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Will Fleming: Three Poems

Published on

behold my abundance mindset

here begynneth the treatyse
of fysshynge wyth an angle

a session about how to unleash
our deep swagger

Boom scroller
Arm holder
                benidorm Tom can’t hurt you

project swag:
(S.omeone W.ho A.dmires G.od)
swagger agents policing
swagger on hold

        there are times when time is
        like a train
        delayed inevitably
        ennui via reading
        fuck

something something very short
i’m glad i’m a living
(?)

Jesus was a liberal
jailed for his Christian belief

a mitzvah:
that mouse who tidies the old man’s
mancave by night

Fig. 67.—B.                 he would fain be clean.

greetings from the desolate periphery
look how free it all is

i am having a good
                BLOW
at Cheltenham

I’ve
sent
three
e-mails
in my
life, and my wife
Barbara, has typed
two of them

                hark!
                irish dancing has fallen.


Power Palace:
do it all for
David Blaine
                TRAGIC HANDS
           Childe support GoFundMe

the thoroughly unlovely
appellation
of the Stakeholder Group of
the Community Consortium
the Free Lunch

for all you assholes out there: i have fallen
off the roof




happy birthday paul auster, gertrude stein and my beautiful daughter

thus spake the Stunning and Fat
Controller

carceral ear flicks
this bandy barmbrack ring that
will write the river book

“I just can’t say no to a good buzz”
bobby always loved me
in a hat

there it is folks
the lady be doth protesting too much again
                      methinks

PRAY BOWL
what’s this i see ova heeyuh (bono voice)
Sinn Féin? you mean Shawn Fain?

guaranteed to contain
nothing but the pure
           sweet fat of
                       the hog

grease trickles from the tip of
my contactless payment card

there’s no glory in taking a man
out of his bed and shooting a bullet
in his head while his wife and children watch


                                                                  MATE
                                                                  (bono voice)

like picking up the phone and
talking to the cliffs of moher
sifting the entrails
where GDPR allows

black cab with poppy grille
the unbearable cleft of the chair
rubbisho:
this torrent of babies

spot to eat, drink & chat…
pass it over
Oscar Wilde wore shortrib!

in the name of freedom: fuck freedom
(bono voice)

the martins and the marys
                         mon frere
lately atoms hit different
                                      just don’t really feel as small


in my senior rat era
I can bear any pain as long
as it has meaning

fruits of the season:

                                      Astro-TERF

                                           Sine QAnon

                                      A.I. Richards

if we can winter this one out
we’ll session
through the recession

when’s the last time you were back in Ireland
anyway




from in doggèd carrion

I

support of literary excellence                 an embarrassment of riches
slightly elevated forms of everything
           & less
           high literature
the appearance of new media as such
across stagnation of spilled milk
                      superficially & certain kinds of
anguish the sleepwalkers
the once familiar pleasures of instruction
              in idealist transcendence
good second-rate production estranging the
great masters from their own
              mass cultural vulgarisation
the common equipment of the mediocre pommel horse
              the goodenough
              thanks to joyce and the esoteric
                      modernist novel
off at specious tangents
the conspicuous and curious affiliation of
        “kitsch”
the small fry of modernist post-novel
      no declinist but
drive your plow over the bones of
kitsch
        all fated but no titanic
spoiling bog bodies
& the elite minor form of                       win / lose
        contempt for the university in particular
a wry & mechanical philology in assimilation
so hostile to absorb dirt modernity
the burning decay

                                           let me quote
no educations to sing of
the explosion of the university landfill & the G.I.
bill cutting a lonely figure on US campuses
        if one can add to this the whole
        wider phenomenon of putrefaction
of what is not yours to sully
not surprised you found the mouldering seed of
wild hawthorn in your archive
                an offshore subsidiary of the global factory
drawing a little bit on dancing in the moonlight
the standing army of Irish poets
        employed or
                unemployed
                           or whatever if
one is male voting age
              self-avowedly at least
marxist
              the beautiful world’s magician
very devoid of poetry
qua the anfractuous romance of biochemicals
good but essentially mediocre folks
              returning inevitably to proud wexford
hemingway-esque not a dirty word
for indoorsy later frictions
        mostly slight
                   thin & elite (derog.)
a spareness of respective assumptions
glossing over another surmise in
              the biofiction’s definitional dilemma
the differences more totemic
masterman and titus the magician
                    novices in the world
                    not icons but

puckish youths
leaving for new york’s eternal MFA
beautiful people of celebrity
rather than weighty social stature
        more cautious & conservative than
        their older siblings
in the case of a man
            lurching
right
his radial elder children retreating
on the move
defined by profession & misprision
            the man of gorey turgidly performatic
making him think this crawl
           twisting into a joke
                      the dodger
while elsewhere man reminisces

                               expelled in youth by one’s
                               father’s will
                               the whole lineage of biochemical man’s
invitation
            the award of his city’s freedom
in transition to impress his
nose into something
his father more heimlich than unheimlich
            weeds growing over this particular waste land
if bog queens were alive
            now recently dead
from horrors in los angeles
amorous & political sacrifice for
            gratuity
one has won himself
            that nice english
                      enumerating the professional costs
                      of ambition
& the contest is rigged in
happy endings &
            high bourgeois
peaks of his amazonesque
            more satirical & visceral in
bad reviews since 1983 my man why
don’t you care abt death & grief & fascism
            historical messages of the publishing world
one of imminent lawrentian demise
            without lawrentian rainbows
founded by night porn &
the essence of a man
not itself intrinsically fascist for anonymous
employment hubs cooking back &
            wistfully semaphored /
later she contemplates my golden bowl
            well now that’s done & i’m glad it’s over
her recovery of purpose for multitudes
who don’t read

                                                        i’m coming to an end

half-epistolary / half-early adult romance at
once the crisis
            musings
not novelised as such
breaking the first commandment
in apocalyptic jouissance
            the drama as such a familiar one
its genes its own reward
            a good EU novel if we are
            not vigilant enough as
last men & women of co-morbidities
nervous about vocation
            as that crisis daily deepens
            all too quotidian
domestic or expatriate willy nilly
in a strange field
internalising the mores of the publishing
            conglomerates
drink the kool-aid as the world goes to lethe
as the point at which abstract art becomes entirely commodifiable ooze



Will Fleming is a poet and Teaching Fellow in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. He completed his PhD on Irish experimental poetry and economics at UCL in 2023. His poetry is published in The Stinging Fly, The Stony Thursday Book, .pdf, Gorse, Icarus and elsewhere.