Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries
Cloaca Maxima
God bless the modern malefactors,
for fellow travellers praise be God,
bless boldness, bless servility.
We used to sweeten cities, draining
beneath the polity, expelling refuse
to oblivious seas and barbarous lands.
Death and dirt and inconvenience
were flushed to cleanse our rituals. Sometimes
we showed the process off, sanitised
and marbled excrement would demonstrate
our sacral sanity, our fleshy state
perfectly washed. But mostly squeamish
we’d flush the filth – or tank it, saying
‘nothing to see’ as spots on spotlessness
were filed for publication after we’d died.
Planed and washed things were a simple
focus, success a virtue made possible
by sewers. The stripping away persists
but drainage isn’t perfect. It can’t
remove all the debris, the hidden
or undigested bloat of bits.
Cupboards burgeon, stomachs burst
in a massed landfill of crap. So what?
say waste management’s modern gurus.
Now the Cloaca’s in the Circus Maximus.
What we used to drain is on parade
and filth summons its prodigals home.
Shit sails up the U-bend
for the shit show, shitfest, the show
and tell of shit, where what we loathed
or said we did is what we love.
The mirror’s dirty. The dirt is us.
Bless the liars who show this truth.
Again
Standing near the overhang of a vast boulder
I look out on thorns and drips of rowan.
Rocks edge the pool of a soft soft cataract
and swirl a bubble swirl of silver tresses.
I climb a peak with thought-battering grind.
An estuary stretches the off-white sky.
Familiar as dust scenting a familiar room
longing hovers with me, for a lover or a love.
My hand suspends. I stare above my screen.
Emptiness floats above it and hides the wall.
The Conservation of Energy
The scythe is not annihilating,
even when it’s sweet,
slicing us off at the knees.
Sometimes a frontal stabbing
of the slender point takes us
or a swift, icy inveiglement
between our vertebrae, neat,
unlike the handle’s club,
dull but needed sometimes.
Even then
nihil is distribution
of husk, gas, slimes
and something else. For
when the thing hits –
half-coughed no worries
a belch, unamused guffaws
of fuck, God, no,
fluid loss – the pulses
of longing, self-disgust
or resignation go
where? Perhaps they survive
as faint winds to bend
and warp the living, distend
or squint our eyes
even in gentle seasons,
a force that chills us
or skeins joyfulness
in knots, stunts our victories
with stiff, heel-hand
but scarcely zephyred blows
which skitter us and we nose
at a new demand
we can’t quite think on or scratch.
Perhaps our light’s conserved
like light, and it swerves
in éclairs sur l’au-delà,
parallel settings glimpsed
past periphery, or stretches
like us to death, but numberless
an ultimate freeze past nil,
or falls back with our words
gulped back, once all,
and all propulsion is stalled
at a great limit then returns
each vantage, each course
of time to singularity
packed immensity
sole source
infinite speck, tight
compressing of a
concertina
of matter, light
negation. And when
it bursts afresh –
it must – would the latest
pattern – set in a dense
circumambience of worlds,
possible impossible alternatives –
be the same, and I’ve lived
before, this before, been hurled
forward, dragged back
and out again, and write this
once-ever, as Messiaen’s St Francis
endlessly hears the blackcaps,
or be fired in fresh trajectories
of out-blast ebbing to cold
and back to renewal, either bellows
powered by breath and screams?
Shortlisted twice for the Bridport poetry prize, longlisted for the Orwell Prize (blog category) and for the Bridport novel prize, Best of the Net nominee Paul Connolly has had poems published in many magazines including Agenda, Poetry Salzburg, Stand, Scintilla, Chiron Review, Dawntreader, takahē, Dream Catcher, Orbis, The Journal, FourXFour, Seventh Quarry, Sarasvati, Envoi, Southlight, High Window, Eunoia Review, Honest Ulsterman, Ink Sweat and Tears, Littoral, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, London Grip, Saltbeck Orion, Wildfire Words, Sixty Odd Poets, and Quadrant. Shortlisted for the Charles Causley and the Walk:Listen:Create Walking at Night prizes, he was third in the Magna Carta Competition.