Featured Writer: David Mclean Day 3

culpability and punishment

there is no crime but being born
said my body, no guilt
but existence,

and there is no wrong you do
but breathing; dreams
are innocent, always,

whatever you do in them.
and the only thing sinful
is being women and men

and living, every sin
beyond that is supererogatory
devilishness, though welcome,

not wrong in any sense.
for you, barely breathing,
breath is a crime that cries

to heaven. everything
you do beyond that
is just shit that happens -

there are no victims,
just other criminals
guilty of living

____________________________

trees and clouds

the trees would pin the clouds to ground
like pizzas condemned to live in cartons
instead of roaming their natural
habitat, the forests in which they swim

with their children, kebabs and cigarettes
and lampshades. the trees are like mothers
who blind and cripple children, so nothing bad
happens to them, so they see nothing

to frighten them, so they don't get into danger,
don't go anywhere, the trees worry
about the clouds and their madness
as they dance for the mad moon

and go wild with desire under her;
but the clouds don't seem to care
they are like feckless boys, these vapors,
they only listen to their dealers

and dealers never lied to me, at least,
they give me exactly what i need -
clouds and moons and beasts
above all the miserly motherly trees

Featured Writer: David Mclean Day 2

scream

the scream is in the carnivorous throat
and the death we put there mourns itself
which is rather wretched

the stones smell like memory
and mourning worn like a priestess
dressed in black robes

and the taste of salt on the tongue
cold as coke in the nose
black as stone

and hope screams in the meat
the throat stores screams it needs
to believe in

so that there is approximate
passion, and some body
feels something

it is exquisitely easy to see
this is life and it is living -
there's no such thing as victims,

every body deserves everything

______________________________


fingers and eyes

i found my fingers in the trees
and my eyes on the mountains
inside their resonant skull
rapped by the sun's knuckles;

though they were still lethargic,
like snakes who are the genitals
of gods unusually reluctant
to rape. i found my memories

in them. they were not married yet
and knew where the mustache grew
from the sold flesh that shrinks from it,
resilient flesh of night

clothed in time, and loath to go back
to fingers in the trees, groping for my eyes
on the unholy slopes, loath to go back to life
and be mine

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.