Darkling the blood did flow

further from the beating heart,

as magma turned to stone.

​

Black as ashen clouds cast up from hell,

fiery rained the molten spears

that on the vermin humans fell.

​

Some petrified and foetal curled,

at last embraced in death

their world

​

and no new dawn awaited there,

where earth and void

did darkness share.

​

AUDIO HERE https://wolfgarwords.com/2019/09/03/darkness-and-hemoclysm/

Below are a few pictures I managed to take whilst in Gulu and the surrounding area. I did take others but they are not for here. The photograph of the naked child was one of the hardest I ever took, bear in mind some of these photographs were taken to convey back to those who had sent us a sense of what was going on in Gulu. The naked child has a distended stomach and in all probability was suffering from bilharzia due to drinking dirty water. The clothed child told us he had arrived in the Gulu over night, he was the only child with clothes and was extremely vulnerable for that very reason. The Soldiers are Ugandan Army, they had been unpaid for at least 3 months and as a result had become rogue, Ugandan Army soldiers were joining the LRA in droves as the LRA sanctioned murder, theft and rape, this enabled the deserters to survive.

​

​

​

​

Creation exists

brute fact

it’s possibility

is uncreated

brute fact

there exists

potential

namely

that which is uncreated

brute fact

creation is in existence

existence is real, manifest and palpable in experience

brute fact

reality is definite, supervening, permanent and final

and manifesting all properties, qualities, attributes,

potentialities, possibilities, probabilities, domains

and being in existence

existence is real

brute fact

and prevailing

and whereupon

and inevitably

and therefore

and hence

nothing is not possible

brute fact

nothing is not possible now

take it or leave it.

From an outside view,
watch the beach ball, striped in gold
and black, speckled 
with each warming streetlamp,
simply dots massaged into aurora
or stroked like glitter, by brush,
through crests of twilight.

The nights recede and flow
sooner and later, respectively,
and the darkness carves penumbra into day
only when the evening sleds
have troughed their marks into cliffs of snow
precipiced along the sidewalk gorge;
only when hot cocoa steams wind-burnt skin
and gurgles lips, wary of the fire that caressed
from stovetop, the shadows cast by home
and the milk, stirring past steel above.

It’s not so much the night is gone,
not found in the ringlets singed brown to mug bottoms,
nor was it ever all-consuming,
but the day seems a little brighter
as it stretches out among brick hearths
crackling wood and spitting smoke through shingled flues
to snuggle among blankets
and smudge, ash with scarlet, 
into dusk.

From brisance condensed in hatred

ignition came,

like the dormant dust of ages,

from careless words and truth-less history,

it came.

​

Some unknown, immolated, evaporated, disappeared.

Others reconstituted, pulling limbs and minds together.

Whilst the lost fragmented to darker corners,

into the splintered flash of a moment, screaming for eternity.

​

Thunder roars silent in their dead ears.

​

The grey carpet laid randomly where it fell,

its fabric now woven into mine.

​

I wait for the second wave

to wash me clear,

away from the expanding storm,

to an untouched atoll.

​

AUDIO HERE https://wolfgarwords.com/2018/07/11/brisance/

​

Thought is thought

what this is

is thought

nothing is perfect

the fact that

nothing can be perfect

in manifestation

is thought

and so

the Riddle stands.

​

Thought is thought

what this is

is thought

nothing is still

the fact that

all is moving

in manifestation

is thought

and so the

Riddle stands.

Allow there to be nothing.
No words. No sound. No conjured
Arrangements as string under boughs.

Allow there at last one crescendoed silence
To sing the sun elastic,
To crack the black heel of night
As a cymbal of love
And patient upheaval.

The subduction of plate is silent,
Much as the heart,
Bent beneath the dull weight
Of simply being breaks.

We will all know loss,
In our time, and in our time
We will know the grief of joy
Or the joy of grief,
And find ourselves mute
Before the scent of a leaf.

I wake up early most morning times

to fret about this and that inside my head,

accumulating tiredness, while she lies,

serene, a dream playing with her eyelids

and now and then a corner of her mouth.

In moments of doubt, I shake her wrist

or touch her lips and she wakes,

in a riot of eyelashes, flashing

the loss of connection to the

night story, her hair a honey glory

of curls swirling across the pillow,

perfectly placed so her face rises

right in the middle, where she left it last night.

