Scored Piece for Helen, Olly, & Martin the Sound Man of Answer Me This!

— We are poets, man. We are fucking poets.

— No we are not. I will not be described as a poet. It’s an artform I do not enjoy —

— Why? —

— performance poetry, I’m sorry, it always makes me want to claw my own face off.

Note on portable profession of performance poetry …

Mike Weller’s scored banter between Oliver Mann and Helen Zaltzman on topic of poetry featured in "take two" Episode 63 (performed twice as Martin the Sound Man forgot to turn his track on) of their podcast Answer Me This!

Sick (Incomplete)

Sick or condiments, please pass the Butter Mountain

Rickets six dissonant passenger viruses raise eyes

one more occasional gasp of sight, a deep green bile

a poem drains mossy fields into thick hedgerows, health

corpuscular hedge funds fulfil haemophilic urges

phototropic, he ejaculates, illness in heads distend

shiver, breath tears build veins leafed & cancerous

hash & clump the green wood inks out tilts of pelt

cilia’s lilt unapparent, white milk corners, copses

Munchausen’s minus sympathetic thrash sores,

there’s no feigning shitting the bed and that’s not

real scent of pine your spraying this headache

treatment shows a discrete trend to kill cats dead

gather in the slender crop avaricious abattoir sure

garlic will cure it & his dutiful drip was putrid

his medical clamp bore lead on my trill finger

& tongue after all its cheaper && there’s a stone in my core & I’m love sick all over

you again but blood pressure reads negative, pallets

so you better accept it for there’s certainty in maths

submersions and sewers commit slow nitrogen narcosis

under baths ‘O’ its good for both of us, get ill

with me, I’ll slide in behind so there’s an absence

romance in sixty watt mirrors tiled &wrong to use

a family members funeral six times as certified

excuse? ‘O’ come gorge on the condiments and make sick.

SMS

21/02/08 12:07am

The rat, fearful of discovery,

sheds a tear for undone plans.

20/02/08 4:23pm

The land crab paints a

heavy shadow on the face of the

precipice and, moribund,

admires his work,

knowing his peers will never understand his vision.

19/02/08 6:14pm

The kelp,

aware only of its existential rage,

blocks the sun over

the raucous shrimp.

19/02/08 1:22pm

The vole’s only defence is spit and mustard. The

rodent is possessed

of iron will and steely determination,

but is vanquished by his deadly foe.