“Now this is more like,” shouts a tongueless voice
admiring today’s ideograph, walking
in the cool before the onset of afternoon
downwards to The Bar, the image growing flatter.
From the path’s top, where it breaks from the road,
one sees a stony anvil and its hammer,
both industrial, but not at all suited
to a hand of any size, machine-tooling
made to make use of itself, incarnate,
human history in a single wanking fact,
Man trying to excite himself and stay
being man, making himself like more himself.
The anvil’s on the North, at an angle;
and the hammer’s on the South, leaning over --
as one leans out to kill or just dominate
by pain inflicted.
They are parallel.
They fit like a bum against a groin. Perfect
in terms of satisfaction. Meant to be,
some say. The space between speaks its movement:
“This has happened”; also “This will happen”.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Not quite the sea’s rhythm.
Two time signatures heard as one tympany.
All together!
And below each element
a space
as a lack of pencil in drawings
often stands for uncontentious detail
and, below that, undifferentiated
stones and rubble in a column which could be
anything you’d want
“Positioning mechanism,”
one says — “Systems to move components on”
Does it matter? What matters is matter
formed artificially into things made
which, in their turn, cause things; and so create
according to a credo fucking things up
by hand, without the use of our hands.
Success toys!
That which had spoken soundlessly
is a natural resonance of the human skill brainless.
Feed back the word “reproduce” in its hall
for long enough and you will hear crashing
unlike ocean, the sound of a forgery,
something which has died seeking refinement,
someone who is made knocking the substance,
and its meaning, out of things as they now are
with second best intentions and slow cunning;
its utterance is echo; and that’s it;
it hears; and it gives back; to get some more
of anything that it may have: kudos
among the dispossessed is still a plus;
and that proclaims that we make progress.
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UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton
42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover
Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4
wfuk.org.uk/blog
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