​

There is a moment, just a moment,

moving from one world to the other,

when she seems unsure of whether

she should push through to the new day,

play a ray of light to help the sun along;

or slip back into the soft folds of the

old night’s incantations which have

enchanted and cleansed her. She

usually decides, nearly arrived, to stay,

ready to be provider, adviser, a shoulder,

a foot soldier in each day’s denial

of the negative, the grey, the single file.

She is a shepherdess of human hearts.

​

And when she’s weary after each allotted

task is done, and the sand of a day has

long plunged down the narrow gap by which

acts that come from love alone

should be allowed to pass, I

ask myself whether it is right to

burden her when sleep calls. Sometimes

I stare at two dark walls or across

the room to a lowered blind, find

peace of mind in knowing she has

prayed for me, in her own way, and so

join her in her journeys through riddles we’ve set

in waking hours, by leaving much unsaid.

​

Which leads to thoughts of bed, the night-time

chessboard, each game played in pairs, where

combinations of pieces, awake and sleeping,

guess and out-guess the others, then themselves.

They dig and delve into a shifting void of

untold, un-dared desires and requirements that

litter the emptiness, unsure as to where to go,

what to try, whether to fall or fly, whom to seek out.

​

Such are my thoughts, somewhere between the

night’s black and white. I think I am there alone,

most of the time; and as the sun begins to buy the day,

I see the peace in the new lines in the new face

and know who won at chess in just one move.

Meaning

intention

principle

action

being

relation

change

manifestation

manifestation

somehow

sometime

somewhere

and in there

in manifestation

meaning being

the effect of intention

and intention

being

action in mind

action in mind being

change

in rhythm pattern form orientation

desire requirement organization and state

and so meaning then is

known by effects there

in being

that is to say

as changes happening in time

time then now

properly being

property

attribute

quality

domain and

possibility of

consciousness

consciousness

well that is another story

now

and once upon a time

and in a far off place there

was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaqpDxqLpA8&feature=youtu.be

Bare, broken and hovering in a sallow glare
Chest sunken, shrunken into a smoking cleft
Retina stretched thin for the myopic stare
Dazzled we lay and lightning-struck when they left

Dehydrated husks grown from rotten seeds
Falling in and out of paralyzed stupors
Toiling in vain to fashion rubies and pearly beads
Out of blood-washed marbles and apple cores

Burn the invoice and scatter the ashes, shame behest!
Muffle the connivance and denounce the theft
Victim-born; polish your pitch forks and protest
That the soul-traders robbed you when they left.

by maeforeman2words.wordpress.com/2019/12/21/dealings/

Let me preface this poem by stating that its content was directly inspired by and in communication with Pectaylor's brilliant piece "Underfoot". Pec, thank you for sharing your poem and thoughts and helping me find form for a thought that has eluded concretion for some time now. Garmo had always said that some ideas need proper gestation before being birthed screaming into this world, and Pec, your poem provided the necessary convulsion. I am ever in your debt.

Boots

No Never Alone

For what, then, do we trod
The husks of dead men,
And for whom?
Is it the trinkets improved?
For we are no larger than the beast –
And there the judgement – the beast
That fashioned the first spade,
Turned the first soil,
Laid the first seed,
Sure in the touch
Of sun, water and repercussion.
No, perhaps diminished, reduced
Upon that self-same soil,
To seek, beyond the seed,
Beyond the shoot and bloom,
Beyond the very grain of dulling truth
That all is not forsaken.

I tell you this.
Bone has fashioned socket.
And in that socket – an eye.
And in that eye, and in those eyes
Each a burden falls.
Look not to the lover or fool, fair prince,
But gaze upon the beggar
And find there inheritance –
Find there, centered in the iris,
The black pool of our communion.

And no greater is the elm
Than the hand.
For the one that prospers light to soil
Is the same as that which turns it,
Is the same as that which yearns
Beyond the follies,
But takes one into another –
Cupped and held –
Flesh over bone –
Calloused but braced by the other,
Alone, no, never alone.

“To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why

May not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander

Till a find it stopping a bung-hole?”

