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Aamir
Aziz
Funeral
of Innocence
an overwhelming pathos becomes impetus to this anthem of lament
I am an innocent dove, imploring for regain of my lost dynasty
where i laid eggs and my newones opened their eyes.
an unknown apprehension of kites and falcons
led to the most irretrievable blunder on my part.
I reared a gluttonous serpent for guard of my best legacy.
it was nurished with the best of my daily findings.
time passed and the count of my ova went down,
and so was with my offsprings, just stains of blood remained.
blame was laid on the vultures and their assaults,
and hence it placed an excuse for its inevitable stay.
the thought of migration stung me, since i loved my haven
a time came when I was declared an outcast from my heaven.
why to express regrets for the nest when the tenants are gone!
would that i had an eye to see through the common heresy and superstition.
on a bare shoot, i just flutter and weep over my folly.
Wanted! A Clown Incognito
Beware
of the feats of a veteran clown incognito
Who is a myopic judge and underfed humped gambler
Convention, foresight, love and reason are his cosmetic hues.
He is royal merchant whose ship capsized along the shore
He is a serpent, a thief, an alligator and a sage behind single visage
His gadgets have varied standards
Builds shrines for the dead and spoils the living
Lacks sight and pretends insight
With a storm in his head, his manifesto is the same
Behold his hurried acceptance of crushing defeat
The authorities look at their brainchild aghast
A diseased, incorrigible and humble puppet of sand
A self-mocking savage, a lip-tight icon
A drowning carcass, an exhausted hound.
Vain glorious idolater, blind to the apex threads.
Wages war and signs the armistice in the same breath
A spoiled child, whose morals vary across the frontiers.
A mysterious vase, a beauty without truth
Toppled numerous gods for his personal throne
His infinite prophetic flights bear true witness to his godly genius
But his doglike ambush attacks on the left over, deny this claim.
A Stone, who has set ablaze his credentials of innocence
He is a poor mercenary pawn and a chessman simultaneously.
Such a notorious and familiar stranger he is and still at large.
May he be residing in your heart, arrest him and undress him.
eratio
Paul
Hardacre
from
The river is far behind us (Parts vi-xi)
bantams
& a mean black dog
their finches
& quails (uncooked
climb the side battens rides a
yamaha upstairs got into transfers
as a method of cheap pine cone
christmas
bells, lights & ribbons
& planet story her
tits zipped into a tight spacesuit
(military
cyborg on cosmic wall
attendant swirling, the ‘data’ font &
green LCD
(& kind of girly spoilt & munching sweets
the
start of firetop mountain praying
in the toilet vs. storms
*
lay in the burnt-out shells of
their cars
poke out windows & wrong turn
/ mobile
mcdonalds (details
sketchy frequent use
of ‘division’ &
pop-ups, soft-top trucks &
jah
be praised he turns &
waves
appropriate
kitchen sounds (sloshing,
scuff of wooden sabots
he kept for mud
& refrigerated hum) too cold
for
pialba torquay / nina’s front seat lick
crush of early atari dusty arcade coins &
glowing detachable brains in a van
was grey even then before cutting &
tyre
swans card tables sideburns
the faded XB
(car sick with brown paper
taped
bryan adams & sting / scary country turned out wrong it
crumbles & fears the moon landing) &
charlie went bald in the end the frogs
watched in silence
the stubbies piled up the pop
of
bullet & bone he rocks when done
& shadow vessels
doesn’t love me (cloth
*
accidental
triple / end pocket of man he
dreams in sanskrit
& drags uphill reverses
off cliffs &
carries her broken through rising
lazy sons / collection of
metal & electrodes his workshop maths our dead pets
mapped
in black & white
with spikes
& mostly cats
the cards & pills a nation
of spoons & drove
to fremantle, wave rock, welded
*
notes
on blue paper
(original dead bundle of words
the peeled metal trunk his head
is walled untitled & towers above gippsland
a hand emerges from the top left corner
the dark
blood
the
tube & bricks he looks
like errol flynn floating
in buttermilk (fragmentary
nature
of dreams, visions & altered mind
‘australia’s most entertaining freak show’
(think
babe, the sheep pig / she-devil saga
legs akimbo, shitting through hoops) &
coalition forces advance to baghdad there’s
that hand
again this
time frazzled syrians
(‘freedom
deficit’ or power kicks / a black mangled
road & bones) these
are the syrians
we had to have
*
‘missiles filled two craters in the
footpath & pools
of blood
stained the main
street’
(the courier
mail, 28 march 2003)
& myers to camera:
‘it’s a brilliant plan’
*
hop
in / terry smells like wet carpet &
east brisbane first month of summer
NAR equals lion
& some kind of fuel
missing
& stayed in desert boy up in
the fort crammed / swelling
with poms she vase-like &
handled her night train
met a quack with
samosas announced most stops & classes the cheap
motor trips us, happy wiped &
bleeding her
dress swings mad her yellow eye twists
eratio
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Jonathan
Minton
Imaginary
Cuba
1.
