Tom Vaux

‘We depend upon our belief that light travels in straight lines.’

What can be trusted, given everything

then, given the curve, the bend,

how the sharpest shoreline of the dark

– go close – is mud of it, undetermined?

Light quanta slap your back a little hard,

friendly as a let-go briar.

It’s nothing observed, no glow

but that push that you look up for,

to your mud-silhouette’s surprise

in tain, drawn by flame from rearward side.

Why verify, turn from that second sight

of candle, having spied the fetch?

Don’t pretend it’s eagerness,

that there’s no dread that taper waits

unseen behind. The noose of certainty,

like that of love, grows tight.

Looking is not sight; ‘Seeing-

glass’ would not be a lie.

Clearer with or

without? How haunted is the phoropter?

It’s too dense with reliquae, the dirt

of more vision than even you could try.

Is green sharper or is red? The last line?

If there are walls they may be any shade

or closeness. Illuminate them, you might

see and touch white paper, on it

cowboys in red outlines,

their horses cutting capers.

And if you were to turn now, witness

no glent at all, and in looking

know it's you behind the silvering,

you are that reflected votive flame, pressed

by unlight that, alone, does not digress?

Pilgrims’ Ode

My home was a forest once, abatures

and hollow ways: now it’s all knock-down bricks

the colour of the leavings of the sick.

What if my bones jilt skin? Hunt a burnside

welcome, dear though not to me, congregate

in no silhouette I know, shog off through

bosk, take the Roman road to Kilburn Brook

where vowesses anticipate such knocks

on wood? Untaxed, the women won’t decline

dense this connected to white pallid that,

now here is the word: carp clave scape tib fib

innominate sacrum. Blast and cite and

manducate with great hydroxyapatite

to put on show their piety, escape

rigor, sign with rib and ulna, strident,

larynxless and silent. The penitance

of mineral. Justle to make known hope

in a jack-straw aspect of their outlines

at rest. Soon they’ll ford cowpissed waters with

typewriter kinesis. They are no atomy, standing

to off-beam attention, swaling in perpetual transit.

Iron in the scissure, signals below

past priory. So what now then if vitals

draw out to make themselves, and haul the miles

of snagging brack and footway, a ventral

sally to that cloister, raising a keen

nucleus like it’s an eye, straining blue

hawsers, wetly pleading for a little

xenia at the hour of their arrival

post-porrection? They too deserve a roll

of terms, though the litany's for us: spleen

colon gland caecum! Tell them there’s a shrine

at Saint Albans, another in Wielldun

beyond the shucks. And have others come past?

the insides can’t make themselves enquire.

It doesn’t matter. They will soon be gone

to settle flukelike in an empty sett

beside the trail, under soil, out of time,

liplessly saying of their hidden home

'This is where god lives.’ As if they make out

defunct spectacle and charity to come, premises

that are only aftermath, the age of appendices.

Finally the rent, human-shaped

hiatus, will take the routes,

go mount the state

amid the mysteries

of phone repair and one-use vapes

and cinema made megachurch

and north west too

and cakes and pertinent refuse

by bins, apexed

ziggurats of shit. I heard

you're nothing, you’ve

no struts or innard

parts, though you've yards to consider

still, although you're patient yet,

your handless hand outstretched,

frozen by the bus lane, no wet mist to give away where

                                        you have no breath.

Spell for the Value Form

The warner told us it’s past time to do our worst

cause, ware, all stocks open to a vorago,

that is the curse. An ‘immense pile’ projects

up to hell. Emil said, Bring agon

to objects. Incorrigible

I know: he’s a one. It’s more

than you can say for us

husks, bearers. Stuff up

the gear with hate?

Pour we, but

we will

yet.

[these

minus

words are not

to be whispered |

they’re not put upon

paper | and are beyond

all goods because i say so |

we have nothing and its echoes

only | mouth them with your rawhead mouth

and gesture with yes bloody bones | expel

unsound | to render still and the clum devout |

what’s left to us is to form value for a spell]