four poems from self-avoiding space-filling curve

Peter Manson

angina of micturition

i dismantled santa i confess i am a man

-tis as a child drawls because it is crawling language

like an ordinary private father of a child

propagated in madin darby canine kidney

sweet silent thought in session tonight on janice long

to help me with this short illness my life peerage and

you sitting in a tree p.u.r.g.a.TORY

grizzly bears disarm a well-tempered militia of

gondoliers shakespeares overseers playboys and bums

break ass for emergency ass on the quire rebound

in half calf to justify the jaws of love it spurned

for life’s contingency lidl and death’s sweet urine

and the sun just set on the shortest year of the day

pro rata thank you bonus

i am the world’s fauxtalian boy the one who searches

to read personal protective equipment at keele

snooze tom for thirty days not that tom other tom tom

is there a damper on your floor tom star-nosed ringo

eight of the molehills contained probable human bone

not one of us lives in my kathy staff bathyscaphe

my kathy staff bathyscaphe my beautiful baloo

the octagonal deadhouses of ontario

by contrast are full till the ground thaws out in springtime

the lord shat on the mooses and on the maglev too

what ted kaczynski wrote about diaghilev is

true of the angry inch which makes no flann an isle      mis

-take not cliff for hank marvin and treacherous bramble

my thermal runaway

that one time the late convener of the trades of air

died to dislodge the late late deacon of the squaremen

one of the elect who suffered martyrdom in air

at number seventeen stationary hospital

prescribed ovaltine and eukodal by his gp

a dog for which he had not then a licence in force

and six sessions of cbt at the cat cafe

that imperceptible contest drags on to this day

underground in air where the soundless benign dead play

some of my best friends are never-ending scrolls of death

on a mis-cut headstone corrected in lime putty

washed over with beige or cream the letters painted red

eroded now to the chaos of all intentions

helium flash

barely a fortnight dead i forgive myself the pain

of debt to the earlier poets of this sequence

my soul i discourage the hand of god from touching

my body i recommend to earth but no pressure

how does the i fit on you i never broke it in

i have rubbed my foreskin on the plums in the fruitbowl

they were my own and i ate them it ended badly

especially for the plums lying undigested

in the stomach of a corpse      forensic evidence

for death of time      the lean etymologist cussin

for tussin confects an old english origin myth

and i hate it still      manna mildust ond wyrtgeornost

the mildest of men and most geekish about his plants