Dolphin Aria/Limited Hours: A Love Song Luke McMullan B L A Z E V O X [ B O O K S ] Buffalo, New York

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Luke McMullan is prising the nails out of the lyric and holding it ethically accountable for any passivity that might lurk in its corridors. This is a call to occupy, to resist the feasting and destruction. As 'we all dance the liberty frogmarch', he reprocesses the responsibilities of speculating and creating the spectacle of consumer lives. What stuns in this sequence is the performative quality of the work as it negotiates subtle moments of utterance and gesture. There's New York and 'Memphis', but even the oral inheritance/subtext of The Iliad with its ordnance and war dead. It's about adding up the costs. The angel investors are falling around us and the planet aches with opportunism. Capitalist adaptations come unstuck, thwarted by their own expense accounts. At once jagged and smooth, there's delicacy in this confrontation with personal and collective responsibility that can take one's breath away. One of the most intelligent poets writing anywhere, McMullan also has great technical facility and can keep us poised on the edge of the disaster he carefully articulates, and in which we are all culpable — he does this in the hope that we might see and act. This poet will change things for the better.— John Kinsella Luke McMullan is a PhD student at New York University, writing on language and dialect strata in modernist long poems. Before that, he worked at a software company that crawled webpages for linguistic and lexical context, on which much of this poem is based. He studied English at Cambridge for three years, and hails from Belfast, Northern Ireland.This is his second book. His first chapbook, n, was put out by Wide Range (Cambridge, 2012). With Sophie Seita and Ian Heames, he runs the unAmerican Activities series, a live reading event in London and New York, and the New York Stock small press. Book Information:· Paperback: 36 pages · Binding: Perfect-Bound · Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]  · ISBN: 978-1-60964-188-7

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Dolphin Aria/Limited Hours:

A Love Song

Luke McMullan

B L A Z E V O X [ B O O K S ] Buffalo, New York
Dolphin Aria/Limited Hours: A Love Song by Luke McMullan Copyright 2015 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza Cover Art by ShutterStock First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-188-7 BlazeVOX [books] 131 Euclid Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 [email protected]

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The world is more or less beautiful than the idea of snow running with wine like a blood tide burrows would covet: the world or the twentieth century, the zero point of browsability: Kleenex Reichstag Leon Trotsky more zines to gorge the stemmer, putting Life in the form of back issues
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I saw the cruel eye of the storm and the wind peaceful and high and an hour wasted by death: you are the very far edge // of man. You blow from your palm the ash of my heart
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Here's a dolphin swimming among dead dolphins, pulsing with moisture to become the sea, whose body is effluvia. And somewhere a horse of more powerful hands is laying down covering fire from a hot jeep; whilst more sober horses dance in the mighty land of grass

( and in my sanguine flesh I fondled idleness: sleeping music to crown my domicile; the cornet is a device my friend would play cavorting at sunset bloodrush )
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Listen: I offer myself: I have changed for good remember for all time the most recent love silhouette my finery in flame.

(this bridge is harder at night but the snow is above minimum requirement) Listen:

when you see the horse tail stars, my taverns are empty put on your furs and reclaim the streets write the insane chronicle of thieves

Under the cornered sky, when we are gazed, flying in bright stations on deaf trains, until morning, conducted, night grows up hunchbacked before dawn, snowlight squints up through the shopping malls.
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Listen (the beauty of my mouth in association with the latest sponsor):

Hustle for life in corridors of monotone Creep down steps holding a lantern and skeleton keys Go in to the office to create light,

falling prey to mission creep, a space station dolphinned entirely by dolphins
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[SCRUM SONG] Chorus. Oh, we can track a user through ten deserts, making love to the end of the night that never comes until the daily health figures inflect our language in a private exchange. Premier Verso. Oh, we debate the release notes in patterns of vigorous woodsmoke. Some whizzkid from development is hitting the peacepipe and taking a dump on the childhood campfire. Chorus.
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Auxiliary Verso. There is an indicator arrow in three versions, giving the lie to the idea of coral: in an infinite universe paper will jam // infinitely, so we rationalise mapping and walk off into the sand Refrain, to fade. Into the sand. Oh, into the sand. Oh, into the sand. [End scrum song for the time being // ]
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And after all this, we run into each other's arms in the worst part of Spain and dig up old ghosts, lay them out in the sun to dry like some turf, and wish death adieu, and burst into flame. I sing my goodbyes from a screaming promontory to my seaborne lover who flies with the cormorants now and the day's news, and shit in a hole in the ground until he comes back. I lie on the ground as a sign of the world, constructing a wing profile amid the elements, howl out my howl, pressing my crown to the target that burns, take off for the next platform. (So Tristan dies at the end.)