Poems & readings

At the National Poetry Library, August 1st 2018

A recording from the National Poetry Library’s Special Edition series. Featuring a very special line-up of poets who have been seriously influenced by the revolutionary French poet Arthur Rimbaud – Niall McDevitt, Paul Stubbs and Blandine Longre, Penny Rimbaud, Louise Elliot, and Jeremy Reed. Recorded in the National Poetry Library on Wednesday 1 August 2018.

https://soundcloud.com/nationalpoetrylibrary/rimbaud-in-london

Poets Live series, November 8, 2016 - At Berkeley Books of Paris

Paul Stubbs read from The End of the Trial of Man (Arc Publications, 2015) and The Icon Maker (Arc Publications, 2008).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diG-t9VoYyk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26ywyqqn2mo

Poems recorded at The Seamus Heaney Centre, Belfast, February 2008

http://digitalcollections.qub.ac.uk/poetry/recordings/author/Paul%20Stubbs

After the flood – Head I – Paraphrasing the Dumb – Prayer – Seascape – The Paralytic child – The Pope departs his Heaven – The Scream

Other readings

https://www.youtube.com/user/Cdebarra70/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=0

October 2025

Four poems of mine have been published in Big Other magazine

from The Lost Songs of Gravity (2021)

A painting by Siemon Scamell-Katz inspired by this poem

https://www.siemonscamell-katz.com/new-page-2-1-1

THE SEARCH FOR THE COSMOLOGICAL CHRIST ENDS IN ICE

Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed

—Simone Weil

For my Blandine

Since the first nebulous

galaxy folded in its petals

and began to bloom only

outside God’s mind, you’ve been trapped here,

a cipher,

freeze-framed by faith;

pre-dating what pre-dated theology

(with your Christological visor lifted

to reveal an eye swabbed

by unbroken resurrection);

while sealed up behind

a glass case of your skin

in a museum

of irretrievable sensations…

so unable to invite sin,

or escape yet the state

of holy gangrene,

you, a churchless Christ

shipwrecked along with the shrapnel of the big bang,

a superabundant skull

hurtling towards what first mind? you who, shall never

provoke a ritual and be

grafted to a human tree.

For neither dead nor alive,

and unable to stretch the

limits of heaven or hell even an inch,

let alone be celestially winched

above your own body;

while continuing to clutch a phylactery

containing scripture already expired,

a forgotten scrawl in God’s

first ledger. A reckoning and a curse for the holiest men

unable to theologically

depart your own cold heart and

negotiate their Ascension.

Then, how many philosophical suppositions

will first have to be falsified before you,

you are allowed to

allegorically thaw?

You, who, without

religion will remain what, in lieu of sin you have

always been: a stylite

or rank moistureless thing abandoned

on this icy terrain…

—So what alien monstrosity, upon a beach, on bended

knees somewhere

in the universe is this

moment scavenging

a shoreline for the first

torn piece of your gauze to be washed up at its feet?

an alien akin to a

gnarled, stunted statue caked in the mud of a half-breathable atmosphere…

a monstrosity on all

fours and praying for

your flesh to be stretched across its nothingness…

—And with one billion Christologists needed

now on earth to forget their opinions on the biblical Christ

in order for you to

stop re-churching it, ice...

So, in order for God to one

day teach you how not to rot,

just how many lung-replacing

canisters of his breath

would be required?

before you, in every Eucharist,

become the only

authentic chiliastic body to

survive the ceremony and arrive:

a bible-correcting

hologram ready to haunt God’s cognates from his mind,

while hoping to have

set up upon

every planet, the

most elaborate holographic lightshow in the universe

in order to portray (at the same time!) both your death

and resurrection! rather

than be left here as you

are to drip through the holes of your own atoms

and then wait, for any

first follower to pray

you free of this never- to-be-thawed glacier of a planet.

You who (that no juridical wafer

has recalled, or dying theological animal

smelt the blood of),

will continue to ignore the deep space

fog light search of us all...

Until when you are eventually thawed

back into view by faith;

and the still-to-be-fixed tarpaulins of your church,

they replace every

last temple and shrine erected (mistakenly?)

on earth in anticipation of you... on the day

when you, a periscope,

you rise up out of this

ice to view all beings,

and the last discernible

mannequin in the universe

still to resemble you, out of God’s head, it is shouldered...

(beginning suddenly

to work out for itself

how to supernaturally decay)

When you, God, finally!

you rename this never-to-be

prayed-to torso:

Christ...

from Beast: The Lost Chronicles (Broken Sleep Books, Dec. 2024)

The Relic

“What have we to do

But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards

in an age which advances progressively backwards?”

T. S. Eliot

Upon this day, fresh from a god’s crypt

or catacomb, you, the beast (a blunt and

impractical end to Historical theology) arrive,

struggling to surmise

just what it is, this relic,

this contraption fallen into desuetude,

half-buried in sand,

where every hour, in every century, blindfolded

and tonsured beings

(in case of your birth)

keep attempting to repair it: a prayer-machine…

(invented, built, then

abandoned by aliens?)

the only still extant piece of machinery

in the universe designed to re-open them:

Christ’s wounds…

re-open them to stop man

copulating with beasts.

***

God’s Prophecy

“its hour come round at last”

W. B. Yeats

When your udders begin leaking Christian blood, you’ll hear it,

from the bottom of a staircase, before a door in hell’s basement:

“You will be born”

Throughout a lipless land of switched-off microphones,

into which a last species screams out in vain God’s name:

“You will be born”

As the last person to see you dissolves on your tongue,

and your mouth eats off your own ear until hearing it:

“You will be born”

Before a sudden involuntary stampede, as the saved, running off

the leg-braces of their human bones, they overtake you, singing:

“You will be born”

Until the day when, the love-lapsed you, has been pushed through into

a world of no-bone, cartilage or sinew, and you finally understand, what

“you will be born” means…

having fed for centuries on geckos, gnats and dead scorpions

to sustain that still unborn second Christ in your diaphragm,

until you in your

real body were born.