from 100 Sonnets
Robert’s ‘sonnets’ have appeared in fragmente, Angel Exhaust and Angelaki. Andrew Duncan has described them as ‘artistically realised originality’.
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Through the butterfly-bone
come blasts of ash
in silk disgust
and three
carbon rods
laid across
commemorate
love’s heat
between beings
who change into death.
Birdsong rusting canal
amber-gris
an iron loop tongues
the speckled current
tied fast
a gasp
of liquid & air
soul’s dereliction
a spoiled handkerchief
flapping at sunset.
Far sheaves calling,
throats unlaced
at random,
sighing with a crackle
in the air.
Gathered here,
the place comes with
arrival’s orange blur;
leaking down the wooden side
clots of softened fire.
Lightning crocus, streak
the sky theatre,
flash on
the spider-ground
soft eggs goggle
& skirts
are breathing through gills
they mushroom
& frighten, photographed,
orageous in saffron.
Fading...second selves
blur & shuffle
past slow cars.
Inside, lit switches
& exits
in outline only.
How do we
carry the body
of what was lost,
what goes out.
Steelblue radium heart,
sperm coating the
aluminium box
where finger
traces an ‘S’:
brand it all,
live on
in tin flies
bouncing off
the night-light.
8194867 air supply:
blood sunset,
helicopter plague
droning.
Crops destroyed,
‘the wasteland grows’
random yet
programmed.
Glass shields
multiply the image.
Weird head dog
dropping
at the disc’s rim
a pinball
rolls across
the eye
tracks it:
watch what
think, thunk
matted-breath-animal.
This ich, this body-breath
this death.
Avenues
of trees
& the pelt
of deer
moving behind.
We are blind
in our lungs, we
touch on dead birds.
Carbon-darkling eyes
record while watching
& turn on
the central heat
where greased skins
reduced to need
are printed by
the fire they press
illuminates
the dimming eros-resin.
Grate-voice, ashes
splutter
from the throat,
the chords
a burnt-out
match folder
blows a smut eyewards—
pyramids fly
over moondust
into the eye.
Glass smoke box
yellow coils
the embryo,
each cell
invaded, graded
by its chances
for survival; see—
smuts cluster
like a five
on a die.
Quicksand silver is
pink gravel,
breathe, my daughter,
glitter streams
into your lungs,
pulls you from the
pulsing birth-world,
birth reversed,
crafts its lovely
shipwreck art.
Craze, sky needles
arcing
death hairpins
touching planes off
to explosion
too soon too
soon to die
the hair shot white
in a clock
instant…shatterbones.
Infra-red death corridor,
resin floor,
the via negativa.
An ox killed here;
speed cameras
line the wall—
the order of
religious mania.
Hands of smoke
tie things up.
Automatic box with strings
whirrs with evil,
clicks & winds
its inner spool;
here comes
the printout
punched with genes:
tears of rosewood
jackpot out
onto the floor.