Water

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Mark A Peart

for joaly


the river
stained my shorts
brackish white cracks
caked mud

an overturned chair in
the cascade of the
slow rapids

in water he moves
like a seal
on land he oscillates
/ osculates

mud is slow
nothing brief

mosquito larva at
the edge
question their role
in the ecological whole

there is a body
of water
between us

a gulf
a bay a river
a seasonal creek

refrigerated butter
warming in the day

a single cockatoo
no spectacular flock
nothing to force seeing
beauty
white on blue and white

body oils
sit deep in the mud

our feet
press oxygen
into the river bed

could i have come
here on my own

we swim when the swimming
needs swimming

loose leaf tea
sheets our backs
in alternates

your hands
now calloused and tanned
– poet’s hands

dogs mingle
in our camp

stranger:
‘dog’s name! get out!’
‘come here!’
‘dog’s name! no!’
‘dog’s name!’

your body less perfect
and so, therefore,
in the water

the water now momentarily
clear
as nature turns
in our hands

the river carries
petrol and trout
each splitting light
into colours

rainbow rainbow

yet
we pluck feathers
from ourselves and other
birds

and sew some
into emptied
follicles

in false plumes
we sink

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Introduction to the Aesthetics of Birds

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Kristin Hannaford

“Repair to the haunts of birds on plains and mountains, forests, swamps, and lakes, and give up your time to examine the economy of the different orders of birds”, Charles Waterton in Capt. Thomas Browne’s The Taxidermist’s Manual 1853


You will situate your troubadour, your lyre-tailed harpist, Menura superba,
central to the exhibit as if he were summoning other orders of birds
by virtue of song. Ignore what you know of silver-white canopies
of feather revealed as the bird dances for its mate. Reveal the fine fern-like
filamentaries framed by lyre plumes, upright and erect.

Your White-faced Heron should appear tentative, neck retracted and settled,
as if contemplating the missed arrival of the tide, the greyness of the day.

The laughing jackass may assume one of two dominant positions: filled
with mirth (beak open, skyward) or in a predatory mood (watchful),
an angled eye observing some reptilian supper just out of view.

Your Satin Bowerbird is best displayed amongst his bower, content
sorting collections of buttons and blue trinkets, anticipating her arrival –

whilst the Riflebird, Ptiloris paradiseus should crown the display
by means of wiring the wings into arcs. In attitude, a toreador waving entry
into the ring, the exact satin flash of blue-green tail erect and graceful.

Parrots, lorikeets, and rosellas will seem chatty and conversational
if arranged together on a suitable branch, or if gathered over seed.

Your Macleay’s Kingfisher, alert, should observe keenly the close-eyed
confusion of the Boobook; use yellow glass with wide circumferences of iris.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Skin

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Paul Summers

just as she begins to speak, a blade
of molten light lays down to bleach

an airless veranda’s feathered teak.
the first for weeks to breach this cage

of crooked laths. beneath the tongues
of drooling palms, a flemish flake of brass-

necked snake unwinds itself to hunt
the warmth. her sheath of scales made

shabby by the moult of growth, the chore
of metamorphosis. i hear the hiss of her

cris de coeur; the ache of her costume
nipping at the ribs. a snake in her prime

abandoning her skin, shaking it off
like the gesture of belonging.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

A Kingdom of Walls

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Anne Carly Abad

The walls have ears
but it isn’t enough
just to hear. They think
if one listens, he, too, must take
his turn to speak
so they decide to grow
mouths for celebrating
the proliferation of their kind:
chain-link fences that separate
your lawn from mine
pink-painted railings that keep
the cars in line
agave hedges that deter
stray animals and thieves
or even picketers who convince
the unwary to fall in.

And when the walls wish to sleep
they simply hiss shush-shush
to the labandera waking her children
for a breakfast of salt, muck and grass;
the man who curses
as his wallet is snatched;
the builders banging away
at new sheet iron homes—
Oh, even the bustling slums
the walls have trained, shut up
and when someone tries to climb over
telltale mouths just click their tongues
and the police rain down ready.
Thus, the walled world lies content,
forbidding, no one may speak,
no one may pass.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

From the Gonzo Dictionary of Literary Terms

Posted on September 1, 2013 by John Carey

bugarstice

is the name of a verse form sung
by Dalmatian shepherds to their sheep
as an instrument of forced conversion
or to calm them during the rigours
of drenching and cleansing. It is a formal
measure characterised by the obligatory
caesura after the seventh syllable
that echoes the halt at nightfall
of combats against Turk or Bulgarian
or the exhaustion of sated troubadours
after their “doux combats” with well-muscled
milkmaids. It is not to be confused
with the “bucolic diaeresis” that resulted
from excessive consumption of fermented
sour apples, the “Barnstaple tarantella”
of the famous passage from Chaucer.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Against the Grain

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Rob Walker

If your face was a piece of wood I wouldn’t know which
way to plane it I say. The right side of his mouth curls into
a ghost smile. Yeah he says my grain goes all over the
place. I use the trimmer to top off the long white hairs
under his chin, stretching the skin to dewrinkle it.
feeling him looking into my eyes as I avoid his.

This is intimate enough.
Mustn’t go to pieces.
Need to put on an upbeat front for him.
I swallow the lump in my throat.
A close shave.       I’ve never shaved
another person, let alone my father.

I think back to a modest redbrick War Service home a
lifetime ago in the 1950s when he would shave in the old
linoed kitchen, stretching his palm across his mouth
wiping his face sideways in the reflection of a small round
mirror hanging from the bakelite handle of a cream-
enamelled gas oven door.

