Jackson

Made from Google-translated SMS messages received during 2019 while living in Yinchuan, Ningxia. // Today is Arbor Day. / Thank you for your support for the greening of the motherland! / Let us work together to fulfill the obligation / to plant trees and build / a beautiful China. … Read more

Outside my hotel, / around the corner from the neon mirage / of the central shopping street, / a woman squats in the roadway, / a metre from the gutter / in the cold rain, / pants down / by her bag-lady bag … Read more

Up late this morning. “They” are doing the / road outside, putting in traffic-calming / devices: trees in the middle of the road, / speed platforms, kerbs, marked lanes. Is this / how prize-winning poets write … Read more

Why is higher maths / so full of the names of men? / Godel’s theorem, / Cauchy sequence, Hilbert space, / Gaussian, Hamiltonian, Lagrangian. // Highschool calculus wasn’t like that. / The derivative was not / the Newton function, / the integral not / the Leibnitzian. // Irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, / complex and transcendental… Read more

… Her father is the gardener. He keeps it / well, wanders in it like Wittgenstein. The others / make fun of him. The child watches // their cartwheels. Asks. One, two, / three, they laugh. But the child is not co- / ordinated. She doesn’t have her count / together. The numbers come /… Read more

they died moaning     the structure / of their skins     failed // as I sat     above / the sea     in a human space / white chairs     white gravel / a high Hellenic shore / they came out     of the sea // the whales     bloated with water / moaning … Read more