Death Rattle is an honest kaleidoscopic portrayal of the isolation, joy and abandonment that beats within the city’s restless heart. It is a trilogy comprised of poems, narratives, lyrics and aphorisms, where the duality of the city and the rural, which have historically been the idealized backcloth for love, lust and loss, flourish wildly. For Hughes the city is a female, fleeting, alluring and violable symbol, the rural a sacred poetic resource gilded with solace and healing. Through choice encounters and assorted personae, Death Rattle bestows with flinty wit, ruthless reasoning and solemn reflection a wistful eye upon the menagerie of the city’s inhabitants.
DEATH RATTLE
John Hughes
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009 John Hughes
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Cover Art: Emanuel Vigeland photographed by John Hughes
Dedicated to KTH
When I Sit There He is Sat There
Prologue
Three elements which balance out: a rural unconscious, an urban subconscious and a cosmopolitan consciousness.’ Fragments Jean Baudrillard
Part One
“When I die, I want to die like my grandfather - who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.” Anon
Hunt
It approaches nine in the eve. Peter Arbo’s
The Wild Hunt of Odin rests against my Mac.
I look burnt out at the garden of snow singularly falling,
Midges in the meady sodium light, hexagonal, blooming.
I am more a black and white photograph withering in an attic,
Punctured by the darkness, mothballed by the dust.
When I fall I fake love's signature, the ink swindles my blood
And the notes in my margins are quavering sutures.
There is a mess of years in my diaries,
Asides to solemn sleep lost to idolatry,
And when I weep fickle for a woman
Frosts creep over the skies of my skull.
When I am more the conductor’s arc in an orchestra’s brass,
Time scalds my liver and heart in a flambé.
When I am so much more well oiled, the waters mass,
The restlessness of youth blossomed, the truth surpassed,
I know my seed coils into the soil of souls,
Mines deep down in the hope of a bright utopia,
Disappears like dogs or falling stars;
The leavened trail of loveless kisses, cornucopias.
Ergo escaping the disguised city seems futile.
I shall remain speared, hang over the pitfalls of death,
Lick headstones as if they are gravy stained,
Be it furies or poetry on the lips of my last dying breath.
The Even Odds
I am sleepwalking home close to 6 am.
I have made another fresh start.
This night there is a pack of cards strewn across the pavement.
The hearts look dishevelled,
The spades seem blunt,
The clubs are emptied save for the hangers on
And the diamonds choking my neck have won.
I am gone to sea changes,
I wander the outward ranges.
And though I cross them, I cross her
And I converse with the walls
Meaning nothing, meaning every soul.
Time shifts hunger
A ray of light in the dawn’s fragile foal.
Continuation of the Dialogue
Does it make your bruises blacker?
Do the gaps of years draw closer like a vice?
Does the skin fallen off your bones stew?
Did you dig deeper and the deeper you dug suffice?
Does your text ring sound hollow?
Did you fit in but fall fallow?
Do the feelings return shallow?
Does the light come then the dark swallow?
Do passions relent into offspring?
Do your offspring reward denials?
Did the fight fall out of the ring?
Do you drink from tomorrow’s poison vials?
Does it always hurt you to show you?
Did you never listen to your heart?
Do you swallow what you cannot chew?
Does to finish leave you static at the start?
Does the body knock itself out to knock itself in?
Did reality gnaw flesh through to the bone?
Does the mind in chaos sew back on the skin?
Do you buy what you cannot own?
Did the questions never seize reasoning?
Do you need a quiz show for answers to begin?
Does holding out resort to losing?
Did you arrive but never go in?
Do you have the answers but no good questions?
Does receiving only make you regret?
Does remembering hold the answers?
Did time stick, your memories beset?
Does your loneliness embrace?
Do you gamble on mistakes?
Did you refuse a refuge with grace?
Do you hold on too long for an ace?
Does winning win the losers over?
Does the person choosing have choice?
Did you eat a four-leaf clover?
Do you relinquish having a voice?
Do you run down yourself?
Did the wrong path get stepped upon?
Does your skin touch another’s wrath?
Do you purge the desire to move on?
Do you burn with forgotten souls?
Does the funny man equal his piss?
Did you feel halved, not make a whole?
Does the everyman encompass the bliss?
Do you gauge well where you must stop?
Did stopping mean you knew where you had started?
Does resumption end if you are on top?
Did you arrive before you had departed?
Metropolis
My love mirrored with all the neon out there in her forests of rayon
Danger reflections refracted inside their figments of loyalty,
The blankness of dark alleys compared with old valleys,
The time to retreat to sleep lost to those who fear to weep,
Great oceans of tears, stolen happiness reaped from the years,
Ripe but not yet ripened crops perishing amid tower blocks,
The vigils of the heart that have lead the way to delicious art,
The sanctity of ruins in the mind that we demolish and cannot find,
The recollections that will not yield nor fruition awake from the soul’s fields.
