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from
CINEMA
OF THE BLIND
by
Anthony
Weir
Blackstaff
Press, 1981
ICONOLOGIES
Club and
cleft stick
Are man and woman
Seasoned by the sourness of centuries
Thickening to peat
Above them and below
Spring after ritual spring.
Bridget and the Barons stalk the land;
Private exhibitionists stand
In front of unappeasing mirrors;
Public exhibitionists squat
On church and castle walls
Emaciated, hideously lined,
Long since ignored
And no longer keeping sin at bay.
The Barons’ offerings are made each day.
Marble monuments to heroes,
Jesus and mortality
Survey a land of cattle,
Men and women
Clubbed and cloven into sickly
Icons of fertility.
Rhadamanthys rules
With Minos and the bishops.
Meat is the eternal master
Where stones were once
(or are still Aligned):
bulls in bottles, bleeding
Hearts in plaster:
No new stone circles
ward off old Disaster.
We operate
Hopelessly, and
hopelessly expect
Our separate amputations to connect.
FISHERMEN
Urinals are strange
places
where men stand
like itinerant sweet-peas
against temporary trellises
and fumble.
Men are lucky.
They can stand while they piss
and play cards or violas
or kiss.
Young boys compete
to piss
over walls green with years
of competitions like this.
Men are lucky.
They can stand while they piss
and angle for strange fish
like Saint Peter.
click for illustrated
version
ROMANESQUE
In Aquitaine of ruined towers,
flat hedgeless fields of vines and wheat,
of wars and princes past and yet to come,
the public images of lust and luxury
wealth and drunkenness
lurk now inscrutably
on honey-coloured limestone churches.
Among the strange complexities of beasts
and monsters, harpists, lobsters, hogsheads,
skulk the shameless damned.
Less than a hammer-blow away from
Christ in his mandorla-glory, mouths and vulvas
are pulled agape, toads and serpents
suck rich women’s breasts, bite
barons' balls; double-bodied
lion-headed birds peck at and bite
the groins of upturned mistresses and victims.
Men pull each other's beards. Snakes issue
from their mouths and ears.
In the shadow of the stone strange figures flit:
carnivals of carnal daydreams.
O tormented monks!
Couples enact their couplings sadly, ritually,
fearful, with stony
resignation and enormous apparatus.
Ithyphallic acrobats, the King of Fools,
Host-guzzlers with Pantagruel parts
enormous scrotum-pursers
celebrate apocalyptic January festivals of
innocent lost innocence
to usher in the New Age with the year
– Babilonia Magna Meretrix.
And from roof to door, on capitals and blind
arcades, devouring beasts slouch
and rampage through vine-scrolls
in the pure dark poetry of stained
honeycoloured stone: elegantly-twisted
soul-secrets of a world that’s past,
the cries of saints and longing,
images of Hell and Paradise
in Aquitaine of ruined towers,
flat, hedgeless fields of vines and wheat,
of wars and worlds and princes past
and yet to come.
PAID
A rent of flesh –
Two tissues shot –
One moment’s gather –
The ravelling rush –
The loosening of one knot
picks out the threads
to wind another.
CATASTROPHE
Flowers are flowering
Larks are larking
Badgers badgering
Pines are pining
Rushes rushing
Fish are fishing
Plants are planting
Swallows swallowing
Stars are starring
The moon is mooning
And man is manning
Everything.
(click
for a poster version of the above poem)
1968
Today
the First of May
is launched the most exciting of charities:
The Society for the Masturbation
of Lonely Old Men in Public Lavatories.
Please
help those who cannot help themselves
and bring them just a little pleasure,
and remembere that for each one who delves
for what might have been a treasure
at one time, a hundred more lie
alone in their beds, longing to die
for the want of a helping hand
- for the want of something better.
THESE
ALSO
Are the Rights of Man:
To wear no clothes
To be illiterate
To have no name.
FISHERMAN
AND TROUT
I cast
at the dorsal fin above the water
that seemed like a shark's to my pride.
I struck
and the searching virgin mouth like a vulva
took my practised, indifferent and embedding barb.
I played her as she strained my rod
and rose and dived and twisted.
But in the next the simile reversed
and I was the taker of the unwitting
symbol that he was.
