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Snapshots April 14, 2005
The hums of motels
So everything sounds like rain
or the palm wind off Timor or Arufura.
You stop the triune blades white
step into the air-con's tune.
Everything falls from the ceiling
even fluoro runs down the wall.
It's as far from heaven as you can get
amongst the humid hip-hop air
up the hauling concrete steps.
There's smoke and gasp somewhere.
You've seen this movie
what infernos! you're on the run!
But there's nothing to chase you down
no bulldust, no crocs, leaping lizards
only the phones and the voices
you've made back home.
Like the fortune cookie said:
'you dial it up', now deal the circle
that rain washes away.
You can dust up again tomorrow.
Night's hums are mechanical, electrical
while brother rain wets the seconds
and sister storm sings, not little tune
a bigger pattern, atmosphere deep
past beige blue curtains and the sweat.
It's animate, breath and thunder.
Let sleep decide!
At least the walls are white
and the wrapper says 'clean glass'.
Jill Jones
Asti Motel, Darwin, snapped round midnight, 13 April 2005
***
Light
then shadow
And bits
Tiny bits
Mind you
What we make of it
Reserving for later
Not what was
But what we want it to be
Wanted it to be
Light
Then just shadow
As it passed
through our hands
Peter Ciccariello
***
what hornucopia can hold
such a backpack of c & w
bent notes strung out & interleaved
'go' gone
sound the lyric lists toward
images as thresholds
each one a door
way through or to
what singing note
to a future ear
waiting so long now
is she still
caught forever in those
cares and woes
the blackbird horning in
all ways again
Wednesday April 13 2005
Douglas Barbour
***
Nought
Nothing that begins has an end
The end is nought
The beginning a wave of light
in the rainstorm of sun
in the depth of the morning's glow
Nothing is nought
that is the beginning that is not the end
Nought is nought
What is is
and the glow of the sun over the earth
is a flower in the night
Hold it in your hand
smell it
devour its perfume
that is the nothing that has no end
Harriet Zinnes
***
For a number of years I wanted to write a fortune cookie poem. At one point
I had a party for which I had fortune cookies made, stuffed with recycled
lines from poems, except for one, the only fortune I ever managed to write.
It went:
If you have broken this cookie with your fingers
don't lick them.
What can I say? As a USian paranoia is always easy to summon up.
Then I thought it might be fun to write a proverb. Nothing happened for 20
years, until a friend quoted a comment by an Iditarod driver. The story
went something like this:
When asked what motivated the dogs, the driver responded: "The lead dog has
a great view. Harder to understand what motivates the others--for them the
view's always the same.
This got me thinking about the psychology of dogs, and I came up with:
ESKIMO PROVERB
The lead dog has the tastiest asshole.
or, in the Queen's English,
The lead dog has the tastiest arsehole.
This quickly morphed into :
The top dog has the tastiest asshole (arsehole).
I tried it out. It seems to me to be enormously useful. If Bush
unaccountably gets away with something, "Like they say, 'the top dog has
the tastiest asshole'"
If a poet whose work seems to me shallow wins a big prize, "The top dog..."
If Microsoft markets a beta model as a consumer product, "The top dog..."
You get my drift.
So now I've written a proverb, and I don't have to think about it anymore.
I hope everyone who reads this will use it in conversation, to speed the
day when it's quoted back to me by a stranger.
Mark "Solomon" Weiss
***
joe's 93rd birthday
through the skylight
a thin moon
Sharon Brogan
***
moon
oh moon
white vellum in your
smoky pine sky
still as stillness, steep
as a god's face
West Irondequoiy, New York, US
4/13/05 4:30 AM
Gerald Schwartz
***
A PICTURE FROM BREUGEL
The homing instinct is universal,
it is not the sole property
of pigeons, dogs and cats.
"Can I go home now?"
But no: why would you want to?
You are not as shit-out-of-luck
as you might think,
you are luckier than Lou Gehrig
self-proclaimed luckiest man on earth.
For Home
skewed dreamland
never truly owned.
The block of houses
along the Jersey Shore--
titled or Section 8 dumps--
eminent-domained from the poor,
handed over by the City,
bought up as tear-downs
to erect no-view-of-the-sea
million dollar condos
Red Roof lookalikes
where drug dealers are As Usuals
prowl the Long Branch streets
undisturbed by gentrification,
making their heaven of someone's misery.
Home is a Breughel landscape
The Hanged Man dangling
from the gallows, wrapped
in black swaddling like Mary Surratt,
swinging like a Mall-tramp's pendant earrings.
Like, like. Nothing is Like.
Once your home is gone
if you have an imagination
that outstrips fear,
then wonder at the ingenuity
of the created world
and at your ignorance of homebuilding skills,
marvel at the drainpipe snakework
now exposed to light,
somnolescent vampiric roaches awakened
and scattered in a panic.
Home is where the motherfuckers can get you.
Duck and cover, stupid.
Our first grade teachers and Chicken Little
had it right about homeland insecurity.
No inference or artistry here.
Home is no place to hide.
In the light
in the Church
in the hospital
all are suspended in black swaddle.
