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Aaron Kent
the poet
Aaron Kent is a working-class poet and publisher born and raised in Cornwall. He runs Broken Sleep Books and has had several pamphlets published. J H Prynne called his poetry 'unicorn flavoured'. How do you top that?
the poems
Ice Skating,
Garden of Eden, 1998
When the floods erred
over the pyre, the ice
caps were still ideas –
a convergence of crystal
starlings invoking themselves
to a hemisphere. My father
still spoke in Rather,
comparing potential
to outcome and living
through the theoretical
choices of a coin flip.
(Nothing would prepare
him for a side, a continuum
never considered ad
infinitum). In evening’s
grubby light we married
mushroom while he sung
broken harmonica
for an orchestra of junction –
the tip forms; mistakes
we promised to make,
a space to take. You, I
was told when we
returned from the registry
office, sledded down
Wollaton hill in the first
stretch of snow; your first
instinct to battle and claim
each sheet like condensation
racing to the bottom,
engorging itself on itself. I piled
snow against the door of a man
you never met, a cleansed
soul burdened with a front
he couldn’t forecast. The cat
determined to hide in his arms,
the whistle of his harmonica
drowned out by a meow
stretched thin across the
enveloping mist. I broke
my arms in a race to the finish,
I snapped my tendons
to calm the light.
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Portmanteau
All of us; you, Aaron Kent, and I
spread ourselves across the mattress
where we read ergodic fiction to each other –
where she lay the golden chariot,
alchemy by alchemist,
unenviable task of poisoning
the dinner party. We bought a simile,
like we had bought a mouse –
petted, fed, hygienic
born to serve a different purpose.
We, all Aaron, carried him in our arms,
our wasted arms in nuclear unrest,
and dug lead into turf
as we pressed its aching body
into a shoebox and begged
each other for entropy. The tone
of conversation had changed
and the split had guaranteed doubt.
I’ve seen myself against a foreign backdrop
like the breast of a white swan
paralysed by the lines and ripples
elegantly stamped on water’s canopy,
where the drinks are quaffed
before the bruschetta stuffed.
Three of us, the inheritance of each other,
like buds snatching for the sun,
sent to follow a slope
so weak so long so dark
against the paleness that eats the very best
of every silver lining etched in the folds
of heavy cloth / case. I still hear them,
us, myself in every quaint out-dated
piano solo of a rehearsed broken
moonlight sonata, like a sober actor
playing drunk – the chimes jangling
somewhere in absentia,
the simile sleeping on the crook of midnight,
a desperation becoming faint. I overcame
and landed with tender spring
between the three of us
there, between the Godlessness of uncertainty.
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Reasons to Take Part
In a Treasure Hunt
Time consumption is mindlessness,
you are the waste of water,
there are stars in the back rooms of your neighbour’s houses
how will you ever know about them if you don’t search?
The cats tell us how to move,
the world is shaped like an egg,
every part of your face tells a lie you tried to keep,
I have eaten both of your novels; neither tasted like paper.
Your sanity has fallen into the wrong hands,
your mouth is open too wide for your feet,
there are more ostriches than mistakes,
you don’t know to use a full stop.
Properly. If at all
there is a no better time than the present tense,
Kanye West is waiting,
the whole town is waiting,
why do you keep us waiting?
Just find it already.
The clues are there.
Publishing credits
Ice Skating, Garden of Eden, 1998: originally appeared
in an altered form in The Rink (Dostoyevsky Wannabe X)
Portmanteau / Reasons to Take Part In a Treasure Hunt:
exclusive first publication by iamb
