GUEST EDITOR: JESSE GLASS
FEATURED WRITER: Jeremy Hilton
BIO:
Jeremy Hilton was born near Manchester in 1945 and has degrees in English Literature and Social Work. From 1972 until 1998 he worked in various social work posts, in later years primarily with children and families. Hilton's writing has appeared in magazines and anthologies worldwide since the 1960s. Ten collections of his poetry have been published, the three most recent being - SHADOW ENGINEERING (1991), EARTH BOUND (2000), and SLIPSTREAM (2003).
He is editor and publisher of the poetry magazine FIRE, which he launched in 1995. He lives in rural Oxfordshire with his partner, the writer Kim Taplin.
1
small dog chasing
one way then another
stony field of stubble
can it hear the calls
fading into cold air
have we not all of us
one time or another
faltered on hard ground
failed to hear those who love us
those not willing
to let us disappear into
such uncertain worlds
fear in the setting sun's light
the cold pillow of freedom
everything to lose
or nothing
scared of the endlessness
endless grey hotel rooms
angels turned to stone
in one flash of beauty
wrecking the silence of sanity
turning from the mouths of strangers
----
2
sunlight patterns
the sea in moving
swathes
the bare arms of boatmen
working these waters
shorelines where the season's
last flowers
pinpricks of colour
bright among browns
and grey-green hedges
protecting fields from wind
boxed-in fields
hardly larger than large gardens
and the fast tide
running low uncovers
rocks and sandbanks across
the channel
----
3
the rising land where the bombs
dropped and buildings flamed
where birds deafened left to
nest elsewhere and people too
families with furniture on carts
and trucks machine guns or
rifles pointed out of the
awnings force their way through
checkpoints defend their children
their property children are
crying for the home lost the only
home this wagon forced to be
nomads now these pictures prod
an anger a land rising in
mountains a terrain harsh with
searing heat these pictures
an anger a headache deep in the
soul somewhere in the world
transposed to our kitchens
turning us sleepless
----
4
living in the wrong world
the last voyager
last lonely one
words falling as
blossom in the storm
as sparks of glass
from houses hit by bombs
explosions in the head
the fear inside
----
5
adagio of angels
clouds on
steel drift
arc of shaft
sun's low shuttle
to nightfall
angels' adagio
thirsting in moonlight
birds silent
unless the owl
unbreaks a loop of horn
silence rising not
on angels' or others' wings
waiting for rain
waiting for her
adagio moments
no rain comes
----
6
and there could be
in that huge light
colours which draw from
the darkness, the inner
confusion, the night beneath
the surface of day, which
frightens the children, makes
them enemies of
themselves,
and so I think of them
Jade, Nick, John and the
many others, trying to
reach out through the
hostility of the world
to a place of light and colour
a place of protection an
outside place that
is safe but is not there
when nothing inside
themselves is safe
----
7
THERE NEVER WAS A TIME OF SIMPLE LIGHT
cold upon the earth
east wind like ice and white
- canal ice? no rivers
rivers
also frozen
nut-feeder frozen
frozen for finches weakened past dawn
and hot tears came
to me brimming up
never was there simple time
hot in the cold house my heart
reached for
the John Balaban poem and for you
"Words for my Daughter"
a feeling caught in
caught in my throat for you
John Balaban?
who is this guy?
that I've never heard of
who can find me out the
weakness the strength the
poem that burns
there never has been
time when the light didn't hurt
when the world didn't hurt
more than it should
I stand in the one
moment that goes on from here
out towards a white
horizon, an earth
hard with denial and winter
hearing the pain
the too much of it like
an oboe within
a horn round the heart
I come to treasure the joy
joy you handed me helped
me find
in darkness frozen night
but cannot say it there is
always difficult light
too much light
words burning in birdsong
--------
FEATURED WRITER: Rane Arroyo
BIO:
Rane Arroyo is the author of four books of poems, the latest being Home Movies of Narcissus (University of Arizona Press). He can be contacted at RRArroyo@aol.com. His passport has been his diary. New projects include: a long poem about Roswell, a new collection of poems based on his travels and also memoirs that refuse to be written. The internet has been a source of meeting new writer friends and reconnecting with amigos once lost in the universe. His website is under construction, but soon a virtual shindig.
DANGER IN THE DARK
Puerto Rico, I wake up so far
from your bed. There are no
roosters in my quilt-patterned
neighborhood, north of my dead.
My Mexican sunflowers smolder.
Isla, you are suppose to float
on the sea and not in human
minds, yet here you are with
the need to smell my body as if
I’ve been with a rival paradise.
----
MATINEE
The movie theater is empty,
but for the film and a boy
watching a giant army
cross a cursed mountain.
The projectionist reads
the wants ads. The city
swirls about the exit
door. The boy is unafraid
of being alone, of following
the army through a blizzard.
He has earned the money
for this afternoon by
cleaning cars and giving
hedges buzz cuts. One man
falls into a glacier's blue mouth.
His compañeros cross
themselves. The boy also does,
out of respect, out of knowing
the imaginary must be honored
or else it'll follow him home.
----
THE LANDSCAPE
Lately, only when I take a drive,
is the landscape more than
computer wallpaper,
background in porno
(what is the link between
palm trees and desire?),
or a coiffured garden where
the rich gather to talk
of the arts with tree shadows
in their apple martinis.
----
TOURIST WITHOUT A CAMERA
Forget St. Paul's and its tired frown,
better this handsome tourist -I must
interrupt this poem but a dwarf just
collapsed! Strangers laugh!-this
handsome tourist who rivals stern
revelations. Let the vague ghosts in
the cathedral pose for 3rd world cameras.
I've a closer prophecy. He sees me
seeing him and he grins. T.S. Eliot, we
like being human. I ask the stranger this
Tuesday's Christian name: Adam.
Of course, perfect. An act of God.
----
BRIEF NOVEMBER TRAGEDY
The meteors arrived,
but were kept from our
Holy Books by a thin
veil of unimportant clouds.
These sky stones won't
appear again for another
century that, to we who
live now, means not for
an eternity. Previous
meteors have appeared
without taking off their
wedding veils or asking
us for our nakedness.
Telescopes ache for foci.
This spectacle is spent
far from our currency,
money stripped of provincial
numbers. We listen to
weathermen because
they only love the Earth.
----
THE FOUNDERS
Mars, at first, wasn't mythic:
airlocks, requisite name rolls,
thuggish scrambles for news of
the blue eye we abandoned.
Then, slowly, Mars won us
over with its hostility turned
into honesty. Death is at
hand, ever the harvester.
We've a life without flowers.
Some dream of trees walking
our naked city. But the blankness
is beautiful, Eden without puppets.
----
THE GREEK PAINTER IANNIS TSAROUCHIS AT WORK
The painter tells the model
to wear a watch, that youth
should be painted with
a bomb strapped to his wrist.
The fisherman also wears shoes
and socks too, but nothing else.
He thinks about the big
wedding he must pay for,
shine's spectacle to please
family he has not seen
for years. Light from the sea
breaks against his terrible
chest and he watches Iannis
watch him-him! He was chosen
from his crew. God loves him.
----
FINALLY
It doesn't take courage to say
that I grew my hair long so
no one at school could see
my bruises, that I shaved it all off
the day I moved away on my
own, that the barber asked me if
I wanted a bag of my head's diary-
no. I was the coward who never
talked directly to those fists, the swelling
boy sure my house was shrinking.
Finally, my head looked a globe
full of nations waiting for names.
----
MIRROR ON FIRE
From the air, the world has no borders.
Cloud-gowned mountains defy the compass,
their shapes the beauty of discord.
How lucky I am: motion without
my own grand wings, and yet god-eyed.
We descend deeply into Vancouver and,
again, customs become one slow tale:
'Purpose of visit?' "To write, think, stir
the dead." 'Ah, tourist.' When did poets
lose their power? Asian chauffeurs wave
pictographs. Arms are pried open for opulent
visits with glossy relatives. The disguised in
shades and foreign tans carry bags of
goods, but not good acts. The downtown bus
is crowded with ex-hippies, seniors and
one runaway poet. I'm too early for my room
and move into the Irish bar next door
that serves quesadillas! Two pints and I miss
my lover, cat, unfinished books and Hardy Boys
books I am re-reading to figure out how
I got into this writing circus freak career.
Soon, my room is a comfortable coffin, but
I rush back into the streets. It's a parade of
phone monologists, young beggars with
expensive guitars, construction workers
peering out of the skeletons of skyscrapers
and dogs, so many dogs (I hum Yoko Ono's
song "Dogtown). I sleep, dream of home,
that place that never asks for my passport.
Dawn is a mirror on fire, my missing twin,
the book I keep trying to write for my dead.
I explore again: time for a walk, to see
a muscular crowd rush from the Queer Film
Festival to pose on the outside plain patio.
A ferryboat takes me to a food market with
raw materials for orgies. On a limber pier,
I write as seagull shadows prove more agile
than my punctuation. Back to that Irish pub
where they blast Morrissey: to die by your side. . . .
I join a crowd of younger people who are there
for the poetry of each other. I've been young
and a rune. The moon in the bar mirror is
harmless, a phantom photographer, a false
volcano. I get free drinks! For? Strangers
reply, for sharing the wealth of your fever.
