Two Poems from NOTHING CONCLUSIVE HAS YET TAKEN PLACE IN THE WORLD THE ULTIMATE WORD OF THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD HAS NOT YET BEEN SPOKEN THE WORLD IS OPEN AND FREE EVERYTHING IS STILL IN THE FUTURE AND WILL ALWAYS BE
Everyone’s story ends in terror
Marina Tsvetaeva for one moment repeatedly after another
Refusing the imperative to inform on themselves
You know that you are impossibly free
When you’ve been buried all that you have left is the library
And your children’s old bones
Handing you whatever it is that you want me to do
You can hear the sound of poppers and rappers
And you can wrap your legs around beautiful
Eggs you saying something profound about something on Venus
It snows metal and rains sulphuric acid Babe
We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our books
Due to genetic defects
Reading this Latin primer
As a book of instructions
You must repeat
I will have done things when
You want to use I
Love instead of he or she loves you use am
O instead of am at
Because everything is hidden in the ending
It says that a woman gives
Money to a girl the girl hides the money with a rod
A farmer is ploughing the land and kicks the girl’s money
He gazes at the money and dances
O land I love money
The girl beats the farmer and the farmer attempts flight
Why is he avoiding the girl
Because the girl is beating the farmer with a rod
Why is she beating the farmer with a rod
Because he praises the money and attempts flight
In Latin you only need the separate word I
When you wish to be very emphatic
Imagine a countryside far away from anywhere
With no fridge with no lights
This is the land out of which
I must write
When atoms are travelling down through empty space
And when atoms are travelling down through empty space
By their own weight at quite indeterminate times and places
There is the possibility that they will be
Shot by racists and lost
If not for this swerve everything would fall down
Like raindrops through the abyss of space
Going to live in the possibilities offered by the giving of a meditation
Teaching or poetic reading after all
You were the first avant-garde poet in the history of the world to be kettled
And you can prove it in verse
If anyone supposes that the heavier atoms on a straight course
Through empty space exist in the epic and could outstrip the lighter ones
And fall on them from above
Thus causing impacts that might give rise to generative motions
Stand-up routines in nightclubs revolution-through-humor
As practiced in Yugoslavia or dissolution of ego
They are wrong
You are under a bed and the bombs are no longer falling
And you are under a bed because you know that the
Times when they stop is always and only a lull
If you close your eyes you can feel the atoms swerving
But not to avoid the colour of your skin
And you can ask yourself if all movement is connected
One day you are making love on a lawn and then the next
Swerving from your own course at no set time or place
Distracted by flyovers and freeways heading west
There is a cloud in Minecraft the way that you built it
And you occasionally go there to relax
Your t-shirt says that you believe in unconditional love at poetry readings
And your shirt is covered with flowers but you wore that one out
It was good to be alive before the empire grew tired
And it was good to have known love before the invention of disco or internet
You really thought that women and men would be equal before the end of 1977
But you did not reckon on men
There is a picture of a skinny white girl on the side of a building
In every city and in every city there is a rich or poor white girl
Spitting on somebody else
And there will always be somebody else praying
To somebody else
And their heads will be touching and all the gods and the cars and their stuff
And these atoms not visible and the injustices and the possibility that they will be
Shot by racists
They are choosing the paint for the walls of their bedroom
And they are thinking and kissing
You see them wherever you go but you do not really see them
When you close your eyes under the bed
During a break in the bombing
You can hear them breathing and you can hear them coming
You know they will never stop coming
For you there is a list
Tim Atkins has been a member of the summer faculty at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and a member of Carla Harryman's Poets' Theatre in San Francisco. He is the author of many books, including Atkins Collected Petrarch (a Times Literary Supplement and Salon.com book of the year), Deep Osaka (a photobook), Koto Y Yo (all from Crater Press), On Fathers < On Daughtyrs (Boiler House Press), 25 Sonnets (The Figures), Petrarch (Book Thug), and Horace (O Books). He is also the author of a play: The World’s Furious Song Flows Through My Skirt (Stoma Press), and a novel The Bath-Tub (forthcoming from Boiler House Press). He has read and performed his work in the Houses of Parliament (for Pussy Riot), in concert at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and all over North America and Europe. His work has been translated into Spanish, Japanese, Catalan, French, and Lithuanian. Mother—a collaborative film-poem made with Graeme Maguire was a finalist at the Cyclop International Videopoetry Festival and at the Rabbit Heart Film festival in 2014. His poems have appeared in many anthologies, including The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018) The Reality Street Book of the Sonnet, and Faber’s The Thunder Mutters (edited by Alice Oswald). The founder and editor of the long-running international online poetry journal, onedit, Tim teaches Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton. His current work is the long poem NOTHING CONCLUSIVE HAS YET TAKEN PLACE IN THE WORLD THE ULTIMATE WORD OF THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD HAS NOT YET BEEN SPOKEN THE WORLD IS OPEN AND FREE EVERYTHING IS STILL IN THE FUTURE AND WILL ALWAYS BE and sections are appearing in poetry journals in the USA, the UK, and Canada. A collaboration with his daughter, Yuki Lily Matsubayashi Atkins, A Girl Is A Machine Made Of Birds is just out from Canary Woof Press.