Tim Atkins

from ON FATHERS > ON DAUGHTYRS

Oh let me just flop down flat on the road like a big fat jelly out of a bowl and never move again!

Samuel Beckett

*

Baby sleeping / woman turning / man on fire

Bill Berkson

                                                       I am

Caught up in you, I admit it,

            As far as the north edge of Paris 

& Wild fathers,

Chalk marks between tall buildings

                        Wild fathers (=wild fathers)

       Out of gas, the fruit of

The bean    or the beast

              Or the bees

                       Drawn up at traffic lights,

   Covered with mirrors                  Bruce Springsteen 

                                                              Forlorn but not

       Forlorn Humming, the political system

                                Doing over beings 

Over being over doing     there is

One answer, just

     Sitting

                               When I showed you 

    You felt sleepy   

                  Oh   Really   Thing 1

                                         &  I did too

The Day Lady Di Died

                         The day Margaret Thatcher dies

            Be reborn a Buddha fireworks

   When all the evil’s gone  

 All the evils   never gone

 Where the money goes

Dottr of yr father’s eyes, with no room  

In this place    for a man here in women

Practice    always & only  of poetry politics emptiness eternally

bricklike yet

Forever setting out, never arriving

         Not building or bleeding

Bullshit, arms, abandoning, abandoned, yet

The good house  Varstik! Varva! Dearest! Hamster!  From Streatham

to Morden  

Written out of the canon, there were

                                Three in the bed)    the song goes

& I made it

Asleep on the carpet

    Unconscious among dust mites

                                        Never biting, always bitten

Holding the umbrella at the barbeque   burning the bad poetry  

rejecting

 the notion of salvation, all dinosaurs are good

Flying ones, the best, you don’t

Follow the smell of a girl’s socks

You follow the smell of a girl’s feet

                         Getting on by pushing

At dawn

Crossing Woolwich Ferry, Whitman saying

Resist much, Obey little,   in his hand, on pink paper

             Old enough to hold a chicken, lounging

           Calling the local cats with catnip & sandwiches

Smashing down on the burp app

     Filming the fairy lights

                                  Oh how I

Hate epics

Cloudless at First

Spending millions upon  post-it notes & tippex    on the stairs

                                     Getting the first whiffs

Of mortality

   Eating the mould off goats’ cheese wrapped in oak leaves

Yummy

In the distance    the faint sound of puberty

In the foreground  the faint smell of poetry, money

              Bumper sticker reads HOWL if you love City Lights

       Arm made of starburst 

Japan, imagine that

Twice in a lifetime

          Bawling down the spillway

Naked & sweating,Hari Rama

Hari Hari

                      Just a girl   made up

Or girls’ things, a thumb, a faint ache beneath the right eye, glitter, tell me who’s smashed the plates,

Lights in the smoke, dark fur past, a flower, and then another

Association, coming third in the international Beatles poetry competition of 1997, and then, suddenly

The Organ of Corti

A bead of sweat between the chest and the jacket

Nobody, sky, nobody

    A baby

                    Then eight years later

     Awake in the firmament

Made up words

             Buzzing fillings

What would Sun Ra do?

  Another baby

In a man’s dream

There are no novels, only poetry, beautiful cities

                 Red leaf of a Japanese Maple 

Brushing your eyebrow

                                 Strings of the ukulele

There are still so many good things in this world

                 An inch deep    a mile wide

Not dead yet  what

Great good fortune

             For you I’ll be   por ti sere

Oh honey