--------
FEATURED WRITER: Alan Halsey
BIO:
Alan Halsey is a bookseller now living in Sheffield, England. He ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye 1979-96. He is the publisher of West House Books. His own books include Five Years Out (Galloping Dog 1989), The Text of Shelley's Death (Five Seasons 1995, West House 2001) and Wittgenstein's Devil (Stride 2000). He has also published a number of collaborations, including Fit To Print (with Karen Mac Cormack, Coach House 1998) and Days of '49 (with Gavin Selerie, West House 1999). His edition of Thomas Lovell Beddoes' Death's Jest-Book appeared in 2003.
i.m. Peter Hoy
How are the things by Hay-on-Wye
and what will you do when you are Death?
The painter has drawn a Parisian scene
characterized by decadence and various suggestions.
There is no end to appearance.
There is no end to likeness and fashion.
The things by Hay-on-Wye
show a scene muddle-mouthed and another
dry patch of rock'n'roll melancholia.
There is a novice in the land
of the Dead who was a friend of mine.
Who is nervous as he was. Some
gather to the light, some
whistle and hum, some dowse,
some fall into a drowsy melancholia.
Some die after death. An old dream
of me gives the impression I need
certain books. The painter
has drawn a black river.
How are the things by the river?
Standing somewhat aside from the gathering there
is a novice I still call a friend of mine.
There is no end to likeness and appearance.
----
ALIEN PROFORMA
The wrecked metal of the spacecraft looked like tin foil but you could take that stuff and wad it up and it would straighten itself out like a crumpled Moebius strip of the target language. As I see it now the target is transparent, a glass dome of the shared vocabulary of two peoples each of whose pronunciation is unearthly to the other: these are such deep threats and adjectival threads represented on the map you have as ley-lines or another compound with the same phonetic register or nearly. For the moment let's call that target the Air Force Base at Roswell, New Mexico. The date is July 4, 1947, the time 11.30 p.m. It needs comparing to a sentence of at best indeterminate significance: there are always ten on treble nine, for example, or the chance resemblance of inhibit and inhabit. These aliens do just look like smaller and hairless human beings but with lizard eyes and in the order of the text a little abstract. It was my own map I lent you and if it's not any trouble a xerox would help. The names of the witnesses, Trudie Truelove and James Ragsdale, are intriguing enough: they are soul mates certainly, accessing the message line and following the simple instructions. And then there's the fireman, Dan Dwyer, who saw two body-bags and one of the beings still alive, about the size of a 10-year-old child. If I tell you that he or she was female you'll begin to see the nature of the problem. The site was or rather the seal was sited off and the story will soon have subtitles added. In the adaptation you'll see the undertaker making two maybe three child-size coffins but we haven't get that far in the original version - the surgeon pauses … When the contents of the skull are removed, they are flesh-like, but most unlike a human brain with its grooves and folds. In the black-and-white target language the film is called grainy; the wingless craft is seen entering the sentence a second before impact. The scalpel goes down the trunk, to the swollen belly which suggests that this small being might have been pregnant. There are female genitalia, but no navel, and no hair. Once the body cavity is exposed, there are no familiar coils of intestine. The body-organs are again flesh-like, soft, just as the framing constructions are clause-like but in alien analysis lack verbs. In the stills she is a doll, naked and abandoned in any sense you choose. When the black lids are lifted from the eyes we see white orbs in the target language. It is phrases like this we cannot translate: high-altitude weather balloon in '47 becomes radiation monitor in '94. Lid is related to lizard in some unspecified way, film to flimsy and so on: they are strays who have wandered from their proper atmosphere and lie threatening and dead on the army surgeon's table. They are future ghosts, hieroglyphic and geometrical shapes like words read backwards through the transparent foil of the crumpled loop which is an airstrip after all, after us.
It's not simply that the numbers change but that first it's three and then it's five but never four: and yet in any account it's only one of the aliens who is said to have been walking around when the humans arrived and that one disappears from the story like a shifter in the target language. The other two or four lie dead in the hangar, make a note, we have the shifter and the hangar right there for all to see like the half-rhyme of text and special effects which for all we know is hieroglyphically correct. That one's as likely to be still alive as any other witness and talking with a similar accent. It was June and not July. Trudie and James are no longer being mentioned but Dan Dwyer's daughter cries and cries. Repeat after me, non video: the officer was banging his baton in the palm of his hand as an inalienable rite, hoax signo. In the first adaptation we see lightning fork across the desert and an alien by this time possibly a laboratory mutant flashed on the screen for a second: the proforma image is in that sense static interference, the sound goes off out of radio contact - we see the lips of the witnesses still moving but we only hear the thunder by now overhead. There is a flip mid-sentence as a floating preposition from a newer technology prowls the desert headland. Then flimsy again, although the alien skull seems bony enough and remains in this adaptation unopened. Syntax is reduced to the sequence of frames just as the commentary's a grammar, you keep rubbing your right ear but the noise continues deep down and right across the landscape behind you as the motor language stays ticking over. In the still the image is reversed and the wound transferred to the subject's left leg. There was an army cordon round the hangar and a heavy toxic smell maybe farts of the alien shifters just before the full stop. You understand? The debris when it showed up in Texas was entirely different stuff. We called them flying rings in those days, we've come that far since 1947, but I don't remember the six fingers on the alien's left hand. The witness's eyes tell us nothing in too obvious close-up. There was that white object in the sky and something funny on the target language radar. Everything goes white, from the unnecessary lightning to the surgeon in ghost-strip. I know what I saw although no one else will say. And when the lid is lifted as it didn't have to be the white eye.
----
from A ROBIN HOOD BOOK
Weakened by loss of blood Robin's last act was to slash his sword on Red Roger's neck: he was a famous murderer, Robin Hood, as well as Little John, together with their accomplices from among the dispossessed, about 1266 or 1283 or in Lionheart's time, say 1194. In this year would Jerusalem be taken and signs known as forest in full leaf of the third age coming of the holy spirit meaning love between rich and poor and new freedom among men. In the decade of Arnaut his lady and trobar clus. The date of his death 24 kal dekembris 1247 was no time at all just as his greenwood was a blank on the map or else he was truly King of Misrule whose wildnesse named him robin heud. He wounded his stepfather to death at plough: fled into the woods where there is no deceit nor any bad law and was relieved by his mother till he was discovered.
It was a time when the forests were being eroded from within by enclosure of land for out-of-town development and ring-roads. As the century came to an end retail parks and industrial estates proliferated. Between February **** and July **** there were fifteen commissions of oyer and terminer occasioned by raids on business parks, Tescos and Texas Homecare and attacks on quangoists and hypermarketeers. And Robyn hod in scherewod stod, hodud and hathud and hosut and schod: his four and thuynti arowus like jingling spells against prestige employment developers. He gadered and assembled unto him many misdoers beynge of his clothinge and, in manere of insurrection, wente into the wodes and strange contrays as outlawes, waitynge a tyme to murdre, sclee, and other grete harmes in that contray to do.
Happy Robin Whood coming to Lyndric falls asleep and hath a strange Dream there. Which at his awaking, he relates to his Companions, and then tells them that he is resolved forthwith to turn Hermit. Robin retires to Depe Dale, chuses the penitent Thief for his Patron, and spends the Remainder of his Time in great Penance and Devotion. He falls sick of a fever, repairs to Kirklees to be let Blood. His mind consoled his endurable time slips away. Again he is lying in Little John's arms, it is a dream within a Barnsdale dreaming: again there is a thief in the forest, now a rival shaman in Gisborne's disguise clad from head to foot in the hide of a horse, a bloody mire of a path through the maze of trees Robin alone knew by weird aiming of his aimless arrow and the dream within the dream before that when he was captured in Nottingham not saving Marian who first named him a'Hood but kneeling as he must before the one in whose image his deere ladye was.
Thomas A. Clark is invited to lecture to the Sheriff's officers: It is not the forest we eventually discover but our own strategies of evasion. The officers' problem is that out in the forest they lose any sense of their own: even their strategies of evasion are stripped away and put to good use by the man or many they call Robin Hood. For either Robin Hood is himself the forest or Robin Hood is nobody at all. Some of the officers will have discovered for themselves the awful darkness of the forest night, that darkness of which brigand Robin is patron saint and protector. For When men let light into the forest, the teacher continues, darkness hid in their hearts.
----
'ROUND MIDNIGHT take two: for GM
Therapeutic thereabouts
expecially Schiller.
They happier slided than slid.
She in all his haunts with bangles and gusto.
Desire when stings when desire.
Plain speaking come to grief in palindrome disaster.
Interregnum.
Trobar clus.
Less than half a bet when a busy de-eff
ulgence of hill-snow they wish on
holds up nightfall.
His sister everyone remembers wrote Dracula.
Drowned his sordid in a lake.
Value as valve
in the mass production of fictitious airs.
Where quickwell's cwcwll
Newcastle Brown is?
Infinitive to spilt if imperative to milk split
and shake when reading of my his-and-her hands.
Ripping up and down
the remembrance parade notice she enters.
----
REALIGNMENT: IGNORANTIA ELENCHI
What's the mutter from the gutter
but the voice of the man in the pew
when in country masses
they intermate their feelings?
Against nonsense on stilts and the sombre Angelus
terminally so
pope-sifting stands up.
Carefree coffee and a five-hour tour of the joy mines.