Give me a shave dad. He’d look around to see mum
wasn’t watching and tickle my five-year-old chin with the
green Sunbeam razor.
He looks up at me now like a child. My memories strong.
His fading fast. Both
keeping up appearances.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Icarus

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Joanna Stanlake

The black outside presents a screen behind my window.
I am watching a documentary on moths — large and small,
white and brown — Ghost Moths, Bogon Moths, Tiger Moths.
(Listen, listen to the tapping of the Morse code.)
They flitter and dart, crawl restlessly towards my lounge
room light through the glassed illusion of a vertical labyrinth.
Suddenly, a shadow appears and dives like a war jet.
(Listen, listen — the music speeds up!)
The large Ghost Moth, splayed in the window’s corner
disappears. Again and again, the bat attacks and retreats.
The rabble of moths vanishes, one by one. Credits role.
(Listen, listen — the closing music is sad.)
Guilty of my part in drawing these creatures towards their
death, the next night when they gather, I switch off my light;
sink into a place like the bottom of the ocean.
(Listen, listen to the navigational clues.)
The moths stir, flutter one last time in a pale blur before
setting their sights on the fullness of the moon, on that great
expanse of space between dark and light, death and life.
(Listen, listen — turn off the lights and listen,
for our small hands hold the power of the sun
and the earth is as fragile as waxed wings.)

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Gora

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Melinda Smith

Gora: A Hindi word that can mean both ‘white’ and ‘beauty’;
also used to denote the British during and after the Raj.


The daughters of India are burning
Because below the skin you see is the skin you want

The daughters of India are blistering
Because inside the brown onion nestles a pearl of great price

Aishwarya your green eyes, your coconut flesh
Michael Jackson your vitiligo

The daughters of India are itching
Because brillo pads are not designed for use on the forearms of children

The luminous faces of Brahmins bloom only in the shade
‘I dream about how to become white, how to look white and beautiful’

The daughters of India are developing cancers of the skin
Because $1.75 buys a tube of Kojic acid, hydroquinone, mercury

The rites of mortification shall deliver you to paradise
You must be this pale to ride

Guaranteed fairness, guaranteed fame
base blackness transmuted to gold, to moonstone

‘Seeking a slim bride of wheatish complexion’
A series of painless de-racialisation treatments

My Fair and LovelyTM ones, you shall shed teak, mahogany,
coffee and chocolate. You shall be stripped

of walnut, of honey, of toffee. You shall be scraped back
to wheat, pounded and bleached to flour

‘Dr Shailesh, the patches are darker now than when I started.’
(to the ignorant the cloth may appear invisible)

Oil baths every Friday. Chick pea flour paste on your five-year-old cheeks
Your father wishing kash hame ek beta hota wishing you had been a boy

No coffee, no tea, they will make you too dusky dear
You shall bathe in cucumber, in lemon and almonds

You shall eat of these also when pregnant to ensure
children white enough to pass

without harsh scratching
There is no evidence that whitening creams cause irreversible skin damage

apply in a gentle circular motion
purchase only from an accredited Hindustan Lever Ltd reseller

avoid direct exposure to sunlight
and instantly the tarnish is gone

Below that layer, another and another
When you reach the bone

you shall enter the heaven of bleached skeletons
Right now, tomorrow, in four to six weeks, you shall achieve

at last
satisfaction

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Journey

Posted on September 1, 2013 by S T McCarthy

yes, yes: about 2×1030 kgs of hot plasma
interwoven with magnetic fields …
I see. a Wikipedian colloquy
a storm of common knowledge in a tea cup
yes, common knowledge … (?)
but, you know, I do not have a problem with religion
in relation to wars, &c
any more than I have a problem
with soccer balls over hooligan violence

science goes on labelling
and x has a fixed value (ha!)
and apparently our stocks in understanding
and life-expectancy are on the rise
but, I ask thou, in your menagerie of idols yonder
how many laid down their guns
before the age of forty?

and in the Dreamtime it is the Sun Woman
who mothers all life into being
unswaddling us, then, in the night

round and round
she goes
counting us down to none.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Dream Babies

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Alyson Miller
It has a full set of teeth and shouts her name, demanding conversation after months of entrapment in that dark wet space—it wants words, not food. And it is not forced out of her but pulls itself free, tiny fingers stretching for the light and scratching at the white skin of her thigh. Another rises in her belly like bread dough in the hours from breakfast to dinner, spilling out onto the kitchen floor and accompanied by a rush of her insides—its naked head blinking and slick against the muscle of her stomach and liver. Some simply appear like a hiccup mid-sentence, crying in her arms as though forever lost and returned home. She forgets their names and their happening, searching the walls of her home for proof of a hoax or a haunting. Or they transform, shape-shifting into horses or beans or dolls, masks on the walls or reflections that speak Peter Pan memories of thimbles and shadows. And then the ghost child, an infant of smoke and glass that holds to her like guilt even as she screams and claws and tries to pluck it from her skin. In the darkness of early morning, they gather around her bed like homunculi, whispering mater matris, mater matris, mater matris, pressing the words into her sleep and burying them bone-deep.
Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Packing the Elbow: Three Linked Poems of Thirty Lines

