Contains Mild Peril

Fran Lock

• Publisher: Out Spoken Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781916046887
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Contains Mild Peril is a book permeated by anxiety, not fatal threat, but the ambient manic hum of daily life. Precarity does something to us at the level of language; it shapes the ways we see and say. Our current climate – political, environmental, economic – engenders its own nervy music. These poems channel this collective apprehension in ways both deeply personal and instantly familiar. It is a collection that abounds in loss, in a sense of being lost, and in the gnawing fear of losing, yet its speakers address us with urgency. This is language in the throes of fighting back.

dead / sea

i

music for suicide

to arrive at the edge of the sea, uncertain as a wedding guest swaying alone at the shallow end of a depopulated dance floor. or to be standing very straight and very still, and wearing all the glamour you have borrowed from disaster: the lisping wounds of gangland, global weirding’s long, black ecological cosh. stunning. you put their lights out. vamper. you are very modern, atonally sexy, full to the teeth of a pouting doom your lips purse into all involuntary. you want to cry: fuck me on a pile of dirty money! you have seen too many music videos. you are in love, with the gun’s fatal tumescence, kurt cobain painting the town with his spag bol brains in a fever dream. never mind. there’s a special quality to the light here, like wading waist deep in a slowly developing photograph. they couldn’t begin to tell you about beauty, approaching the marbly seaside dark down the wrong end of a telescope. they couldn’t begin to tell you: how beauty resides in being unformed. you always thought that loss could be lavished upon us like love. you suffered so many arrogant kisses, debunking your mouth with a mouth in the night. intimacy is a hand trapped between hot folds of flesh. you admit it freely, you do not know how to feel, but you are so lost now, like peter pan, estranged from his shadow. your dead are never coming back, and you don’t want to feel. the morning’s sharp insult like salt against the skin. you want an extravagant disgrace, a sorrow sleek and fierce as all hell breaking loose or what’s the point? yours is not the irreproachable grief of virgins, crossing themselves at a fork in the road. your grief is the place where farce and shame will intersect in memory. ask him again: how could you? oh, your love has its masochisms and its vertigoes, its wounded melodrama: how could you? the black lagoon he’s creature to disturbs the subtle function of an artery like lust. he flirts a better pain than yours, revels his infliction in a dazzlescape of lights on snow, a bed of velvet devastations. oh, a better pain than yours, a slow pain spread with ardent cunning. away in a manger, his big mid-brain is chemically coddled. candled, curdled. the ancients knew how women went deranged with grief and wandered the earth tearing their hair. the gods don’t favour you, leave them to their omissions and dominions. the gods do you no favours. you have failed, you lost another, and only the sea accepts you now. you lit a fire on the beach, the leaf-greedy fire found nothing to feed on but clothes and photos. benjamin called writing memory’s theatre. strut and fret. your dead slum the current trailing furs like film stars. there’s a performance and a haunting. and you do not know the difference. you are traipsing the high-wire, dragging your heels in fuck me shoes along a silver line in the undisputed, depthless blue.

ii

a brief history of the intoxicants industry in ireland and the americas

eddies of ice, commercial dirt. and i’ve no use for ravens, crows. a seagull is the white lieutenant of my grief. omnivorous fate i’m captain of. i gather my collapses now. ahead of me, you went. irreparable atlantic, air i dare not drink. the sea a lesser desert. gulls, my bedouin faction of the mad. the unlamented moon upon a stick. an unrelenting labour. how the lung is tasked with blackening. and i’ve no use for crows. mangan, dragging his iambic backwards through a hedge, slapping the dust from his genius. behan, crying out in the quiet part of a coward play, like a man rising from an indifferent nightmare: that’s not what i wrote! don’t laugh. if you laugh i will never forgive you. i will smile, but i’ll never forgive you. eddies of ice, this potbellied, sickly bliss. a bird as big as an unmade bed. seagull, squalid estuary of feathers, friend. white bird adrift in a damaged brain that cries to god. that stinks to heaven, that cries to god. even the protestants pity us. martin luther, drawing his horns back into his headache. the splinters asleep in the grain of a cross. i have counted them all. i have courted them all. i have risen wanting water, the lemon suck, a swifter shame. and ironed my smiles like school skirt pleats, folding my face through another day. no one must know. every ship in a bottle an ark, unpacking its animal magnets two-by-two. wolves come first, and last. resplendent wolves will inherit the world. they have eaten the meek. eddies of ice, my wriggling insomnia. a turretty empire, splendid, on fire. some fool, nailing his tongue to his nakedness, nailing his foot to his mouth, our lives to the rubbery suction of latex teats. you, before all. the cemeteries now, looking leafy and injured. minutely massacred, babies the graves will not suffer to hold. and i have no use for ravens. a million gulls are the roof of the world. for all to make a landfill of our language, actors arranging their teeth preparing to do us pikey in different voices. when you wore every slamming door, and a pioneer pin, and a serious flag. here love, my most, mercenary rose. the lily that walks your lapel like a plank...

