Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
Marge, let’s send a sadness telegram.
I roamed under it as a tired, nude Maori.
No trace, not one carton.
Kay, a red nude, peeped under a yak.
Was it a car or a cat I saw?
Amen, icy cinema.
Nurse, I spy gypsies. Run.
No, I tan at a nation.
Flee to me, remote elf.
Eva, can I stab bats in a cave?
Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo
Loops at a spool.
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Martedi Grasso
1.
An infant left unexposed
to linguistic stimulus
will automatically begin to speak
Enochian, the language
of the angels. Black
and white, boy and girl operate
in this language together.
One cries, “Let this length
therefore be called the Standard; let
one Tenth of it be called
a Foot; one Tenth of a Foot
an Inch; one Tenth of an Inch a Line.”
Under this, gently: “un mecanismo
arbitrario de gruñidos y de
chillidos, so uncommon in its failure
2.
angels in their tens of thousands
encircled the throne,
whispering telocvovim.” Soon, flames lamb
ent wrapped round Tottenham
and wrapped round Clapham. Before this:
“The restra
ints imposed by a mercantile
culture, ruinous
in effects up
on many who comprised the crowd,
encouraged rapid volatility”.
(A doctor co
unted very able / designes
that all Mankynd converse
shall.) Everything m
3.
anifesting its own version of fullness:
“Infra thin
separation betwe
en / the detonation noise of a gun / (very
close) and the apparition
of the bullet / hole
in the target.” There should be a
word that can only
be spoken if
one does not know what it means.
And these signs shall follow
them that believe:
(under breath) they shall cast out devils
in my name; they shall speak
with new tongues…
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OLI HAZZARD was born in Bristol in 1986, and studied English at University College London and the University of Bristol. He is currently researching John Ashbery’s poetry at the University of Oxford. These two poems appear in his first collection, Between Two Windows, published by Carcanet.
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Read more by Oli Hazzard:
Poem in The Guardian