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Terrence Chiusano

Thirty Lines for Dora

An actual reply is a kind of thanks—for taking the time to make it, etc.,
very much taken if appreciated—but I think this reply isn’t actual,
isn’t addressing the glitches that make the simple difficult: she reveres
arrangement, applauds the symmetry of a dainty doily, you mourn
your moodiness. Both are bamboozled. Not that the screens, so-called—porch
latticework with its wooden planters and painted pots; three lacquered
panels folded across the corner of a messy dressing room (silk garter, pink
panties, striped tie, spittoon); tight white sheet reflecting-projected-
image: a little man with a newspaper in his lap asleep in a little wooden
rocker beside a canvas cot in a little brown house under a dark moon (cat-
with-head-in-milk-pitcher on stone stoop)—aren’t arranged how you’d prefer.
Inadequacy would be the word. Bad, another. The search, so-called, closes
one of its kin—prior or parallel—on the order of panes. The flaws, the sum
of these odd misbehaviors—of problems of aura, of linkage or lumping,
instability, crumbling or crumpling, of the quirk of having to break
one part to fix another—is what irks me. A cameo works (it’s here!
it appears!) but as if the phantom flick from the phantom quirt of a phantom
charioteer arriving unannounced by balloon from the sandy grasslands
of a distant isthmus’ windswept steppe; or the sudden cry of a herdless
camel driver thrown from the deck of a foundering whaler and washed
incongruously ashore at our feet. A rock is solid, superior on the face
of it—come scramble across me—no need to know “up front”: as you go
each nook unfolds. That’s the “aesthetics” of it, the part I’m reacting to
when I say it’s poor or thin, when I denounce what it “means.” I’m only here
for the view, but I keep my own counsel, draw my own conclusions
(“make shape,” “form take,” judgments, opinions, convictions, positions);
always there are, always seem to be, ways to work around them. Should
there be? need to be? Should there be always? I may do everything I want to
and still be unhappy. I may be the best of any ilk out there and still not be good
enough. I may only take when the command is given but still be greedy.


Thirty Lines for Pépé Le Moko

“These” as “this” didn’t. The question is what “as” what
“did.” And when. I’m not asking for a vision, as if to appear
to myself on a muddy path in a foggy forest one evening
in the form of the messenger, feather in a felt cap, and with a wink
and a sneeze (gesundheit!) and a wave of my long brown cape,
coded note exchanged in a harmless handshake, I disappear
into the falling darkness through the fern-filled cleft in a mossy
boulder behind which, balanced rods-in-hand on the bank
of a babbling trout stream, a girl in galoshes and a boy in rubber
boots are about to catch a fish. No. The plainer the simpler,
like the habit begun in dirty little London flat of dusting
before bed; or an artless whim one morning at the bar of a musty
hotel—flickering fluorescents, pressed tin ceiling, paint-
clotted fleurs. (We’re having a brandy on a damp Saturday.
Ssshh.) My problem has always been one of use. My hat,
for example, never seems surprised that I wear it, and I may,
in a similar way, be nothing more than a note on a napkin lost,
maybe, through a hole in a pant pocket, split in bottom of wet
paper sack—not surprised to be so; as comfy blown into the stony
craw of a dry sandy draw as ever I am in my “jolly green seat”
(pet name for squeaky chair at dented writing desk). But even if
the so-called strength may be the so-called tone, the remaking
isn’t in the guise of a prior image. Guise is prior, is as a manner
prior, is at first what’s most visible but later proves less deeply
scored than those that came before. What I’m saying is: since
there are no murderous bumps—that bumps are not murderous—
there are no problems that “boil o’er,” that coax the “only
sometimes” close enough to see the other landscape, the one
where it isn’t. For instance: I keep beside my bed a wooden rod.
When I speak it sounds like me, when you speak it sounds like you


Thirty Lines for an English Cucumber

As I was waking out of attending to where I was—listening, watching
(a small crowd on the steps of a splashing fountain, a yellow bird
on a green bough, a rubbery worm inching over the root of a flowering
plum tree, the setting sun sifting through the copper-colored bun
of a beautiful girl in a long brown dress softly sobbing over her boyfriend’s
bewildered shoulder)—well, these are the beats, and long overdue.
And who, just as he was, stood there fuming? Alone. Alone, seething,
raving, stewing. And I couldn’t help but think how much the fool
he was. I was galled—there was no one in the world to look me full
in the face, no one to bet to see me with my back against the wall:
tennis ball in hand, fresh haircut, one boyish dimple, blue hoodie,
dog whistle, canvas shoulder bag, untied shoe; shouting at a goose
shitting on a golf green. The point is, I resolve—faint figure on fuzzy
horizon, fuzzy smear on misty bathroom mirror—into a tart “blend,”
a “smart” loop, “a pile of lots to do.” (i.e., I forsake more than I partake.)
Duration is a compact but permeable, pliable, sometimes friable fringe
in time around an object—trim beard on bony jaw, tassel of prairie grass
(chewed shaft circling molar-to-molar-to-roof-of-mouth)—and things
beyond, beyond continuing, things that are a beyond, are a confidence.
They tend. (Nothing a direct sense.) And with each flow more worry—
but more gorgeous talk too. It calls for seeing “my take” (share of common
cutpurse) as a given, my own sour puss as a kind of walking counsel.
And I walked for tomorrow, it counseled me to (sally forth! follow
your nose! go with hope!), as if it were merely the crest of a rolling
hill—trout stream, birdsong, hayfield, windmill, meadowlarks, red
barn—crested on my way to the next; no greed, no empty congratulations,
no empty pauses, no cowardice, callousness, complacency, guilt, blame,
shame, indolence, hypocrisy, boredom, dishonesty, no cowardly
close calls, no shams, cant, pretense, fraud, no false promises, no false
causes, no forked tongues. I took it at its word, its sweet deceitful word.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

A Bird’s Guide to Flight: Instructions

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Chloë Callistemon

Instructions

1. Grow primaries from finger cuticles.

2. Sprout alula along the tops of thumbs.

3. Plant a bed of coverts to hang from arms.

4. Seed scapular feathers along shoulder blades and axillaries in armpits.

5. Fuse clavicles and graft coracoid and attached carina to scapulas at base of cervical vertebrae.

6. Reduce the lengths of femurs, fibulas and tibias — prune and regraft if necessary — then bind femurs close to rib cage.

