Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

[With these poems Painted, spoken begins the serialisation of The Syllabary. A randomly generated version of this continuing project and other work by McCarey is available at the website above. - RP]

In the syllabary the Y axis is rhyme, the X axis is alliteration and the Z axis is consonance. At each intersection of those three axes is a cell that contains a noise, or a word or a set of words. Sometimes the words within a cell, or in neighbouring cells, have grammatically related meanings; more often they are semantically unrelated: fusion and fission at work. Each of the meaningful cells has a unique story to tell. I’m sure the others do too.


21.10.17 

Hierogram

Higher into the dark
(My vertebrae rattling like a pile of soup plates)
Of your eyes,
Rock rabbit
Lolloped in from another tale;
In Abyssinian
Ashtok, where the pharaoh’s scribe
Put his hieratic
Best foot forward. Hire a car
And drive, man, drive.


21.11.17

How’re you
To be so those blue
Eyes don’t empty
Lines in your face
Of crumpled notes
From an otherwise
Grand piano nobody
In this
Global economy wants.


20.11.17

Cower?
Couldn’t piss
In a urinal.
A gastropod in the cowrie shell it’s coined.
Absently the slaver fingers the slit
As he counts his merchandise on board.
The slaver clears the reef.
The cowries cower below.


20.1.17

Whores and gurus
Cooks and crooks won’t do it.
Cowering there
Cushion and core
Tell the language
What it’s meant to cure.


20.1.19

Crook and cook:
Skewer and grill;
Twist the rendering:
Pin him up and vanish.
For the shield-biting berserks
Lunch was the continuation of war indoors.
In Orkney, Rus’ and maybe Saxo Grammaticus
The cook it was, with his scramasax,
Who’d to top the innocent kinsman come to parley,
The Latin cook forshriven by the martyred Norse.
Reverse takeover: the guest was the dinner
And the dinner consumed the host.


20.11.19

Cowk
Cowk
Vomit.


21.11.19

Stuck at this one. Howk it out
The ball from the ruck,
Spud from sod, stone from tread
Shard of root from gum
And then what?


21.1.19

The Hook

It’s just there
In the middle of the room
No bait nor nothing
Thinks I’m daft as a mackerel
Of course it doesn’t think at all
Just happens to be there
Like I just happen to be here
You know, no plan nor nothing.
The hook.
Sooner or later.



21.1.20

zapped


21.11.20

Cantalupo
Up in the Appenines.
All you can hear on the moon
Is the howl of the wolf.


20.11.20

Monkshood, eh? Well you can keep your cowl
And give me an Argive helmet, with the head in,
Flayed and mogrified to larkspur spikes.
Lycoctonon, we’ll call him, winter wolfsbane.
A totem pole of him and all his troupe,
A tower of docking stations for the bees,
Catspaw the wise old monkey used
To pull his chestnuts out the purple coals.


20.11.1

Cow – my wetnurse! Land of milk!
Packets and tins afloat like Noah’s navy.
Six days rehearsing the first word of Nostratic
End in bits for the Saturday Irish stew
Floured and quivering Turkish delight.
Childhood ends with a shlook like school milk.
Now you shamble among the urban veggies
Like Abel’s ghost in downtown Madras.
We’re afraid to touch you.

20.10.1

I can’t cry for you. 


20.10.3

Eh ye wee clype! She said.
(Clype was a telltale.)


20.9.3

Keep it.
Creep back where you came from.


17.9.3

In gathering reams of ripeness
You reap what you sow.
You take what you don’t.


17.8.3

If ray takes shape and gape takes grape
Why not, said the reaper, have a little rave
                                  with the rep?
There’s a word for all this
I want nothing to do with it.