Sex and Murder Magazine

Debris
By Micheal McAloran
erbacce press
Reviewed by David McLean

Stench
Rip of silent blood
Torn veins of the skylines
Atrophy
My skull a death orchard of bound bones
In the sickness of my laughter I vomit scars

I cite here Scars, one of the poems in this collection in full. It is one of an impressive collection of short dark poems here that follow a specific form, in that they are apparently nihilistic in the axiological sense, and the language is very rich in images, stench images, the odor and color of blood and shit given us on the chipped plate of the new millennium's psyche. The richness of the last line here is typical in others last lines may be:

I am disgust
(Reek)

The debris of my tears ablaze
(Ablaze)

I am the spit of the sun's vulgarity
(Spit)

So each poem is a little jewel cracked from the modern cancer, the malfunctioning spiritual pneumatics in each one of us. I don't feel that McAloran is looking for some nasty god in the details, he is showing what there is if one seeks something allegedly more, some holy source of values. His sort of “nihilism”—like most others—is only nihilism if we feel that the question of a source of transcendent values is an open or interesting question. If we don't mind vomiting scars then we're home free.

Obliterated skull you are the
Silence of tombs
Rest rest for in your fatal flowerings
I am breathing
(Rest)

There is a promising conclusion here, as we hear at the end, we fill the world with our whatever:

Tearing out stitches with my teeth
The echoes
Fill the skyline
(Stitches)

We can live in the shit and learn to see the aesthetically appealing in the amplified roar of self-mutilation. This collection of aphorisms or sketches, almost a haiku feel to many of them, is one that I can heartily recommend. Get it at erbacce-press.com/michael-mcaloran/4542338472

The Gathered Bones
By Michael McAloran
Calliope Nerve Media
Reviewed by David McLean

This little book by Irish poet Michael McAloran is a marvelous set of comments on the poverty of consciousness as it faces death, decay and the fundamental exigencies of mortality and our shame before the temporary flesh.

The dregs

The filth

Burning the air like
Shredded paper

Sharded bones crackling their death
Consumed by the darkness
(from Shroud)

These poems are songs assembling our various pains and are marked by a powerful sense of hopeless anguish in the face of futural nothingness.

He leaves a

shroud of black knuckles cracking
in the vault of [the reader's] skull
(adapted from Skull)

Because it is a disgrace basically that although there will be ruins, we have no future state into which we may enter, just sullen death and terrible absence where everything about the self that actually renders it “us,” our actual consciousness, is absolutely extinguished and exists no more.

Much of poetry is premised upon religiosity. Among intelligent poets only Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath stand as contributors to the Summa Atheologica. This is why this book is so congenial to me, it offers no consolation, there not being any, to those who regard their psyches as so perfect that they deserve survival.

And McAloran uses a Bataille quote as a header to a poem. Certainly, this book is part of the accursed share, our mad expenditure of anxiety against what is perfectly natural, the excess energy that builds in this shitty society extravagantly expended in a potlatch of words offered to our own negative sensibilities. And it threatens the established at least in the sense that the alert reader may wonder about the point of going to work when:

My laughter is
The fallen

Leaves

And the night

Crushing my
bones

The derelict
Silt of

My desire
(Silt)

Energy here is the eroticism of slow slicing, death by a thousand cuts, the bones falling regardless after, the whole chapbooks is an almost perfect set of songs from under the floorboards:

Soundless

The bones collapse
Breath upon flesh a trace of viscid night.

Flesh against flesh of desire

A taste of blood in the mouth
Nothingness to capture the cleft trailing winds

Through the absent skull an echoing dark light
Vibrating teeth of anguish

Ashen cries of final emptiness
The darkness clarifies

Tomb of forgotten breath

Meat of endless night in the catacombs of
Soundless dreaming

Buy it at lulu.com/product/paperback/the-gathered-bones/10909141.