7. Hollow bones with care.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Making Love & Omelettes

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Jo Langdon

After a line by Veronica Forrest-Thomson


Slight kitchen views from white sheets
—warmth of breath and skin—

there are tile shapes in the lino,
just enough window sun

to mistake for a lit globe, a yellowing
of day taking shape across the floor.

But in the first room—blinds drawn,
edges shaping shadows, tidally,
across the curling spines

of books, colours muted,
pages loose and stacked at random—
there is a slowness, a taking
of time, each said word

folded close by ampersand; the morning’s
pairing of shapes, doubled and joined:

‘is’ & ‘ought’

eyes & fingers,
love & breakfast

(as omelette or glazed pastry.)

Later comes the day’s grit:
a sink full of eggshell & coffee dreg

—an expression caught in passing
by the glass, ‘the blank world…’—

A blueness of sky to signal cloudless,
and little much else.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

And What Did You Have Yesterday

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Yuri Hospodar

(?):
A plate of semi-distant futures
Left in sort of unscrubbed tourmaline forkware
Waiting for the bacon to leap to its tines (–) ;

Killing fields of audience
Makeshift in its pre-prepared out-of-the-
Fridge whoopsie stare and on
To your plate
(or
(…)
saucer, there was tea).

I had transmissive leftover’d toward
Reportage of guests and their stewed arrival
As aristocrats did in this faded age,(.)

But it was all toast in the daisyfield
Of vegemite unfolding in the sunbeams’ aim:
(!)
O
(!)
awake, awake(;)(!), we were called like
Little children and assumed the moment
Was only for us;(,)

Yet the sullen window remasked its reflection
And opted to condemn this merrie way
To a swaggered and somewhat stunned reunion
Of cereals and swollen fruit:(:)

I had mapped the flight-mammals’ path
To no semi-practical end – (;)
It really was foredoomed to a sunrise
Of dormant species’ happy chirpings
Left and looming on some bushy hedge(,)

And the verdant britalline of the
biplane’s sunset headed toward
some unexplained horizon
swimming in my watery how-do-you-do
Mid-greetery eggs
.
(.)

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Armstrong’s Zeitgeist Visor

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Meredith Wattison

The geese on our dinner plates
hung
but implied progression.

Would bear with me
as I declined, protested,
held fast.

Would still be there
next morning
under a cold meal,

‘I’m going to pretend
it’s a fried egg’,
I’d announce, meeting

the golden goose hunger.

Under the tablecloth
was sky-blue Laminex.

Under the table was ether.

My father slept in striped pyjamas
like all the innocent men,

his sighs filled the spinning, pin-pricked, backlit
house with the Apollo 11 Moon Mission, lifted it

like blackest, brightest America.
The moon as yellow as the film of gold

on Armstrong’s Zeitgeist visor, planishing
as my fingernail across the dripping bowl’s

Sea of Tranquility; and smiling Einstein
whispered ‘death’ into my little shell-like ear.

There is a stalking red fox in the loungeroom;
a Royal Doulton Flambé. I have decorated the net curtains
with green gold Christmas beetles and weightlessness.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

True North

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Rasiqra Revulva

(i remember)
row
on row on row of
powder pinker than pussy
disappearing into our skulls
through a crispy blue five-dollar bill
(i remember)
tenacious neon slivers
clinging to your brand-new president’s choice debit card
(i remember)
shyly bending to the bill and
you
pushing down my neck
with a loosely-cupped palm and four blunt hooks
(i remember)
because the curled paper conduit
wasn’t high past the membrane wasn’t
deep enough inside me
(i remember)
my sinuses
starting to blaze under my skin like
a lighthouse
or maybe like rudolph
(i remember)
your strong smooth fingers
your hard short nails
dancing on walnut veneer and
coiling
on my knees
(i remember)
cheek-puckering residue working down my throat
on the unseen depths of my
tongue
(i remember)
how you cried without blinking
(i remember)
shallow blue fountains as
you whispered I love you
like a
prayer
(i remember)
like the bitter taste of come
pushed down by some eager cock
(i remember)
ejaculation – genocide
those millions
billions?
that i gulp or gag i guess
(i remember)
and i swallow
each desolate and inevitable death.
(i remember)
i remember.
yes, i still remember.
and you still try to tell me that
this
wasn’t fucking intimacy.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Barely Noticeable

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Angela Gardner

stencil grass and blow— up
ponies sadly
deflating I stoop

to native violets.
My mind, a mild
and clouded surface

women delicately pink
winged and clothed
their silicon flesh parting

under cast iron column arches
garlanded overhead
with pressed metal flowers.

Ticket barriers pulse
in concert, a closed
system in perfect reach

the tool’s crude optic
runnelled to paths
dense and chemical

In the glade’s depth
and plasma air’s
transmission upward

forty clicks to flagfall
eye pressed to image clutter
trembling without

artful riot of pleasures
so the body — giving
chase — sidesteps

the complicating forest.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Descort for Riotous Orchestra

Posted on September 1, 2013 by A J Carruthers

(after Langston Hughes’s Chant for May Day)
to be read by a Worker with, for background, the pulsating waves of a Mass
Orchestra, multiplying its sounds like the roar of a mighty Cascade.