Told she's lost a stick she never had
anybody's mother would regardless of whose
shout it was shout.
If euthanasia is just another word for
assisted life cessation
they'll call in the big-gun canonists infallibly.
One being sainted for miraculous dullness of a life
why equally not the four sad donkeys
in the Luxembourg Gardens?
Along la rue chez Stein l'Hôtel de l'Avenir
's initialled on its window-blinds ha.
ha. ha.
ha.
ha.
Less gritting of teeth than of eyes
if it's windy as April in Paris.
Where the apples are mixed with the oranges in logic
the question for the novice sedevacantist
has to be if papa is haereticus, dubius or both.
istimirant stella or sky-fish.
Bisyllabic as or on a northern moor
remote as the earth when a comet between clouds
we have searched two nights for
and kiss under.
----
AFTER SPICER
I
My beginning exile.
The ports stay closed in Kelvin's poem.
The daisy in Geraldine's
chain of being human.
Let us with the author of Roxy
by whose grace I am here and about
to begin
read Jack Spicer together.
II
My 'beginning exile'.
'To find the western path.'
I'd almost forgotten Jack Spicer until Kelvin's
recent poem about Billy The Kid
and me. When I speak of women
I remember the smalle raine
the western path
and I in my bed againe.
III
These days a camera flashes or so Kelvin
tells me when I've driven through a signal.
I might not mean 'my beginning exile' in the serious way
of a translation or a message such as rumble strips.
These are part-time signals not to be confused with a daisy
chain or an interregnum. A green man in exile
means walk. Lines written in a room
belonging to the author of Strip Signals.
IV
By 'beginning exile' the author refers to a recent
separation from his lover. He's found a daisy chain
perfectly preserved in the middle of winter.
The opening line is indebted
to a fragment by Thomas Lovell Beddoes:
'The red rib of beginning Adam.' I can't find
this line in the Works and possibly misquote.
Billy you're so far away from home.
V
There is also a debt to Dylan Thomas,
W.S. Graham and some other poets of the nineteen forties such as
in the beginning Jack Spicer.
Understanding is not enough
It is strange how my dreams have recent
ly stopped. By 'dreams' I mean
what I used to see in my sleep.
By 'beginning' what I mean is beginning.
VI
You get these words and fragments
of words such as 'ly' in a transparent box
and you stick them on a magnetic surface
to make your poem. Susannah was given one
for Xmas by Derek her lover. The words
I find are bitter and I always sing
and lie. When I say 'the author of'
somebody remembers Bertrand Russell.
VII
In the beginning I meant
to pin this forget-me-not
given me by someone I'm unlikely to forget
inside the cover of this workbook.
If I can't then the words at least
fit together or stick as on a magnetic surface
or like daisies remembered in a chain
in the bleak or at least quite grey mid-winter.
VIII
I've just found the space where the radio was before Kelvin
nicked it from Jack Spicer's poem. I've just bought
20 Bensons in a shop with a sign thanking
me for not smoking. Gavin's just received his instructions:
check what we're doing then check that we're doing
what we said we'd do and then that what we're doing
is worth doing. Is that the right order? I've just been
in love for six hours and the rest of me is driving away.
IX
… For being human
the signs escape you if you're unlucky
or willing to believe every damn thing
Jack Spicer says. Which I don't for one.
Your postcard image of the nacreous clouds
an effect of fading refracted sunlight
is as only a rare phenomenon
can be between ourselves perfect.
X
Driving or in some sense driven. In another
of Kelvin's poems the ports are blocked
by farmers who are French and according to him
twenty deep. One of the lovers referred to
wrote the letter in capitals
interleaved at the opposite end of the author's
workbook. Understanding is not
even in translation part-time or enough.
----
from LIVES OF THE POETS
lady mary wroth
onely that It were very soon for unkindness to begin
she yet by her speeches shows a longing
and a great news told me of my Lord of Pembroke
The Countess of Montgomerie takes liberty or rather licence
to traduce whom Lindamira pleases and thinks she dances in a net
Yet since a Lover I haue beene
And memory as witnes stood of those best dayes I knew
my torments allreddy heape disdaine on whom all sorrowes flow
alice sutcliffe
A Mother to mee and a writing ask
Lest afterwards and unawares
In shapes transformed by faults and favours
Confusion sorrows and sure uncertainty
Exceed the maze in which you go
anna trapnel
mony my Mother left me I gave for the relief of the Nation
and the Vision which mentions the horns and cattel and Oxen
their faces and heads like men having on either side their heads a horn
Revelations touching the Lord Protector during 12 dayes in a Trance
I saying they were not to question in Cornwal what was spoken
at White-hall by an inspiration full of wonder The Cry of a Stone
a Sea of glasse there chrystal was which none shall hinder from those thrones
william shenstone
I have no idea but what comes in at my eyes which is a landskip garden
(an alcove six elegies a seat two epitaphs and a serpentine river)
my Inactivity's enchantment a precipitate cascade in my (Virgil's) Grove
a thousand antic motions around Indolence a kind of centripetal force
charles churchill
by way of apology
his Country credit at last gasp
he a frightful Satyre got by nervous rhyme £3,500
he took to the st-ws with that devil Wilkes and a great stock of gall laid in
for Liberty the Bruiser almost every man looks strangely on
cannot truckle to a fool of state
and having snapped the last cord of Hogarth's heart-strings
on my journey proceed
robert lloyd
What I or no one writ but my friend Lloyd in his downright Ease
Nature'll run away with to night if he is there in the Fleet
ebenezer elliott, c.l.r.
Devil's dull son then doubtful whether man or maltworm
flitting to Sheffield with eight or nine children in a cart
his feelings hammered cold-short will snap and fly off
Our Corn-Law Rhymer whose pamphlet printed by order
of the Sheffield Mechanics against wilful men
Who tax'd our cake and took our cake
To throw our cake away
his mouth his alphabet whose grindstone and garden
Ranter scavenger preacher
Is this famine-life of England so loveable the soul should return?
charles turner
Those 3 boys Brother and Brother so untoward
his Sonnets though he spin in the chalkwold
Tyranny of Dreams as a country Parson very nervous
in his watercloset keeps a recumbent Venus
----
HOLLOW SWAPS
A Gathering of Emblems for Post-Modern Finance
or Salience is golden but my I's buckshee
They sent free-standing as a hedge
on a vapourware buffer the right message:
a capex today could be an overhead
tomorrow. Irrational exuberance is dead.
§
It didn't look bad but behind closed doors
like-for-like anti-trust disguised such complex or
contentious off-balance sheet entities
as Chewco. Modus Vivendi: float on ice.
§
Asset-heavy and non-core they
need bulge bracket smarts to stay
brutal. When in negative territory
always stress test plunges through parity.
§
Yell or flatter. Split capital trusts no-one
unless more consumer bang is pulled
through double dips to the timeline
in a week without interims scheduled.
§
When you are ready to generate synergy
call a second tier player with restructured debt.
Beware channel stuffing and soft peaks. See
for yourself how frequently downgrades follow updates.
§
With qualified special purpose entities
at standstill all the milestone casualties
tank sideways. There are still rare
days when no new language appears anywhere.
§
To watch the next shoe drop while the doors
are revolving stick around like the monitor
in full metal jacket. Try headcount resources
if futures double in snapshot diagnosis.
§
Out of the blue and into the red
but there had or so the rainmaker said
to be a bounce with nothing in the vertical
silo more than a bit of hoovered goodwill.
§
Slipping into coma in a cash shell
you'll be deeply discounted or monstered if you fire sell
even plain-vanilla snoozers to a penny bucket
shop however buoyant at one notch above junk.
§
(It looks as if a high-risk daub
became an off-the-books debauch.)
(When all the ducks are in a line
all the golden parachutes will open.)
§
'There was a time when people forgot
their responsibilities.' At Harken Energy
phantoms priced the bad news in without a negative spot-
light. 'Everything,' the ex-director said, 'seemed easy.'
§
In the dash for writedown check the crumple zones
in the 55 footnotes for orphan money.
Here's how to bad-mouth distressed loans.
Here's the word that made a yes out of me.
§
Autonomy expects as Liberty said
but the comparatives in white space ahead
when ball turns balloon at the collapse
of intercessions bid proxy on a token package.
----
SUFFERABLE FRAGMENTS FROM THE MEMORY SCREEN NOTEBOOKS
Dichotomedes called himself the Casual Dogmatist. He said sleep is the mother of all and the father of all and Will by necessity calls forth the unwilled. He liked to speak of 'abundant chaos' and said the four elements are pleasure, pain, intention and resistance. The saying 'The polis falling out with itself looks for enemies everywhere' is attributed to him and also the fragment 'Heraclitus was wrong when he said that the sun will not overstep his measure because everything does'.
'Speaking up, talking down.' This remark, supposedly referring to Plato's epistemology, is cited as the reason for Dichotomedes' expulsion from the Academy.
Dichotomedes also said 'The voice fills [itself] as smoke [does].' And: 'disparateness is only sometimes disparity.'
§
Last Few Days
Los. Stardust she stopgo frontier entrance. The struggle continues. It was nearly twenty years before I heard from Sister Martyr again. Spauding overnight: Danse Macabre, Nether Edge. How to beat the poll tax: Babel. I'm sorry Serenade To The Stars was too lost too. At least or last I know I am writing what is already written. Accounting is an art and involves interpretation but a classic slowdown is not a recession: picture repetition rates anybody's lifetime as value added history I do and don't recognise as decades of the twentieth century I seem to have survived.