An
island is an island if in relation to other land,
if eating an orange makes me think I’d like to eat a banana,
if unable to think of two things, I divide the one in half,
as is the custom
of moths in flight
from one
flower, then another,
and a third,
if limiting the choice between only two models
of economy cars makes the choice easier,
if I mis-choose a sensible car then refuse to take it as is,
as is the custom
of refinished paint,
retrofitted wiring,
if in translation, the distance between as and is
increases,
if cuba libre is a rum and coke cocktail,
if a mustachioed Juan Valdez in floppy hat rolls
cigars for the heads of state,
as is the custom
of eating, drinking,
smoking on adjacent
window-stoops, of speaking
across the street
*
If
is an island if taken
as one sign within
plenty: if seen through a series
of display windows:
sliced oranges
copied as orange juice copied
as instant beverage in zero-
gravity: radio waves
decompose as static,
their signals returning
as global fallout
as powdered crystal
*
A
discourse develops in another
circuit, as one
fruit is copied
as another: an orange
image copied
as sliced
bananas: in hand,
the one
is translating
as gesture:
as
is an orchid taking the shape of a moth,
thorns
around the reddest berry
2.
I
am speaking to Eduardo
beneath the open window.
He leans in, listening, with the same
expression as before.
I am speaking with my hands,
pointing to the empty stoop above us.
I am gesturing an absence,
my hands at my sides, then upheld
at shoulder length. In gesturing,
I am saying no one is here.
In gesturing I am saying
you are there. He is speaking
in gestures as he whispers,
his mouth shaping su...ve...cino,
drawn-out, as if written
on wooden tablets, as if spoken,
the word could drift. I am listening
as I watch his hands
pace his sentence, marking the air
in an architecture of shared space,
first the door to a room, then a window
opening elsewhere, bit by bit,
pue...pues...pueso... I am catching
sounds passing between the intentions
placed side by side by side, as if
the sentence were lengthened into a street.
He is gesturing you are here, as if
the room were arranged
at the end of the street,
as if in the room there were green
trees, green blossoms, as if the room
could expand, and his hands
were full of fallen fruit, and mine
of promise, as if the rooms
weren’t there and floating now to sea.
3.
Eduardo
walks the length of street, singing his way home.
He starts and stops to his song, humming. The song draws a circle
around each step as he passes. The song is a sketch of home.
The song
is a sketch of fallen Ceiba leaves whose imprints color the pavement.
On the stoop above, a radio plays Carlos Puebla, yo sigo siendo
Cubano,
continuing as he crosses the traffic. In an open-air bar, a Cubano
band sings
for tourists sipping mojitos. The songs may end. At any
moment. The songs may
repeat beneath one placard for Castro, another for Charlie Chaplin.
El Chicuelo,
the songs sketch one terrain for home, then another. The songs
have the character
of distance in discovering a Zapata Finch perched in the column of national
flags
at Santa Clara. The songs are flags without trumpets. The
songs are a sign for arrival.
The songs divide their sketch between stoop and sidewalk, bar-stool
and one of
several flights. The songs are a wheel whose colors do not move
as the wheel
moves. The songs disperse as aperture, moth-winged, over the radios,
then return
in the surplus of wires and circuits in a fuse box. Beneath the
column
of flags, the songs assemble a surplus of Ceiba flowers the color
of flags, thinning out the length of street, the flowering of trumpets.
4.
How
many rooms can you sing?
How many rooms? Between the length of street
and the column of flags, the room is a greeting.
