Hythe+ 10 Four Poems by Aaron Kent
Aaron Kent, I Herald Endings and Count Metamorphoses
When you Wake you’ll Believe you are a Theatre Critic
(I)
Concentricity is measured in vaudeville
performers weighing down on an imitation
of intimacy. It isn't, but stick a line
like that in a poem and you've subverted
any expectation the reader had.
(II)
A transmission is what happens
when status is blind to
somebody else's energy,
and here I am held hostage
to every phantasmagorical museum
I've constructed on a wave of insomnia.
(III)
I don't know all the science, sure,
but would I like to be a scientist?
No, though I'd do anything for eight
or so millimetres of mercury.
(IV)
If I could eat my weight in money
I'd waste a perfectly valuable
financial investment but at least
I'd get the taste of how much
I loathe myself: humid August drug-
sticky, sweet like liquorice I imagine.
Synonyms for Inheritance
I'm again we're moving sorry,
eye nerve for the feels when
my pupils itch; the squelch
lets me alive to know and good to
make the hand move the music follow.
Instrument the silence perceptible
as movement away from four four.
Two four than four more, too far
from Thor for thunder to worry be-
and-love like ridden two years.
I scratch into headaches my skin,
can't riches my share then arrive
as words in political din. In the finest
sense, near the people of the deep
calling estate for renewed revelation.
That’s the Last Time I Watch Performance Art Live
I choose magic, but it doesn't fall;
the notion was as quiet as I was.
Take a flesh tea and squeeze:
competition, work,
get-up, jump, play.
The paranormal is a sensitive platform
where the sunshine is stable.
Now he has won three tinderboxes.
Half-life:
the chimera's adders
appear on the marathon
and flower slowly.
If you ask five cats; cookies are
not a good serviette.
Some do it because I doodle.
Paperboy war with pantheon elements
after the gradual chant of rhododendron:
PANTHEON!
Like snow; have questions:
Notebook! Yes! Etc!
After two minefields,
if confused with a mortician
I will be normal.
Every deadbeat workhouse
avoided a wavelength of persimmon thunder.
Suppose you are against H20
and want to survive several breaches.
Louder and More Menacing
I am not like your dead body,
how you could die so many times
and still warrant funeral rites.
No, I am stringent and foolhardy,
I am more careful, more deliberate.
You don't have a chance at ordinary grief;
a dog on its back, on its last breath.
Your lips pale and silent embers in your eyes,
a swollen corpus christi; a toothless trunk
in solemnity. I cannot weep, I am the product
of your choosing, the drink you have
and the drink you lost, I am a remedy for thirst.
I am the son of a godless land,
and the father of a landless god.
*
Aaron Kent is a working-class writer and publisher, and runs the Michael Marks Publishing Award winning press Broken Sleep Books. His work has been praised by Gillian Clarke, J. H. Prynne, Andrew McMillan, Andre Bagoo, Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo, Abdul Kadeer El-Janabi, and John McCullough. His recent books include the full-length collection Angels the Size of Houses, and a collaboration with surrealist artist John Welson, Requiem for Bioluminescence and the pamphlet the Rise Of.... He was awarded the Awen medal from the Bards of Cornwall for his poetry pamphlet The Last Hundred in 2020, and had a brain hemorrhage a few months later. Coincidence? Probably.