WORKER:
 
 
 
 
 
10 INSTRUMENTS:
 
20 INSTRUMENTS:
40 INSTRUMENTS:
 
 
 
50 INSTRUMENTS:
 
WORKER:
10 INSTRUMENTS:
20 INSTRUMENTS:
40 INSTRUMENTS:
50 INSTRUMENTS:
 
WORKER:
10 INSTRUMENTS:
10 OTHERS:
10 OTHERS:
10 OTHERS:
50 INSTRUMENTS:
 
WORKER:
50 INSTRUMENTS:
10 INSTRUMENTS:
20 INSTRUMENTS:
30 INSTRUMENTS:
40 INSTRUMENTS:
50 VOICES:
 
WORKER:
20 INSTRUMENTS:
40 INSTRUMENTS:
60 INSTRUMENTS:
80 INSTRUMENTS:
100 INSTRUMENTS:

(two cynics enter, sing amorous song, then exit)
truth that evening’s in the Square
when the bowed heads ruptured the earth,
when the sounds followed the baton.
when the violin tuned to its orchestra,
workers:
be like this violin.
we intone in the strength of our unknown
power, (improvocation in E minor)
grow out of the passive world
grown strong with perfect harmony
bows and lips together—
to beautify this situation, this Spring,
and every Spring
forever for the Workers!
(improvocation in A major)
Workers:
be like the strings playing to the baton,
strengthening each note,
no part neglected—
reaching every world.
(improvocation in C major)
all Subjects:
migrant workers,
student workers,
farmer workers,
workers in urban and nonurban communities
Eternity speaks from our future,
(improvocation in F# minor)
when our passionate tones rise
common Eternity speaks.
(sharp tones rising)
(disjunctive rhythms infolding unharmoniously)
(shifts to Ab, Chorus of the United Front joins in)
when the baton rises,
when the baton falls,
(dominant 7th , all improvocate together)
our fates join, all Peoples of all worlds:
rise up! rise up! rise up!
even in the most mundane circumstances,
we’ll subtract ourselves in this time,
look! the forces of this world are ours,
look! the whole world is turning on its head!

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Coming to Your Yah Yah

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Philip Byron Oakes

A quilt of ad hominems keeping orphans warm.
Defending the static quotient by which the infinite
shrinks, to fit a premise the power finds palatable.
A swamp of normalcy, belching undigested bits of
the enigma, into a miasma leading one by one to
believe. In a gel of the disparate on old time knees
bent to keep from breaking for the door.
Bequeathing a passage through the glaze of
particulars. Slippery in sliding the wont beneath
the guise of rounded days. A desultory elegance
presumed an antidote to the clamor as the hour
runs out of options past tock. Deadened nerves
taking the temperature at its word. By virtue of
corollaries, mimicking the topography of inner
landscapes, sculpted by emotive elements
periodically sweeping the table, to sabotage a self
on loan from the way it’s supposed to be. In
keeping the portals clear for the to and fro of the
unseen but felt, in the myriad tangents of fear
catching up to the word in a cloud of omens. As
it needs to be in order. Only the context turning.
To ferret out what’s lurking between the greenery
and the grass. Sponsoring a face for the occasion
thought unreachable, by hands or feet, the
writhing in the tumult, tending the blink of
the steed embodying the metaphor for the
grid giving the void that special place to
come home to.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Karelia

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Carol Jenkins

Every day two villages disappear
[insert blank space here]
Phwaaa. It’s summer but here are

snow drifts in attic corners,
great banks resting where the church
{insert blank space here}

has turned into splinters of silver
wood and holey ghosts.
Every day two villagers disappear

[insert two blank spaces here] so
pray against arsonists and careless
cigarettes. The village (blank space)

is declared neperspektivnie — to be
liquidized for lack of proper prospect.
The fields are given to the crows.

Every day two more crows appear
[insert black spaces here and here]
to wander through houses like

the winter wind, that mills history
to a rough grey grit. The village shop stocks
[insert blank space here]

and vodka, and soon these bottles
disappear into empty stomachs
and move on. Two bull-dozers appear.

[Insert blank space
here and here
and here]

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

*the children*

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Megan Kaminski

I smell jasmine and salt taffy. Pink scents permeate the
bedroom flowered wall-to-wall small buds blossomed. Blue
night draws dark streaks from the lagoon, calm water calling
toes and ankles. Not abandoned and not remembered, waiting
in this damp place. Drownt down district washed clean
scrubbed red by an impatient other. I long for kept light sailed
safe into harbors far. Rudderless boat moth-loved sails.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Portrait of Valentine

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Rachel Fenton

After Roland Penrose, 1937

Those I have loved, the three;
how they preen. Green eyed, finch-flecked
first kisser. Cheek skimmed,
I kicked the sleepers home that night
mam called to warn of trains
and the Yorkshire Ripper.
Long since the wheel spun its last,
three years past eighty-four.

Kingfisher lover, how you adored my shadows,
(the pit pond a lure for your Southern sights)
dove, turned the air blue with talk,
what you wouldn’t do
weren’t worth knowing abart. Nah then

there’s you, common starling, playing coy,
looking back in a what you’re missing glance,
keen a glint on every feather. I, less
English rose than bramble, briar hair picked
of fruit. When I open my mouth I lose
my words in a flurry, I flub, I foozle;
my tongue a practice struggling scales.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Sigourney Weaver Helps Me Out of Some Feelings (Not Pants)

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Emma Barnes

Sometimes when I consider the inside of my brain it seems like it must be honeycomb not flesh. Or the symmetrical petals of a complex flower. Sigourney Weaver always looks like she wants to tell me to go run around outside. Or read a book. Stop trying to make noodles in your skull. Ramen was never meant for this. Sigourney

Weaver knows I have a therapist but likes to add corn and butter to the broth anyway. It’s always Hokkaidō styles around here. Ezo or Yezo or Yeso, or Yesso, you can take the miso out of the ramen but you can’t take the ramen out of the miso without putting it in your mouth. These feelings are ancient and naked mole rats.

Conditioned to darkness and not feeling pain. You can try to stop them but they keep on digging with their teeth for the tubers to feed their queen. Sigourney Weaver is my queen in the eusocial utopia of my dreams. It is a pity I’m the only worker trying to make this happen. That includes Sigourney Weaver. She’s not keen to give birth

to litters. But Sigourney Weaver knows how to undress my feelings as if they were a small child. Always that tug to get the neck-hole over the slightly too large head. She folds the arm expertly across the front of the body to release the limb from its sleeve. She is unafraid of their tiny, soft bodies. The feelings, they are naked after she

touches them. And once they’re naked it is easier to sweep them into the current of a fast flowing river. Feet first little feelings, feet first. Sigourney Weaver blows air out of her mouth in what may be a horsey manner but I don’t interrupt her to say that. She’s dangling the last troublesome jerk-feeling by her fingers over the gap. And splash.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Monument

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Louis Armand

1.

Play the fluted column. Treasury of the consciousness of Man.
Ring the emperors’ bells. The disappearing hat-trick.
Replace chipped crockery. One copy among others.
Animal furnishings. Will make nature obsolete?
And so they cluster. Picture, fresco, miniature and stained-glass.
Pantheon and auditorium. Museumed bric-a-brac.
Lion array chase — onwards, filling the cabinets with
Reflective glass javelins. The sketch for a categorical
Mode of delivery. Beauties of history, etc.
Beat to airy thinness. In former times — towers, pyramids
Display a hoard. Chair-legs, cellar bolts, pharmacist’s pestles.
Stock-take — object to label, series of objects to series of labels:
Stone elbows, plaster of Paris, the gap-toothed Alexandrian
Embrasure. Perhaps, historians a hundred years from now?


2.

The triumph of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk.’ Concentrated trauma
Lulled by shopping paradises.
Apollo’s lyre. Testament to resonance of glass cases.
Surface vocations. Seismograph’s barrel rolling along.
Style, material. Plastic forbearance.
Flourishes of beaux-arts pomp. Railway bestiary’s
Private dwelling. Water tampering with foundations
Reduced to on-going health complications:
Chemical analysis revealing new toxicities;
Transpires to white. ENHANCED. LSD.
Its paradox is testimony or testimonial
Irreparably damaged. Taste-testing the restored surface
Only a miracle can prevent it, or lift the halo from the canvas.
Coming to an end. Mobile sold-off as windchimes.


3.

Marble euphoria. Elgin knock-offs at rock-bottom! Genuine artefact:
Take stock of pedestal. Mantle-piece Laocoons for re-
Engraving or brass rubbing. Place orders here. We specialise:
Worship value-adds or plain utility. Obsolescence built-out, or:
Statutory relapse. “If a man cannot live by his own exertions.”
Singular dedication to the cause. Cellini as codeword for
Massive download. More than mere paradigm, the stone dildo’s
Corrosive piss-take — domesticated fertility rites of the bourgeoisie.
Gather round. Today’s theme is INTERACTIVE. Joystick,
A gift from that sovereign. Take the free virtual tour —
Recycled as admass Botticelli, “Blonde Venus on Surfboard.”
Ponderous, immovable, statuesque even, riding the
Slipshod sublime — oil dollars and West Coast pipeline —
From that ancient quarry in Egypt, imperial purple, Yves-Kleined.


4.

Purely conceptual. Blocked by perspective.
The subject matter. Nominal but rarely minimal.
Things and states of affairs. Pronouncements and conventions.
Suppose the following hypothesis. Convocations and praiseworthiness.
Social reality, like a river to the sea, like a mountain to a glacier
A drift towards inertia. Flowing faster, against the grain.
The task it sets itself to break the mould
Is enormous. Plastered, it staggers like a rubicund burgher’s
Objects per se. A warning to the awe-struck,
But to communicate their downfall,
Fully aware of the difficulty? All that neo posturing,
A weird deadlock in the heavily stoned
“Equilibrium market.” Delirium,
Diagrams, algorithms. So say all of us.


5.

Any building will do, tiered, ducted, virtual-proof. Cloud-columns
Take a load off their feet. Brandishing
A star chart or calendar, zodiacs of arrested post-production:
Slabs drawn from quarries, chiselled to fit the underwriter. % points
Suppress the urgency. “Marginal” as old-hat now as
Stonemasons, hawsers, the veritable chopping-block. Rule of thumb:
Calculate via differentials, integrate backwash. Dig the
Soft foundations. Inflatable
Stadiums, half-geodesic half-styrofoam coffee cup. De rigeur.
Installations. Mounds. Compounds. The looped video-tape
Efficacy of interiors. Two-way wallpaper widgets. Genius
Plots Legoland in Revamped Siberian Gulag! Sub-vectors & linear
Span. Fracking the street-cred mileage, subterranean.
Caveat emptor? Sex Pistols free with every Jubilee handbag.


6.

Because we have long been limiting our appreciation to those
familiar with this procedure. Because we emphasise the senses.
The leaves one-by-one, shed their privilege and wilt, clinging to
every vein, offering skeletal transcripts to diagnose sincerity:
a leafy mass or multiplicity? A golden showdown, a seam
isolating the head and its gloatings of proportion, its separation
from the body. State and Church. Foundational paralysis.
We speak of Europe as an Asian peninsula. Inverse discoverings.
The tip of the odalisk’s nose. The heady imaginings of high altitudes.
A dupe & his accomplices. Trade routes. Trade in antiquities.
Ironic? Wide open? Sealed? The packing cases full of straw.
Creating only illusions: the hand-sized vessel spilling oil,
a stranger obsessed with the fine detail,
coming towards us in the dark.


