Death Rattle

By John Hughes

Death Rattle is an honest kaleidoscopic portrayal of the isolation, joy and abandonment that beats within the city’s restless heart. It is a trilogy comprising of poems, narratives, lyrics and aphorisms, where the duality of the city and the rural, which have historically been the idealized backcloth for love, lust and loss, flourish wildly. For Hughes the city is a female, fleeting, alluring and violable symbol, the rural a sacred poetic resource gilded with solace and healing. Through choice encounters and assorted personae, death rattle bestows with flinty wit, ruthless reasoning and solemn reflection a wistful eye upon the menagerie of the city’s inhabitants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hughes
• Release date: Sep 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465994417

John Hughes

John Hughes was born in Colwyn Bay, North Wales, Great Britain in 1970.He has worked as a milkman, landscape gardener, newspaper photographer,occasional proof reader and a fish terminal goods inspector. He currentlylives in Oslo, Norway. His other works are listed as follows: POETRYAphelion (1992),Recuillément (1993)Black Tin Deed Box (1996)PrestonZeitgeist (1994) Money & Make-Believe (1994)Room Twelve (1995)The Fiend that He Became (1995) Poetry from Beyond the Dashboard(1996) Touché (1997) The Night is Young (1997) 58th Parallel (1998)The Plant Collector (1998) O Livro das Letras Casa (1999) Replica (1999)Passports for the Journey to the Mad Dam (2000) Flowering Off the Chrome(2000) Rolling Over the Bones & the Running Through Poems (2002) WhenHope Can Kill & the Midnight Sun Poems (2005) Orpheus’ Loot (2007) Death Rattle (2009)Skin of Teeth (2010) Singeing of Beard (2012)FICTION Aphrodisiacs’ Spaghetti (2001) The Wondrous Adventures of Dip& Dab (2002) Deeper Tangled Grass (2005)The Bloody Shoots Burst Out of Uswith Love & Bullets at their Roots (2010)

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Death Rattle is an honest kaleidoscopic portrayal of the isolation, joy and abandonment that beats within the city’s restless heart. It is a trilogy comprised of poems, narratives, lyrics and aphorisms, where the duality of the city and the rural, which have historically been the idealized backcloth for love, lust and loss, flourish wildly. For Hughes the city is a female, fleeting, alluring and violable symbol, the rural a sacred poetic resource gilded with solace and healing. Through choice encounters and assorted personae, Death Rattle bestows with flinty wit, ruthless reasoning and solemn reflection a wistful eye upon the menagerie of the city’s inhabitants.

DEATH RATTLE

John Hughes

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2009 John Hughes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Art: Emanuel Vigeland photographed by John Hughes

Dedicated to KTH

CONTENT

Prologue

Part One

Hunt

The Even Odds

Continuation of the Dialogue

Metropolis

Butcher Boy

Lovers

Erroneous

Invisible

Mildew

Stay

Ghost

Spillage

Lover

The Music Will

Slattern

Before I Slip

Enigma Variations

Sorrow

Whore

Dreamer

Hermitage

Molten

Votive

Women

Blue

Love

Love Letter

Shell

Capital Return

Part Two

Pensées and Aphorisms

The Room for Virgins

Death Rattle

Part Three

Fenrir

I am Coming Back Through

Couched

Stranger at Sunset

Cornucopia

Coat Hook

Reverse

Inexorable

Rebel

In the Dim of a Bedroom

Lazarus

Barbarian

Breakfast

There Is a Gap In Between

Hit and Run Blues

The Other Half

Fickleness

Joker

When I Sit There He is Sat There

Cutting Room

Gone Between

Pragmatism

I Play a Cruel Game

Song of the Sexes

Interlude

Your Name

Wager

Shame On

Addendum

Prologue

Three elements which balance out: a rural unconscious, an urban subconscious and a cosmopolitan consciousness.’ Fragments Jean Baudrillard

Part One

When I die, I want to die like my grandfather - who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car. Anon

Hunt

It approaches nine in the eve. Peter Arbo’s

The Wild Hunt of Odin rests against my Mac.

I look burnt out at the garden of snow singularly falling,

Midges in the meady sodium light, hexagonal, blooming.

I am more a black and white photograph withering in an attic,

Punctured by the darkness, mothballed by the dust.

When I fall I fake love's signature, the ink swindles my blood

And the notes in my margins are quavering sutures.

There is a mess of years in my diaries,

Asides to solemn sleep lost to idolatry,

And when I weep fickle for a woman

Frosts creep over the skies of my skull.

When I am more the conductor’s arc in an orchestra’s brass,

Time scalds my liver and heart in a flambé.

When I am so much more well oiled, the waters mass,

The restlessness of youth blossomed, the truth surpassed,

I know my seed coils into the soil of souls,

Mines deep down in the hope of a bright utopia,

Disappears like dogs or falling stars;

The leavened trail of loveless kisses, cornucopias.

Ergo escaping the disguised city seems futile.

I shall remain speared, hang over the pitfalls of death,

Lick headstones as if they are gravy stained,

Be it furies or poetry on the lips of my last dying breath.

The Even Odds

I am sleepwalking home close to 6 am.

I have made another fresh start.

This night there is a pack of cards strewn across the pavement.

The hearts look dishevelled,

The spades seem blunt,

The clubs are emptied save for the hangers on

And the diamonds choking my neck have won.

I am gone to sea changes,

I wander the outward ranges.

And though I cross them, I cross her

And I converse with the walls

Meaning nothing, meaning every soul.

Time shifts hunger

A ray of light in the dawn’s fragile foal.

Continuation of the Dialogue

Does it make your bruises blacker?

Do the gaps of years draw closer like a vice?

Does the skin fallen off your bones stew?

Did you dig deeper and the deeper you dug suffice?

Does your text ring sound hollow?

Did you fit in but fall fallow?

Do the feelings return shallow?

Does the light come then the dark swallow?

Do passions relent into offspring?

Do your offspring reward denials?

Did the fight fall out of the ring?

Do you drink from tomorrow’s poison vials?

Does it always hurt you to show you?

Did you never listen to your heart?

Do you swallow what you cannot chew?

Does to finish leave you static at the start?

Does the body knock itself out to knock itself in?

Did reality gnaw flesh through to the bone?

Does the mind in chaos sew back on the skin?

Do you buy what you cannot own?

Did the questions never seize reasoning?

Do you need a quiz show for answers to begin?

Does holding out resort to losing?

Did you arrive but never go in?

Do you have the answers but no good questions?

Does receiving only make you regret?

Does remembering hold the answers?

Did time stick, your memories beset?

Does your loneliness embrace?

Do you gamble on mistakes?

Did you refuse a refuge with grace?

Do you hold on too long for an ace?

Does winning win the losers over?

Does the person choosing have choice?

Did you eat a four-leaf clover?

Do you relinquish having a voice?

Do you run down yourself?

Did the wrong path get stepped upon?

Does your skin touch another’s wrath?

Do you purge the desire to move on?

Do you burn with forgotten