Glasses by Russell Gordon

can’t stand wearing glasses.

locked eyes with you

so securely fastened, rustproof

but it’s the glass that meets your gaze

as does light, wind or dust—I pass through.

a glass roof and ceiling, sealing from the elements

all-seeing eye

of a storm

a distance afar apart away a way around long ago

ignore the past a doorway.

adore the present you threw me into when you

cut me in two after you crawled through the whole and you

made me a spectacle

made me some spectacles

fashionably fashioned from some old bones you

found at a zoo.

I crawl through, shuddering, drawing the shutters

soundproof windows to the soul

shatter.

 

stand tall and bare faced

a flood of ichor in the veins

dammed

damned

so cold and mortal… no more

please

I,

a trapeze in a glass house’s ceiling

gasping for empty tear-sacs in vain

the trap is the apple the core behind my eye my socket

all-

seeing eye,

all

in my pocket

reach to throw it all away

can’t reach

can’t even reach the seventh day

the seventh son

my seventh one named Babylon,

my one-night stand with Heaven

my love, my

circular circus.

can’t stand it, wearing glasses.

yr yr by Matt Margo, reviewed by Clara B. Jones

yr yr
Matt Margo
2017
Ghost City Press
29 pp
Free to download with or without donation

 

 

It is difficult to characterize “experimental” or “avant-garde” poetry definitively. However, it is widely accepted that these forms break with conventional practices. Matt Margo is a recognized promoter of experimental poetry as a writer and Editor of two poetry journals and as Publicity Director for Gold Wake Press. They describe themselves simply as “a person who writes,” though their identity is, also, defined by use of non-binary pronouns and non-gendered creative work. Margo’s 2015 poetry collection Blueberry Lemonade, established them as a prominent young poet of “angst,” addressing trauma and neurotic impulses. Rather than being a collection about the interior self, however, yr yr‘s poems position the writer in relation to language. Their poem, “sea,” exhibits the form of pieces throughout the chapbook, words or phrases separated by various graphemes unique to each composition. Titles are short, single words—“animal,” “craft,” “killer,” “whale,” “mind[less],” “arts.” Each word or phrase might be considered an element to itself, and, in a post-modern sense, meaning or interpretation is, for the most part, surrendered to the reader.

 

sea

sample of mint leaf ÷ matrix equation ÷ the end of the season

÷ relatively peaceful ÷ a raised stone basement ÷ beyond the

clouds ÷ performance and precision ÷ the science of human

history ÷ seen to be sympathetic ÷ this pathway is

suppressed ÷ boob tube inanities ÷ wrecked off the coast ÷

completely in lowercase ÷ eternal dream ÷ group stage ÷

coach of the dragonflies ÷ superparticular ÷ all animals be

stunned ÷ the variegated pink ÷ determiner of shoe sizes

 

“sea,” and the other compositions in yr yr, can be understood as true examples of minimalist “collage poetry,” and, if we are not to consider these poems as random collections of words and phrases, we must assume that they are intentionally positioned, perhaps, via the writer’s process of free-association. Whatever the derivation of these pieces, they are Rorschach-like, and, if not intended for diagnosis, are intended to provide pleasure and non-representational fantasy. Sometimes, poems contain references to titles, such as the phrases, “in the hydrostatic equilibrium” and “a sudden change in the atmosphere,” in the piece titled, “fog.”

The poems, “futures” and “transient” contain the phrases, “opus of chaos” and “state of chaos,” respectively, possibly hinting at Margo’s view of themself in an uncertain world. On the other hand, they may find comfort in “a universal human language,” an element of the poem, “logic,” and reminiscent of Noam Chomsky’s formulations about “deep grammar.” In the poem, “gazelle,” one phrase highlights “pure poetic fantasy,” that may be a coded message about how the writer perceives their collection. Similarly, in the poem, “winter,” they embed the phrase, “derivation is uncertain,” within a poem whose elements are otherwise [seemingly] unrelated. However, in at least one poem, “red”, Margo includes the phrase, “form follows function,” an element linking the compositions, and the writer’s view of them, to serious critical scholarship, in this case, about the writings as a whole.

