OK, with much sighing, here's an attempt at self-poetic announcement. I
can't do much with a biography, other than I was born in 1955, in
Warwickshire, and reared in Birmingham, and have migrated, unintentionally,
via South Essex and London, to Leicester. I have no university education and
a crap job, used to publish a bit in English avant-garde-ish magazines like
Angel Exhaust of the late Nineties, but now those outlets are closed have
nowhere much to go. I find it impossible to make a statement of personal
poetics in this context, I certainly could make such, but it would probably
take me several months to do so. Nor can I choose representational poems of
myself, so the spatter below is simply a pot-luck from the latter part of
last year's occurences. Italics are not possible in this format, which
slightly damages the poems, as I use those to mark certain tonal contrasts
quite frequently.

Waal, here goes:

(david bircumshaw)


The Collected Poems of Joshua Nene (1955-99)

    (i)
Walk Dead Still

You modulate a Court, with all its summoned.
Who's in, who's out, who has the King's ear.
Who the judgement. Behindbacks, snipes,
En attendant Gagool. Good Laud, I refuse

your forensic, your sting-pull,
your herd-manage talk.

  (ii)
Constable

Every so often I go mad, and climb a tree with squirrels.
It is an English tree. Its fruit pucker from the skin
like gargoyles on a Goth. Look, there's a Blake face,
or here a Smart. Clare? It is a moral tree:

in a breeze it shakes so, its periwig its peruke, dusty,
as if an insect judgement woke. Once
we thought it a Liberty tree, sang of it, too.
Still, it gives me fresh perspective. Arrested,

still. See?

   (iii)
The Possibilities of Rhyme

Ashbery has 'Orpheus, a bluish cloud
with white contours'. A voice
from the speaking crowd, too,
a noise among the heard. I saw

a man once in a rhetoric cloud,
punneling his escape. He went
anon and anon until
he disappeared in the daze.

Optional Ending Extra

Ys. Aitch.

     *******

   Wants Happen Amulet

The moon is heavy with the full. Broken cloud,
copper, smoky, aches across it. A smell
of burnt powder, waste, and the loosening stones
of an ancient pile, grey, its pale turretwork
of embattlements, stand inviolate bar
the crackle of a leaf turning, air's yearning,
the remote invisible sentry's tramp
and about, and a concentration
amounting to a mind. That is to say the air's
mind, the not-yet, the nuclear constellations
being born behind the eyes. The time,
delicate as a girl's waist, or a boy's,
sidles by the watch like a breath walking,
in this almost apotheosis of the dark.
An owl hatched out of a storybook
hoots at identity, fur scent blood, and a yew
creaks as if a thought's mass alighted.
Something's about, turns, and a black imprint,
a negative, a prince of all shadows, forms,
all behind scenes, childers to be seen,
of a crowd's heads, a gaggle agog a heard
of eyes. It is time to descend, prince,
you have risen to come down, speak, ghost,
from your high abstracted precipice,
your speech-plinth. Focus, prince, grasp.
While the black feathers of the raven ruffle,
ready to ply inly, and the night-tree
winces at your weight, your firstwords landing:


        ********

Charm, strangeness, natter

Its bird, its burden,

creaks its wings, leather, horny
froth, flakes, falls, yer nall
storeRR yer knot whorl

that the bodytalk investiture

berthstalk, its cloudy exhale rReyes
a diagramma body hitself
azimage lay doubt
on dissecs
tatation map aintimate, fur
investeRrr, gater
its reptile, its bloodsnub shrivel
corp her hate nirvend
sharecrop divisors
stop, holder

with kate sudden longher
under normal gravities,
birdfold, 5' 3"
t'all as me
with 'Swear it. Forever.' Dupli

green eyes rising like impossible suns

cater nower kate
luff's hlafterfalling dottir
quake her, shakesimage ~
swherl.


  ******

         Michelangelo's David

Violence is a cold word and marble.
              And Michelangelo.
Princes must needs status, statutes,
              Forms for their laws.
Born, I drew a statue's name David.

Michelangelo is marble, and a man's
              Hand on the cold
Stone turned to the curve of warm.
              I touch the bow
Of the huge pectorals, draw down
                      Slow

Thorax, abdomen, navel, then find
               Submission below.
As did Michelangelo. To touch our
                Prince at tender,
What price? To hold a man's strength,
                    Bow low,

                       David,
               Let your hands flow.
The body being it, its beast this burden:
                 Violence frozen.