Momtaza, I wanted to review your book or reply to your book or give a sense of how your book replenished me. Not just your book, but your thinking, your challenge, your friendship. It is easy to feel lost at sea in a world of imperfect poetry, between the failures of the avant-garde and the pretty pleasantries of careerist pathos. I struggle to know what my poems are for or what I want them to do. Your work shows a new escape route, helping me to muster a little energy and compact that into words. Here’s to your shining light in the darkness, and here’s to the fullness in sense that you bring to the page. With love, Ed
Midsummer Night’s Delirium
after Momtaza’s Borderline Disaster Poetry
Midsummer Night’s delirium / Midsummer Night’s twisting backwards
through the screen / Midsummer Night’s familiar fatigue like a song you never
wanted to give up on / Midsummer Night’s cold shower / Midsummer Night’s
rhythm in back muscles seizing / Midsummer Night’s cliche / Midsummer
Night’s rainstorm in a pothole, the floating nos canisters becoming life rafts for
the imagination and its impossibile grandeur / Midsummer Night’s mechanical
thought, snagged on an algorithmic misprision that we can’t shake off / Midsummer
Night’s forgotten birthmark, found once more in a frantic search for
flesh or obliteration / Midsummer Night’s tilt on toes at the apocalypse afterparty
(the last afters shall be first and the first shall be last after the afters) /
Midsummer Night’s open malfeasance, the unrelenting buttressing against
chemical facts, presented as nature, felt as sun / Midsummer Night’s airplane
plummeting through a halo / Midsummer Night’s melting desuetude in the
face of clock time / Midsummer Night’s spit / Midsummer Night’s grease /
Midsummer Night’s gesture / Midsummer Night’s second nature, lips curved
to kiss or cuss like knuckle bone / Midsummer Night’s I wonder why I wanted
you so bad and now you’re here it’s not that I don’t more that I can’t, until when
I don’t know / Midsummer Night’s not for leaving, not for staying, only for
shaking the petrol cap off and giving the heart a refill, when the fuel is too hot
to light without somebody getting burnt / Midsummer Night’s cracks in the
burial urn / Midsummer Night’s spectacular ravine echo / Midsummer Night’s
surviving amidst the uncertainty of survivals / Midsummer Night’s ice clinking
in a glass watching pornography with the blinds closed and the window open /
Midsummer Night’s get voyeurism à la mode / Midsummer Night’s you get
used to departure, scraping the memories and the longing into a singular crisp
note to rest on / Midsummer Night’s get jangling in long-emptied pocket /
Midsummer Night’s solutions seem to always appear, well,most of the time /
Midsummer Night’s backseat secrets / Midsummer Night’s unopened peony /
Midsummer Night’s what I expected, if I’m honest, was something different to
what I got – that’s how bad I am at the mathematics of dreaming / Midsummer
Night’s there’s no nerves left to go on, so we’ll keep going under until we
learn how to see down here / Midsummer Night’s sunflower seed, sculpted in
unrealised splendour / Midsummer Night’s prayer for every forgotten artist and
starved prisoner / Midsummer Night’s dirtied collar / Midsummer Night’s cigarette
stumped out in sand / Midsummer Night’s alright for fighting, but just
alright / Midsummer Night’s crackle makes bone blend with grill in the unlocked
hub cap, each axle sings in strain like crickets’ legs / Midsummer Night’s
bad poetry, I blame the choler of distortions that leave the signal jammers
drained, sickly / Midsummer Night’s charcoal sweats / Midsummer Night’s
gold rings on the bedside table / Midsummer Night’s harsh bravado / Midsummer
Night’s teeth knocked out / Midsummer Night’s lessons not yet distributed
on those who most deserve it / Midsummer Night’s calamity form / Midsummer
Night’s tracing the curvature of a molluscs shell in the moonlight
shimmer of a rockpool / Midsummer Night’s constant presence / unmaking / leaving
the world / on a silver slab / ready to be cut.
