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Afferent Meiosis
You take permission of yourself more than give it
Upward from extremities to head, virtual
Puncta scoring a line between yourself
And what you do across the blood-brain barrier
Yes, the child says to his own request, at once
Asserting and undermining his own authority
His hands are clock hands that he cannot yet read
Pointing like a wounded bird to three and six
Where viability and kinship to founding dreams
Are almost enough irrespective of whether
And what kind of fruit is in evidence, only taste
And nutritive value in question—Hey, what’s that
Fluttering in the net?—and whether you’re able
To look at a coat rack, or your wife’s or her paramour’s
Dressing gown draped over a chair back while pinned
Beneath your own succubus, and perceive universal
Humanity where once you would have seen a threat
The Dream Disturbed
Those mermaids know what to do: dive under
Having felt the giant wave slowly building
But you, confused, try to climb over
Only to be given the fugue treatment
In the voices of four winds plus water
Having once been lost at sea, now since
Your aura would interfere with a compass
It’s a laminated nautical chart
You carry around everywhere, showing
Greenland bigger than Australia
That makes of this world an orange that rolled
Out of a net bag in a thoroughfare
Unfortunate as any fish
Avalokiteshvara Avaleur
As topsoil is cleared to build a house
One angle of a right representing the homely sex appeal
Of a well-built figure
The other the impossibility
Of a house made equally of bones and candy
As wattle and daub
Already I don’t care who will live in it
Working mechanically back from nebulous
Professional obligations through the more intimate
Ones contracted into rictal spasm
Depilated to reveal a cashless economy
As foreseen by good King Richard
Bestriding the Holy Land on stilts
Made of tally sticks
I post an eikon from much further east
Through the mail slot of the Greek church next door
This crusade waylaid
To cash in all images without distinction
This colour-coded skylit atrium
Where delightful roses smell of hawthorn
Guerrilla traps in an expurgated account
That kill instantly, and a gilt framed blackboard
On which the inscription is an encoded description
Of an imitation of a Turner seascape
Done opaquely in gouache
But in the sea mist you can just make out
The masts or are they pylons
Whose limbs sprout limbs like lateral buds
Country Driving
Even should this evening find you
Behind some wheel
You will be floating along, alone
A couple of feet off the ground
Clutching a circular object not connected
To anything, as the children from the closed-down school
Point at you, laughing, at home-time
At least it will give your tired legs a rest
The sky reflected in time-bleached bitumen
Between hectares of pine
You will then at some point approach a smallish man
Trenchcoated, of strikingly regal carriage
Who, having seen and found you less interesting
For the time being anyhow, swoops
Head down to feet to tear at carrion
It is the Universal Self that speaks in Jal Nicholl’s poems. Supernumerary confirmation of this lies in the fact that he finds poetry easier to write than these little bios.