7.

Redoubt or restitution — the moral of a fluctuating dollar’s
infinite kindness. As God on his pedestal —
Anaphora stout pouring of opens. To aberrate certainties?
Red figure painter etched into the black ground:
Attic; acid; boiled down to loot; Minerva (by any other name…)
such proselytes, such troped littorals, skirting the
Complex. Provenance warranting a footnote, cf.
Testament or phobia, claustrum and agora; the cast lot of
rejigged horizons. Meridianed silhouettes. The relativity of pi.
Conserved or preserved in the forecourt’s parallax: forecast
as corrosive as it is corruptible, per carboniferous im-
Permanent. When does a rockface resemble a man? Achieving
the volcanic island’s sense of self by other means: agonic,
traces of fluid in the grooves. Catharsis by no-contest.


8.

Ideally speaking a composite picture unleashes
the complicated pose, leaving us hands-free but inside
a forest of marble nudes — gloating and admiring
mediocre outcomes as much as the lush or
headless, alas, our critical sense fails us, a sign
of an irreproachable resistance to style, aka
classicism. The ear attuned to false music.
The dream of buoyancy’s piss-take, big band’s
symbolic intention… we scrabble among the offcuts.
This great amateur or auteur or embossing
of the female body: a ploy to hold up the roof,
showing off to Apollo: what you’ve got, we’ve got more:
how the muscles strain against myth and brotherly love,
must be looked at with utility when the festivities begin.


9.

Selecting stone over clay, wood or metallurgy, to ‘progress’ beyond
the quarry’s limitations; these are given: what’s ‘natural’ to the
perplexed individuality. What’s ‘unnatural’ to the State.
Contrary to rumours the dictator’s cocksize did not daunt
the master craftsman’s wife, demanding instead a ‘management solution’;
she dedicated her ennui to the interest-bearing debt,
in love with purchase power — amortised, chiselled out of
Ephesus, or further — God’s bankers tending the austere vision,
carted all the way from one end of Creation to the other — sticking
needles or pinpointing the flaw in the holy effigy. Another Christ for the
empire’s stockpiles. They call it the prophet margin, haha.
The lion in the garden, the ape under the stairs — toss another infidel
beneath the chariot’s proverbial. What good’s a stone wheel? A beam
or dust in the collective mind’s eye — but these things are real.


10.

Not to be outdone by due diligence
the ardent configurators work their
hankering after magic dress-down, blast!
Salomés’ introvert classification conundrum
lancing the goitre of paint formed in the lower left
we call shoreline or catechesis or place where
moral ambiguity coalesces or simply congeals,
dare I say concentrates attention in the desire
to impeach? The Dead. What to call the painting?
Rotten apples or, Musical Drift. Prisoner
in bas relief. A sonata interferes with recitation.
A lost tooth fouls the sketch paper. Charcoal
for a castration complex. The figure, bold as brass.
Anything to do with war will bell-shatter.


11.

Hotel lobbies emblazoned in Churchill-era British bulldog
prints. Austerity jingoes. Brainwash & South Bank.
The model shop with plastic Demerolled Marilyns, where
light degenerates into pseudo-micaceous, sub-terra,
and creases. Icon catastrophe. Blurring the line, more
or less likely. Sucking off the nitrate dispenser.
Crass renditions soil noirish out the number 10; how to
sully blocks of stone. Why make sense when crap sells?
Purple eyed dollar-dazzlers, creaming off the
regulations and vibrations battery-packed, buttplug ceramicked,
petuntse, shattered and gathered, gartered, kneesock
risible. Do you pay extra for the black eye? Add an inch to your.
Reactionary values, pay now and play later. D-cupped,
feisty, discursive, super-siliconed. Exit through the fit-up.


12.

Bombed-out in domain drift, draining
Thames Delta blues rip-offs, and hoping to
buy it off-market, despising means of exchange
if it makes you feel good. So it sits in private hands.
Knuckledusters make short work of marble grins
and ankle-cuffs, a delicate fabric exciting as
the north-facing prospect , gripping it for all it’s worth,
putting the body-double hard to work, body image
to shame. Monumental fleshwork. Nip and tuck
Bond clones to fabricate new Irises for
futurama — how to score a trillion. You’re fired,
Oedipus your self-satisfaction a gamble worth taking,
M-fucker. Keep an eye out for the great barge.
Put that in a referendum. Eye of needle. London Ear.


13.

Tremble in the face of all that Cthonic mumu-olatry: a bumsteer
of Canberra’s artificial hind leg, wired to the new survey
resonance. Retro mind-tronic. Antipodal androids. Pingback.
Relapse is a tasty queen. Cinch your cinque ports, mensies.
Roman baths. No poofters allowed! We only F by the rules.
Synchronistic rudiments means: dago digs digger’s donga.
Pantheon is French for dream-on baby. Go fly that kite
or swing that pendulum. Pamper your neck with a new rope.
Relapse is a tasty morsel of Barbie flotsam, backdated. Eat my
majority. Do you have what it takes? Grab the opportunity
between the legs, before it gets away. Eenie meenie,
massive or diminutive. Get your free facial today. Docu-real
Fascist offices. Insert name of ministry here. The back door
where lions emerged into rugger huddles. Press-pack floozies.


14.

Whipped post-haste to irreverent canapé tippling
off to the old slap-on-the-back post-performance shindig,
country bumpkins lapping it up, all aflutter about urban sophisticates
shellshocked by the devastatingly amazingly poignant leading man’s
trenchfoot realism in the choice areas of THOSE neighbourhoods, a cherry’s
brainfever captured vividly in the social pages, the photographer
a thousand miles from her talent-base, but flashing bauble’s
from civilisation’s murky interior, O proscenium fascists with their
Oswald Mosley-isms dressed up as lightly leftish banter,
commie Ruskin-isms put in their place, all local flavour
sent packing to an Eastcoast MFA theatre program,
Blitzed-out by the statue of the director who gathered tycoons
in Singapore and Australia to the cause of one-up-manship;
on roach bait and destitution they spat art and buildings.


