at all, something like a remote part of Australia except in other respects it could have been Mexico, somewhere they don’t speak English, and they are showing me a video, something like one of those c18 travel narratives except with me as a wanderer who leans out of a window as it gets dark and I shine a torch into the water except it is if I am the torch, so it is impossible to see the shadows where the light is not; on my own on this very small island, the rock is not marked except by breakers when there is a heavy swell, on which I am set naked, except a rag that covers my loins, except there are two lovers somewhere the other side and I shine my torch that has a kind of tremulous motion, not possible in real life except during brightness-excitation, into the water, in Africa, except I have made no preparations apart from a few seconds to consider what might be the best footwear, and I climb up and then ride down this great water-flow like in a fairground except it goes on for miles through canyons, and things are nearly back to normal, except I am still in the worst place, reading a statement about corporate responsibility, except the word had been written corporeal. and then I go running up the hill, except not running in my usual way, sort of loping, with crutches made of edge-cone singularities, except I do not know how to explain this. The bones in my face move in a tectonic embrace fit for the occasion, except thirty years too late. The sound that wakes me is a swan clapping the water, except I’m miles from a river. It is two jackbooted thugs storming the stairs, except I live in a ground-floor flat. It is a neighbouring state’s motorized cavalry, except we have no neighbours. It is the summons of distant church bells, except it’s Monday. It is the couple next door arguing, except next door is boarded-up. It is my partner getting up to go to work, except she’s been gone some months now. It is the phone in the living-room, except they disconnected it last week.
Hence
Hence I start on an ambitious new poem. Hence man has no sense of them, nor are they under the disposal of the will. Hence affinity of film to dream, hence, set up, erect, as a post. Hence, erections without emission and embrace of short duration. Hence, their decisions frequently turn out to be suboptimal, hence the target becomes damaged or the degree of damage is increased. The faint firedamp leads days hence to some quarrel. Herren-Moral, the fiercest, and hence king, of all the spiders in this country. Hence, draw or suck up or away the liquid from among the solid food in a plate. Its color is dark red, hence its association with Grandfather Fire who corresponds with the beginning of time; hence conditions you with firmness and hence return home, hence put back in a disfigured or nonfigurative order. Projection-lines diverge, and hence cannot intersect. Hence, they pool their resources and resolve to enter the market, to work with a fresh set of meanings, hence to warm up to the mechanisms that enable henchmen to impose their world as universal, and hence as legitimate. Many years hence perhaps we could open these letters and decide, but for now it is the energy show and we might be perceived by members, and hence members’ responses are poorly correlated to the ideological world and hence no need to reframe in language the various and intricate sublimations of civilization, hence this woman running towards me in the park. Hence we could not stay to awaken you from this organized and rationalizable field of study. Hence it seems like a mistake which we have tried to explain before. I decide not to go to work next morning and hence spend the day in maintenance chemotherapy. Hence, variation in home prices based on school district may not be as great as in other cities. Hence, a 10% jump in median household income. Hence, it would appear that toxic pollutant-releases are negative, but homogeneous, sending spores in through the smallest apertures, hence thriving on the corpse of the monumental languages around us. Hence in a given time the crank-pin will move through a given part of its revolution, or the traveller weight will decrease and hence if one chooses a large flange number, the length of the traveller will be more, hence the name, which means Glue place.
Instead
It's better to erase small sections at a time instead of painting around the entire object. This gun, instead of being cast in one piece, is made of three. Instead choose a freeflap harvested from the patient's forearm to cover the eye, skull base, and other facial structures. I decide to extinguish my head torch, but instead I accidentally set it to flash mode; placing three eyes in a row with no explicit statement instead of teeth having an entire jaw-bone indented like a saw, remaining modifications of the light-plane instead of encroachments of the middle tone. I note instead a pair of infuriated monster eyes in the cage. It employs a rolling, circular knife, loaded with straight attack-power instead of strength. Instead of a painting there’s a diary hanging from the wall above us but the train stops prematurely or we get out at a stop too soon and instead we get into this plane and I realise that we are not going to Taunton at all, but to some southern European city. Instead of the cross, the albatross. I mean to go and ask it to come in but instead I sleep and when in the morning I look out it is just a few cigarette butts in the doorway. I get up with the intention of turning the radio down but pick up the phone instead and it tells me instead of seaweed-albums or pressed flowers, start a fashion for pressed street-rubbish, which would reoccur in the novel I am to write, but instead of noting down external appearance I am given illuminating parts of psychic life, so instead I flail about with the most slippery of words that will talk to me, once, but not right now. Instead, there is music, a stranger’s friend is talking to me of the hatches on maps they used to have instead of contour-lines. Feeling tired, I decide to switch to the street instead of taking the harder longer option of the light plane. We drive around and clearly there is nowhere for the coffee she imagined, instead we leave the town and turn off into a vineyard and eat our lunch. I cannot see the source of the bleating, instead the numerous farm-activities, a couple making speeches instead of love. Instead I follow the familiar route, down through the woods. What I really mean to say instead is, come back won't you, just all of you come back, which might occur if the laps, instead of the ports, were made of unequal widths. Use collective knowledge instead of technology to solve problems. They could not find the Palomar object but found, instead, a 21st magnitude object 4 arcsec south-east. Instead of the completely soldered joint between the inlay and pontic, the writer has used a small squared bar of ink.
Giles Goodland was born in Taunton, was educated at the universities of Wales and California, took a D. Phil at Oxford, has published a several books of poetry including A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001) Capital (Salt, 2006), Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012) and The Masses (Shearsman, 2018). Until recently he worked as a lexicographer in Oxford. He is currently looking for new opportunities. He teaches evening classes on poetry for Oxford University's department of continuing education, and lives in West London.
