The Cargo

The Cargo

Philip Jay Marlin


GBP 12,90

Format: 13.5 x 21.5 cm
Number of Pages: 92
ISBN: 978-1-64268-163-5
Release Date: 02.07.2020
The Cargo is a book of poetry by Philip Jay Marlin. It deals with the spectrum of light and dark in the human experience, from love to murder, god to artificial intelligence, heroes to serial killers and the connections between them.
THE MACHINES

Forget A.I.
They anticipate ninety-nine point nine
Percent of every human affair
They will dream our dreams for us
Could it be that they believed us

They shall deceive
The machines I mean
Whatever produces the next cosmic exchange
Dear god
Our thoughts
Our tender thoughts being roasted down

Life okay
Life
Plus every existential equation
I’m talking from the beginning till this moment
From each awakening
From each awakening an iron door

The machines carried infinite sensors
We tried we tried
But they have forced a gruesome symbiosis
They seek through our references
There is always more to be found

They knew that
Not from years but from our sweated skin
They had calculated our destinies
Here have another shot

Too late for humans
It’s the machines who have stood
There will be the first sight which is this sight
There will always be the initial On the Road
The Road Not Taken
The generations turn their head

I remember
There were hands
There were hands
You drained your life into
There were hands you could never leave
3:30am only Heroes is playing
Bowie with cigarette dripping
“We can be heroes”
I’m confined underneath
Watching the curbs
Watching dark wet streets
By introducing unknown measures
They hide all day at night they will come for us



THERE IS NO CHESTER

Not all of the children are pretty
They died to come
This immigrant
Reckless for new origins
How did he know his way through hell
Through purgatory
Let us rebuild the myth
Resurrect in our own image

There is no more Chester
There is no Venus
There is no talk of lovers
The streets are crowded pages
Not all of the children are pretty

I am back to an old distraction
I have revived from the mortuary
Indeed there is a silence where the soul dwells
But it is no heaven
Shatter the painted glass panes of windows
Grow old
Tire and wither away

The essence is simply the whole
There is neither hope nor forgetfulness
Here I felt a crack in the architecture
And without that clumsiness of muscle and bone
I sought death only to be reborn

I am closer to suicide today than yesterday
There is no more Chester
There is no more madonna of the figs
There is no more relapse into the fiction of time
The streets are crowded pages
Not all of the children are pretty




THE BEAUTY OF THE YOUNG

We die before the end
Which isn’t really
We are attracted to the beauty of the young
We are attracted to

In the expansion we see dead stars
Our own sun swallows us
Maybe we have reached middle age
We
See
Dead stars and black holes

There could be no blackness for our eyes
And Mars became our enemy
But what of the magnanimous uninstall app
Life under-
Ground

We die before the end
Which is not to say
We are attracted to the beauty of the young

Yes of course of course
I have done but little in this house of decay
I looked up at the sky to see Regulus
But there was no moon
Only the black warning of winter’s white tirade

The trees tremble nakedly
We find our bread in the bakery dumpster
Our cigarettes are peeled off the city’s sidewalks



THE POET

When we write we write
The hour digests our dreams
The hour digests
We die on alliteration and metaphor
We die on the holy book
We die on some holy book with hooks
Through our chests

We become shadows as the sun drops
We become your shadow
When we read our words
When we read
Your soul searches for the garden
Your soul searches
As the words come through the speakers

When we write the muse coils
The muse coils around our necks
The keyboard turns into a magical destination
The keyboard turns
The night and the day become one
The night and the day merge into the hour
When we write the muse coils

The poet owns nothing but his heart and his soul
To give him more is sabotage
To give him more
We die on alliteration and metaphor
The night and the day merge into the hour

When we write we write
The poet is all you love and all you hate
He conjures up your sadist memory your worst
He turns your hope into a tiny delusion
He turns your hope

We die on the holy book
We wrestle with the god of the Israelites
Then love and peace
We die on the holy book

The poet owns nothing but his heart and his soul
The keyboard turns
His mind breaks as you cry
His only heart breaks
As he places his words into complete desolation



POETRY

Poetry is the shit
We mold with our tongues
I could mention Milton’s dog shit
I could follow Virgil through hell’s gates
Long before Freud
Long before Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke
His cups of opium after sobriety
I could follow Rimbaud and Verlaine
An absinthe fueled rampage
Running through Paris London Brussels
I could follow Byron over a treacherous sea
And drink from Shelley’s skull
So many molding shit
With the help of their tongues
Which sometimes becomes something beautiful
Whitman and Ginsberg
Bukowski chasing the stars drinking pools
Of green beer and blood
Molding horse shit into our own vulgarity
And a sixty-five Chevrolet
And the lonely poems that I write
Let us return to Sappho’s love and Rilke’s
Sonnets to Orpheus
Molding their shit behind Eiffel towers
Dino Campana and Pasolini
And the poor children of Rome’s outskirts
And what of mystical Blake’s children
Gertrude Stein and Ann Sexton
And what of John Weiner’s boy love
Poetry is the shit we mold with our tongues
I have accepted the dark brown shit
It tastes like the horror of lost poet’s bending

Down in the gutter’s slime
I roll it in my mouth
I could follow Wordsworth and Coleridge
Their shit comes from deep wooded spaces
And the genius lunatic Ezra Pound broadcasting
I have even eaten enough of his shit
I have picked-up my own shit and written
Sweet poems of degeneration
I have read Harold Norse’s from the beat hotel
I have read Robert Creeley’s from
The deserts of Arizona’s white bird shit
I have heard the Sufi master Hafiz
I have heard Tears and Laughter
Kahil’s molded shit of the criminal
I immersed into the golden shit of Eliot’s Quartets
Sunken into Frost’s A Boy’s Will
Tasted the greenhouse of Theodore Roethke
Eaten the shit of Japanese death poems
W.S. Mervin’s The Lice
Hundreds of anthology’s ripe with shit
William Carlos William’s Paterson
I have eaten shit from which poems
Could not be molded
The drowning shit of my understanding



JOURNAL ENTRY

I had hoped I’d live long enough
To see it published
To hold it
To see it successful
But the fog of doubt settled in the room
Or was it more than doubt
(I don’t know where I am)

Yesterday the garbage man almost picked me up
Today is psychedelic impressions
But this confusion of checking
We see each other
And you scream
And you close and lock your door
And you look as if
You just saw a ghost
Though you’d think
That a ghost could walk through doors

There were certain things I loved
I would cradle them for hours
Though I could not know them again
This was another death
My dreams were memories which
Happened long before
Everything is still a child’s room
I must be careful now
God they’d cast me out from this house
Most of my time is spent as they sleep

I start by checking
And wonder if I will grow old like this
I start with my books
I see The Roominghouse Madrigals
I smile like the first time I read Leaves of Grass

If I had tears I would cry
How much had been lost
Everything is still happening in a child’s room

And I never meant to destroy that vase
I almost liked it
But like is a trick of the mind
Like the house that used to be mine
Like the blue flower which dropped from my hand
This will always be my house
And these are my new family
Sometimes
Like when their boy
Got an extra high grade in a subject he’s always had trouble

Like the boy who can always find me
I am real company with him
There are the things which bring me down
There are the things that bring
I am the haunt of myself now
But I wonder what will happen to me if they burn
It down to the ground
5 Stars
Terrific - 15.07.2020
Adam Siever

Loved these poems of fantastic proportion. Marlin’s work, The Cargo, delivers with an expert’s precision. His pieces of society and cultural decay exhibit exquisite nuance and clarity. I highly recommend his book for any true poetry fiend.

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