§
Del Adorno Corporal
Wrong which means I have to admit I stole the photo of the clock with the initials JE on a Tuesday night when I was tired of ideas. The name wasn't Martyr although mine by any other I could be Midnight. A pun's a written-out's blast or boast weapon in or upon class or crass struggle. There are certainly cases where U and A will do when no other vowel would except an I on the cusp or in conjunction run to ruin ran to rain. A debit is usually busy as exchequer credit. 'These lines and AH': to picture the event set off this no long distance up to line 4 and draw a curve through so that the waterfall runs from hence into the river underground. Our garden at Nether Edge is a picture and so thanks for the use of your emblem library. Sperror sends his best while Iconismus says farewell not to Shelley but the firewall.
§
Ideas for Names for this Unpronounceable and Tagger-like Something
Bzuarb. Actual Time. Exciter Shunt Field. Lizopard. Longitudinal fissure. Chreec. Contradiction or konkretedichtung. Synchronising Pulses. Black. White. Utilometal or Alphavitch Carte Blanche. The shadow of Blackpool Tower. The shadows of three gulls and a ferris wheel. A curve through simple words. A leaf or a starfish seen through a broken window at the Church of the English Martyrs. Gargoracle. Transverse tree stone waterfall blockhaus: Descent by steps or Contact their headquarters at once. Wroting. Barzabbea. Nathemata obpact as if Solomon Starfish. Ord pix. Obit. Copyang. The difference between sound and ssound. The cutting-room ceiling or the ferris wheel says farewell to its shadow. Sign writing only: 'Criticise'. Wrong.
§
Spauding 'XY'
difference between sound and ssound. Once he'd decided on the name 'America' Martin Waldseemüller started to think about Virgil. Just imagine all the names America could have easily been called but it's no good dwelling on. The parallel event set off from hence into your emblem firewall having noticed it was copious when outside unconstant.
§
'First traveller from Dismay,' Beddoes told his notebook on 10th November 1821. '33 Coventry Street.'
'The expectation determines the event,' said Dichotomedes.
§
After-image
with a label saying 'England'.
'Destory at once.'
I'll try not to think there's nothing instead of it inside.
'Substance, or the unthought.'Aristotle considered this untranslatable remark one of Dichotomedes' 'rebukes' to philosophy. 'Contaminated with purity' was another.
A diary without dates might not want dimension although uniform as cuneiform and precipitous as precious by definition.
'Substance, or confusion,' said Dichotomedes, 'still itself.'
So much for waterfalls sketched from the life or imagined.
Poetry when jumping the firewall rhymes.
A longueur's any lounger's pitfall.
The objectionable flickering as Zilver as a frozen lake with a label attached that week there was a lull which says 'Resign'.
----
THE HUNTING OF THE LIZOPARD RESUMED:
EMBLEMS FROM THE SHIP OF FOOLS LOGBOOK
'Avi-ucipas oe or naviget m iticyram'
lemures, lamiae, etc.
nymphaea, mandrake, etc.
wormwood, rue, etc.
'forgetting the ????, insomniacs' etc.
§
Though familiar with the skies
of Anticyra and the age-old recipes
for hellebore pottage Mercurialis
the Younger chose the pickaxe.
§
Certain mouths of hell and places
appointed where the ghosts sometimes
talk with the living 'the lava and ashes
on Mt Hekla rose in March 2000 to 13km'
§
The death by remedies,
said Dichotomedes,
when to philosophise
in itself would suffice.
§
Those dizzy oysters said the lizopard
had eaten their Christmas Roses.
Their magic so politely professed while they passed
an heap of other accidents, etc., talked of metempsychosis.
§
St. Nicholas' crew in the storm he's busy calming or would
if (cover they shift they colour they may they) he could.
'Substance or the unthought' which was known
as Dichotomedes' Lighthouse before its ruin.
§
Sugared safeguards at the interference fringes.
'Beyond impatient - butterfly again - unidentified species.'
'Opening the gut we found a black-letter bible and sundry
other volumes in folio, Browne, Burton, etc., with a guide to Lethe.'
§
- 'and what I say is merely
reading' said one merrily
who when counting unicorns
mistook neurons for nuance -
we are turned to Harpies, feastings to words
--------
FEATURED WRITER: Christine Kennedy
BIO:
Christine Kennedy is a writer and artist based in Sheffield (UK). Her recent publications include contributions to In Place Of An Object (CFAR/Aldgate Press, 2000) and RSE 4pack No 4: Renga + (Reality Street Editions, 2002); and the solo chapbook Possessions (The Cherry On The Top Press, 2003). Her most recent exhibit was appearing after death: muslin outer form for Katie King in the group show 10x10x10, curated by UTK at Bloc Studios, Sheffield (2003). A new internet work, Dusting The Mae West Memorial Library, will appear in the next edition of the e-zine How2.
ARCHBISHOPS MANSION
While you sip
your complimentary evening wine
fills the rooms
Inspired by the Opera House
the guest rooms are unabashedly romantic
with limited parking
Tea and coffee is brought to your room
in a picnic basket
the draperies billow
Scarlet O'Hara's crystal chandelier
miraculously survived
your soaking pleasure
----
CHATEAU TIVOLI
Rodney and Willard have carried the flamboyant appearance of the exterior inside
forever altering your decorating sensibility
Halfway house to a famed ashram
the riotous, museum-like quality
is carried over into the guest rooms
Mark Twain and Luisa Tettrazine
are equally spacious
The only drawbacks are the neighbourhood,
noisy scones, cereals, juices and fresh fruit
----
HOTEL TRITON
Comfort has not suffered
Asymmetrical wooden armoires offer plenty
playfulness makes you forgive diminutive dimensions
valet valet valet
----
INN AT THE OPERA
Half-hidden behind the Opera House and the Veterans Building
a paradigm
Complimentary pressing on arrival
performing artists and their fans
The plush little lobby
fluffy pillows, etched flowers and birds
Grace notes
with a well stocked mini-bar, microwave and staff physician
----
THE MANSIONS HOTEL
No surface has been left unembellished
The Innkeeper, clad in sequinned dinner jacket, plays the saw
the author of Christ was an Adman
he isn't afraid of innovation in his hotel
There's the decapitated head of the resident ghost who reads minds
A swine-filled picnic is in progress
Barbara Streisand, Robert Stack and Michael York have enjoyed
a little chocolate that never leaves the premises
----
THE QUEEN ANNE
A luxurious boarding school for girls
but many prefer to take trays back to their room
Hair dryers in the baths are offset by brass-necked lamps
and a framed picture of George Washington
----
VICTORIAN INN ON THE PARK
Looking for a way to raise their children while working
transformed the house
Experience the more luxurious aspects of life
with a graceful Rococo Revival fainting couch
Light filters through
a decanter of sherry in every room
a small complaint that never overshadows
----
WHITE SWAN INN
No smoking or pets
TVs enclosed in an armoire or a cabinet
Everything is homemade
A bedside switch allows you to control the gas fireplaces,
hunting scenes on the pillows
and a red tartan couch
You'll be rewarded by complimentary snacks
Teddy bears cuddle in the reception area
----
THE ALAMO SQUARE INN
The rooms are darker, with smaller windows
Delicate relief work
in the forms of wreaths and ribbons
----
ALBION HOUSE INN
Formerly a flop house for 60's rock stars
The Janis Joplin suite is a favourite of honeymooners
Complimentary brandy
bird-print wallpaper
and breakfast steams every morning
----
THE BED AND BREAKFAST INN
The closest you'll get to staying in a native's home
Cherished antiques have descended,
some of them love seats
----
BOCKS BED AND BREAKFAST
Connections are nearby to take you anywhere
----
GOLDEN GATE HOTEL
Lovers can look forward to
a "deconstructivist" fireplace
Rococo revival love seat and coffee table
the city's strongest coffee
and a birdcage elevator
----
HOTEL GRIFFON
A run down Sailor's inn of
clean, contemporary design
attracts mostly corporate clients
on a romantic getaway
Quietly elegant
with exposed marble vanities
Beautiful vistas of traffic
double-paned windows snapped up quickly
----
INN AT UNION SQUARE
Chippendale and Federal styles
squeezed next to one another
Shoeshine ambience
a friendly, more personal alternative
----
INN SAN FRANCISCO
Quintessential flowers and truffles
in every room
----
JACKSON COURT
This charming Brownstone
sophisticated in a masculine way
with its brass beds and coat racks
Marble basins and antique writing desks
stash perishables
----
JAMES COURT HOTEL
Be forewarned of
"boho" flavour, cheap rates
and rehearsal spaces
----
THE MONTE CRISTO
Good value in a peaceful environment
originally a bordello
it lacks drama and personality
----
PETITE AUBERGE
eye catching accents
old books, fresh apples
----
SAVOY HOTEL
modest scale and price
are worth the few extra dollars
----
UNION STREET INN
French doors open onto
padded salmon coloured velvet walls with wainscoting
Double doors open onto
window-shopping in San Francisco
sybaritic and hemmed by greenery
One would never guess
----
WASHINGTON SQUARE INN
This inn overlooks verdant Washington Square
Some rooms look out
while others face an inner ambience
There isn't a bad view to be had
In the afternoon watch the locals performing their t'ai chi
followed by evening wine and hors d'oevres
--------
FEATURED WRITER: Geraldine Monk
BIO:
Geraldine Monk has recently had two major volumes of work published. Her widely acclaimed collection Noctivagations was published by West House Books in 2001 and her Selected Poems was brought out in 2002 by Salt Publications.
