The Unhinged Critic

 

 

boned-out distempered detailed disobedient bathed

 

 

so:    says The Un-hinged Critic    resemblance and affirmation cannot be uncoupled

without a gentle carnage a shoe is la lune

a candle la plafond    a bowler hat la neige

verisimilitude

being born to distort

these pupils reckon colour

 

 

at different speeds    tête à tête       but not in

the architect's model where    perspective leaves merely an odour and bodies once posed

vacate responsibilty

 

 

for themselves    keening    bland coupling on miles of underlay

in the vast atrium    the plan never worked as proposed

- utter deletion! -    it worked better

 

 

boned-out distempered detailed disobedient bathed

 

 

The Unhinged Critic will say:

light is time thinking

a ricochet of photons granulating into even finer photons

as in any model    any object    any painting    any thing it is space iself

that thinks up the outline

around everything    arranges

 

 

    furniture and people into

furious little cartoons      made out of the after-work

says The Unhinged Critic    filled up with lint and capoch

reality as relief

 

 

thus the plan is formulated

it's belief in disbelief

which says:  The Golden Apples

of  Mythology       were probably oranges

 

 

boned-out distempered detailed disobedient bathed

 

 

so:      all you grievers go hang!

learn this from Jung    when his mother dies he builds a tower

with maternal aspect

- the floor-plan has her wing-span - then lives inside assimilating her psyche

returns to origins on

the banks of.        aminotic Lake Zurich

 

 

[ far from The Unhinged Critic ]

 

 

under bird-shadow and cloud-cover the sweetness of Spring

as a light billowing tent then when

wife dies as well    he builds another storey

 

 

in which nothing can go wrong    at eighty development

on-going    forward to the forseen becomes playful son

improving to completion

 

 

boned-out distempered detailed disobedient bathed

 

 

 

    Matthew Caley

written for A PLAN FOR LIVING

 

Matthew Caley's most recent and seventh collection is To Abandon Wizardy [Bloodaxe, 2023]. His second pamphlet of loose versions from 19th Century Frenchpoets - this time all women - The Sealed Well, has just been launched by Blueprint. Recent poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, London Magazine, Bad Lily, Poetry Salzburg and The Spectator. He tutors, mentors and consults for The Poetry School and has just represnted the UK at the 20th Novi Sad Literary Festival in Serbia, where was was awarded

The International Milan Nenadić Prize for Poetry 2025. He is next reading at The Litvest Literature Festival in Timișoara [ Western Romania)] which takes places this Sept 24th-26th 2025

 

“Chief amongst British poets Caley takes seriously the vision of synaesthetic abundance laid out

in Mallarmé’s essay ‘Crisis and Verse’…[ ] Caley is a great poet of transposition and vibration…[ ] Caley at his very best, an offhand philosopher and bard of the demi-monde,gently blowing our minds”.

Dai George POETRY WALES