However yr yr may, or may not, be connected to the mainstream literary scene, all poetry is fiction and cannot be completely realistic—though we may want to believe otherwise. With this collection, Margo has transitioned from a type of literal interiorization to poems that increase the distance between writing and reader. yr yr reveals Margo’s aesthetic authority. They have seemingly moved beyond personal conflicts to address the contradictions, ambiguities, and complexities of adult life. I highly recommend this collection to any reader interested in ambitious and mostly successful examples of contemporary Experimental Poetry by a young writer, and I eagerly anticipate their future work.

Aad de Gids on “Longshadowfall” by Michael Mc Aloran

Michael McAloran’s “longshadowfall” Editions du Cygne (2017)

sunken is the ship with readers, the ship of readership, inbetween the poetic prozaic streaming which Michael McAloran (hereafter “Mick”) virtuosely does; sunken am I inmidst the succinct as bleak, pure poetic ‘da stream’ of endless wordparures in which meaning threatens, meaning threatens to emerge and does emerge,about our modern,postmodern, postpostmodern world, always prepostcataclysmic as we’re always inbetween the one disaster happened and the following initialising. what Mick does is lending this “meaning” a river while also render the very notion of “meaning” a discutable but probably more acutely, despicable status. people need to attach “meaning”, patches of meaning to the world, to life, to death, (adorno:) “[impossible] after Auschwitz”, and it is now the question if this assertion, this very assuredness with which we think we can add meaning to this processual world, is in its whole, to say the least, questionable. in these last eight, perhaps nine years I know Mick he has evolved not but has evolved enormously. I would say his artistry has the same intensity but he has succeeded to sharpen his knives. it is the mystique of McAloran to represent this great Irish lineage of Irish writers, these edgy, escatological writers, yet necessarily and of course due to the generational phaseology, irreversibly radicalises both as celebrate as annihilate them. it is what our generation do for a living. parricide, maternicide de luxe, we have thrived on our (most extreme) litterature ancestry while we face these, well, horrid times now. it was obvious that after Wittgensteins “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, Sartres “L’être et le Néant”, Gertrude Steins “The Making of Americans”, Marguerite Duras’s “L’Amant” and “Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein”, Samuel Becketts “The Endgame” and “Waiting for Godot”, and further the litterati Céline, Cioran “de l’Inconvénience d’être Née”, Celan, Musil, Thomas Bernhard, Adornos “Negative Dialektik” and “AEsthetische Theorie” and Horkheimer-Adornos “Dialektik der Aufklärung”, Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer etc., etc. who were all iconoclasts in extremis, we had to do a fine job in articulating, accelerating, igniting them. then also the french poststructuralists who had gradually and not so gradually bashed all notions we were ever familiar with and landed Freud-Nietzsche-Marx in the trashcan. but a generation has risen and came up to the task. of them, Mick is one and it is in his superexact poetic acribic lemmata (as in an encyclopedia) in this book (and others before) he captures the landscape-psychoscape mistings of psychotic sociuses and inframental arches of insanity and psychiatric abberations (in antipsychiatry still the apt way to respond to these accreted hypersocieties (Basaglia, Szasz, Foudraine, Laing, Fromm, Lacan, Cooper) ) in shards of individuals, often either dead, roaming around the dead, browsing along death, a precise mappology of the noir necropolises of our time. part of the intensity of Micks poetry lies in the fact that he doesn’t write a tourist guide to Palermos’ or Paris’s “catacombes” but demasks them as societal and very much in our scope now, as we see it in the street, cities, in our houses, in our fucking lives. as I am “reading” his latest book “Longshadowfall” it is not convential reading. it is as if the poetry prose (divisionisms we have already let fallen like a ton of bricks in the ‘80s) resists itself against reading while, when one comes within the impetus of da stream, figments of wordlineage, repetitive allitterative wordglueings, hypnotically phraseology are beginning to intoxicate you. this goes further than any complexisised postconventionalism: it is that and, the transcendence of it. we’re also the facebookgeneration poets postflarf a kind of NY “Die Collector Scum” anticollective yet transdimensional fringist fuckist movement always in to write mirrorly as it is at the same time exposure of “what it is now”. Mick, me, David Mclean, Greg Podmore, Carolyn Srygly-Moore, Ryan Link Ralston, Jacques Andervilliers, Linwood Jones, Christine Murray, Reuben Woolley, Lisa Gordon, AC Evans, Dom Gabrielli, Thamyris Jones, Tara Birch, Lee Kwo, Carrie Ann Warner, Margarite Zaatara d’Arsinoë et al et al. this is the flowing mist of authors emerging up out of the ocean of facebook. without forming a “school” I guess we “let the world speak” in 1000 styles and perhaps with similar (not the same) experiences. that Mick’s writing isn’t without personal reverberances as also reminesces shall be evident for all who dive in the intensely written often achingly scorching as strangely alluring “fine poetry styles” yet without the usual corewords: flowers are made of flesh where surprisingly Mick, these flowers, Rafflesia, grow in the Malaysian jungle. (to B ct’ued) (and with superfluous citations)

