Millennial Lice II (animatronic pubic lice), 2024

 

35cm x 45cm 

Oil on Expensive European Fabric 

Ah Beautiful Sky (second print run)

 

In the middle of a second print run for ah beautiful sky by slubpress; some minor alterations, re-haps, etc etc. Should have around 25 new copies for Helping People show on June 21st. In meantime, if you want to purchase one go to the slub site or send me an email here: coledenyer@live.co.uk. 

Or below: 

For £8 including postage to RoW/UK/EU. 

Paypal is biglittlehammers@gmail.com, 

just drop address in the message. 

https://paypal.me/ColeFrenchum?locale.x=en_GB

https://slubpress.cargo.site/Ah-Beautiful-Sky

‘Sir the State,

You are Britain’s Fairest Man’

Denyer’s salvo brutalises hope - one cannot be in a state of health, let alone happiness, in the state of Great Britain Ltd.; one cannot be in ‘a state of complete physical mental and social wellbeing’, as the definition has it, within a state that denies any of its dysfunctioning parts a chance at the latter two criteria. In a state made up of masters and slaves, of lords and ladies and statistics, each lives according to the rule - contentment and joy as we know them, are possible only within the dire crucible of this ultimate relation, whose greatest legacy is suffering and abuse - and, what is the same, each is therefore that malodorous dialectic in and of themselves, while such untold grace persists. One’s physical, mental and social state - one’s medical, financial, emotional condition, one’s private and public being, one’s relation to others and (and as) to oneself - is undeniably a product of this state of affairs, this endless shift. Denyer’s text demonstrates this sickly proliferation of infection and bitter conditioning deftly, as though it were not also his body, his account, this ‘voice’ - as indeed it must be, though it speaks also our own, all of us, here. And it does this to the extent that, at intervals, we recognise that eidolon - ‘the voice of the nation’, amidst the poem’s voices, and cannot extricate one from another, cannot unpick the seam we find at our lips. The horror, the horror!

The text bleeds, is ill, so many symptoms and side-effects in the guise of a pantheon of planning acts, penumbrous acronyms and formal titles, fiscal punishments, idiomatic axioms, profitable ‘scandals’ and other media dirges, etc etc…; as a cursed body, a curse that is its own hex (Dieu et mon droit) the text haunts names that themselves haunt us, though we do not or did not know them - names whose stories, whose lives, are so many parts of our own; indeed, in this tableau, they R’ us. Ah Beautiful Sky seems to my mind, herein, the metonym of our discontent, a receptacle of our sickly firmament built of itself in our delusion; its very symptoms are the glass that binds the case, our cup, our affliction overflowing. And yet - they are beautiful, these accursed vignettes. For a consciousness of self and world arising from these maladies, finds space for what of love persists - though this is often presented indirectly, hid behind the onslaught, the poem’s ceaseless spectacle of collusion, shame, mourning and neglect. And in so doing Denyer gives us, darkly, a dying fall of hope, straining to be free of the incursions of debt and repossession - a memoriam to the truth of experience that is enough, or must be, in its truth, to assure that merry rabble in our disarray, that life is that which could be so much more than this, and nothing more. ‘We’ could be what we know ourselves to be, but never find entirely before us, finding itself instead, as ever, for now, in such teeming, maladjusted reveries of verse. And nothing more, sir?

Owen Brakspear

Céileachair your House is on Fire (Draft)

  

Céileachair your House is on Fire, 

your clothes are burning 

Longphorts, raids 

hear Granny talk about 

Clonfin Ambush, Longford 

the arrival of the first Civic Guards, 

her father 19 men, 2 lorries, 

reinforcements 150 men

14 lorries later British Forces burned 

inside glass houses

& still water the dead apple tree

checkpoints, patrols, house raids

& Granny, behind the glassdoor 

the weight of the body 

mainly on her fingers 

feet back to stand on tip-toes

one of the 'five techniques' 

 sad bowing sunk of breath 

a bough of drink in disguise 

the Planter & Gael 

Pink Angels delight in an aquamarine

dessert bowl after skirts & kidney 

where nought is wasted 

no mulberry wrinkles inside me

Granny from the bridge over 

Darkes Lane masonry falls 

the Grand Fern Pine it’s empties glint

Céileachair banned 

under Orbital ceiling

the faded grey gnomes 

painted white the brambles

as well hammers,

beautiful wires, people

the milkstar rose in is

low iring

Céileachair of natural need 

in gelignite or disgust & the opposite

is reflected the whole history 

‘Madame, you are not allowed 

in this Safeway, the next Safeway 

is in on Honeypot Lane,’ &

laugh & stumble away, 

pissed at Baptism Confirmation,

Eucharist asymmetric warfare

The Hay Wain in a broken gilded frame, 

that bitumen black tumulus

under Sun King is rotting culture 

that restoration oils can’t cede, 

‘Lady, you're barred from Tesco.’ 

yet spider hatchery as spiderlings do, 

dispersing as far as the bookcase 

Dirty Mick PADDY O’ Bastard 

Why is your hair always grey?

& why do you wear bleach 

stained purple dresses?                     

the Audi a4 Quattro Clutch Replacement 

is your new address 

closed gardens candytuft tiles

in Yellow Lake Deep 

blown across fireplace 

a catchment area 

in a cul-de-sac 

of search & destroys

on damp dogtoothed carpet tiles 

replaced Bairstoweves 

like ladybugs Mary Our Lady 

For Sale, her seven joys & her seven sorrows

filled empty gin bottles

& your children are gone

muttering? What is a mother? ing 

to move in silver hay, in Woolworths 

innocence is true & you knew 

Céileachair, your House is on Fire, 

your clothes are burning 

your bones are somewhere else  

near Elstree Studios, 

Clockwork Orange Durango 95’ 

lane outside Brickett Wood running 

from Munden House 

to School Lane, was the 

Police Landrover / ‘Trough Beating’ scene

would remind you that 

‘you canst thou draw out Leviathan 

with an hook? Or tongue with a cord 

thou lettest down?’ 

suffering of that particular intensity 

& cruelty into the orange light 

let down to drown & sink by the word 

in the Name of the Father, 

Gardaí nunnery rebuke

all the way down the banisters 

gastric contents intraluminal 

My Lady Paddy O’ Bastard.

BxXx (REDRAFTED)

 

Ma ville monarchical law 

needs arrow-slits 

crenellated white-stone 

the finest grain of social body

pressed inside freedoms

panorama breadth 

Alpha Global City Rich

in my heart colours 

chevrons & ziggurats 

one of God's creatures

ragged over stone  

                                          instead of brick 

star shaped King Pest      

cross-plained

in the forest of plastic receipts 

while cabbage civilisation exists 

under Atomium

what vast marshes of 

dog shit at night 

shine under numbstands 

a cestus of starres 

                                          from inspector's lodge

I am beautiful as a safe 

of pipes filled by Quartermaster 

chasten the carceral city small theatres  

tortures shaped dots with wheels, 

                                                      gibbets, gallows, 

the pillories sing 

                The European Council,

 it’s soulless Eurocrates 

seeking to introduce a standard 

European bottle holding a miserable 

                                                   70 centiliters, 

robbing life of charm 

& subjecting it to 

The Economic Man 

Flemings gone French 

in Beer world, 

                       curry leicht

scharf paired to Ultra-Luxe

more six grain 

& I’ll live forever

off the eldest child, Leopold 

Heer copse to sunn blamed 

frenulum pressed into lintel 

LA PRISON=SUCE MA TEUB

Deluded is disarmed (draft)

 

My room is rectangular, white and silent. My bed has a white enamel frame and sensible metal springs. High up, on the south wall, there is a square, metal-framed window, too small for me to jump out of even if the reinforced glass could be broken. I cannot jump out, but the sky can and does float in whenever I want it to.

Two unoriginal landscapes hang on the south and east walls. One depicts a field of corn in the foreground, with trees in the background.

The other, trees in the foreground and many fields of corn in the back-ground. Both scenes are overlooked by a summer sky.

There are two hard chairs and one reasonably comfortable, upholstered one that I deny myself and reserve for visitors. Oh yes, I still practise self-denial as others exercise their bodies. And with just as much pleasure.

For the rest, there is a bedside table with a small cupboard under-neath, a washstand with an unbreakable, blue, plastic water-jug and an equally unbreakable, blue, plastic beaker. My toothbrush and toothpaste sit happily in the beaker waiting to be used.

Not my razor. I do not have a razor any more, not even a safety razor. The authorities, in their utter ignorance of my character and disposition, fear that if I had access to a sharp enough blade of any kind I might try to do away with myself. Instead, a razor is brought to me every morning. I shave under the closest supervision. As soon as I have finished, the razor is taken away.

The light is attached to the ceiling, out of my reach. It is controlled by a master switch in the ward-orderly's office. At seven every morning it is switched on. At eleven every evening it is turned off. Day in, day out. winter and summer, it never changes. The authorities have no sense of diurnal variation.

No doubt, the authorities think that it was they who decided to send me here, It was I who decided to come here, By my actions most carefully calculated I made sure that the judge had no alternative but to send me here. I have no doubt that the authorities think that i am confined here at their pleasure. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. I would only be confined if I wanted to leave. I have no intention of leaving. Let the authorities have their little delusions. Deluded is disarmed.