In Eduardo’s room I am greeted. The balcony door
leans against the wall. The walls are like skin. A map begins
as this—graft, graph, the health of the city. Or is this
historical,
a matter of witness, holes in the wall letting in rain? Vision
is not a window but light entering the room
in the shape of its apertures. Outside
the walls are evidence:
at the Palacido
del Segundo Cabo (six
styles of Spanish
archways (Greek
columns, filigree
design (wooden
cobblestones
(glyphic signals in fresco
and neon green
This is the first instance of witness, before another, and the visionary
third
(mapped as an
island if the island is evidence of other land (the expansive
bounty of a city (if the room is
evidence of a city,
if laundry and potted Ceiba trees,
retro-fitted wiring
behind the balcony door
are evidence of the room
(if not the door bolted to a door, but
the door
leaning against the wall
(against the wall, tissues of verdant
plants spill the ruined
expanse of the city walls
a map of its
history expands or declines, as is, or taken as
assemblages of
green cells between plaster
eratio |
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Thomas
Lowe Taylor
An
homage to Bob Dylan
A
PRISONER IN A WORLD OF MYSTERY
Everything
was exactly as real as it seemed
As, what'd passed unknown was not so much seen as recalled from
doubt
itself, no matter in the moment unsurpassed would not believe in what
was
said against aggression or the moon itself no mentor but the sum, a
seam
some noise perhaps around surround as passion's prelude a foment or
scatter,
that's the due itself. No choice not to do, no alternative but
the
unbearable not-knowing in the midst of not-doing. She said not,
or was it
knot? No difference in the plural of itself you'd met nothing
in its
outside colors-ant colonies and their associated poetry festivals of
fart
and spoon, the twin angles of the side aside in its own juices wept
or
wrapt. This was at or thus.
Your own passage a remote sensitivity, not a paradise
or even
its opposite, a gnawing snake inside your own sensations, a relativistic
appropriation, an unmet sensorium, like a version. Where'd been
met its
other in the non? Lexicon de rigeur non plento nor spasm-out some
other
moon or funnel. The man at the hearing spoke into a mask-like
cone, as if
recording to some distant location, or else providing a translation
for those
who asked. Was it other? Maybe the voice of the turtle left
along the way.
I'd spoke like this before, even beholden to my token and signs of doubt,
like he said, the stuff of life.
Don't go on too long, it might run out like colored
fluids on
the ground, distinguished by their robustness and not their mettle.
Decide
yourself if it's any other way around or just what it is to itself,
it's no
matter to the matter of what it is. We imagine there's a future
at all, eh?
North to Alaska, the rounder signals win, you drop out and hold alive
along
some other way reminding out the same thing forward or not reminded
at
purple or blue-green noise evading all sense of recall. Lane violations,
like other glib noises hunkering beside the posse notwithstanding invaders'
calm, no recluse demento alive within your hands along your sighs reminding
songs along the road without piety or any other manifestation of his
or hat
the clinger spun and silent within its' own chant.
Rocks. The natal dune, the portion out-of-control,
and then
hide-asided. No lent or stammer, no cranial in the doom of outers
heads
them one-on-one against the tune, some small anchor to the splintered
passing line, a higher rising sound against your ear, that was the ankle
of
doubt to which you referred prior, noxious weeds are limned at the wall's
outer. Rocks on again. Shine unmet nor mist at shore a lout
and flamer,
here's the dunk no foal or charge, limits grind against you soon or
not, the
lummox dune and shape. What's too many to deny, what's not too
long, or
servile, a lacy-dee, a tune without spasms you've elongated and then
left at
the side of the road, no muter in your mast. Your careful work
goes
unnoticed, a flower in its stem of glass and water, a wafer, a knot,
a
doo-wah-ditty on the mask of dust. Your own business, laughably
not itself.
As and not of. There's the sign along your matted squirrel, lath
and
plaster on your jowls a smirk and repetition nor another you'd said
"not
again" and then gone on forward lunging speed and bump of light
the blinding
flash unfurled and then let go against the non. Here's where it
went on and
on again. Maybe she's not interested but just wants to make a
memory
perfect again in the recluse of its own lingo remedied for a mentionable
duck. That's the light, you say and then head on out into the
spirit night
in the dark of today leaning forward-seeming "taking a chance on
love" was
how it went down again the rhythm scanning out and on. Rusty solo
winds out
from its ephemeral gloom.
I lean into the wind of your ribbons, stretching
into time
itself like the history of what has passed beyond. A ruff or ruffle,
no
doubt about it, scheming into the non without some destiny or portrayal.
This much is certain to what you intend. This much would do it
again, or
not. You'd angle on bespoke, as they used to say, beyond doubt
or this
perverse love-affair with the non. The sentient angle is not broken
nor is
it tended within parameters or with some other day you should have left
behind. Cling to what? Just how much worse can it possibly
get? This'd
eke, this'd lean aside and weep or stain.
