By John Rivers
Perro Negro is happy to publish exclusively seven poems from the forthcoming book Recurrences and Occurrences by young Glaswegian poet John Rivers
Recurrences
«Come on just do it» She said . «You wimp, we only live once»
I was a wimp so I didn’t do it.
Soon afterwards she dumped me.
Just recently I reflected on her erroneous ways. We don’t live only once. We only die once but instead we have to live every day.
Culture with Small c
Culture contains continents. It can be conceived that culture covers countless things: cauliflowers, caramels, condiments and carrots are culture. Also camels, caimans, cougars and cockroaches. Equally cocks, cocksuckers, cunts, cunilinguists and copulators.
Now consider comrades, critics, curators, commissars, counts, courtesans, carpenters, colleagues, co-owners, collaborators, conspirators, countrymen and cadavers. Concluding, culture is quasi-ubiquitous. Certain are the moments when I say to myself «Fuck culture, I’m going to be a callous, uncultured cunt.»
Otherness
I have returned another person and it is to another place where I have returned. I have returned to take from you everything not already taken by the oblivion.
Heraclitus
The moment when I say this moment, this moment is not longer this moment.
Futility
You asked me why and I couldn’t tell you. Now I know it was the knowledge of knowing that the intimate words I had written on the wall of your memory would be erased by that wind and that rain inside us.
Elections
Old people. They inhabit old houses. They smell old. They use old words. They dressed in old clothes. They dream old dreams and they think old.
Their future is an old future and now our days are coloured with their images of a non existent yesterday. They voted old and for now they are the future and we are the past.
Tragedy
He was so sentimental, ever so sentimental that died squashed by one of his own tears.