with these, to an accumulative point mere listings of words, the delivery of the message happens more in a tactile as an a priori communicative way while this perfunctory chosen series of lemmata expresses precisely that function of “linguistic communication”: in the illustration that it is idle. not that we have here a text formulated without the utmost precision and deliberately used placement of each word in the chosen ensemble. to a degree that it is almost unbearable the language is mastered and using our hard, strange habitualisation to insert meaning into read words we either succeed not or we succeed halfly in while we’re already urged to read on. this is a book best to be savored with two pages at a time also because one can barely know where one’s at when closed halfway on a page. I now laid a marker at the place where I still read: the toilet as we say in Europe as in the AngloSaxonWorld they say:”bathroom”. it is there I’ve been told men read their “man/uals”, newspapers and well, poetic and prosaic tractates. this is nowhere to be meant that this is “toiletmaterial” or to use a word Mick often used in earlier texts: “pissoir”, “abattoir”, etc. but it is ironically there we still find the rest and concentration to meet texts in a relatively calm environment and can squeeze the most meaning out of those written considerations. now they are all that but not of mme.de Pompadour in the Trianon here, for instance we see these hued, painterly and haughtily imperative possibilities of what has been written in the repeated “what” at the end, as one imagines uttered in all indifference able to have been mustered. and it is precisely this quality that make these texts “of the time”. here we have pinpointed descriptions of athmospheres willfully also broken off as to not deliver your average “scientifically overaccurate redundant” info; the “information” precisely is much more of “what there is” uttered as if in a smokey jazzclub or “what it is” in the gritty flatfelted porncinema. we’re loaded in the night and what the fuck is your destination if I may care? “listings” amass there where promising initiate messageforming grow out of the text and as if decided in the writing suddenly breaks off or change direction, if need be brusquely. there is still another way the texts in longshadowfall are getting the “disinformationist” treatment, as in their place beneath the arche of abstrahation on a scale of dense abstraction towards on the other side where Mick sits “in the zone” and whole areas get infected with this quality of what is a “rant”, “description”, “mappology”, “athmospheric floating”, “radicalisation” while the real radicalisation still is the strange evenness with which this all is “curated” and in its overall promptness present a tome of masterly new Irish as global, postBrexit and extra [=out of] Brexit litterature of bleak times and affirmation, punk.