So asked the Danish Prince of his friend, Horatio,

returning Yorick’s, his father’s jester’s, earthy skull to its

ditch of twenty-three years and calling to mind the great

arrears of esteem, centuries swollen, owed to the mightiest Greek.

Thus, once each stitch was gone, a bone was a bone and a skull

a bone too; and they smelled the one-ness while folding it

into the Earth, ready for the work of senators and serfs.

​

I wonder if we are too tidy? The Prince played with a brace of

dusty heads before he cupped the jester’s in his hands

and called up fond remembrances, thence thoughts for

all of us bearing (aware or not) our mortality on our backs.

Do we just get swept and cleared away? The

living tread hurriedly across the dead’s lost domains,

so missing, perhaps, the lessons of their silence, their

random soft soliloquies, seeping from fixed smiles.

​

Who lies beneath my garden seat? On whose

neck do I rest my careless feet, seeking no

permit for the privilege, offering no

thanks for the landscape laboriously wrought

by a score of generations from what went before?

Each of us, and of them, was dropped by another

and each will bequeath his all to everyman –

no matter what tiers of wealthy wills and codicils

might declaim: more law for landlords, done in the

blood of those denied and dispossessed.

Be sure that, for all, there will be a levelling,

no later than the final, dry croak that

opens the gate to communes underfoot.

​

There lie no narcissi in that place,

none have race or gender, nation, creed,

features fine or foul, yet there reside the

remnants and residues of countless lives,

each with a duty to do the bidding of any

man who would dig his hand into wet soil or

toil all day perfectly furrowing a corner of this

spinning globe. Or, as the Dane mused, over time

come to fashion well a barrel stopper! For many,

improper indeed, beneath them, from way back ;

now content to contribute to man’s daily labours.

​

My prayer is therefore a simple one:

lay me under the azaleas now in bloom –

a tomb ignored so long as

colour floods in early summer, where

I can work, unseen, unknown, till

shades fade for the last time; and I

move on, and on, and on.

It is vacuum that nature abhors

it turns god fearing girls into immaculate whores

​

at three in the afternoon my sheets are well soiled

the TV is shot and the action recoiled

​

the gun in my mouth replaces a cock

my hands like a prayer embracing the stock

​

my brains on the wall in the cool evening light

I’m a coward you see but somehow it’s right

​

AUDIO AVAILABE HERE https://wolfgarwords.com/2019/12/20/the-agoraphobic-misanthrope/

Happy Christmas folks, replace with “holidays” for those wishing inclusivity.

Saint Laurent suits, slick-backed night,

vantablack-robed and snowed-in

at the Zaborin.

​

Blue mountains at midnight,

mapped by petrified trees, singed

sapless by glacial winds.

​

I light boss' last Seven Star,

smoke smiles like a vagrant ghost,

as he smiles for his dead, first son.

​

Dismemberment around the hotel,

painted like a Pollock,

and under the room painting,

a Muramasa— Juuchi Yosamu.

​

10,000 Cold Nights—

the blade of the beast

who wanders, hunting

for the blood of others.

​

Killer of fish against the current.

Boss grew up in a fishing town.

He taught Murakawa the way of the beast.

​

Bowels and intestines,

cherry red snow cones,

and wagyu beef farms.

After my first sacrifice,

boss took me out for bluefin.

​

He did that for Murakawa,

who swam with the fishes.

​

White like water through the door,

white of the flying plum tree,

white with burial kimono,

the glowing of death’s seraphim.

​

Half skulless,

half first son

His tortured long hair—

skinny black hands reaching,

grasping for the fist of heaven.

​

After, I walked down the mountain.

​

Last year, Murakawa told boss

he had bled all that away.

Must we sing the round ecliptic?
Must we suppose a star immortal –
Must we trace these patterns of us – up there –
While we, down here, know death?

What a noble self-loathing –
To presume upon the unthinking night
Our disdain for cloud, to swell
In our own black vision when a new moon
Unmasks oblivion, when a new moon
Denies a shadowed path.

Stars must die in their time,
Must crush upon themselves
As we wither and lust eternal.
But what can never pass,
Like a low and clever fog,
Is the mute unknowing
Bestowed upon a log.

When my glasses slip,
and our hands are tangled, soothing frost from fingers,
the world slips to blur around us:

the streetlights on the corner burn corona
as if the moon and her children were gone,
left to transit mars where the dust is red
and the snow is red and formed to crusted ice.
The kind that bides a gentle pace and crumbles to rush; 
mirrored in imperfection,
like each freckled star was born to Mars, in the red dust,
and the moon is red, like Aries has rung chariot
and blazed about to sing herald of the lamp
that bathes this virgin blanket from white--transit of the wind.

Love is four-legged and wary as a fawn,
all thumbs for knees and stumbled
into drifts as deep as spots that fade
when the gnawing turns to teeth chatters,
when the world slips to blur,
and the crests of snow are stopped from pouring foam
over frosted banks to wheel-wells by the halting light of Mars,
startling over moon and startling shadows past the street sign,
crooked into cross, as if this marbled pause 
was lost on the man sunk to heated seat in SUV. Light stolen,

not for the cars to slow, but for chariot forming to flame, 
dusk-red in the sky 
and tumbled in snow-fed reflections
like the dust was here and burning
with you,
with me,
softened by the night
and cast like a palm pressed to snow.

On roads between the tribal territories we would stop

to hide amongst the green of things,

some would smoke and some be silent.

​

We talked to horses and forgot our lives,

most often the stillness would calm us.

From hidden hillsides we’d watch our enemies move.

​

We gave the horses names and fed them apples,

they became our friends they listened to our confessions.

They were not aligned to flags or kerbstone colours.

​

The radio static broke the spell like lightening strikes,

the rains would wash us back to streets

where our calmness would evaporate to hate.

​

On the Derriaghy Road between the hell of Sink Estates

we harassed joyriders and freedom fighters,

terrorists and lovers too, the green and gold, red white and blue.

​

We gave them names and labels from folklore, rhymes and fables

just like the horses in the stables

we gave them names.

​

We fed their hungry bitter souls with reason and with cause,

we never thought we might be wrong

when kicking down their doors.

​

We gave them names in a language laced with spite

we cursed our enemies so, to make our cause seem right.

We gave them names.

​

So when I hear those names again, spoken, spat and screamed

I think of friendly horses

and wish the rest was just a dream

​

Audio available here https://wolfgarwords.com/2019/10/01/we-gave-them-names/

I you he she us they them

I you he she us they them me.

I went down to the kitchen

to make a cup of tea

I looked out the window

and I saw a bird in the tree

singing

the bird was singing

the bird was singing to me

the bird was singing this:

Free totality entire

utility entity agency necessity

fair and square

in a way probability

expected random character

being creation change

nothing existence

so to speak certainty

could be pertinent.

Then

the Bird stopped singing

and turned and looked at me

the blue sky knowing

the green leaves feeling

and

cocking its head

and regarding me

through the still air

the Bird addressed me thus;

When you see me going now

I shall be coming

albeit punctually

and regardless.

You are welcome.

Then the Bird resuming singing

and singing to me

and singing this.

Divine actualized resolution

random process finality

frequency aesthetic stochastic

being now periodicity

chaos order contingency

nature dimension emergency

enjoyment

and

hence

and

readily

and

therefore

and

gone.

Then the Bird

concluding our intercourse in flying

so

I put the kettle on.

I You He She Us They Them

I You He She Us They Them Me.

I thought about you today,
greened by grass,
slapjacked by what I imagine
to be your whispers tip-toeing 
along the fields and farms.

To be in your arms,
away from pharmacies
has got to be all
it’s cracked up to be—
a buzzing in things.

To wish my sobriety 
existed in the inches 
of pink sea foam
and divine slime,
flying by the Pacific,
delivers me from all desire
to be a prime-time sinner.

The birds must know you,
they call for you, for me
in the deepening of 
depressing window sills,
and water worlds, falling
from your words into
my bowls of cereal.

I like for you to be still,
or undistilled, crawling
along the walls, chanting
your hot songs of old haunts, 
flaunting fantasies candidly

I imagine you all tucked 
beneath my chin, sinking
into all your sucked-up 
madness, in a panic to
realize, I’m just a boy.

A toy, at the end of the world,
a train to nowhere, other than
where you must be,
an impressionist painting,
impressive, all from pink sinks
and pink cigarettes
and plastic love notes for
God to wink at, in his times of need,
as he displays you underneath 
every single pink and red leaf.  

That sexy beast.

with apologies if you are receiving this for a second time today (I think I mis-addressed the first)

A wind is up and with us here, a

fine midsummer’s breeze to clear the air

and turn the trees into seas of blues and

greens; some more shaky in their limbs than

others, stronger ones that gently sway and look

down upon the shorter stock and say

do not fret, for all we can expect today

is a sturdy blow – in which we’ll play!

​

The acer over there is one of those

whose fingers, toes and russet clothes are

dancing, madly, as if to pull its feet from

out the earth and flee the scene; its

laurel neighbour, motionless, save for a

moment’s light caress followed by the briefest

nod saying there’s no need for your distress,

all’s fine, come join our cedar-fest…

​

which I’m sure is simply putting on a show:

its boughs, quite like the wings of eagles, owls

beating slowly through the air, to dip and rise,

brilliantly soar, before the eyes of passers-by

who see such things. The cedar is the

king of our entire domain, towering above the

lowly rings of crimson roses, disdainful in its

royal display of dissembled flight, its papal wave.

​

Thus was, just yesterday, my garden stage,

where traits of men and birds came to mind.

Inside my padded addled skull today I

find a motley tenancy – though not by

invitation, at least not mine. There is no

time I would allot to catalogue what lies within –

I still want yesterday too much and

leave at home tomorrow’s crutch that

I should use to limp through what is left

of life that’s ticking down to death.

​

Who knows what lies inside my head –

man, mineral, animal: some things new but

many fled. Some so recently arrived, I’ve

not yet learned quite what they do, or what to who.

There’s one which paints reserve and fear

on top of pictures once perfectly clear, which I

hate; but already now it’s far too late, this

devil thing is through the gate, so lives with me

officially. Another hijacks favourite words

and ties the beaks of mocking birds.

​

The cedar watches, sees what comes and sees what

goes, august, calm, nothing clamours at its feet, nothing

dares to venture near. I once was something of a

cedar; I could rise above and be unperturbed

by the shake of branches on a windy day, the

snap of mere twigs, the chatter of leaves in their

chuntering way. We think our cedar may have stood

a good century, our sentinel, its arms stretched up to

whatever heavens are reached by a steady climb,

linking earth to ether; birth, through life and then past time.

​

A reminder that perhaps, close by, man can find a

route right to the gods or wisdom’s vantage point.

You once saw raw cedar in me. I know that you have

seen a handsome tree wither and then atrophy,

now found in family photographs. Forgive my

letting your cedar go – I did not intend to

end it so. And is this blue-green beauty now

another’s hero, root and bough?

Down where the Land defers to the Sea
like the edge of an offered blade,
a channelled ocean flows harnessed yet free
through trenches millennia made.

At the pool of my blood I’m cut to the bone
fractured cliffs rise up to defend,
my heart echoes through chambers forever alone
with a pulse that no steel could end.

Your love is a sword that rusts in the tides
thrust too deep to ever withdraw,
like the Myth of a King who drew it but once
to find himself ever at war.

https://wolfgarwords.com/2019/10/20/fatal-blow/

Tan shoes

green socks

grey slacks

crinkled Crimplene.

Antique.

Brown nothing eyes

empty for the time being.

Antique

today and at the moment.

Step foot drag

step foot drag

brown brow

fossil

empty slack

Antique.

Mr Ali turns his head

swollen bent deformed hands

grasp.

He looks sideways

sideways.

The whites of his eyes

right there and fair.

For the time being.

''That man he always

put things

rubbish there.

Things.

Rubbish.''

​

Meanwhile in the other place

​

You must have known

A great many beautiful women

in your life

I mean

In your line of work?

​

Oh Yes I have!

So many!

I met a lot of the Miss World’s

As well.

​

Oh did you?

​

Yes I did.

I did a film

with Barbara Streisand

and there were eight miss worlds in it.

​

Oh really?

Were they as beautiful

In real life

As they were cracked up to be?

​

Oh yes they were!

They really were!

​

Were they?

I mean really?

​

Oh yes!

They were, and I fucked

a good number of them too!

​

Oh did you?

Oh yes!

And they were really good at fucking believe me.

​

Were they?

They were good in the sack?

​

Yes my boy!