She is currently working on a series of poems encircling the imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots in Sheffield.
ABSENT FRIENDS
From Nether Edge to Nether Stowey: two words four hours
six counties and one astonished heart jolt away.
Raised lips
maraud
rooms of
repros
with a sob of spinel
and ripe of
hot day lupines.
Adjacent to a memorial brooch beneath three spikes of hair at
Nether Stowey was a shaded place on a bright September day.
A bright
to read a leaf
through the sun:
a coot foot
in clear water.
Unexplained events are not bound by storms coming as they
sometimes do under the bluest of skies.
Brit-jet brack drift
oceans floored for cent......s
salt dimple a-Whitby with-a
fragile
spark it
drives away serps
with a glint it spit out
evil cockle eye.
The museum closed I roamed alone and never touched forbidden
"do not..." A trust that spines the full exquisite down.
Gutta percha flinch at
imitation rub
highly
dyed
horn a sap a
merican
vulcanite
cane pale pure
exposing innards of
lockets.
Enshrined in glass beneath three spikes of hair I read slow
and clear as the Saturday : I read "six" divided by "friends".
Heart-broke columns
urning birth
succoured death dates
head in
hands give a fig
froots
weeping wallows
perched atop.
Six mourning rings Coleridge willowed to his friends.
Items referred to. Not shown.
Hope boiled in soda.
15 watery minutes cooks eternity
enamelled at a fro
passing hey to ether
catch a-story oops transparent
fame at laaaa…
Which six friends to cherish till dust us do
wears a ring of hair and gold and seed pearls?
Death is a test
on earth
for the living begin
again death
is a test on
earth begin
a same
Was it a game. They came with rough inscription among
many snakes wrapped a round long hands and skulls
"Love my Memory" one demands and others abstract.
Luck of hair
look at air
lock of her or him
singing chaste to a
rude spread virgin
oiled asa
brilliantined Byzantium quiff
in memoriam
touched to a
trinket drop o tears
opal monmoons.
Throughout Europe they offered young girls ribbons and
combs for hair which grows quicker kidneys.
I have a piece of (I have
thee (carved you
here on my heaving (upon
not unworthy of (the palms
thy being (of my
now (hands
I wondered through the glass which six friends I could so gift.
To bequeath in absence of doubt of love or sentimental fondness.
Clasping death
in homecraft perspex
plait of links
in the i
dea of dea
th
twinded into
sorted lengths
from a very common
centre
Hair-weaving was done on a round table by women. Egyptians
exchanged hair-balls of love. Mexican girls stored their hair
combings for burial. Lancastrians and Spaniards pull hair for
birthdays. It grows after death this stuff that angels
lust after in the after-garden of woman. Cock? Give
a good knock. Hen? Start again.
Re
m
em
ber
on me
ceed
re
rings
me
-omb.
That night came up upon our heads. Who were the six?.
The curators were kind beneath the fake albatross. So
kind my bracelet became uneasy. The unravelling of
wraiths and their whims. Upon a painted pause the
custodians of memory offered me wine without miracle .
Fancy hair
moulded to
reliquary
a cherry
urn of sucking stone
to gem out
dated keeper
wedding band
dashing reddish
with a rare
man.
A relaxed space - I check the next day. It is the next
and standing. Sky systems not lost identity. Clear
as the day was Sunday. The museum my own.
Beneath the glass. Ribbed sea-sand.
To flaw or else to
sever so
There were no words to describe.
No "six". No "friends".
Death a test. An earthly.
Brooch bemocked. Ring a swound.
Never a breeze up-blew.
----
THE COMFORTING
A greater shroud of comfort none:
to screw one's little head in
fad brocading curtains and
spin atwist twill it grips
t'head to a pulse a-tock
and ou blood a bove
to pin point comfort
cornet van-it-as
green sleeve is
melba deca
dant e
cutty
ice
po
o
le
its
atop
feely
thinga
with roots
skinny fibres
forensic thin a live
stain the what inside linen
in a thread of so lovely writ
flimsy as nerve tissue cumulus
when angels cross the noon chant
Angelus gushty ups the gymslip shiver.
----
MARIAN HANGINGS
A BYRD OF AMERICA
breast wove w winter-cure mustard
park bench uv a beak
caw rue rainy-day feathers
left right up-north nest
webbing inta dreamcatchers
----
MARIGOLD TURNING TO THE SUN
Maria-metal quite contrary
strength draws
sun's lips slewed adroop
not following lower things
comes a cropper
sky blew yelping
dog-eyed
----
PALM TREE AND TORTOISE
scatter enemies
while you may be
a tree sticking out
sore thumbs and cruciforms
prettily arranged
you sprouts a horny trunk
to gladden hoity-tortoise
----
MARIE-ME
"Sa virtu m'atire"
motto immersed in anagram
omen a name
fountains play
before dark stately
homes in
on caging
octagon
needled crown thralls
thistle downd
----
THE HAND AND PRUNING BOOK
"virtue flourishes by wounding"
my gift of love cut-c
lean fruity through
----
PHEASANT
"game"
is a shifty word
"it"
movers between
sights
as every bird knows
how
to sucker eggs :
never trust a moving bush
----
DELPHINE
dauphin dolphin
archin' through a stitched-up
porthole
being mammal is a but
smelling the colour of
something fishy:
never tryst a fixed grin
----
PHOENIX
"in the end is my beginning"
----
GHOST SONG
Spell binder driven
wet.
Two articles in
start to finish
trickle
unsee unfeel influence
stuck fast in
oilcloth cheap
unravelling fest a
beast engraved too
light to
trace.
(Oh Kathleen sing Willow
Oh Willow Willow Wil....low)
Start to finish
straggle two
lying
red faced apples
two names cut
deepening
unsense
ever
exaggerated
fatally.
Sunk. Sodden.
Uncredible
weepings.
(Oh Kathleen sing Willow
Oh Willow Willow Wil…ow)
----
THE GREAT ASSEMBLY & FEAST
Loped & strungalong the calmquake forests of astonished branches.
Crissed rivers teeming spring. Much upona. Clambered hummock
and dung and sleeping animal-hill. Ganged Malkin Tower to fest and
murder plot. Grow semtex - a likely. Bang up L/caster (via forbid
Trough). Run proof. Bolt-stare of stone. S'easy. Blow away - fuft.
Tread flesh & flagstone. Skip cobble nicks. Go dizzy hand-linked
rounds. Jitter. Belly knot. Brewst hysterical terror. Turn mindlimbs
out their course. Spasmics. Consort then with demons. Drift deep.
On rafts of fish skins.
They glamour. They bleed. Deceive. Imperfect animal. Barely
once removed from. Come. Snake woman. Wolf woman. Whore
woman. Witch. Deformed and depraved mother woman. Worry-
to-death woman. Howl all night under reeds. Girlgrace. Blood
to nothing. Love seed. Nether smell. Pro terra. Contra mundum.
Spread
carved with a penknife
dearly & dangerously
muffled wingbeat of earthslides Doc Martens
cloggerstomp devil-discos
liplix
teeth deep-in cracked mugger-fingers
brace o thief ears
dog shaped rhubarb dill pickle & burgers
seacock blue milk sparks of salt
mushrooms of considerable shaping and bigness
atomic tongues
vinegar sponges
assorted skins soaked in moonshine
little bone of wolf pizzle
ciborium of pace eggs arteria magnus of man
wet Friday fish five stone loaves
stolen mutton
(done to a turn)
and midnight diminished to a sliding oyster
cruel communions drained
last sup
Innocent's Bull Blood
More than meat or drink. Better than stars and water.
Words birthed. Made flesh. Took wing. Horrids and
enormities. Chantcasters. Daubing lunarscapes.
Stench polluting skies. Broodcasting vile tales. The
abortus embalmed. Babyface on the chopping block.
Death of Our Perpetual Succourpap. Swingalong with
Satan. Donkey cock. Hot crosses. Jack Nazarene and
the Five Bleeding Wounds of Passion sing in a-boo.
Sad-Jack-J in a Waa-Waa. Twisted tales. Tired.
Abominations and filthiest excess. Words took flesh took
flesh. Winged backwards. Shock of hind sight. Foreflight.
Special-speech. Litanies.
Tower room turned. Video shift. Zoom clausto. Hanging
rafters. Meat hooks. Unread omens. Mills about. Satanic.
Daft. Heaving parox. Over come in waves. Passion nudge.
Crushed smiles. Lips slips around stigmatas. Witchmarks.
Wild web. Slip on woman's slippers. Man-made. Thinly
spun man's skin. Lurex. Spindle pricks. Weavers. Spider
rites.
Hare spit fire. Green glass gob. Trine. Sextile. Convergence
of Time. Mother winders out your moons. Mashing tea.
Sucklers. Crating hurtables. Webbing exquisites. Gagging
jeers. Flouting magnificence. Slobbering warmth and familiars.
