love is perhaps

love is perhaps not best expressed
in sonorous somnolent sonnets,
through all the anxious irritated anticipation
awaiting consummation in nauseous
orgasms, those nasty nights,
shading to nostalgia and anger
at the thief time that takes instants
and lies about their brutal bounty,
tits and telephones and words
where we no longer exist, sexless
status that gave us It, being
poised on the verges and margins
we live in, borders born to be crossed
like crushing obligations and denying time's
duty, devilish death and his thrusting aching
snake, your living kingdom still
is my body, sweaty tumescence but
half-awake, our decaying
weight

- David McLean

life was

life is chewing gum on a gravestone
and whistling to keep down
our spirits, the ghosts
we lay are memory
and a silver bullet
in the heart of nothing,
this dark womb meaning
and the seed in it
life was once,
just memory and
gross ghosts
touching

- David McLean

if

if the spacious places inside were not so disgracefully
vast they seem serious as if a dream were a disturbance
on the surface of something that signified rapture at
the vast complexity of life sanctified or something,
missing, worth believing in and they said
no one is guilty or innocent and no one
is a sinner, for some reason, moral
relativism is not nihilism and value-
nihilism is not the same nihil an idiot
thinks a fool thinks it means it seems
but still, the will is this gorgeous gorging
on its own nothing, and then some, it
posits us as positional relics a posited God deposited
in his shit, a memory that carved we his holy suppository
from lonely stone holy cenotaph we sat under
stoned as Romans for all the homeless soldiers,
and ladies with panties in polythene bags and Polly’s
long dead in their displayed cages, who lay down their reasons
to sleep the seasonable sleep of reason whence babies come
to love us and life knows its slimy fons et origo slimy simians we
are God’s faceless bastards who borrowed names from
the sodding coffins he stored our smelly sin in; and forgiveness
thus we give each other like whores sharing a line
before hitting the streets time threw us in too
filling the void inside with lies and a liar’s
pride, time out of mind, the most arrogant motherfuckers
are the buggers who drink the rotting love from Buddha’s butt
where he stored nothing and all that sort of stuff, as if the fat
boy thought we would happy be in this crappy life and he
were other than the stick to scrape the shit from a bum’s inherited
hemorrhoid of stupid me, the numb acceptance of wrongness
of long wrongs though he fell in the bitch and twitched his selfish
Nirvana over us, like coke for God’s nosy gnosis, though
god knows his gnothi seauton and that automaton,
machine man we are has nothing to know, really, no
soul to grow home to like a dustbin with words in the dusty
sin wherein the queer worm that turns sheds his silky skin
with all light’s tonight on in her fidelity’s lexicon with bells on
lascivious lexis loves us has word she flourishes thus a dog’s
erectile insurrection, and angels got in on their angular tomorrow
we sorrowed for like the whores we are, the gong a God
bonged on, the song Marc sung once, the remarque
and God’s cupboard full of love and the boredom of love,
the carved bong and the drugs and the smoky
cross we crucify our songs on, the fixed crucifix, dismal
cruci-fiction opiate bliss, the last long hit,
the love and the death
and the piss
i savour all of this like “some motherfucker
loves us” and all that tasty shit, in the graceless
embrace of the saviour who laboriously
lactates, still his father we are,
our proximate penance, our mourning’s appropriate
scar

- David McLean

Anne Sexton and the suicidal god

Sexton was quite right,

what we forget about the first
Christians is their delightful thirst
for a thrifty suicide and that best of
good nights, the frightful climb
back to God’s maternal breast

away from his tortuous paternity
that loved us, if Augustine hadn’t seen
the sin he invented in it then
the several hellish reverends behind
all the sects would never have spread
their sexless seed of

death. our degenerate generations would have been
a passing nightmare for dull death
as he turned disturbed in his creamy
sleep. we would not have burned up
our shooting stars shooting smack in the night
nor known our ignorance of life

and the time that stares it blind

- David McLean

bad seventies

when the acid in the brain extended the fragmented
day to the pinprick of time and the exploded
pupils stole a soul before a mirror in someone’s room
where i floated in emotive unmotion
like a foetus in a grave or a corpse in a womb,
and Bob Dylan sounded like electroclash already
i realised that this was the life, really,
like that wanker said
and that thus was it and he outside would not remember
and think i was me while, until we were both dead
the “true” i of my lying identity would always live there
silenced
in a never-ending time’s spiral
in this wound-up trip, that was,
forgotten prisoner
i don’t want to be, not “me,”and all that shit –

and sometimes, at night
i think i (and he) was quite right,
this isn’t really my life.

- David McLean

we wrote a life

we wrote this life
sometimes
from fragments of memory,
like shattered cancers,
susceptibility
to the daily enframing
of nothingness in sky sublime
as death above us,
woofing Eden thus, doggy
days that repeated,
meanings stolid
as this, Picts once lay peat
depicting history as misery
the stumbling structure
erected trembling as love;
and i am cold
gloveless in the boiling snow
that shows us the intermission
mittened like children
and how knows where the warmth goes
it goes where all the time goes
after the gods,
to entropy and absence
where they reflect their proud nonentity,
re-membering me this dismembering
to several singularities
and the drugs that loved us
enough
the junk cold in the gelid blood,
the good ice
and the meaningless meaning of life

- David McLean

her variations

i

a feeling could nearly be a tear
shed by a moon or a star’s
hairiest heaven,
but not this moon
that falls so slowly through its nothingness
and dismembers this oblivion
that weighs us daily,
measured and found
wanting, what we want,
orgasm, a meaning or a repeated
dream, forgotten
the creaming we need,
the bleeding,
not these stars that fall
through memory
as parts of the broken past,
heartless their
maternity
that determined
me,
whole at last –

ii

time temporalises this us thus,
as Nothing, Nothing noths
some something,
its nihilisation nihilates,
the embrace
today
faceless
“we” replaced

traces a retention,
the trace is the tension
that embraces “us”
and a taut placement, as such
taught us, that localises the intangible
good, the playthings
some larger God gave us
qua love, this, bliss is
the Instant that kisses
patriarchs larger by far
father,
and shines his star farther
- dawn he shone upon,
you too, who? – as recorded boring
you – or some-
thing “we” is –
elided by time,
not his
just this artifice,
justice, just as ice is the blood
in the veins, brutal truth
as a devil’s professional
proof, professed
is death, penance and oblivion
missing, defective our resurrection
too, to You

iii

and it is alright to cry
tonight, weep reason
within reason, the seasonal
summer tears you rain for me
and memory, memories we might be
and whatever you might do there,
here the sound of a being
being Being, being-pains
remain

“it is, therefore, permissible to weep”
she said, my seedy lover,
forgiveness can be given us,
and is,
for the salt that’s striven
to measure immeasurable heaven,
a devil’s leisurely pleasure
the meaning lesion
where stolid stars are tears over
the unknown firmament,
like cum over God’s shitty tits
and Satan sprayed them
like a fire hose, a devil knows
it is permissible to weep
this facial forgiveness,
the sky solidifies white then
– and then she did,
my memory’s last
mistress

iv

days scale away
like skin snakes shed,
the worming snake that lies
coiled and turns at the heart of
time, the bestial beatitude of Blake’s
buggered rose, just choking on the
coke in my nose,
such time i make mine,
en-owning the forward-
sucking directionality
that replicates intention
intendere arcum in
love and sin,
the bow aims cold
oblivion, the needle
that blows us cold
the vanity veinly
known, the veined hands
a night holds,
and all that shit;
the veins over the sticky
dick, stuck between the tits;

for the night is grown old
now, and knows this loud misery
better than ever,
loutish Pandemonium our indwelling
we inhabit, habitual
ritual building
some ruptured structure
that trembles nippled
erection to dead
heaven, alive islands nipples
rise, erect through love’s scum
its cumming fun

v

the sign resigns
alive,
and the life of the sinful
signifier is scarred skin
love cut in, scarified blind lies
the ties that bind
the absent mind,
the final gash inside that
waits
that reminds us
of its patience,
life is fragile
like an animal
and heaven does not
mind if we resign
its rejected, defective,
depressive design
- some certain time -
if we cross that last conceivable
borderline;
time’s out of kind
and out of our minds
sometimes,
the love we find
is lies
the sun that shines
inside

- David McLean