As in 'nothin else to do' is how you step aside the
lunging tide
of what's passin' passion in our midst, a mammary of your own gland,
younger
than that now, or formal declinations among the foam persist or fathom.
Late to the nooner in her eye, another sore on your gums reminds you
that
time is passing, too. How's the dune, yet a single or a natter
on your
missed opportunities for remiss and calm, a doorway beckons like an
opening,
or what it is. Yet the glimmer of fortitude claims inattention
from its own
absence to focus on the name itself, the tone of the deal, the mass
of the
plume in ascendance. From formal links, this is the normal trope,
screaming
up and down the neck of the instrument, how your arm aches from the
typing
on the slotted surface, banded loops at strum and flake you'd healed
in the
inner eye, sent like a message to a foreign country to one who understands
your dilemma, nor cures it out against hope.
At all costs, continue, damn the potatoes!
What'd cur or dog?
No other on the shore wiggling at the suggestion of it. No pattern
to the
ramble, just cause again, a snore or stamen, a liquor on the dunes
themselves, a repetition, a boring stone. Bide a wee, slam a clam
and pool,
rank a pastor soon to musk and gloom, its' own due, not measured or
forced
against its will and center. Slake a doom, pull a gee or flak
a poon and
skeiner. Flock a porter fuming at the gate. Scrape a doubter
from the
later skull or room hard in its own juices met and fatter. Shove
a pouter
tough along the plume but lean its' outer frame a lute or spoon, natal
and
wrong, out at the running flame, trough of the running pie, lark of
the
pining rue. Your own dimense and skimmer, your own hoist and song,
your own
rope of light and tools, your own alter on the cross of lines and seasons,
your absent score in the liner of the arm and horse, your own crime
and
fortune, your own ark.
Next on board, another spoon-fed distillation of
the absolute
into its' own manner from which calculations are made for the detail
of what
is not explicitly said. There's the notation on your sleeve, writhing
with
your hand against the wind in her ribbons or the arrows on the wall.
Salient features remark, remind, continue and make their statements
along
with, along without. No mere decomposition remarks the heavens
in their
perpetual silence, as if some destiny inhered from the assumptions made
that
there is an answer to your question, provided you ask or other directions
in
the incomplete map of your heart's echoes. I'd a liner in the
moot tempos
laid aside from wherever relief comes upon you in the middle of the
night.
There's the noon and beckon, the plate upon the forked tongue that leads
the
world downside and reminiscent. His flatulent pose, his broken
hoses, his
allowable denials in the face of a nameless stupidity leaves you weak
with
the unexpressed and the fortunate outsiders at the fence muling and
repose
at the dark of the day and the tone of the times.
Here's the deal-your own anchors are left in the
ocean while the
ship steals away into some newer Rincon of touch, boards leaning up
against
the seawall, teen-aged girls hokey and strewn about like leftovers.
A silly
whim, a newer relication from what's not spoken or eventuated toward
the
celestial father unknown as it is in "no answer" to your questions.
It's
not exactly futile, only irresponsible, muted in the anchor of some
passion's
reclused forbidden. Host. Female to the outer banks, she
weaves and
slaloms along the dusky trails from the top of the hill down into the
forbidden glade at the bottom, it is an idea like that which tells you
the
end is near, near enough to calculate but yet not stroke or pimento,
a
blonde horse and rider up against the moon and tangle. Can you
wait just a
little longer? "Just say no to hope," the poster said, the
second lady's
face smitten with a flax sincerity you might have seen on the sidewalk.
It's
a revelation, muter dee, and let among the natives who are more than
restless, they're pissed. Not drunk, either, but pissed at the
infantile
disappearance of all that was and is once again in dispute, fathomed
out of
the heavens with neither pity or scorn, just dropped into the punch
bowl
with a solid right against your chops, blam! And wham at the signatory
calm,
wham at the empty chasm in front of you, aerobic fear of heights lets
you
dung and down, stair step at a time to say forgiveness is in the realm
of
the felt signification of doubt at the censor's clamor and throng.
I'd knotted thrust against her swollen hips, as if
to feel
something with my left hand against the formica in my heart, no wet
distances are perplexed into silence by the norm ahead, it's a
forward-seeming thing to wait too long for the first motion of a related
song, one you called ahead and made a place for in the remute distances
of
your heart's woe and stain. Nor max nor pattern on the wind.