[longshadowfall3 litterary tactics] there are still other tricks with which [Mick] shall be aimed at a tapering of languages’ directional urge to hostage us within clusters of meaning undesired or totally inaccurate yet forcefed by litterary petit mals of penitentiary tendencies and inframetalinguistic cryptic iconology. Mick tricks in the language itself using unforeseen tropes and counterclusters. one strategy is to break a quasi-sentence at erratic places breaking the build up semantic threat using syntactic brusque, punk slashes unstrategically so: strategically, in anti-esthetics which enriches his poetry. within an impetus one reads a thread to be surprised by a sudden halt after the slash of which a whole other clouded topic is charred. slowly this counterhabitualisation by the reader builds up to take what it takes to read this ongoing da stream with wariness and conspiricist microcriminology. this is writing in our time that, writing is disabled in writing and as I always have maintained Wittgenstein and Adorno didn’t formulated oppositionally positioned adages with [“worüber mann nicht sprechen könst soll mann schweigen”] and (A) [“das unaussprechliche söllte mann versuchen auszudrücken”]. hybridisation and postironic complexisation are from this time and they unite these adages while as PTSDs these statuses now became accurate and prepostcataclysmic syndromologies. never and nowhere to reach a crowning of a creationist Disney utensil. inmidst (“en milieu”) of the “what there is” (Peggy Lee) we start to write and aim not at an aim anymore bc there has been raucous decades with projection to a no/future and it is here we find ourselves on the mosaic of maps Borghesian as Rothkoan as Sanchezuan the ennui, of these resp.writer painter as couturier a secret regulative of esthetics of the upstart of a new millenium. yet also from these ombré shades of artistry layers shall be shedded while Micks poetry leaves a trail of difficult to track landscaping letterant/sing and almost a sinojaponese conveying into “cups of characters” tomes of life brandishing in their achingly acuitry. the “characters” are placed in loose clusters not always safest housed to commit to science, poetology, readerreception, bookeconomy, in fact fucking up all these instances with a certain ease, “je ne sais quoi”. one of my drives with writing was always the hope someone would be outraged with it; Mick can also be sure of that. still a bit about the asiatic impulse of Micks “iconology” and “iconoclast charactergroupings theory” which, form mistings, clouds, liquids of dark tenure (like the parfum of nasomotto “black afghano” and yes it smells like) with sometimes some torn lightshards as if seen from inside a cloyster. Irish this, English and European.brexitist undeniability to touch old hearts of yonder and hides of jaundice. so the slipt in asiaticity obscures further toothpaste white reception and comedy figure sincere politics or terrorism. no religiousness here. David (McL) is pleased with this and so are we. it is also a litterature of unbearable openness falling apart together with the wordlemmata as ruins the roaming of which can prove satisfactorily rainy and grassy with bony finds and forensic sondations. the cups of sinojapanese “characters” shall read as Mick writes: “them”, “journey”, “into”, “unto”, “not”, “ashen”, hereby lending the listing (Linnaeus) an open quasi taoist zen inconclusiveness, the one word/character/icon/paintbrush partly harming the next or specifically soften what already is decayedly soft. then I also saw a tactic which can be an editorial factor as well as an anti-esthetic factor the evidence of misspelt words but I have a feeling that to leave them in was Micks choice and it is a good one bc the radical unconventionality gets quadrupled with this. as Bas has made photos without a filmroll on purpose or exhibited in a dark room where none could be seen. a painting was painted of a city and then pollock, baselitz, kiefer, beuyslike totally overpainted with dense and destructive scrollings, lines criss cross completely obscuring the city underneath it was the time of the baader-meinhoff, londonderry, dublin, el salvador, vietnam, LA riots. that, a litterature (or artform) should take radical stance with the art itself becoming inintelligible (and with this, intelligible bc it is the mirroring of what the fuck is happening), is quite the rage or, not. that facebook provides podium, stage for letterings and imaginings still disturbing enough to acquaint no readership nor reception of presented images harbors a sign of the times. in short history of facebookparticipation all has changed and nothing has changed. cybernetics and internet are becoming more and more vehicles to scabrous advertisement yet to take it ALL in is what they think they wanted as well as the negation of what they stand for. Baudrillard: [“if all is power, there is no power”]

Lesbian Flotation Aids by Scott Redmond

San Franciscan bookstore

Invited me invitingly to the aisle marked ‘used lesbian fiction’,

‘Used lesbian fiction’.

‘Used’. ‘Lesbian’. ‘Fiction’.

 

Does it mean novels and prose of lesbians who had been used?
And if so, what had they been used for?
Were they made to run on treadmills to power our banks?

Or as flotation aids for amputee otters,

Or perhaps they were used as emergency scarecrows?
No,

Probably not.

 

Perhaps,

It meant used in a much deeper, more oblique way,

Like used up, like chewed up, like spat out.

Beaten up by a world of discrimination, looks out of the side of the eyes

                                                            Of strangers

                                                            When hands are held in public.

By remarks of ‘oh, which one are you, the butch or the femme?’

At dinner parties up and down the social strata,

By pay gaps, and fights for marriage and cries of sins,

Perhaps the lesbians in these fictions were just used up by the world.

Or perhaps,

They are just books that have been owned before.

 

But if the books are at all accurate,

It’s probably both.

Just not the otter thing,

I don’t think.

optional mathematics by A. A. Reinecke

 

Bio: A. A. Reinecke is a writer, playwright, and poet. Her likes include caffeine and the correct use of Oxford commas.

Reading Backwards through the Yellow – Interview with Carolyn Srygley-Moore by Loring Wirbel

1. Why did photographic images become an integral part of this book?

 

         CSM: Initially I asked my editor, Azriel Johnson,  if I could include a few photos. He suggested a full mixed media selection, half photo, half poem. However, I couldn’t begin to cut half the poems in the book. As far as i’m concerned, each poem acquires the necessary crescendo toward the end theme and end section, emancipation.