Tib. Dandie. Fancy. Ball. Mock transfixions. Giving up the.
Ghost.
----
LIFTERS
In the heat of quiddity
blazing violet
drops not
one iota
one pebble most foul
and scare on grim shore
not one pair of
lips to eclipse
serrations
or mountain range to
breed raw orchids
fly magic
triangle
fly knotty
senses
to rack and
sweet ruin
~
Rank and piling
malignant
fate ---- how do you
who do dawn
suddenly
dead on
me on Dead
sea
fruits and fools Run
in the blood burning
the midnight silver foil
moon and stone in a
nutshell
straining to burst
rich beyond
~
At crossed roads
STILL
dressed
to kill a rose
between
two storming
daggers
drawing playing fingers
running red and
quicksilver
along the edge
of fire
drawing darkness
to insult
----
ECHO VISIONS
A mischief
chief) breeding up (up
pup) p)
into a monster (amongster) (angster)
tear)
ends in loud (oud)
dowd ud)
unseasonable (reasonable) (risible)
able)
laughter
after)
dreading (eading)
the precipice (is ice)
is)
ambition (on on) its drags (rags) and slaves
aves)
in (in)
nin)
the house of terrestrial (trial)
rile)
wired angels
rage out of this (his)
is)
world
When phantoms drone
down the air waves
too strained an attention
might hurt the head
Azeal the angel is overworked
addressing the apostrophe
The
eye
not
named
cannot sleep
Point of lure
glass of lyre
steep of grace
skying fly night un
soul-steeple flow
glass of lure
point of lyre
steep of grace
The
ear
not
called
cannot burn
If they move
what can scare us more than a
pair of dropped white gloves
on a half-lit city street?
----
THE SAD LIONS OF SEVILLE
Downwind the Alcazar,
up the reeky fish.
They are so miffed a
foursome prowling static
in their alone stretch
of facial droop
to the point of
rich.
Who counts the small
hours but the
weary
the
sick
and these
sad lions of
Seville
pulling such funnies
upon your life
had nothing so gaunt
upon it
to stare.
Bulls happier by far
in their bored to fattened
death
than these lions in their
none and
briefly glorified
telling.
So who shot Lorca up the arse
down the road?
Not we say the lions
with our hearts clamped in irons.
No, not you by glimmers
but you
you little cocky sparrows
with pois'ed arrows and
a gun.
----
STRANGE BUD TRUE
Despite ever increasing knowledge
remote stars remain remote.
Blood is thicker than but water is more
speaking volumes - the sentiment despite.
Thicker than the thin crust the outer
core hued and almost black schists.
Light-hype the holy-tides love.
In Merrie-Eng marigolds are summer brides.
She died no great outer beauty from eating
melons. Her tomb came to light.
Under the horses hooves a deep pit opened the
age of merry-goth-follies.
Then catalystic cow climbed the spiral staircase
and plunging down deathwards the pit closed.
And everybody knew the Vichy were beautiful skin-
masters of the deathwards double-cross.
Rotor-ship enthusiasts predicted Vichy water
thicker than blood would hit the fan.
Stabbed in the heart. An amazing background.
Solitary clue. Fan. Faked body theory.
With traces of human ghosts on her
hands her lover's dagger children stibbed.
Men pursued embroidery. Women went to sea-wars.
Fingers of facts. Fishy. Strange unravelling of non-history.
The University prepared Earth's early atmosphere.
Bade power. Brit petroleum. Stibbed lightning. Be.
The Turk unravelling Russian meant nothing to Vienna.
Suspended by threads the chess bored man applied heat.
Spain: sad heat of agony and incident. Faces on kitchen floor.
Eyes could not be scrubbed: wider and wider not out.
Behind frosted glass. Obscure references. Cutting bread.
Reconstructing past past. Scrubbed route without words.
The Doomwatch Dragons was not a tea urn. Or rock ruck.
When a ground shock occurred a reconstructing reconstructing.
----
PA(X)
Many centralisations
across the universe:
Andromeda in a spin.
Nether Edge slippin
dow
n its
o
w
n
hil
l
sk
i
n.
The virgin statue leaking
weeps in
Venezuela.
The corner shop.
A dark bar.
Some field.
Every bus stop.
Texas over
a barrel.
Burma in the
doldrums.
Ang Sang Sui as ever under house arrest:
Flowers
hang fire
in her o-so tired hair.
inherhair
~
Bloodsuch
eye of Mars
ahems
on Earth -
after weeks of clear skies
clouds
perverse
beneath
blocked horizons of contempt -
as if we care -
eye-poking
teeth-extroothing
amputations
is an ongoing
gong-gifter
a swash of derring-do
so be gone
mythical mads &
planetary charismatics
- yo -
- love -
don't live here
anymore
~
Sidereal time emphasizes
reversed profiles:
(or so it says on the back of
my imaginary pack of cards)
pink lint and gauze
re-verse in-verse
draw a load of
pesterers along the rind
of raw.
Is it too late
or too early
in worldstory
to talk seriously
about
ticky emotions?
Try this:
Dark strutters lept icebreakers.
Happy-sads skim purring hurt.
A-leapt-frogging all intellect leaves
outstanding orders to wilt-out
the bleeding heart
Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
bbbbbbblllllllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeddddddddsssssss
Let's amend August :
bicker-out invasion planning
drift-ift to September
without maim.
It's a start.
O
It's an
A
--------
FEATURED WRITER: Dan Sargent
BIO:
As for myself: Originally from Erie, Pennsylvania, I
spent the last few years in Boulder, Colorado, where I
concluded studies toward the MFA in Writing and
Poetics at Naropa University (formerly The Naropa
Institute). I received a University Fellowship in
2003 from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette,
where I am currently a candidate for the PhD. in
English.
Other works (poems and translations) have recently
appeared, or are forthcoming, in Agni, Paradoxism,
Quarterly West, The Penwood Review, Oxford Magazine,
and Sweaty-Toothed Madman.
I. he tears at himself
a. with his voice
b. "I cannot--cannot--
c. cannot I"
II. ghostly, the turn comes
d. about, between
e. us--as though we'd always been armed, together.
III. Thales found the sun's mirror--
f. he floated through his courtyard, whispering,
g. "I love how you are not there!"
IV. i
V. is
----
EXERCISE IN BEING SERIOUS #529
Whenever possible, for a three-hour period, of any day you prefer,
over the course of a week, never settle, no matter how much easier it would be, or seem to bring a little brevitas into your work, for a sentence of less than, and I mean this literally,
ten clauses.
----
MORE, FOR LOVE
To have you rest upon me; to keep your hand
in a jeweled case, and music, music when it opens--
If writing of you, in this way,
is a manner of holding--
may my fingers bury themselves in your arm.
----
AFTER READING CHARLES OLSON'S "THE KINGFISHERS"
They were almost hunted out
of the mind
for a few feathers
in the hand--
"Now, Class, yes, we'll make this our turning point."
We're expecting more than birds.
(By now, they've gone the way of weaving--
"If it ain't made by machine, it'll fall 'part 'n less 'n a year.")
What use the bird? The fishers have gone hoarse from exhaust.
Byzantium rumbles and fumes.
The hippodrome circled with Volkswagons--
"Tranquilize 'em with bargains at the Wal. No barbarian gets in w/out a ticket."
----
SAPPHIC DERIVATIONS
...feet over marble...
...
...sound among pillars...
..speaking...
...
...white...
... tells me,
"Your Laurel has been too long away."
I write my name...
Lie down together...
Men have said that we
...never again
...rose colored...
Arms around...
Beneath the ocean, a thousand men...
...apart on the rocks...
...or was it the sound of his voice
In the seashell...
...
To me...
How could she...
...wind-hewn...
Laurel has gone to the...
...call. My voice--
...the only howl over...tonight.
A dark hand...
The wine...
..fingers draw... slow
crescents on your thigh...
...as now...
...
Alone, every storm terrifies...
...
Your dark skin--a shade of pleasure.
And my robes flowing...
...the cushions...
...voice...
...lips near my ear...
Was it your breath? The heat on
my skin that...
I went to the spring near Apollo's...
...
The boy asked me...
...I was crying...
----
A translation of Sappho from the Ancient Greek
HYMN: TO APHRODITE
To Aphrodite, on your throne of inlaid gold,
star-splendor and heaven-woven charms about you--
This is my prayer:
Don't destroy my heart
with suffering; with sorrow--
but come to me.
If you have ever heard, and listened, and left
your lapis-carved threshold--descended
in that golden chariot drawn by swans.
If you've ever come to the dark; the cold
that our world must seem to you, born of sky and sea...
And I remember--
You here, beside me.
That smile on your face!
And you asked,
"What is this sorrow?
Who is it? Whose heart is closed to you?
Who has done this wrong?
I will right it. I will avenge you
with a love; a madness made just for her.
If indeed she loves you not,
she soon will."
Oh, come now, as you came then. Come and have at my enemy--
this indifference.
Do what I'd have done.
Oh goddess, mistress,
companion in battle.
----
FROM THE POEMS OF ARCHILOCHOS:
#201
Oh Muse--
say something!
#14
Remember, Glaucus,
a mercenary is your friend,
till he comes lookin' for a fight.
#64
Don't insult the dead.
It's bad luck.
