1

Immensity's blade rushes the wind and
grieves a full deck of bad luck

A managed democracy dances in tune
to a spread-cleft litany, as the Queen's English
warbler, toned to death, unstrews his truth

The blind justice hangs his slogan. Stop.
Burgeon a burden for the chant laureate
entuning and consuming his own genius. The comedy
terrorist brags his mince as roast beef

No peace fries up on a multiple mind grill,
dithering states in desperate times: the sandy
trap-door promise of paradise rusted by frost.
The biggest part of self weakens its softest
option: its cast out old iron alibi song

2

Steam from the nostrils of the talking engine,
Nervous sweat, stain your place in history.
I myself believe no matter anti-voiced

A crowd's pellicle riddled with restraint as
bulldozers cut deep veins in the sand.
Veiled bodies are piled in, no happy hour for
a last prayer, no compensatory homaranismo

I'll buy it, the testimony of the dead, the
imageless human cost: dark stars aloft
and dirty bombs below. I pay with portions
of myself billed in flickering slices. Gifting
the price, a real pain I say: ‘As

soon as I write I I am gone (I am not) I
say (to 'my' self): "Make yourself scarce

3

Each creaking oak beam evokes catastrophe
the erotics of raw terror the frisson that
talking will make it happen, acknowledged pain
dispensed at each doorstep. An

index made in just being Britain
invokes threat itself its wincing
nomination held hostage by
shutting our eyes or gnawing
the dry grains of near-certainty

Lips sealed our mouths threaded for
easy snoop and sniper

Our heritage conscience cools the
pre-judgement of history's closure
a hissing that stripes the swart tarmac

4

Cream light drips
through a moist
sky. Somewhere above the
clouds airliners with
the wrong tickets are

eased out of the
story. Mute pictures

of misery provoke dream
helicopters hovering over
the 'problem', unable to land

Breaking into my
neighbour's house to silence
his burglar alarm I
intervene in history

5

Whose body crackles with self-quotation, tape-
loop requiem to which it loosens its step?

Your own secret department shuffles your
script, an Unconscious as collective as
responsibility. Or guilt. It's drift. No sifted
evidence while group-think shifts to shafting

Enough! Statutes selve up the sovereign
vote of little appeal, tagging new
lags, to purify the tribunals of the tribe!

Sense a Bright's light relief now an animated chip
of multi-kulti mufti moons across Baghdad as
rapid-eye as a dream of prime-ministerial photo-op:
a fantail of microphones lays his fantastic egg, and
blitzed martyr-bits pile up in paradise, next door

6

Frost-sharpened sunlight burns
the skin. Between the staves of vapour-
trails a sprinkle of the promised sand sings I
met a traveller from a sleeping cell

Capital stampedes its gushing ruts, desires
the eye's friendless fire on flesh in gloom
moving in tune to propulsive gash and gown

The aesthete of barbed-wire corsets plumes
an incendiary flâneur, blown in premature
invagination. Bodies fill with his self-less throttle,
humming on the radioactive breeze
for phantasmal reward sold as debt

The figure in the doorway is bled away
by policed light that invades the portal

 

Copyright © Robert Sheppard, 2006.

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Robert Sheppard teaches at Edge Hill College, near Liverpool. His most recent publications include Tin Pan Arcadia (Salt Publishing, 2005), a large selection from his magnum opus, Twentieth-Century Blues. Liverpool University Press published his critical volume, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents, 1950-2000 in 2005, and he has also edited the Salt Companion to Lee Harwood (Salt Publishing, 2006).