No waiting
in the next room. Engulf me with your light. Hunky pontoon,
his other
nomenclature. Remoted, like, moted again, made small and tight
in your
imaginary lexicon of blue floats. Skanky due or not at all, not
read at
all, but collected like the strange butterflies they represent at the
national zoo where all states from the comatose to the ecstatic are
represented in song and dance. No chances are made at all in this
wooden
dream of light, my finger tight into her in the dream, was there any
end to
it? The One of acts reminds you that there is a theme here, only
not one
you might apprehend with your phlogiston dials and buttons on your shirt
left open to the waist or central, this is the actual name of what's
going on.
Lark it. Deal among the natural spunk, what's
left on the rug
beside the bed. How'er ewe? Flax-it down the long tides
measuring again in
the knuckle of foreheaded spam. Folded. Morticed.
Intent of the open dork
clears your outer funk like an escape or a dowel strained into the light.
As if, what's familiar might mark the day atune or not, knotted soap-rope
hanging in the shower. Flux-steamer, drivel snout, police total,
skin of
the chaliced skein, as your "robe" is shown against the sky
with his face
streaming blood on the surficial rim of your pain.
Lank the skrawn! Fold her back against your
legs and poke it in
and stay a while, moaning and kissing and striving for dawn against
the moon's
own pinnacle of light. Here's the reason to stay alive.
Here's the name
you called out and got no answer. Here's the time you said goodbye
and didn't
leave. Here's the light brigade going to its' death in the afternoon
of
a forgotten war in a forgotten time for no reason but money. Here's
the
time you moaned into the night and felt a pain rising through your heart.
Here's the pinnacle of civilization about which no one is proud and
from
which nothing descends into history but the silence of the heavens reminding
you of your solitude.
I've marked this sign of the sky with my own skin,
but who notices?
Another mark finished the day and went home without any pay but a smooth
pat
on the butt. I was such a dune! And here was the war on
the name of time
which elongated our moment by one tenth of an inch and no more, leaning
into
a sense of the hour which mentioned nothing but dirt. My own relatives
founded the armor of the retired soldiers dying in the bar late at night
over cheap drinks and cheap talk. My hero sung his poems into
the
microphone and had them etched onto little disks of plastic, a distribution
of the are-nots clinging to the raft and singing into the night "Help
me!
Help me!" as the waves crashed into your eardrums with profound
deafness. A
lided silents.
An hour after dark, it is still light on the horizon
of your intensities
and forgivings. This is the hour of harm. Would you have
spoken first, it
might have listed to the left or right, depending on the hour of speech
and
the movement of your eyes, skittery or focal. What's not to do?
Really, it's
doubtful to smoke, even less so to register the morning's clear shots
into the heavens' ceiling on the walls beside you—no escaping
the continent's
elemental drive toward what it will be, not what it is already in the
allowance it has for diagramming. A structure, if you will, of
its own
mentations. If that's not too generous, you might move on and
encounter the
true nature of what it is. As has, so let. A formula for
nouns and other
evenings hosted toward the light. Say Idaho to me in a quiet voice,
"Priest
Lake" rules with lifeboats under each tree along the forty mile
sides up to
a point below Canada where you might slip through underwater, unaware
of it
all. A stride aside entails no northern due, but links machines
with
invisible ties of clear material drawn from the air itself quickly and
without pause. No matter to her musk, no deviation from the road
not taken
but enterprised long among shots, hard among latent fingers.
Just go ahead and call echo, he'll answer.
I can't even remember what
it was I came here to get away from. Paints willing schisms with
their own
colors and their opposites at the same rhymes, prayers uttered upward
into
this density without remiss or calm, a dead decay of summary which clings
and scatters around the towns and gardens in your heart. Lincoln-log
sky
with ends abutted into blue and green. Your own munificence gathers
into a
knot of light and then subsides into cool gray scenting toward black.
It's
not dark yet, but it's getting there. What's the stroke along
your hair,
what's the name she left on the wall, I've been down to the bottom of
a
whirlpool of lies, I ain't looking for nothing in anyone's eyes.
Calms
the latent storm without knowing how or why the winds themselves knew
where
they are going. Stand against the hill with her ribbons blowing
around you.
I came here without knowing why, a tabula rasa in
repeat performance,
where the knowledge grown resembled the coins thrown upon the table
six
times in a row and then consulted, a haruspect of the other world you
will
carry from here in the empty box that is your self.
eratio
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