"WARNING: some of the material may not be appropriate for all audiences"
"all a poet can do today is warn"
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there on an island in a large lake called Mälaren, very near to Stockholm, with woman, cats, and a couple of dogs. He is an atheist, an anarchist and generally disgusting. He has a BA in History from Balliol, Oxford, and an MA in philosophy, taken much later and much more seriously studied for, from Stockholm. Up to date details of well over 1100 poems in various zines - both print and online, both degenerate and reputable - over the last three years or so are at his blog at http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com/. There you will also find details of several currently available books and chapbooks - including three print full lengths, four print chapbooks, and a free electronic chapbook. A new chapbook is due out in spring 2011.
(**all copyright remains with the author David McLean)
the clinic
the clinic is built with bricks
of guilt and insufficiency,
it is where words live
their weakness, forbidden to dream
or be; it is white and poison,
a bitter pill, childhood and Eden
and restitution, a paternalist dream
to believe; dreams do not come free
they suffer education
as a cruel but rather conventional punishment
to prevent recidivism in their infantile crime
of imagination, seeing solutions
where the problems have scarcely even started
winning.
refusing to notice souls within themselves
or be intimidated by intimations of morality
or immortality, they know they are short
of body and on empathy, they are children
and mean little;
they have bodies to be and need
after the darkness
after the darkness comes waking night
and worlds walking lonely on broken shoes
and worn feet, the words decayed
away and bare bone showing
white and unmeaning.
in the snowy gutters lies little
forgiveness, broken bottles and shattered
memories, glass and absences,
the refreshing corpses of cigarettes,
a tiny hint of death
after the darkness comes walking night,
a half-forgotten scent, centuries
to refresh, absences and futures
hollow in your hand, eternities to reject,
no words here, but flesh left to respect
it costs
a night costs a century spoiled
when the babies are all suicidal,
already sweating in the womb
their nightmare.
it costs a year
and a subliminal memory
to slice a cold growing
from a child's eye
when you have been that child,
when you like to assume
you are still, mostly,
alive
insignificant pictures of the dead
the night is light like werewolves were coming
in a 1960s Hammer Horror where i stared for centuries
at insignificant pictures of the dead,
in the past wherein i dwell sometimes by preference.
the flesh grows red memory on their dusty bones,
gnawed to a script of cryptic glyphs by time's
tooth. they fold out their icy icons inside me,
a voice whispering chill from a peephole in a church
wall, numb oracle of death and no heaven,
because we are them, these insignificant dead men.
the night is bright like werewolves were coming
for us, i walk slow with the dog as cold as love
the dead sing
the dead sing of nothing, mostly,
of love and war, like Neil Young;
they are older than eternity, even
the children among them, these dead
men, for there was no forever for them
so they sing nowhere
or in the living. they sing in soil,
in everything that went missing,
like names and obligations,
like a sense of derelict duty.
the dead sing of nothing,
certainly not of beauty.
the opportunities
nature stands everywhere its appearance
thrust into nothing, like man is an ecstasy
made of stepping into it too like a shepherd
and a tender, not an impartial observer
because the scientific eye lives nowhere
in its absent engagement, struggling
to be better than every nothing
and it gives us opportunities to grow older
and die and rot and be missing forever,
but before that it gives us unconditionally
the full presence of everything, every
second. nature gives everything, for free,
it's not god, there's no question
of it just being lending
Cadaver unwashed
Cadaver rests unwashed in his sedentary home
where every spade is his importunate
futility, hands clutching absences
to his eagle breast, his mole eye
blinking confused for heaven
through the waxing branches
over his plot. His sublime plan
was freedom; a huge tower
tumbling its anxious glory
past every imaginable mourning,
every existential condition involving
decay and conditions worsening, slithering
past the loss of words and skin,
of words like “skin,” of everything.
here lies old Cadaver at the controls,
his manhood missing, timorous
dreams like mice running free
screaming under the self-same trees
he dreams, meanings
and seedy murder, semantics
splashing heaven in him
because every word praises
something, even Cadaver
dancing his death forever.
Cadaver in us is unwashed
everywhere, and memory screams
his ecstasy in the acquisitive dust
like nothing does,
this Cadaver i love
handyman
he announced himself as a handyman,
a demiurge, and he destroyed
the impulse to metaphysics
for centuries,
biting faith into the innocent brain
like bullets, thriving light in its weakness
for he was dreams
and salvation a telegram to be.
forlorn philosophy was sleeping
where the cracks came,
confidence forgotten,
so we can wake up one morning
and know we know nothing,
because this is human being
and Dasein drying cigarettes
on an electric heater.
no room for believers,
we noticed we were free
tension curls a worm
tension curls a worm in the blood
a sense of terribly wrong static in the skin
like a tinny transistor not quite receiving
meanings broadcast by pirate ships
lost at sea and sleepy;
tension curls a worm in the blood,
full of dust and a burning dream,
because man is ashes today and illness
is in him, the worm in us that gnaws the flesh
and bone, the homely proximity of death
and the heart of dark suns. these children
we were who have never been young
and have nevertheless grown up
old and alone, all their dead roads
go nowhere, there is no way home
for these children, dust and dry bone
the sensible sorrow
the sensible sorrow winds around the tree
like a cloak of leaves, like a child wound round
with dreams of leaving,
because a departure is just an absence
starting, a child's feet becoming a refugee
and standing alone in a gray station,
discouraged by preferences and identity
and unselective affinities, this sensible sorrow
winds around the child like a tree
that is dreaming of leaving, of leaves
falling, declining to other springs
and dreams of greening
sensible sorrow and empty meanings
just different varieties of being
under a broken sky
we sojourn here under a broken sky,
cracked like charity's bell tolling
for every body forgotten
on history's despicable battlefield;
the lightning cracks though it seasonal
as any terrible recollection, children
pulling their selves together
along the track of the humped spine,
amnesia and intimations of immorality
our glorious temporary mortality,
being meat a second under a sky
whence all the angels have fallen
eternities ago, to burn in us broken-
winged potential all their nothingness
we struggle to love. we sojourn here
under a broken sky, a promise torn to life
being hides supremely well
being hides itself cunningly
so the presence of the goddess unconcealed
needs cajoling an eternity,
though we live our few years
like rats in a cage
and can glimpse truth a minute
though the bars of books, our compassionate
sentences in the living prison, cruel cloister
compassed in the bones of this skeleton,
and only death to draw from us
the nothings our beings tell him,
he never listens
how dark can an animal be?
(for Jeffrey Lee Pierce)
“how dark can an animal be?”
he asked and the answer was in him
turning in its silent sleep
as he screamed,
his train was slowing, stopping
forever, it was his terminus
and love had grown a flower
a ghost alone
because nothing is forever
and we do not know
what to say about the dead
and nor did he,
he is dead now in our own darkness,
and “fuck it” is just another two words
