John Wilkinson

1953 / London

[from Reckitt's Blue]

Water glasses in and glass waters like an eye glasses over
To outstare : so waters rush down the glassy eye

Rolls behind the lustre it apportions, the eyes' armada
Bristling with quivers-full, ruddying like time-lapse orbits,

Tethered like the floats marking contours of a sand shelf,
Rotaries that saw across the big suction pads,

Dredge into the mooring, steal fishing rights, exact water
Options that boom under the fretful high buzz :

Where once were carved screens, chancel walls, our house
Extraverts, inside glosses out and nothing is glossed over
But incisively broken, neatly parsed, picked apart with ultra
Precision tools then displayed in clear suspension, listed
Organs are sectioned, the roving eye performs its autopsy,
Heart confirms, wildcat operators square off flats of mud
Shaken so to slop out wells, mesh will let the catch tumble,
These are their spoils. Sluiced all dissipate where island
Purses, cowries, heat-bonded pockets, floored eyes follow
Strung skulls turning in a tuned flood, each a self quadrant.

Box the sample, calibrate the spring flood,
See the ceiling grind slowly, ground stump

so unseal the catacomb of seed, run
Without a lock, its on-line activation protocol

Frigate birds reject the pallid sprouts, a foul-smelling mat
that lawn is but deaths waterfront,

The trade group daubed in white will disembark,
Agents of the tribe retrofit a blank display with hoardings,

Highlight walrus tusk and cans of tuna. Headless,
Neckless, shoulderless, surveyors click the bundled sticks

Fanned across their backs, feel towards a spirit trap, stray
Where nerveless spirit scraped out

stinging particles, stormy light plumps the veins,
Vibrates a diastolic harp of vines, slit gong dithers

coating lemurs folded in volcanic clefts,
Sunlight scarce applies its thought while ash sighs airborne,

Sifted through microns-deep, these deposited
In light-controlled drift gloss , blink of an eye

from saturation to alluvial.
For detail see miniature skull exploded in vitro and labelled.

So in darkness cancellations ridge beneath finger-pads
In closure corrugations buckle where serpents thrash
In skin-tight patinations transfer between the surfaces
hi approach supplied reflections writhe in anticipation
In congress fur stops words behind the mouth, its ket
In volutes electrical the poor ghosts in their element
In the wave function , in monsoon blast
Blade s of air conditioned chill, knife a bumpy surface
In flotillas, feel the bumps, enfilade on ocean swells

Islands racked with cries soaked off cliffs,
Intifada , cries the dead reply to with their own cries
Interrupting waves, forming swells known as dunung, shift
, staggering the files of shod creatures walking
Through hell's yards: Neatly docketed
They tow their line through dense slabs of algae,
In their heads they cannot echo, cannot
In their lucid trance pass along a scream,
In their calm smooth frictionless usal

Brought to this pass this chiliastic dead-end, human
In their peering eyes rolled back in a scoured, sanded cast.

Behind the illuminated exit sign a cataract churns on a loop.
By the emergency stairs a symmetric frenzy shuts its trap.
100 Total read