Guest Poet: Sam Smith performs apostrophe combe

Sam Smith, my editor for Repulsion Thrust, is also a magnificent poet himself, as well as being a novelist, and publisher.  His many endeavours can normally be found at http://thesamsmith.webs.com Today he's performing his wonderful poem "apostrophe combe", a sedoka sandwiched between 2 blocks of prose - as used in China's Heian period (794-1185).   The text of "apostrophe combe" appears below. The music was written and performed by Mark Kime. Enjoy!
 
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apostrophe combe

Slant-stacked, unquarried, these slate cliffs are a wafered ice cake that has been snapped, then pushed together, refrozen and snapped again. Within stratas of slate are stratas of slate where water can penetrate. Through other stratas of black slate white and pink quartz has been dribbled and veined. On beach stumps this quartz is last to be eroded, becomes a globular warty mass, a dirty icing, nor more picturesque than fire-melted plastic.

    Above the lustrous blue

    of a shale-silted sea,

    over path-scarred heathland,

    goes the flame-flicker rotation

    of three brown butterflies.

Could as easily hate this place as love it. Arrive on a wet day, gusts from every which way flicking rain into your face, walk over/through drain surge and gurgle; and it will feel relentless, this ever-blowing wind, the wet that gets into everything. All that you will see of the grey sea is it roiling white around black rocks, misshapen balls of its khaki spume flying over the gulls sitting out the storm on the putting green. A sustained blast of wind will seem to hold down any house you are in. Only, on its cessation, for the house to balloon out as if about to explode. Except that this time it doesn't. And you await the next blast.