from Budgies

 

by James Davies

 

 

 

 

I have bought myself some pyrite

   To make everything seem alright

Smell me wafting of new Dario for men

   Because I’m walking down that bit of street I don’t like

 

A man in a chicken suit walking along a beach

   A woman in a chicken suit walking along a beach

A child in a chicken suit walking along a beach

   It is not documented that I suffer regular bouts of depression

 

Eating expensive deli olives poem

   Tim B said I’m insane for doing this on Saturdays

The thing that is nothing has multiple references

   When is the next David Lynch film coming out

 

My bicep is very tired; I have mug superglued to my hand

   My bicep is very tired; I have laptop superglued to my hand

My bicep is very tired; I have superglue superglued to my hand

   There is no fourth variation on this line

 

Oh lovely shopping channel. O lovely lunch bar

   I think you’re ok and I kinda like you

But he doesn’t and she doesn’t

   No stratospheric colossus of sound rises

 

I have used my last piece of leather

   I have cut out one pair of shoes

Tomorrow I will sew them

   When they are sold, I don’t know what will become of us

 

Have you noticed your language is very childish

   Thank you ever so much

Boiled eggs on hard on

   It says so in this PowerPoint

 

Come give me weird yellow liquid

   239H9 was the mark on my favourite toy

An understanding of the way plastic looks

   Say it like it is to beat around the bush

 

I should use shampoo like this more often

   Like Paul Gauguin in Tahiti

The world is at once clear and serene

   And birds do but chirp and chortle in the sky

 

So he popped into kiosk cos they got an offer on a case of Diet        Coke

   Meditation on sulphur, calcite and stibnite

Went humbly by a leaf

   But Paul Thompson had me by the crocodile clips

 

It’s the caravans I like in the picture

   Do you want me to take a photo of you eating lunch

Shall I take a picture of you saying all the tobacco’s run out

   A stone sculpture on the beach of Dinas Dinlle

 

The spirits beckoned me

   And I could not concentrate on anything

So I patched up my trousers, put new cords in my straw hat

   And strengthened my knees with moxa

 

Adrian Duncan has received the following statement from

      the bank:

    What was once an adventure became a clown

I have lost my scarf

   Peeling a grapefruit’s pith is a burbling cousin of Steve Reich

 

Skeleton and script

   Thicket and palimpsest

Depiction and inscription

   Infinity and confinement

 

A Wooden Horse: number 10A

   The argument is all ways and both ways;

Always perniciously lively but always on its last legs:

   That is of course if you believe a fellow customer is deliberately       avoiding payment

 

A pack of hounds barking on a cloud

   A pack of cards thrown in a bin

A bendy straw near a broken brick

    Ten or so red budgies dead in a bucket

 

I’m anxious to disappear behind the birds

   At times I reclaimed the rainbow

What was a rusty pan filled with petrol

   A busy fantasia on the birds of Burgos

 

Sometimes that room with Romeo and Juliet still cripples me

   Concentration on a fjord

The Buddha and our child is a line by Faber and Faber

   The landlord served me another stale lamb chop

 

If I am asked what I ultimately mean

   I shall point in the direction Equivalent VIII

Henceforth all my thoughts shall ever be coloured beautiful       apocalyptic

   Yet sometimes tempered and peppered by errands set by Chris       Watson

 

4.6 billion years

   620 million years

220 million years

   28 thousand years

 

 

 

 

 

James Davies is the author of Plants (Reality Street), The Manual Handling Process (Beard of Bees) and Acronyms (onedit); with Simon Taylor, as Joy as Tiresome Vandalism, aRb (if p then q) and Absolute Elsewhere (Knives Forks and Spoons).  He edits if p then q and is one of the organisers of the Manchester reading series, The Other Room.