iii

everything happens for a reason

the general mood is befouled defiance. the hazards are floating free of their fires. ugly girl with the high-top trainers has swallowed a song like a sword. it must come out again, somehow. oh you, fauxnician sailor, all washed up. your death is so played out, your long and tattered ceasing on a bloody beach in brighton. liquidated. yes, it was the sea inside that drowned you. walked away from us, from the jaundiced toil of cities, from a hurt so thick that you could stand your teaspoons up in it. weekends of clammy pique, bowing from the waist behind the yellow curtains, or sprawling in the local park, a patch of weak, white grass cordoned off like a violent crime. pit bulls, shit schools, cripple-lipped buskers slurring into their sinatra, driveways pubescent with weeds, cars on bricks. yeah, imagine, our cousin says sarcastically, how could he stand to leave all this? not leaving, then, but leaving me. streets, hampered and hunchbacked, eloquent with revenge. grenfell graffiti. drink distorting talk to politic in gutless pubs with drunken fuckboys chafing for a phrase in the hazy expanses of friday night. your worst thought was a desert and you walked out like a mystic and were gone. my cravings debase me: winter, the heirloom leaflessness of hedges, trees, dirty verges insisting their thistles. i have a need for pain, to stand facing the river, mulish and starveling. do you remember, the morning we lit the wood-burning stove on the barge? coffee, cigarettes, a cold day’s slovenly currencies? do you remember the night we climbed the flyover? we thought we’d touch the sky, we thought we’d leave a footprint in its glittering physics. below us a swamp of lockjawed concrete. the empty motorway was waiting. predictably fatal, an estuary. fever ray’s first album, a deep distance inclined to kestrels, the shape of a hare courting a hot pulse under an eye. you were starry, then, we made our own beauty. oh love, my only friend, i need you when no north is true. taking the train today, this latest vertical coffin accuses: there are worse tragedies than yours. i’m running, sunrise like inspiration porn, all pink-red-orange-captionable sky: everything happens for a reason. i have friends who say this. i am like london. cumaean, an unsuccessful suicide.

iv

martyn / sibyl

the dead will take root anywhere, even here, when coughing up the old congested dread that wakes us on some roguish night or other when the saints have fled, and we will have no more of their composures or their pities. the dead will take root anywhere, even now, and with the smell of resin and the estuary, their smithereens are whisking on the methylated air. they say there is no prayer for our protection. equivocal deliverance, the only kind we’re fitted for. agrarian provocateur! green fingered vivisector! god, who turns the corpsey furrows with a spade, and bids their bitter sap to rise in soil like instant coffee: fine and loose and dry. the dead will take root anywhere, surging again through the curdled mortar of pre-war houses, out into our dingy gardens, our small, obstreperous palates of stone. long night, lone, eavesdropped and seething, inclement with calamity, and i should know. i come out on the roof when the day is a blue lingering and sleep cannot contain me. i lie up there, awake for hours, and nurse the earache of their infrasound. on long nights, lone, of skirmishing cognition, i hear them, captive in the static like a warning of a storm. you hear them too, or heard, they wait beyond your vision or your reason. we were children. they believed a child could be beaten into sweetness. we were children, taught to walk with our hands in our sleeves, little girls gothic with patience, little boys walled up in their wariness. there are things we can’t unsee, and you have lain awake, abandoned by god, sore with stomach ache and acid wrath, goose-bumped, grim, and bittering your innards in off-licence vinegar, insisting on the stinging cider piss that kisses you goodnight forever. there are things we can’t unsee: the light in amber tangles struggling through tinted windows; the dead rising up from rural churches, shedding conjure dust and crumbs. they have no joy in them, or peace; they’ve heaven’s corrective, affectionless love. whole congregations, dour-mouthed, and martyrs to the hardened artery, the pedants of disease, picking their scabs like delicate red and black brooches. you saw the woman too, standing without shoes or coat, opening an awkward scream like a wet umbrella, her hallway behind her, and framed for a moment like a hand held up in front of the sun. you saw the man whose face made mischief out of symmetry, wringing his wrists, flaunting a swollen jaw. there was that gaunt aul’ boy, stumbling down the gallows path, his bindle of pious ailments high on his narrow back; a young girl hugging her threadbare errand, scallying and tousled, a hole in her cheek like a bad apple. you saw one other: the man who dragged an abject blanket like a baby brother, sucked the salt from flint to stave off hunger. he was quite mad. he called to us. we ran from him.

