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David McLean (email, MySpace)

 

About the Poet:

David has poems in, or accepted by, just under 210 publications in print and online. He currently has two chapbooks: "a hunger for mourning" and "poems against enlightenment," as well as an upcoming book titled Cadaver's dance, which will be leased by Whistling Shade Press this month, April 2008.

 

 

naked night
 
naked night is a luscious
absolution as it freezes
stars dead in heavens
that have forgotten
why they once bothered,
 
though they have memories
scratched all over them,
the circle of interpretation
is Hermetically sealed again
in its forgotten closure,
 
our amnesia enclosed there
like a logical commons
stretched over each everyday
heaven we forgot long ago,
being dead men
 
again
 
  
the inevitable moon
 
the moon shines
smiling slimy
as a simile
i do not believe in
her reasons
 
she's alright -
a bit like life -
but i only see her
briefly,
smoking on the
balcony - a bit like
life, really,
not my kind
of thing
 
though, still,
in her void
night, the moon
sings
 
still
 
 
wrapped in plastic
 
we are wrapped in plastic
from birth today, and yet
the concrete that love lies on
is still cold enough for reason
to feel the charming burden
of the lonely bones
 
and the nightmare there that writhes
inside night outside us, interstices
between these loveless nothings before
and after the fact, till death unwraps
the needy meat that is a man - being him
is for those sad souls
that can
 
 
anamnesis
 
birth is just a nightmare,
or a faint irritation at worst,
measured out by the size
of the egoistic expectations,
and the humble tininess
of life, their incongruities,
and that ultimate insult
by uninterested time - nothing
to forget, remember, or hope
for, before, during or after
life, just time and always
night
 

God's names
 
we wrote all God's names on the walls
of our womb we lived in,
but paleonymics failed us
and most were misspelled
and they didn't all fit,
so we guessed at the best
and seven devils sat here this morning,
they were dressed in pedantic pessimism
and had dead flowers in the hair
on their bald heads, they were memory
and death, they were my friends

 

they sang

 

they sang a solitary prayer

once, and it was never,

like the light the cats reflect,

refractive backs, the day

brakes on them broken

as mourning cracks

 

the slovenly hills

have forgiven us

our several resurrections

through figurative intentional

inexistences; and yet.

 

pallid face of mainly day

retention tends

to forget

 

  

don't need a name

 

i don't want a name to wear

like a coat in those awesome

cold loneliness, life we find

in nobody's void

we may not even lay claim to,

our non-being

 

i don't want all this worthless

hopeless security. the night

will strip it from you anyway

as you lie tucked up in nothing

rehearsing your unscented coffin,

your inexpensive coffin

 

i don't need a name

or a god, i certainly don't want

any resurrection, just a comfy

cancer to crack us

from our Humpty-Dumpty

shells. i don't need

 

a name or a god

but i quite like the void

and its cheesy meaningless

smell. i quite like coffins

and cancer and devils and

hell

 

 

death in his grave

 

death in his grizzly grave waiting

is cozy Cadaver. the strange scars on his face

scare nobody. they deface nothing but

the loving skull - weird weighty gaze

of a child avoiding

the void. whispering his hearing

prayers to the listening nothingness

there

 

so, hail the unevokable inevitable nothing

that edits lives already

in the cradle, the baby

that fears his ground's

displacement - the blanket we pull

from under his sinful

living.

 

and such will come to us

with time and untidy

luck. the crippling

weight of the waiting coffin -

we're so fucked

  

 

those who reached

 

those who reached

to grope heaven with clumsy

fingers, they were just pissy

pools of words, as we are,

they were the fleshy sediment

of discourse, growing solid

as a dream, as a reasoned

meaning, as a dead man's

belief, a memory of mourning

and a forgotten need, the blood

and the vein that bleeds

 

 

my body walks

 

my body walks with the beast within it

never sleeping, brutal heart torn

mourning,

 

and there are pools of nightmare

there, the drying leavings of discourse

she has forgotten in me, words

wielding their whorish caring

 

like swords; the greasy abortion

thought on heaven's naked plate

is everywhere and nowhere, the tidy

void rapt in the impossibility

 

of simultaneity, callow as any

regulative idea - that there are words

and worlds and times

we share

 

who cares?

 

 

more things i hate

 

the town towers over us
like a murderer or a child-
molester over us, its
victims, its worthless grace
blesses us seldom with loneliness
we long for sometimes

its life is madness and man
a ball in a painful pinball
machine, his balls in the
vice of necessity and gainful
days employed in the gay
slavery of nothing, a job is
this, just the meaningless
grind sucking blood from stones,
blood from your own bones

money should be plucked
from the pavement magic
as a mushroom, like love
and its chance encounters
that twitch us like cripples
when spleen recedes
for a few minutes - it's what we do
instead of living

 

 

the storied ghouls

 

the dog-faced ghouls have sow’s bellies and a thousand tousled teats we suck dreams from tonight a ghoul is like a dream and marauder they suck marrow from our hollowing skeletons skulled with the love that projects us home to the timely coffin snack-bar for gods and devils and the ghoulish demons who feed evil as they feed our unseemly dreams dream-evil around the town love is coming down it runs rushing down the coffin’s lid that hid us. still

 

 

this body, this prison

 

and we simmer in these strait confines

these meaty manacles

pinned to finitude between these ribs

in this hormonal hell of glandular lusts

 

and the exigencies of feeding, need,

and restless memory, we flicker our

seconds are aeons away from heaven,

and yet we choose this, the willful child’s

 

suicide is no one’s choice, but the beating

heart beating faster, the hair shirt daily

that saves us our deliverance

that speaks well of the lack we are

 

and their past, the departed

and we would touch the Other

though he is always there

and dresses thus in flesh for us

 

he choose to share the carrion

that saved us, the ultimate Other

father and brother, judge and

lover

 

 

lusting like sparrows

 

lust buffets us like sparrows

torn by our windowing hormones,

moaning like the whores we are,

yet still the stars shine on us

the infinite mercy they borrow

from her, most potent ever

blessing memory and future

actuality, for though stars fall like

a sky’s castration and death

is ever upon us, mercy and love

are endless and birds not forgotten

but their fall noticed, and death but

a change, so children pray,

the hope that remains, unstained,

unchanged its chain, blesses

us and suffering us

is love enough for a death

and a heaven forever

just the moment we are,

under this madness,

under all the feckless stars,

warm like kittens in a father’s

failing heart

when words, when worlds, fall

apart