#68
I want a fight,
like I want a drink.
#95
]which God?
Who pissed him off?
#118
The Fox knows a lot.
The Hedgehog--the one thing it needs to.
#122
(So) how the hell'd he rot the neck?
#127
I beat the shit out of 'im
from the doorway.
#131
]you're chicken-shit[
#136
](is that) a tumor between (his) thighs[
#138
]and cut off his balls[
#174
]the cut brings pain[
#184
]that 'ole
fat hooker--with those fat
ankles
#200
My shield has gone to rust.
I no longer march with my old friends, the spearmen.
--------
FEATURED WRITER: Rod Summers
BIO:
Born: 19 September 1943. Verwood, Dorsetshire, England.
Served in Royal Air Force from 1960 to 1973.
Study:
Advanced Nursing & Air Ambulance Nursing. (1961-1963)
Tape Recording and Editing. BBC course, University of Hull. (1972)
Experimental Department, Jan van Eyck Academy of Fine Art, Maastricht 1974 to 1977. Resident in Maastricht, Limburg, The Netherlands since 1973.
Began contemporary poetry research organ V.E.C. in 1973.
POET & ARTIST. Works with SOUND.
Communications & Narrative / Analogue & Digital poetry / Audio Art & Sound poetry / Analogue & Digital graphics / Mail Art / Plays, Events & High Performance / Publications / Photography / Small plastics / Audio Art & Network archive.
Continuous working relationship with sound, tape-recorders, recording tape and editing block since 1961. In 1996 converted to computer digital editing.
Guardian to an extensive library of artists recordings.
Audio-works have been played by national and regional radio stations in Europe, Canada and North and South America.
Visual and recorded audio works in museum, gallery and private collections in 50 countries including The National Sound Archive of the British Museum Library.
Individual performances in 10 countries and CNN International TV.
It's not all right to get older
And write throwback poetry
but I do them anyway. Because
The inevitable ageing process
is pissing me off
With it's unsubtle variations on
The life style to which
I had become accustomed.
If anger is a sin then so is love.
Each yang must have it's yin
Each low above. At least,
I still have most of my teeth!
Staring at the stars but fixed by gravity.
Ripple-less and good
or riddled with depravity.
Big boots on a local lava flow
Or terra-forming the Moon.
For we
Driven by Force of Circumstance
to the icy barren peak of
our own emotional Everest
Have returned, more or less, intact,
On more than one occasion.
Tell me that experience compensates for youth
When my knees hurt.
----
SILENCE FOREVER.
It's the silence I can't stand
I can't stand the silence of funerals
All that silence. All that space.
All that time in eternity.
One too many funerals
I've been to one too many funerals and
I'm beginning to recognise the ritual.
It's the silence I can't stand.
Soft Sorrow's wings, corvine black
Lift me up out of the pew and into the vaulted canopy
Hovering with wooden saints and the residue of incense.
And from the lofty perch I see all space, all time
Is inevitably reduced to silence absolute.
The priest hums, the organ plays,
The priest incants in Latin.
And I think "The vicar has a good voice but the organ has a better."
We shuffle out behind the coffin
For the drive to the crematorium.
And more silence.
The white flower head decays
From those petals closest to the stem
Monks chant verses to evening
Green turns to yellow overnight
And falls, dust into a swollen torrent.
The mists have burned off, all veils are drawn aside,
Reality laid bare before the tempered gaze of our hard won consciousness.
All responsibilities our own, no god for grace
Just you and I and the whole awaiting universe.
Let us... sing and dance.
Hail life, for the time of our lives.
----
Should you ask my position on war
I would consider withholding my opinion
For, like anyone with common sense;
And an eye for the pace of Evolution,
I abhor all forms of conflict
And yet there are things I would fight for.
The priority of preserving life
Means thicker walled tanks and guns that fire further
Kill before there is a danger of being killed.
*
But suddenly one lance has been shortened
And the steel clad bull approaches with an
Extended lance and devastating spiked-club.
We live in a time ruled by bully boys
With weapons, friends and fathers
The majority is marginalized and
Now considered collateral damage
The downside of devastation.
Try telling me this is democracy!
What feeds politicians and diplomats?
Who pays for the bullet and the shot-down drone?
Who made them to sell in the first place?
Show me that testament naming the meek.
Show me infallible prophets
Show me love with it's brains blown out.
----
retrieval (traces on rock)
In dreams where my nightmares ride on shoe boxes and
Anonymous crusaders fight white with flimsy metal coat hangers
Breasts are exposed as milky as a dandy lion.
Where once trod worthy men, no trend to buck
No pound worth pawning one's flesh for,
Never grounded, now glides the counter magnate;
Faeces Saturate,
If we could change the predictability of Adaptation's strict regime
He would copyright both tick and tock.
Even the deep end cool has iced out. Don't dive.
Another sign to read before deciding to ignore it.
II
One page for me, a capstone-less column for the mega fiddler.
Location, location, vocation.
The power that spins the grindstone is atom engendered
No one escapes the spark shower.
New Planets please! And Gustav, make it snappy!
III
There was a time it was my wish
To once become a shaman
There was a time I wished to believe
I had become a shaman.
Then came a time when
I could funnel rain from an occluded front
At the crack of my speedy will,
when I could feel the jostling forebears,
trace history in their breath,
trace the place in the cosmic waiting room
where I will sit with them
building temporary monuments as
reminders of what has been lost
and what we stand to lose.
And by their whispered stories
Of truths that they determined
They now demand to know
Why we have not learned from the mistakes they made.
----
One day they found me hanging from a cross
No gold watch or camel in the desert
Sans prize or disguise
Just
Hanging there.
"Are you comfortable?" They asked
I sensed concern but didn't recognize it
"Not exactly," I replied "There's an itch inside my skull I cannot reach or mentally disregard.
But you can't help with that."
"Are you ease?" They asked
Not noticing the knotting in the muscles that stop my head from hanging.
Calluses caused by wind friction shouldered indicate the locations of the most grievous knots.
Or perhaps they're just invasive warts
I don't know, that's behind me.
"Well I was until you started looking at me."
Unaware of the approaching storm they wept whilst they slept
And there was me snowboarding Saturn's outer rings
Going as one with gravity, saganome, gheealogue.
No traffic, no shoulder-bag drag
Totally 'Spa'-no-fruit.
Man! I was fast, fast, fast AND super stylish.
Check this out!
Cut me out and stick me on your wall!
"Do you have any needs?" They ask.
I look at the women among them.
Weighty the will of genes.
Is this really the best destiny has to offer?
"Tell me the nature of your front door," I say.
"I'll knock should needs be, meanwhile I'll make do here,
Fraying fascinates me. Wrought Unwrought eh?"
The conductivity of the atmosphere is not uniformly consistent
And before wandering off they mark out my place
With old bones and sinews that have lost their elasticity.
I could look at them now if I thought for a moment there was relevance there.
Come the following flood these history books
Become compost for future archaeologists
Traces of organic material we might say, what will they?
2.
By tasting dust the gates of triumph swung open
And we, in full regalia, marched in only to find the place deserted.
"Alright lads, stand down, whilst we plan our next move."
"This will be good training." I thought
And shifted my weight as best I could.
----
NOLE
I find myself
Leaving the un-named in that state of bliss
And tearing up my pact with Chaos.
Aware now that numbers lie
Seeing the motives of zero
And the ambition of one.
The bishop or the mouse?
The gene pool or the House?
I t.v.e. cheer "Come on you bull!" but
The bull never wins though it can cause embarrassment
Bleeding profusely and too dumb to die swiftly.
Moistening sand.
Nothing wins
Forever.
Me he encontrado a mi mismo
Dejando atrás lo innombrable en ese estado de bienaventuranza
Y rasgando mi pacto con el caos
Conocedor, ahora, de que los números mienten
Viendo los motivos del cero
Y la ambición del uno
¿El obispo o el ratón?
¿El "charco" o la "casa"?
Yo T.V.E. vitoreba "Vamos, toro" pero
El toro nunca gana, aunque puede molestar
Sangrando profusamente y demasiado callado para morir rapidamente
Humedeciendo la arena
Nada gana
Para Siempre
----
no
wasted
lines
big chill coming
to passion in Trashville
verifying eccentric chaos
initiate
masturbating over Margaret Thatcher's collected theories
of sanctified social suicide
so! that's you thinking then?
----
Don Juan in Reykjavik with his Aunt Nora.
(Don't you know?)
"If that's an erection my boy
I'm going to withdraw your portion of Viagra
Don't you know?"
Men said it was clear Nora had taken offence
She went to the cupboard
Once bare
And got her big, knobbly and much bent stick
And with some force let it fall on his dick
Blam!
"That'll teach you!" she ejaculated, now into a huff
Don Juan didn't flinch he was into that stuff
And they became friends regardless.
Chop chop chop! Clemente cuts fresh fish into bite sized chunks.
Rod casts irregular realities from his fingertips and ergonomic keyboard.
Clemente doesn't understand that shit
(Now SHIRP is launched let us avoid instructing upon from which side one should do one's fishing.)
He tells stories of the sea
(Education is more than dropping books by parachute)
And the fish that swim therein
He speaks of depths where monsters move in slithery ways
And life and death are the most real things, the norm, the consequence of being.
