Featured Writer: David Mclean Day 1

looking for

you were looking for me
and so was i
but all we saw
were memories and things¨
somebody else said,
probably lying, reflecting
themselves, and sort of expected
me to be,

so i wasn't, obviously.
but i found all these absences
inside me, if we shall talk,
metaphorically, of interiors
and interiority

when i am a surface,
a thin film over the world's
plenitude of emptiness -
stones and trees and all of history,
murder, crime, night and humanity,
and a few other things to which children
listen

a dead crow lost
at a long gone goddess's
breast forgotten, there i found me
that i did not leave or need
to be, reasons for existing
were absences and just
not listening, love was
ignorance and memory blood,

all the surfaces were enough

______________________________

winter drags

night's winter drags the body of an injured animal
behind it, calling it history, because social movements
and whatever happens there are the contortions of sexuality
and heaven is but a relieved bladder.

it is a wounded beast that crawls through us
and sweats its desperation on the page,
it is an open wound that never heals,
but bleeds and give us no pain

or forgiveness. it is being, because hearts
are leaky vessels in several senses,
it is a night and its injured animals
are people who are dead forever

already, but slow to understand
that the coffin coughs up
no truth for us, and real injured animals
are much more important than man

and all the nothings he understands


David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there in a cottage on a hill with a woman, five selfish cats, and a stupid puppy. He has two full length books out. One, pushing lemmings, at http://www.erbacce-press.com/davidmclean/4527659941 and another, Cadaver's dance, available at Alibris or Amazon.com. There is even a self-published book of poems at Lulu called eating your night - http://www.lulu.com/content/2756039. Details of other chapbooks and round 680 poems in or forthcoming at round 290 places online or print over the last eighteen months are at htpp://mourningabortion.blogspot.com. A new chapbook, La morte vivante, is available from Shadow Archer Press. Another chapbook is free online at http://www.whyvandalism.com/ebook_poems-against-enlightenment08.html. He also features in a special issue of Instant Pussy available as a free download at http://www.lulu.com/content/4389526. Two more chapbooks so far are coming in 2009 from Rain over Bouville and Poptritus Press, he has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.