The revolutions that will never materialize in the litanies of littered eyes,
The dreams we dream ceremonial as the wishes on lips existing immemorial,
Lovers never born in the concrete streams, the random taxis spotlight beams,
Conjurers’ tricks in the metropolis’ minds melting away with the kisses of the blind
Ache all that we have come to know of the unfathomable streets undertow, unrefined.
Butcher Boy
I have built a wall and it’s halfway to the sun,
After rising later into the days,
No sooner has the dusk’s cloak begun,
I ascend the depths of the old ways.
The seconds of the days, though young,
Hang with a note or crescendo of touched absence.
The strength she found was more my abandon,
My weakness collection. There is no defence,
Our misunderstandings have been hard won,
I manoeuvre between states of how we wrench
Ourselves into a knot of wrongs.
I go to bed with mercy on my lips,
A pharmacy on my tongue.
I never wrote love letters to your hips,
I see you amid the T-bane drone, when gone
I want to take the past and screw it,
If I can’t do that I want to chop it into bits,
If I still had the belief to go on, I’d renew it,
But I can’t afford to think,
And past mistakes churn my shit.
I want to believe love is still alive,
That my love will again find the vows I took,
That new loves will experience my love,
Though it seems an unwieldy task,
Mentally still fucking what is fucked.
Lovers
We wash ourselves up on beaches intended only for the seas’ drifts,
Hold the shells to our ears so they might resound with our heartbeats lift.
Erroneous
To step beyond a bottle of rusty malt,
Not incise yourself for being so cold,
Let your fingers remember the vaults,
Touch the soul with the body of your mind,
Return the keys to where you were sold,
Turn a page and not find flaw and fault,
Replenish only that which you can find.
Invisible
It is pensive out here tonight,
So I shall crawl over to the dog pound and take a stray home.
I will name her Oblivion’s Dream.
We will stop still, the city surrounding, falling inwards,
Off the glass the echoing vilifications of fools,
Raucous laughter distorted as trumpets,
In the reflection, on the end of the rope, the dog, a figment of loyalty.
Mildew
I am finding the strength from the abyss of cliché.
I am sat on the toilet and life drags my soiled ethics across the toilet paper.
I am a man disinterested in women and men who offer to the drink and dreams of my
Sullied cup.
I am sat on the rat hole of love and all I can do is offend the meek.
I am too lost to think of a sensible answer.
I am abject of meaning, bashing the square bucolic jpegs into megabytes of my pixels ill
Reticulations.
I am shadowing poverty with abandon as is my want and wonder.
I am love’s breathless doppelgänger. I am tender as the forests disarm light from the sun and cruel as the sea parts the waves
From salted tears.
I am pain pining for the honey of bees and the flesh of mankind.
I am still an idealist locked in the mansions of possibility. I am sheathed in the wreath of night, drawing the curtains of the ashamed across the
Windows of the disturbed.
Stay
When I set sail upon your eyes their sloop storms in my heart.
Ghost
I found you hiding in a cupboard covered in the fust of decayed bones,
I had heard you moaning answering your midnight calls on the telephone.
I told you to get over it, get a dog or girlfriend, stop making overtones,
Break on through or return to the other side, stay out of the twilight zone.
Lover
My eyes are pinned in yours.
My irises wheeling catherine wheels.
If I close them I am immersed in your pool of lips.
Spillage
The day that you were born God must have spilt his jar of freckles and moles
And seeing how furtively they landed on your fair skin,
Caught as they were on your back and belly and neck, smiled,
And sprinkled a few more down on you for luck,
Then taken the rest of the day off so he could admire his handy work.
I focus on the pair constellated beneath your left eye.
The Music Will
Music will not work
As I sail off at a tragic tangent,
Misconstruing death’s tork,
I can see the tensile plangents.
Music will have death perfumed be the agent,
Pull apart sensation,
So that life’s scent dies without creation.
Slattern
Joy coils round true as an electromagnet to its field.
She is far from the bulge at the equator that bore her.
I am ploughed through her flesh in a constriction of giggles.
In the morning she snakes away on the solar wind.
I try to blow her dust and debris from the bed sheets
Tell the miscreant in the mirror he is innocent of the black matter.
The sordid reflection hangs there being looked at through a telescope.
Before I Slip Into
for Janne
Beautiful minds are echoing out of windows,
Bird song ringing through the chill dawn air.
I make a nest in a merciful branch,
The leaves are rustling tongues,
There promises are forged without a care,
I can lie alone and ancient in the sun’s spangled ruins,
All the stars fallen into the horizon’s glorious gutters.
Enigma Variations
for Marning
I