Matthew Carbery


from Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone


below blows i sure don’t know
can't make it out or won’t
a blue blurb a banded thing
i think ariel preparing his orbit,
the prosperous all at fault
for her swan song in a zealous net.
new found land we flagged up, off
with care, rammed cattlelike
and roasting slowly, basted
in each other’s oils on an axis
of constellations. let the jet
soslowlyshuttle and hours are
arbitrary crossed and addled,
pent horrible, there twenty
metres forward fifty two who
invested lie horizontal, against
ice sheets, away of grim hurtling
in gloom the rehydrated gnocchi
setting in alongside realisations
of stations, that gut ache that
this is me and i can't sleep so
tipsy from altitude, and final
dollars worth local ipa at markup
from here i can smell my sweated
underwear through my clothes, my
crotch puddling, the television
in the headrest for the guy behind
carcinogenic on my neck, importing
a tricky melanoma within a lobe
which i'll discover too late and will
carry me off, vulgar. squeezing out
to piss i mirror and flex the mottled
fibres of limbs, dank with grog


--

scrub born, the leap left him leaving his self
from teat to tête or the time it takes for flame to take to it
where grace in a fort strung to a bookcase 
smoking DMT from foil 
in my old room gutted                              “pass the ashtray 
she said she had                                        “a skin
and that she'd died                                    “& the light
nearly it was really real                            “what’s that 
spoke to rashied ali                                    “are you writing 
his spirited molecules                                “another drug poem?
as he clambered over the kit                                           no— dimethyltryptamine
the misfit's foot fall fell
measuring the same
in minutes of cusp thinking
our queuing quick gave way to a looting
just it was just such a hot summer
demanding exigency or will to power or means of production
it was too hard to tell the whispers of an oligarch
from the phlegmy murmur of a/c
or hair dryer from the flat thru the wall
 
balkanised rebels 
right on were off
to defuse and become diffuse          
walking thru shells of class rooms
shucked out of learning
sounding interstellar space 
and feeling being its bliss

--


the sum total of my self is
less than the qualitative difference
between kung fu panda and
kung fu panda 3. you say "stark"
as i say "stop". an issuing consent,
sat heronlike on a bench by the
canal, the obligatory plaque claiming
emotional right to that scene. a tidy
earner, you'd think. otto, a fourth
generation transplant, works securing
the tributes to the wood, and, though he
speaks fine english his reading is poor
and he can't tell the difference between
words and names, and tries not to look at
the dedications as he drills them home. brunel
did so much quantitatively. the bulks
in the south west alone, the great britain,
the tamar, the clifton. the name "isembard"
suits the structures, signed by samaritans.
who would hazard anonymous sentiments
in the very real end zone. a flicker a welcome
as the bulbs warm to life, the sturdy thanks
of breathing and carrying on, hunkering down
in the vacant lots of Being, studying moon
cycles and waters, which are clocks only clearer writ.




Matthew Carbery a poet and researcher currently working in Plymouth on avant-garde jazz poetics, whilst developing a monograph from his thesis on late 20th century American long poems. His poetry is concerned with the transatlantic dis/connect between British and American poetries, the concept of 'periplum' and the language(s) of politics, militarism and topography.
 
 
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