the dead will take root anywhere, they do not care for proverbs or precautions. i was a child, and i thought as a child, and i saw as a child: the whole world gold through penny-toffee cellophane. you and i, dissolving a sweet tooth in sugar. in summer i practised an endless piano; there were charioteers in plastic sandals, kicking up stones on the rathkeevin road. dogs in skinny gridlock, a piebald bitch like a broken plough was dragged along by her back legs. and you, running amok in jesuit plimsolls, ward of the state. you don’t recall? the grownups spoke in whispers. i could not name the things i knew. you did not know the things you saw. the dead will take root anywhere, in endless heat, the living room, we shook the magic eight ball till the future fell out wild. the haywire logic of children: what does it mean? we want to know. and we ran to the sandy field, the rushy field, the well below the valley. always talking to ourselves, between ourselves, in pig latin, backslang, faltering cant. our pidgin words were ominous with inquest. names hovered like wrongful arrests. confession was forgetfulness, was giving up: i want to forget, you said. the scent of hedges, fuchsia, wet and red. the light and silence held my tongue. pregnable pause in the day’s undoing. we mustn’t speak, not yet. to emptiness: i saw him there.

they found his whistling head: large, and forced between two rocks. the head was singing like a kettle. the head was white and bloated, made from spit and paper. a nest, an egg, a lantern. they raised it up in a swaying light. a bird had broken open its eyes. his eyes. our dead are neither wise nor drowned. our dead will take root anywhere, as miscellaneous as weeds. you know this too; we’re oracles of all the land is rife and sullen with. they worked you over for years, pilloried, imploring, from stairwells and from quarry bottoms, mutilated, stupouring. we saw him there. i won’t pretend. you slip silently into their ranks, oh, regimental sol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Last exit to Luton
• A rough guide to modern witchcraft
• Precarity
• The Rites of Spring
• Devil
• On weekends
• Dazzler
• Some small beseeching
• On insomnia
• Giallo
• Gentleman Caller
• And I will consider the yellow dog
• A ghost in our house
• ‘Daddy’, indeed
• Dear Comrade
• True Confessions of a Catholic Schoolgirl
• The Miracle of the Rose
• Epistle from inside the Sharknado
• Happiness
• ‘Drinks with friends’
• On trauma
• Come home
• Rock bottom
• On guillotines
• Children of the Night
• Contains mild peril
• A tiny band of glittering stones
• Valery in Zombieland
• Gentry
• Loneliness of the long distance runner
• Hippy crack
• Sisters under the sun
• My dear Maurice
• Sister Cathy
• Francis
• Poem in which I attempt to explain my process
• Saint Hellier
• On incantation
• Citizen Pit Bull
• Jonah
• Sailing from Jökulmær
• Matthew in Heaven
• The accidental death of a plagiarist
• Remedial dog
• A backward dark
• ‘What it is’
• The difference between
• Centennial
• Visiting Prometheus
• The seven habits of highly affective people
• Special needs
• The very last poem in the Book of Last Things
• Us too
• X (mouth)
• dead / sea
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