Blood. Flower. Joy!
Sweet Ladies, Good Morning! Speak of Wickedness. Wonderful Western Future. Comfort. A Season in Neo-liberal Heaven. Stars like Seeds and Swine will Fall. 42 Socialist Feminist Horoscopes. Away My Grievance. Talk. Ho! What Fiend Squatteth There? Bloody Wheat and Sweet Mercy. Practical Sunshine Witchcraft. Joy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Mothers of All Question. Many Marigold Salads. Sister Sorrow What
Sing You? Poems. Lyrics. Songs. A Sequence.
Blood. Flower. Joy! (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2019) is a sequence of short lyrics. Poems from Blood. Flower. Joy! have been published in Adjacent Pineapple, And Other Poems and Datableed. An earlier version of this project titled Away My Grievance won the 2018 Ivan Juritz Prize.
The lyrics in this sequence are fun; they explore the comic and strange, magical and ritual. A modern little book of spells. The poems are anti-individualist, ameliorative, socialist. Read extracts below.
'an organic, incantatory synthesis of voices ancestral and contemporary. Each poem is an earthy celebration and a woozy spell.'
James Knight
'a brilliant, telling, teasing reanimation of what lyric can be for us now.'
Lara Feigel
This irreverent, striking and bristlingly original collection of poems is unlike anything else you'll read this year.
Rebecca Tamas
breakfast be my idle bridle
when winter’s coffee
is soft as the lilly
i sidle out my bed of ivy
as from the pine
lets fly my nightly care
slim picking for finches
more tired than the dawn
that breaks you there
dead bulrush, dead penny
still i will be merry
a loafing sprig
solving the salve of solving
with the head of a pig
angry all the time
but the bad angry not the good kind
buddy, smugness is all i’ve got
free speech is all rightaroony but
i just can’t hear you over this frock
my kink is Socialism
and portraits of men with carnelian
listen up good now, comrade
dress sexy
see Tories
go pow pow
green green green
goes the ritual beast of Spring
feed the mare
her wormwood and grist
the cat is in
the pretty black stream
go home
vulgaris
you’re depressed
you there, you are a druid
of terrible portent
i ought to be sick
i ought to be oysters
and lamb fat
poor pebble
i hear humble thunder
killing snow
and more hot white claptrap
But now I have put away
the pepper and dirt
and have a mouth all full
of big yellow teeth
when I was banished
I spoke like the banished
my, my, my,
gardenia and gladioli
now it rains, rains and rains
like wheat in a wreath
it would matter tremendously
if in our midst
there were
a thresh of frost
it’s
werewolf vs amethyst
and I know where my money is
it matters whether
an iris grew
from that there drop of sweat
and a pumpkin from the blood
glad tidings of comfort and joy
bewilderment very much
here on the dark side
of the turtle neck
this word right here
can lay down a ghost
and you can thank Simon
and Garfunkel
for that
all I want
is to buy a good brown loaf
and I’ll see it
in hell
lingers his hyacinth
picking up what i put down
enchant
someone’s little blue
husband in the hawthorn
away my grievance
with his blushing blue
frankincense
who needs her innocence?
when i die
i go to boy heaven
damn
these green trousers
i’m in
no goblin turned heroine
Greta agrees
garish as a peony
for yielding redeeming
jump into the mountain
ass backwards and grin
Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too.
Frank O' Hara