The Linguistic Eye Scans of Robert Sheppard

This week we delve into the linguistically innovative strand of the surreal-absurd with a poem from Robert Sheppard. It is full immersion.

Here is his artist statement:

This poem operates as a linguistic eye scanning the images that the world offers and which it refuses to read sensibly or realistically. It is a kind of squinting, although sometimes the world is just plain weird. It isn’t difficult, if you don’t look for difficulties.

Adversarial Stoppage  

(for S.J. Fowler)

He lifts his eyes to nowhere, nothing.
He lives in his listening; barely tense
for the moment, enters the sounds.
Cries in polyphonic discord. Eyes shut,

he drops his arm, ape-like, to his side, 
as if scratching fleas. Screwed eyes.
Neck veins throb, a little throb pumped
up from below, and a plaintive squeal 

rich for fricative dispersal. An angel’s 
thin pipe transmutes mucoid gurgling.
His articulatory mechanism and brain
are locked in symbiotic weaves and trills, 

music as much in absence of sound
as in what is heard. Weight falls in the thighs,
as song becomes speech, art becomes life. The 
human animal is back in its body once more.

No wonder he sits back to cool the intensity
of this affront to the condition of mirror. 
Across the traffic crossing, he abstracts war
into captures and prisoners, clicking his fingers

before luxury towers printed on the luxury 
glass of the ground floor of the luxury block.
Shingle hushes a gentle tide. He may have
walked in from the sea, his face abstracted

into two pits and a slit. The skull is worn, 
chipped, teeth gone, jaw long slipped 
free. Do you call this breakfast,
with that crucifix angling to St Andrew’s, 

more tortuous conversation about the soul,
and how much it costs to insure it? A surprise
attack upon history: a crown threading wind
through its jewels, a plague-doctor peering

from beaked eyes into my distress. They 
read me like the nameplate on my door.
I’m as lost in shimmers as a wavering stoppage 
outside the chequer-flinted oratory. Fists

clench. He is not here to bless me.
This face is only readable from the inside.
Whoever she is, this slender figure is her
beacon but, sitting, that’s not a beak on

her Attic face, angels calcified around her
perfect feet. The space behind her swirls;
sound twists into shape. She conducts thick
air with her brow. Black ink spills across

her costume, consequential drift. That eye,
again, limpid but fierce, as she rips everything
to tendrils of cat-gut whine. The discarded
bow floats in a pool of reflections, the curve

of its brushed fibres bristling in silence. He 
assumes her interiority: his safe knowledge
of it, her soft surrender of it, a dark deal: one
squeeze of her shoulder attenuates her thoughts.

She could slow towards one degree above
stoppage. After the voting: the opening of
boxes, an MP4 player of killer nursery rhymes.
Girders assert something like direct rule

above unvisited ground, the scrubby stretch
of between that we accelerate over, towards 
a strip of name on the brow of the low 
bridge. We dub FX and nod at the sounds, 

as a blue sky carries floss of cloud across 
the rooftops. A cylinder hoists rust patterns
for our ceremonial fabrics. I dance in and out
of latticed shadows that carpet this pitted tarmac.

Heaven knows where the sky-blue cylinder went,
on its way to myth or rubble. One slanted column
holds the sky in place. One kick and it falls.
The arched backbones of two men draining water 

bottles creak. The book falls open at the neck,
summary justice one syllable from the crouched man.
I still wait across the road for the lights,
merging into waves like a graph of viral infection.

Of course, other sentences are available, trail 
out of themselves a strip of themselves, 
saying what they’d say in any other legible
configuration, but lacking the urgency we yearn:

a helter-skelter between buckled words
with black spores collecting in the elbow of its
curve. Numbers aren’t crunched here, or words.
They’re bucked, as though within this tickertape

lurks an oracular cypher or a wire fence barbed
with musical notation free of its staves. A
crowded island of coded numbers seeks
independence from imperial measures,

filling the colony with small data, thumbnails
and counting. A spray of ink, or fur, or limb
tops the paper lampshade world of his display,
so that each heel-taut thigh remains moist.

Paramedics munch their blood-red jam
sandwiches, swill their cloudy pomegranate 
juice, and lick their sticky fingers. 
Tranquility emerges between emergencies. 

Robert Sheppard has just published the first two books of his ‘English Strain’ project, The English Strain (Shearsman) and Bad Idea (Knives Forks and Spoons). His selected poems, History or Sleep (Shearsman) as is a book of essays on his work, The Robert Sheppard Companion, edited by James Byrne and Christopher Madden. He is at work on Book Three of the project, British Standards, and other projects, such as ‘Flight Risk’, of which ‘Adversial Stoppage’ is the final part. Sheppard lives in Liverpool. 

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