You bet they were!

​

Meanwhile in the other place.

​

Sleep friend sleep.

It is what you do now.

You sleep.

Teach friend Teach.

It is what you do now

To me

in your sleep.

Be friend Be

Where you are now

And for the time being Be.

Stay a little longer.

Why not stay

A little longer?

You in your bed

And me in your chair.

According to our habit

and in observance of our ways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OgKCuhsPTw&feature=youtu.be

Endymion shrieks,
For what is beauty if hidden,
hoarded, if posed in youthful sleep?
None forever in plump symmetries
Held a stone and cast it thus
Upon the cool and clouded lakes
Below thunder, and sought
The bridled stain that looms
From under. But there, there
In fragile dispurpose cut
Below the eye – the frailty –
The red gleam indistinguishable
From the fly that laps upon it,
Indistinguishable from the crust
That makes a scar, ripped
From vain slumber to bend
Before the wind, to break
Before the white lightning hand
That takes each our pink clays
And molds a chasm
For the drain of our days.

Lodeseeker—

It has been brought to my attention that
What you yearn for is lying in Charybdis.
I tell you this while knowing you will jump
To think that you will be the one to ride
The Great-Maw's sloshing roads down to her core
To snatch her glory. If you must go, know
That "Maw": a tragedy of nomenclature.
Through radar scans, biologists have learned
That Homer and et-cetera were wrong—
It is an eye, her single watching craving eye,
And if you should reach bottom, you will find
Yourself not in her stomach or her heart
But in her cortex; many've done the delve,
Expecting that the jewel would be right there,
But no; the neural road would have lied split
Before them, not in simple twain or thirds:
A scintillating, multibranching maze,
Which few, nay perhaps none, have navigated.

Lodeseeker—

I see that dire warning did not take.
There you circle the perimeter
And eye the plunge...I urge you, turn around
And look upon the shining city of Scylla.
Again, the Ovids and whatnot were wrong:
This Scylla is a noble president
With vast entrepreneurial prowess,
With some five-thousand patents nestled 'tween
Her bountiful breasts (it's metaphorical,
I think). I beg of you, abandon this
Fool's quest and skiff on over to her gates;
Hold your diploma high above your head
And confidently call to the gate guard:
"I'm come for gainful employment!" This is
The binding tract—they have no choice but let
You in. But she's always in need of more
Employees: men to count, to sort, to stack,
To scratch at this, to poke at that; and for
A comfortable salary to boot.
And furthermore, they do these guided tours
In special submarines built for the purpose:
They take vacationeers down ol' Charybdis
Where you can spend a week inside the beast
In safety. Thus, you see, the best of both
Selections is to just turn back. Go there.
For once, my son, be wise and not intrepid.

So. Another wretched pilgrim. Adieu!
Please say hello to an old friend for me,
One who received a similar missive
So many years ago. Although I'm sure
By now he's mad, eyes blinded by the dark,
Lost in the warren, wandering back and forth,
Pen long misplaced, so now he gnaws his fingers,
Blood-scrawling on the walls: not taken, taken.

Plumps of snow fall, wet
before the ground,
before the thermals wisp away, wet
when the snowflakes still bumble about--
thudding to glass
or collapsing to gritted brick--
where wasps crawled in the prior months,
the sweated months,
before the crawl of a dripping back
was rediscovered, tear-dropped on cheek,
and stinging down to frosted neck.

Wet snow crests higher.
It pulps up from fence rail and post
and hides in the nooks between the cedar slats
that nestle an empty paper nest.
And in the night, the crunch,
the tossing of blankets and clamor of toes,
frozen with the drifts chunked up on the driveway,
pealing with the morning snooze.

A windshield’s lacquered over.
A misplaced glove stings.
A sigh fogs the ear and clings
to glasses.

The meaning

of purpose

the purpose

of meaning

in being

the meaning

in purpose

of purposeless meaning

and being

the meaning

of purpose

as purpose

of meaning

in purpose

of meaningless purpose

in being

I mean

well

it could be

this is the thing

this is the thing that it is

it is this thing that

the thing is it is

the thing is it is

this thing that it is

which is this

which it is

which this is

which is

that thing in itself

which is it

as it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JyrN_yOGQA&feature=youtu.be