15.

Performing random splenectomies. Do you
atrophy easy? Are your mid-life rock band aspirations
realising their potential? Buy your
kiln-fired voodoo effigies here. Mix spit &
clay with newly garnered pubic hair. Nail varnish
red attic figures to your avatar’s eyeballs. See
new formalism’s lush in action. At first Tracey
regretted it, then she didn’t. Gilbert
rejoiced over the yellow laminated
altars and life-size Mickey Mouse. George wanked
and took the triptych to the cleaners. Our
entry fees guarantee your unique experience. Go
spiralling out of control with our talent enlarger. Relax
while birdbaths twitter and dribble sublimated intent.


16.

By the beginning of all trapezoid arrangements,
namely the carpel-lack of parallel obligations,
against the background of hefty ablutions
content-orientated towards the HOT exhibition,
realist versus strategic arms limitation amnesia,
urban terrorist activities, and a new McDonald’s taking up
Dirk Bogarde’s old space on the beachfront,
the subsidy system of love and beauty and all Mama’s desires
for archaic bathing costumes (jeez, it IS the here and now),
and mysterious states of operatic interdiction:
Roxy Music, fox hunting, this is planet earth
doing better business with signature guitar lines,
an authenticated Les Paul (he liked the showy gold)
montage effect as fingers… well, fingered the frets.


17.

Rambunctious, Ritalinned, minding Rimbaud on the 5.15 —
terrain overglossed, botoxed, lypsincing to airbrush, a
reputation for depixellated swimsuit issues — snout as
salient as the trough; Bo Derek and canapés at No. 10;
risible as art, but as fiasco a one-up on the man-ship —
tantamount to forking a pleb at the gates, egging-on
sensibility to the test. Knees up on the backbenches.
Redolent with turps, the stiff upper. Painted mustachios;
touchy and hyped, after the public rip-off saga; boys’ own
team-tagged. Training night on the National Express.
Soon as the lights went out, you know; the conductor,
remiss but alert. Chaos downunder. Rummaging.
Rushing. Each with their cross to bear; slaves
to the demands of a T-Square, felled by a T-Bone.


18.

Given the state of hand-me-downs, the demands on
a handcart hauling stone from the Red Hill quarry
driven through the turnstile as gravity drops through that
fire exit and that you cling to shining walls, we renounce.
Affording a new cantilever, you cycle across death’s
Mona Lisa moment, wistful and pungent, leering
sub rosa in the mason’s hall, proscenium arch ritual
or a carpark full of fistfights and wounded trolleys,
the ingénue soapboxing a cataclysmic market truth
with parabolas and arabesques, as sincere as masonry, fit
for eyes tattooed to eyelids, sleeping the sleep of the just,
a glued-on substance or permanent ink, a stucco dribble
for all intents but not purposes, so willing to get stuck
digging in. And as for the mosaics, we cut our tongues.


19.

Crafted with trembling micropore; the hand,
aggregate of doleful silicons, sculpting the small hours in
belcomposto. To cross the mindbody divide for kicks.
And weighed down, the Overhaul kama-sutraed viz.
necessity of the revolving cylinder. Spectacular!
Geo-politics of Portland in photoshopped retrospection: time-
lapse, feathering the edges; the last-but-one grinding into silence,
alas, and all atremble. Tamping the slickers, flexing the miter rods,
and featheredges. A porous, aggregated cunnus. A commotion.
A speck, finger-in-the-eye. To erect a sub-division
necessitates a complete overhaul. Belly-flop in the gene pool.
Crossing-out the regulated progress, customer feedback,
icons of brain-mass spatulaed to white square, black square,
trembling in the silence forever after.


20.

The ruse brought about the focal point, a bargain chip
by delegation under the spatulate shade of a pyramid,
the touch of an overseer just a little too plumb in the burning
cold of the desert night: which way the eye of the split-level falls to
Rasputin eyeing off the biggest monument of them all, the maintenance crew,
their appetites, their need for scripture in the dark hours of overtime
registered as far away as here; the original plans were hidden, but
Zargo pulled open the door. Scrolls tumbled out all tech and parchment.
The zombie plague was touchpaper to the necropolis voguing as life,
retired to Denver, alternating with an alternative Texas. In Portland, it’s
sheer bloodlust, she said. Three quarks for Muster Mark, she added.
Burned, her lips fluoresced under the limelight and we had our doubts:
burned, bitter, tasteless, with a talent for veined marble; that’s what
burned. That’s what put the smoke up the golden chimney.


21.

Valency in the Mork & Mindy capsule. PJ’d. A dork with a
quork. You fizzle the god particle. Interstellar naphthalene.
Regimented as hell, the cyclic reflux, toilet-bowl
plethora. The artist’s sketchbook Arcadia with eyes on.
Pulmonary embolism stages a career comeback. He
stepped to the point-blank of it, making Dobell faces.
Paranoid they’d mistake him for just another after-dinner
relapse and slot him down the disposal chute, sans
testament. The set square jamming the works. The knob
bobbing along. Sub-aquatic frequencies making brainstem music.
Proud as punch to’ve got the hang of it in re-run mode,
visiting on a whim the tomb of the unknown writer he’d once
regaled vigorously. One of those matron parties, blue rinsed and
chiselled bust-lines, the local vivisectionist holding court.

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged ,