17/2
January,
and the time for lament
one of those winters
where everyone gets sick
I mean everyone
gets tired
rewinding the muscles
collapse into collage
when the ideas are so thin
and the poems take so long
you'd think
we'd be fitter
with all of these stairs
all this heavy lifting
heart-to-heart
no heavy breathing no stars
just the birds and the swings
crows and parakeets,
a big golden pigeon
big endless January
taking forever
twisting my ankle
& chasing you out,
remember?
I don't know,
but I'm sure the politics
is making me sick
fixing a lemsip
yellow tulips by the sink
limescale cracks like the arctic
and the attic somewhere else
fills with water
returning from a voyage
days of crystal
nothing twisted in the tactics
of the capital
no snow no medals no grievance
no good tracks to cover
now anything other
than total surprise
would leave us all raw
and vulnerable.
I feel exactly like this,
six o'clock
February 17th 2017
exactly like this
whatever you want
to call it.
1/4
I couldn't keep up with the reports.
I started lying. Anytime anyone
asked me for comments, I said sure.
I said sure, it is the duty of poets
to know what year it is. But some days
and some weeks we weren't certain.
So I said sure, it is the duty of poets
to be uncertain, really only poetry
discloses our condition.
But this was ridiculous.
So I said, sure, only comedy is perfect,
I mean real comedy, the whole set
falling down, accidents of any kind,
real hurt, slipping into a river
like a language
being eaten
by a bear.
Is this the dereliction
we were scared of? Some little speech
about abrasion? How will you measure
real pain?
We used to meet people from the future,
now it's the future,
and we can slow down decorum,
drop the front and say whatever rhymes
well enough, well sometimes I've been
full of shit and I've continued, tactile,
all this, and my heart.
The question continues to be why?
This part is called confession
without a subject. Now you,
you climb up on my back now
and tell me what you see.
These tests are literal.
I'm failing you all.
31/5
What's not my forte beaten
by the gap between the poem
and the time of its arrival:
the last day of the month
whose name is stricken
from the record and the weather
is green and bright and fragile.
What's not in the poem exists
inside and occupies my time,
it crowds the room with message
and survival, how the clouds
just bloom on the horizon
refusing to answer, refusing to say
a thing to pass the buck
and fuck debate and fuck debating
what I wish for can't be written down
can't be spoken, can't be said aloud.
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Author Bio: Luke Roberts is the author of False Flags (2011), Left Helicon (2014) and other chapbooks. His long poem 'To My Contemporaries' recently appeared in Chicago Review. He is the editor of Desire Lines: Unselected Poems, 1966-2000 by Barry MacSweeney, and has also published a monograph, Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry (2017). He lives in London, where he works as Lecturer in Modern Poetry at King's College.