Issue 8: January 2005

Matthew Caley | Matthew Francis | Kathryn Gray | Daljit Nagra | Tim Wells

MATTHEW CALEY

El Desdichado Replay

Gerard De Nerval tugs gently on the silken leash that strays a mere metre
or so across The Luxembourg Garden gravel
pausing to contemplate his navel, the start of a novel
or the lop-sided length of his pet lobster's claws.

He plucks a star-strewn lute for his errant lover.
He knows the glints in the brightest jewel
turn out to be its flaws.
That the stricken tower will

loosen the tongue of its bell. That the page and the night are
as black and white as jackdaws
and salt-petre. That time will tell. But the lobster

itself knows all too well that a revolution
can be fought and won in the time it takes him to travel
from one side of paradise to the other.

King-Size Rizlas

Apparently, the high-caste Dandy, arm enlivened by an octoroon
attempts to set a taper to Arcady.
Her black-purple nipples are medallions
struck by the spell of a Petrus Borel or a Philothee O'Neddy.

His elegant verse sees nothing perverse in Les Lesbiennes.
He lives in The Painter's Studio by Courbet.
A rash of syphilis-spirochetes are seering his mien.
His mind astringent as a lemon sorbet.

He observes the dirt on his coat-cuffs
with as much care as he fashions the lines of a sonnet.
Miss Lemur or Miss Prosper plucks a leaf

from the slush-pile of Fleur Du Mal to light up a spliff.
Her ankle rests on a cushion painted by Manet.
Her mind on the co-co palms and the roiling surf.

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Jerome K. Jerome
sat on an auburn top-knot;
the entire oeuvre of Pliny The Elder
on crow-black curlicues; John Steinbeck plonked on a tom-boy crop —

then Brecht, Bataille and Baudelaire balancing on
the beehives, moused perms, bangs and braids —
for truly, 2.30 Sunday afternoon, was where one learnt what art meant
recalls the fickle Consul (for it is writ and has been said

The Platonic Ideal of the ultimate
tome is always floating inches above your head)
concealed as he is, drenched in the salt-flecked yuccas, breathing in

the purr, the sigh of the ocean
as The Young Girls Of Our Lady Of Guadalupe
sashay out for their lesson in deportment.

Matthew Caley's Thirst (Slow Dancer, 1999) was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He's won 3rd Prize in the National Poetry Competition and been Poet-in-Residence at The Poetry Cafe, London. His second full-length collection, The Scene Of My Former Triumph, is forthcoming from Wrecking Ball in 2005. It includes the three poems printed here.