God has spoken, his Monty Python self
"Oh, don't grovel!"
clacking puppet jaw
the answer to your prayers
Redemption
only if you can laugh
through signs of the times
Braindead woman
Parkinsonian Pope
poet
novelist
I, none of these, have given my sons my living will
his best piece of poetrie,
to wit:
when the day comes I can't chew my blubber
put me on an ice floe,
not food for worms
but Purina Polar Bear Chow.
My older son calls me
irrelevant baseball talk
then "The question you've not asked"
his uncle comatose
one month today
self-opened veins
now failing kidneys,
his mother, my Former,
a raging madwoman.
"There is no change" he says
Yes there is, for finally
I am thankful.
Stevie Winwood
said it better than me
I can't find my way home anymore
either
And for that I am truly grateful
not to that home, Breughel deathscape--
instead where I am I exist maybe live.
Kenneth Wolman
***
Of himself, he has many pictures. All portray him with old-fashioned tools,
in the process of making baskets and wooden toys.
He is smiling, but never at the camera; as if he is speaking to someone
else. Yet, always, he is unaccompanied, usually in the middle of a work
process.
Just look at his letters, the hand-writing is exact, though the thought is
dreary. He uses elaborate language for the simplest thing, favouring
archaism.
His hair, cut short, is combed elaborately. He looks fit. He looks posed. In
style, his clothes are studiedly artisan.
Lawrence Upton
***
WHEN
when
the bright
so cheery
young nurse
she said
to him
when you
watch television
you should
lay a towel
across your thighs
to cup your scrotum
to ease the pain
he realised
that viewing
would never be
quite the same.
Pmcmanus 7-54am
raynes park
***
snap (john paul II)
the poet is dead.
millions of fans
the world round
twist sonnet beads
in their sorrowful hands
the poet is dead.
other poets arrive
in jeans and t-shirts
to elect another leader
while down on the beach
a child writes in the sand
'Goralu czy ci nie zal?'
hermit song
broadcast from shells
rolls on the reef
Andrew Burke
Mt Lawley 13.4.05
*Polish folksong 'Mountain man, aren't you sad at leaving your home?'
***
ANOTHER WORLD
Every time the clock strikes twelve,
I worry for an hour --
What will the next chime be:
one or thirteen?
Twenty minutes to go,
then I'll know.
"Better to light a candle
than to curse the darkness."
Robin Hamilton
Loughborough
Between midnight and some other time.
***
walking down the street you mean to
reach the reason you are
walking down the street however
reason is not to be
found: here it is
the bridge which implies river and destination
to overshoot or get off
there: like Celan out-staring the Seine
detailing the rowboatıs profile
every split board
heavy with our mutual friend (mind your language)
heavy without question
David Howard
***
³Mark and emotion, matched one to one. A unique emotional handwriting.
Technical skill as pathos. Aversion as a way to point to the horror.
Materiality at the extreme.²
A sketchbook composite from remarks by T. J. Clark about Jackson Pollack to
introduce a two day symposium on ³Modernism and Why It Wonıt Go Away.² UC
Berkeley:
Take a stick. Take a can. A can with white paint. Opaque white paint. Put
the stick in the paint. Figure the initial gesture: a circle, a ladder, a
lightning stroke. Make a white circle on a black rock. Erase the first mark.
No. Do not erase. Paint another circle around the first circle. One. Two.
Three. Four times eight. Open five cans: pink, brown, silver, blue,
lavender. Put a stick in each. On each fourth, shift the color. Migrate
quickly. Stop. Go. Witness. Slash. Go. Slash. Witness.
Make one ladder. Two ladders. Make the circles circle the ladder. Make a
second ladder. Make the circles circle both ladders. One, two, three, four.
Shift each ring into a different color. Throw down a lightening stroke. Make
it zig, zag through each circle, across each ring. Erase each slash.
Witness. Erase. Witness. Surround the entire rock. Color. Slash. Circle.
Ladder. Lightening. Say itıs finished when itıs finished. Black, color,
rock. No. Do not say itıs finished. One, two, pink, blue; three, four,
lavender, silver, brown. Stick. Stick. Slash, erase, witness, stick:
Imagine a page. Imagine a white page. Imagine dark. Imagine the dark stroke.
Imagine the dark stroke emergent. Imagine a ladder. Imagine a ladder broken.
Imagine foul. Imagine the territory destroyed. Imagine the territory
destroyed to save some other. Imagine the other destroyed. Imagine
destruction. Imagine the art of destruction. Imagine waste. Imagine the end.
Imagine sirens. Imagine the tongue burnt. Imagine ashes. Imagine war.
Imagine:
((April 9, 1999 - Crossing the Millennium (Project))
Stephen Vincent
***
Channeling Happy Birthday Baudelaire messages
through ventilation
thru Tom Savage
up thru
the libertine up thru
the Pokemon masters arena
up thru
llamas
broken in temples
up thru
slayings
blessed w/water &
incense
"::::today is your birthday
and you have survived
giving birth to twins
in Lemony Snicket Land
absinthe makes my
heart grow open I
should do it much
more often
why are so many of us
hypocritical readers?
with no companionship? or
ghosts? happy b-day
dead poet--
you don't need society--
you don't need mourning--
Hoooray B-day Boy--
I'm glad we're all
still here
your flowers don't
seem
so evil anymore::::"
ours could be
caught
in the hedges we
could be pulled apart
arrows entering
soon our dirt
Gerald Schwartz
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