Crack! on the side of the boat.
A second crack! with the back of his head
and the golden image was dead.
I cast again.
EPIPHANY:
Eochu, Lord of the Underworld
Barrel
Slung between powerful thighs
Marvel
Fixing my humble and envious eyes
Slides out of its stock
Veins standing out, thick
As a man’s arm:
Authority
Long and splendid and black
Extends towards the ground
Then with a masterful flick
Slaps a taut belly
Swings down again
And slowly slips back
Into thigh-portal
Leaving me trembling and awed
By unconscious display
Of superhumanity.
GOD
is love is
a hoarding
behind which hide
desperate competitions.
MIND
is
rind around desire
Passion:
ration of our fire
Soul:
a hole of consciousness
Life:
a knife to carve the emptiness
SIDELONGINGS,
BELFAST 1969
In dark courts and entries
between cold urinals
long since demolished
where men looked over and down
at each other (hopeful, peninsular)
little girls loitered.
Always in pairs
(for they were not lonely)
uncourted
unentered
they whispered to grim, sidelong men
How much will you give us to rub you off, Mister ?
Little girls with dirty
little-girl faces worked
stony-faced men with quick
and matter-of-fact
little-girl hands
to new-old
I-told-you-so of soft flesh
when some men don’t pay
near old, lost urinals
where other men
sidelong and wistfully
fingered each other
(bleak seas round peninsulas)
shifting from toilet to toilet
or paired off in the night
past old little girls
for brief, hopeless pleasures.
A
POLICEMAN SAID
On
a frosty afternoon in January 1977
a lion escaped from his rickety cage
in a travelling circus
in a Belfast suburb. He was followed
by police and circus people
with chairs and sticks. A middle
aged woman in a pink dress
collapsed with fright when she saw
a lion in her back garden. He was
cornered in a car-park and covered by
4 submachine
guns
3 Enfield rifles
1 double-barrelled shotgun
1 single-barrelled shotgun
and several police revolvers.
After
he was finally lured into a cage
by the lion-tamer (with whip)
a policeman said
he would rather go after gunmen than lions
THE
MEANING OF LIFE
If
the meaning of life could be put into words
the Bible would not have been written
nor the Upanishads, nor the Holy Q'uran,
for the well-known Meaning of Life well-understood
would have precluded all those often-unhappy
displacement-activities that are called Culture
and Civilisation, and which only occur
because the meaning of life is unknown - or,
rather, known only to a silent, invisible few,
who, if asked to express it, would say:
Shit. The meaning of life is mystery and shit.
Or: Nothing. The meaning of life is no-meaning.
But
nobody asks them because they are diffident
dissidents, and even if they were asked, no-one
would pay any heed to their answers
because the heedless questioners' whole lives,
their planet-shattering apparatus of culture
is based on the lie that life's meaning
is something other than nothing,
other than shit -
and they and their children are it.
SEX
IS THE RANDOM EXPRESSION
of
the disjunctiveness of us all.
Love is honest and wholesome and simple
that sucks cocks through a hole in a wall.
SIRIUS
Sirius
shines
the dog star
low in the sky
the brightest star
revolving round
a small dark sun
which no man has ever seen
like a body
round a soul
or words
around a man
or a man
around his words
or a man
around a man
or words
around a soul
like a body
which no man has ever seen
a small dark sun
revolving round
the brightest star
low in the sky
the dog star
Sirius shines
ON
TURNING AWAY FROM YET ANOTHER
SEX-SCENE ON FILM
Futility
and fate are fused within that orifice
which turns men out unfinished
unmaking and unmade.
Then, from its origin
the ugly, silly frontispiece
slips out inert, expended from parade.
SATURN
REFLECTS
How
wonderful
are spectacles -
obstacles
so magical
they let us see
other obstacles
(which may not be).
Spectacles
like testicles
are usually a pair.
But spectacles
are appendicles
you can choose
not to wear.
A
MEDITATION
As
a bubble in water by its own levitation
rises up to its own, in its own is destroyed,
death is an event continuous as creation
whose season ceases in consummate void.
Poems
from this page are included
in the handsome
PRACTISING
HOWLING
e-book
which you can download
here and now
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