Ahead of my fourth collection of poems, 'Moriyama at Hamiltons', coming November 2022, here is an edit of poems composed so far this year.
More of my works can be viewed here: https://dorrellmerritt.co.uk/Dorrell-Merritt-Selected-Poems
Image: 'Ferry', 2021, Dorrell Merritt
Four euro kebabs
Eyes wide on Eisenbahn; night steel, grinding as a street-ensemble,
alfresco tables, with deutsch murmur; a foreigner drifting in hunger,
the clasped dregs of a long summer; hähnchenfleisch, sliced, sauced,
cabbage, potato, lettuce— spread bread, stuffed into pyramidic tin,
clasped to the breast, chest, neon glints, gaudy bars, technicolour worlds afar.
In the shadow of the giants
After A.R. Penck’s Standard–West KR4 and KR8.
No fallacy, all phallic and earthen, as old as pyramids or caves—
I’m bowing, and remembering and learning all at the same time;
Nostalgia through the epochs and ages,
Facing the giants, black as carbon, pained, painted scruffily.
Eternal symbols, kinfolk humble, universal, as aliens or new man—
Small as a bird in a hand; purity in clarity, and stories told so,
So massive, I’ll forget not, plucked strings, with the sad echo.
Diane Keaton
diane keaton was a painter, in my dream;
reclining bodies she painted, lain like lazing goddesses,
angular and beautiful,
brush strokes, complex, in ambitious backgrounds;
dark blues, dramatic and blurred some.
gaunt were their faces, smiling like skeletons,
drawn to them in admiration, like sirens,
slate-coloured; regal, as marble, in the deep of my mind.
Untitled summer composition
Crippled like red brick crushed,
in skips on scrap yards, or thick dust
in young lungs, cough-laced and cursed.
A bit much and a weighted bane,
a stray strain as the long day wanes,
mine to lose, all the same, with a heavy sun.
A treatise on apathy
Moonless nights, alright, with stupor-heavy sleep-time;
Numbness, deep as oak-root or lonely walks with twilight bats,
Sickness and loveless and all the while lingering still—
Bending will, dread and dreams for half-written, re-written plans,
Rain-stained, and draining as long as the day, or a piece of string.
Long journeys home, the fleeting warmth of arms and others;
Nothingness, laboured as worries of worries, fraught and frayed,
Apathy, a bold consistency, ensnaring with a beauty cold;
Everything great, plain, all the same into one, like a ouroboros—
Slipping into grandiose robes, so heavy and then some.
Love, by La the Darkman
After Love, by La the Darkman.
Top deck, night bus rides, down by Brent Cross way,
round bends, empty roads, lamp-post orange-blurs,
sway into a lonely deep purple;
thought, light as neon tears, or string samples—
time levelled, digital and beautiful in a concrete darkness.