Tighten your belts for we just can't deny
We are cursed with a plethora of stupids
Civilized? Not much! Not yet and we are not even trying very hard
Don Juan is in Reykjavik with his Aunt Nora.
1. They became one with Saturn's storm, indistinguishable from it's restless ageing insubstantiality.
2. There are so many faces, infinite variations on adopted expressions, reflecting the colour of the day, or the hour.
You cannot make suede shoes from green chestnuts
But I believe they now have an ointment for this complaint
The mushrooms turned the fondue black
When Green leaves only Brown and Smithly
These two, survivors of the Armada, were blissfully unaware
As was their aunt Nora, the Iceland connection and more.
Hark to the true ring of his anvil
Smell the chestnuts roasting in the fire
Was Gran here again?
Lay down your weapons and join us
on the rippling waterbed join us watching the boxing.
If something is absurd enough it is funny for everyone.
I'll give you a tenner for that cricket.
It's not enough.
Imagination is the ultimate necessity, necessity.
an impression of recognized heads and ventilators
wind blunts the sabre and the urinoir becomes a singing motorway
with regular refreshment/advertising breaks
which, contrary to history, do not inhabit
sombre elitist canyons just for the sake of words in flight
but are impositions upon eaters of Cos. (frente, v. To eat Cos lettuce)
And all the time the painting of a headache pill dries exponentially.
----
IT'S A PARTY!
It's the party of the poets
So make sure you bring yours to the ultimate fiesta
We will need good souls like you, but
you should do something about your nasal hair.
Language is rigid but it's not brittle
----
Brush with dream
I threw my parasites into Saturn's bloody storm
and
Gathered that spat
Back in my face.
Now in yours
2.
The boy explained he had learned
The Te Deum from his Nintendo game station
Whereupon
His grandmother lashed out with her llama
And spilled a nasty Italian aperitif
All over the back of his hand.
"You've been 'angin' around in churches again haven't you?"
Said Gran now
Scarlet with intolerance.
-
Danger is real, n'aidez moi pas, alstublieft, no, no.
Crush and tamp the road to lunch
Of Spanish omelettes.
3.
A garden hose
Held in a sprightly manner
By Vera.
4.
Blame
No Blame.
Death.
Think about that.
4II.
Confusion
Reigns
An
yw
ay.
W.F.C.?
----
A REQUIEM FOR 2003
Anonymous killed Anonymous today.
A crowd killed an individual today
An individual killed a crowd today
Frequent as a geyser
Be shocked if you have time.
Black bag nametag hanging on a toe
Suicidal bloodline break
Take your hope and blow.
There's no future in being dead though.
Excuse my presumption to tell but
If you allow your mind free reign
There is every chance
You will gallop into a barbed wire fence
Every now and then.
Encounter with experience often leaves scars.
(Creased the brow in consternation)
I have a bad taste in my mouth
Does Evolution have a 'sell by' date?
II
What we have lost to evolution in the last 25 years:
Kids who believe in Father Christmas.
Adults who believe
In the winter solstice and the effect that burning trees
And appearance of great feasting
Can have on the god of cruel deeds.
What we have lost to evolution in the last 10 years:
The appreciation of skill
Skill
Political innocence & things that money can't buy
Respect for far
Tramps and anonymity.
Who continues to deserve your admiration?
Why should I defend Trashville?
----
Breasts and Incense
(2 poem poem)
I.
Tired of boring old rhyme with predictable meter?
Had enough of already dead poems from apparently living poets?
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II.
Blessed is he that breaks the word plough
Blessed is he that scratches the surface
Blessed are the seagull eaters
Blessed are the Moriban Gart
Blessed is he that liberates Gods mortise
Blessed is he that drinks only dew
Blessed is he that windmills at jousts
Blessed is he who is blessed with emotion
Blessed is he devoid of devotion
--------
FEATURED WRITER: David Kennedy
BIO:
David Kennedy was born in 1959 and lives and writes in Sheffield, UK. He edits and publishes The Paper, a journal of innovative poetry and poetics. His recent publications include:
Eight Excursions [with Rupert Loydell] (The Cherry On The Top Press, 2003)
The President of Earth: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2002)
Cornell: A Circuition Around His Circumambulation (West House Books, 2001)
THE ATTENDANCE BONUS
She screamed from loathing and revulsion as much as from pain, and he knew
it. Often, of course, the employer doesn't. The chains and silence which
ought to have sealed her isolated self within twenty impenetrable walls, to
have asphyxiated her, hadn't. The chairman may be God in the company - but
technically he's only the leader of the board of directors. What I do know
is that when the two chambermaids returned, one was carrying a tape-measure
and the other had a basket over her arm. In its simplest form, the
attendance bonus is just that.
A LITTLE SUNSHINE
A second, important definition is of time. We were all in the garden when
the double peal of the gate-bell sounded shyly. Moments of sympathy are
evoked rapidly in succession. Noiselessly I opened the window and sat down
on the foot of my bed; hardly daring to move in case they should hear me
from below. Coming from a man who decisively rejected his own country as a
place of residence, these are strange words - particularly when written in
London. They took a turn or two in the park, where there was a little
sunshine.
APPLES
He looked down and saw her standing on the pavement edge. From this vividly
remembered delight, I deduce the fact that apples were not very plentiful in
our home. But to what quality it owed its character, since character of some
sort it had, no one troubled themselves to inquire. It cannot be that I was
required to work very hard or very steadily. Katherine stirred her tea and
seemed to speculate. He was like Ezekiel, a dreamer of dreams.
AN OLD BOY NETWORK
Nothing like a little English rain. I graduated, well enough to be given a
research scholarship. The pencil broke, no need to shout. The astonishing
thing is that he and I constitute an old boy network. Some people confuse
inspiration with lightning. My mother was thirty-nine and my father
forty-one when I was born.
A SEVERE SHOCK FOR MRS ANSTRUTHER
It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though I
saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. The incidents
which the "enclosed photograph" recalled were productive of a severe shock
for Mrs. Anstruther. At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button
on my waistcoat round and round, and looked in great depression at the fire.
That's one thing, and another is that when I'm gone you'll find an envelope
in my desk directed to you, and inside it something that would help you to
find it, if only you have the wits to use it. Furthermore, the mere record
of his conviviality is exhausting. I know what you are going to say, and I
have as little wish as you to strip the place bare.
LYDIA'S LIFE
Of children I saw an infinite number. You have come from the past, from our
past, to witness this family's decay. The baron appeared to be surprised and
pleased at my knowledge of matters with which he had not supposed I was
acquainted. The twin sisters who sat behind the barred window, cloistered in
the half-light of their cluttered drawing-room, had stayed that way for over
twenty years, since their early childhood. With the change of crop and the
changing climate, the structure of Lydia's life changed too - even her
hammock worked itself loose and began to sink to the ground.
OUR ARISTOCRATIC HERITAGE
The common problems are tackled in crisis intervention. Granny, more
devious, used the excuse of our aristocratic heritage. The supposed
limitations of doing long-term psychotherapy with working-class patients
have been spelled out and perhaps exaggerated. Slut's wool like gone-to-seed
dandelions lay undisturbed under our furniture. The demoralization
hypothesis. My daddy whipped me till my nose bled buttermilk.
Note
The title plays with the idea of store cupboard cooking i.e. making
something quick, tasty and nourishing from what's already on your shelves.
----
ADVICE TO ALL GIRLS IN LOVE
from Ruby M. Ayres, Between You And Me (1935)
You can never tell what the Atlantic will do next.
Too much monotony is bad for anyone.
What is the word we write most often
in our chequebooks? Isn't it 'Self'?
Shipboard is a dangerous environment.
Husbands are inclined to be sleepy.
All through history there have been such dark pages
when blushes were the fashion instead of cocktails
and the equality of the sexes. Can you play
second fiddle? Sometimes sworn enemies
bury their hatchet in the most surprising way.
A locked five-barred gate at the end of a pleasant walk,
thank Heaven, has gone out with chaperones and crinolines.
Why do you think people give parties at all?
----
TWO SKETCHES OF SPAIN
WHEN I WAS SPANISH
I
The waters were cold.
The souls of men were immortal.
There were fewer people and more conveniences.
There were as many men as women.
II
Women loved flowers.
Horses were strong.
Dogs were useful.
The children washed their faces.
Mexico had more inhabitants than Argentina.
III
My brother liked the lawyer,
but he did not like the physician.
We closed the window.
We counted the books.
We scoured the pans.
We slept little.
I never passed such nights.
IV
You were hungry.
What a handsome horse you had!
I gave you my watch for your bicycle.
You came with me to the bank to identify me.
V
There was a good furnace in the basement of my father's house.
He talked of nothing but Montevideo.
He did not give the chairs to you: he did not give them to you.
He was buying iron with gold.
He said that he could not warm the house with flowers.
He went out through the window.
VI
I liked perfumes,
but I preferred taste to the sense of smell.
I looked for my parents.
I wished I could wear a duck suit
and white canvas shoes
while we were crossing the plains.
THINGS TO DO IN SPAIN
Make fritter shaped.
Blow with bellows.
Break the wings.
Assonate.
Make a thundering din.
Shape with the adze.
Remove horns.
Unpave.
Lay addled eggs.
Put the legs in between.
Put on iron points.
Cry like cranes.
Toast again.
Fry slightly.