WORLD POETS MAGAZINE

  Hill (i.m. Geoffrey Hill)   Remove your hard-hat, turn off the hazard lights. You do the philosophy in different voices, with Heraclitus travel through gloom. You think the deceased are not the dead: the dead do not cease.   Your poem had an effect on me: it smelt like cold music, exercise of war. It points away from you, who are dead, who was not thought out or down. Nor is music sound.   Deities use us as the lenses through which they see the shadows of themselves gather wing. As one sweeps one is swept in turn. Stories froth through us. In our time   the masters of the white vans refine what cannot be said. The frowning nurse fulfils the prophecy. The kite-flyers fish for gods. Roadsides strew with canisters of nox.   The assembled dead are new-fallen sibilant leaves. Call-waiting music purls among the many tongued ghosts. A question concerns the Sibyl: is strong art made by the angry, or the unwise. The void.   Heading towards the spee...

  Streets of the Abandoned City   The Street of the Candlemaker runs slant to the river where time is detained in slight tallow bodies, moored up in ragboats awaiting the tide.   The Street of the Illusionist was never there, or so it would have you believe; an empty black bag in a vat full of pitch.   The Street of the Graveyard is lined with books, with symbols and scorings no one can decipher and carvings of cherubs too weighty to fly.   The Street of the Birds is a vault of locked cages, each inhabitant rendered to feather and bone. Wind blusters through keyholes to parody song.   The Street of the Kings wears a crown of eye teeth plucked from the jaws of anonymous dogs. The Street of the Dogs was scratched from the map.       Sleep   The city is old. It pulls furs about itself, hunkers down and draws archetypes  on the insides of its eyelids with chalk:   a staircase stopping to consider if it is going up or down, a bed em...