Monument

By and | 1 September 2013

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.

This entry was posted in 57: MASQUE and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Related work: