David Spittle
from Decomposing Robert
speak blue toes to who has the tongue
you make me laugh lie gothic hoax idealist believing so
in rot
but really, what do you know? what have you seen?
your friend kept a dead bird in a jar
until its soft breast seemed to liquefy.
you’ve seen the skin-cracked heel
of grandfather’s sore –
seen
living let the dying in
yet you’ve still the gall, obtuse and indulgent,
knowingly unknowing to follow
hypothetically in WORDS what decay might mean
like none of this matters but is
neither you nor me
but our communion here, unlikely
likened to the rafters
holding earth
with buried bones
to mix us
in writing
as disingenuous cement
not tome
nor tomb
but
“room enough”
for us
No thought without decay of thought, no declaration or gesture separate from its own decay
including this – leeched to sign in vain its own logic
to the rotten foothills of a larger undoing;
more creative, alive and playful than any embodiment of living –
a living consumption of what was living made again alive in producing
propionic acid, lactic acid, methane, hydrogen sulphide, and ammonia
or in the undressing of bone from striated red-glove-stuck to peel-skin-shirt
shirked by the black onion fly, duff millipede, sexton, larder,
clown and comb-clawed beetle; the iron-clad stink, earth-boring freeloader,
yellowjacket, earwig, small-hive and vinegar. Not just the maggots
but looking up at a tilted mirror to discover your hair is thinning; balding as a decay
of ties to youth, you think, and not without misery:
decay of today’s mood from its surface buoyancy into a seething
back and forth in facing bodily change, actual recognisable – in the moment – difference
it decays the image you have of yourself from this to ageing that. Decay of subject
into object, from indifference into panicked scalp and failing thatch,
of a figure of speech into a figured in speech whereby I’m dying for a change
becomes the precariously alive dying in change,
struck,
without being able to stop,
by what is striking
you
second to second,
and against which there is no strike
to take but only realisation (and maybe hats)
that decay was always how
anything came into being,
imminent
as its own taking away –
but still and unstill, making.
David Spittle completed a PhD on the poetry of John Ashbery in relation to Surrealism at Newcastle University. He has published reviews in Hix Eros and to PN Review. His poetry has been published in Blackbox Manifold, 3am, Shadowtrain, Zone, Datableed, Zarf, and has been translated into French courtesy of Black Herald Press. He blogs at http://themidnightmollusc.blogspot.co.uk