there is nan’s visible neurosis as she tremblingly lifts the lid of the laptop & eyeballs the dark screen turning into action sponging from her a vision hemmed in worlds of hard borders. she never switched one on before & now nan’s doing so in a dream of mine in which I call out but…
Read Moredementia IV
nan cursed grandad for leaving on a trip to heaven without her. he fought tooth n’ nail against leukaemia & prostrate cancer. —nan survived grandad & couldn’t cope with it. wen I ger’up there I’m gunna throttle him into next week. I always found it funny how nan assumed the calendar in heaven mimics earth’s.…
Read Moredementia III
it ends with the wrong vowel for it to be as inert as tao. without its isochronal “o” this insoluble tau u-turns into void. I dow know worr’e’s on abowt ‘alf the time. yoo ‘av’ t’ave cold ‘ands to mek pastry. dow yow tell fibs…I waar. n’ I ay. fibrillary tangle of & & &…gone!…
Read Moredementia II
now ‘ow’d I do it agen : “that” then that or that then “this” then “that”? nan’s head’s a sack of cabling smeared in lard. plaques harden like bacon grease gluing memories in a lump. when did the lump become a lump? the excruciating breakage of familiarity. the world turned uncanny as protein gluts brain…
Read Moredementia I
When my grandma died from COVID in December, she’d also spent many years descending into dementia. After listening to a 6 hour long ambient album called Everywhere at the end time by a musician from Manchester called The Caretaker, which attempts to sonically represent the slow declension into dementia, I decided to write a series…
Read MoreNoise II
ring tones & motorbikes chatter like angry macaques. cars purr like horny lions in the formation of offensive elephants. buses blare like confident ostriches in devastating clans of particles. clockwork objects sound the sounds of wildernesses aggregating. there are inversions in the world : vastly populated worlds beneath the “world.” it will take evolutionary events…
Read MoreNoises
even the seagulls have begun to rev like motors their urgent apocalyptic craws embed the cathedral green in the revelatory compass which points to doom : the bins gushing with liquescent detritus. the crow rickshaws & the magpies pummel the air pneumatically. the trees inhale like air-brakes on buses. the seasons conveyor-belt & churn out…
Read MorePhasing in & out of Subscendent Wholes
My dissertation has been handed in & now I am flooded with mild anxiety. It hadn’t really occurred to me that most people write about authors long deceased. John Wedgewood Clarke is very much alive and active; as are the sources I cite, in large part. Only Heidegger & Derek Parfit are the exceptions. This…
Read MoreThe “Spectrality” of Phytoplankton in John Wedgewood Clarke’s Landfill
In Landfill, poet John Wedgewood Clarke takes the reader on walks along the trekking paths of some of England’s most outstanding areas of natural beauty. One such area is the Greensand Way connecting Surrey and Kent. Clarke, choice picks this location owing to a property of its geological composition: it is made of chalk. Landscapes…
Read MoreDimethyltryptamine
Recently I was provided the opportunity to smoke DMT, one of the most confounding & intense experiences of my life. It is difficult to reconcile the out of body, death-like experience with the simplicity of this ubiquitous compound, found in mammal brains & numerous plants, including acacia. I felt death. On coming out of the…
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