       As for photography, it’s my second creative love after writing. Therefore, Azriel suggested phasing into each of the sections with a photograph. I did not go for theme, really, in selection, just a sense of what was, poetically, to come. The library of photos comes from 2015 to present, commencing with my visit to Nashville, TN to visit my mom. We went to The Parthenon, and I grabbed a few photos there: one of my mom, 89 years old, confronting the giant statue of Athena.

 

2. You have a unique style with phone-camera. Oblique angles, many black-and-whites, unusual filtering. Did you develop this by trial and error, or were you intending to make a particular vision?

 

CSM: Phone cameras are tricky instruments, as tremendous in rendition possibilities as they are also limiting. The poor man’s photography, as it were : I  shrug. It fits in my back pocket.
Being a visual art , photography became exciting to me when I first began to shoot. I’ve been trying to capture the visual through many modes since I was a little kid. The angles etc that you mention perhaps have evolved for myself since 1970. I love the effects of black and white photography. Just as Ii love black and white film, the juncture and crossover of polarities enthralls me, with the resulting greys, always necessary in portraiture. And in worldview.
The filtering comes and goes with how playful I feel. Or if the shot fails, how can I correct it. Or do I feel like working grain into a pastel or chalk effect. Do I want the lines to appear blurred, or clear with the ramifications of the pure, the distinct. As I work I feel like my bin of art supplies is at once at hand.
I think my photos express the playfulness  I have in interpreting the visual – in interpreting the world: in trying to maintain presence of light within the darkest shot,  and beauty even in the banality of existence. Even in the hovering homeliness, even ugliness, of life.

 

3. Your last book was themed according to place. This is a series of poems from 2013, except for the last poem. How did you decide on this particular collection, and why poems from that year?

CSM: The two books that are being released in my name this year are both organized around time, each for different reasons. The compilation of this manuscript occurred in scouting my output of 2013 and seeking pieces I most appreciated, found most accessible to others. It has taken this long to publication only because Yellow did land somewhere in 2014: that didn’t work out, not for hostile reasons.

    I did find, while collating those poems, that the book separates as if organically into sections that finally climax with the section “emancipation.”  I don’t recall if 2013 was a year of cutting away the blue parachute strings into an uncertain freedom. But this book indicates the culmination of such a personal achievement.

     These poems of 2013 were largely triggered by a loss in my life. my hound dog Ben. He appears and reappears, as fraction, as fiction or nonfiction,  throughout the sections, primarily in the first, which is why the section is called Ghosts Along the Wall.

     There is a scene in Charles Olson’s poem ‘The Kingfishers’:
“When I saw him, he was at the door,

          but it did not matter,

          he was already sliding along the wall of the night,

          losing himself in some crack of the ruins.”

     This scene recalls to me how it is, being that place of ambiguity while leaving that place of ambiguity, a figure dizzily ripe with anonymity and historical constraint. The will to change, as Olson says, does not change. Yet who doesn’t desire sameness, stasis, lack of transition? Loss of my dog Ben was huge in my world. It infiltrated everything, how I looked upon micro and macrocosm alike. He was a validation of Self and Other amidst human deceit; in this manner, almost the absolute I seek, in the end a dog nearly deified.

 Drawing Hands is the 2nd full section: a dip into the human-all-too-human as Nietzsche wrote.  The human at its worst at its best. But the scope of this section is  circumscribed.  Limiting. Hence onto the next section.
The second to last section, Resisting Plath, is all about trying  survival even when the birds are singing in Greek.
The last section of this book and the theme therein is the acquisition of emancipation. From what? Our wounds are ghosts our human egos our human inhuman experiences: our desire to trespass the margins so much so that we see things as they are or are not. So we hear the birds speak as Wolfe did before her death, or are driven to deleterious ends by the sorcery of language. In the end we leave our limitations. Perhaps via deity, perhaps via agency, perhaps via simply self-actualization. I for one insist on the possibility of redemption, if not by familiar means.

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
none but ourselves can free our mind.” – Bob Marley, Redemption Song

This song, and theme, has very personal resonance for me. When I graduated from
Johns Hopkins, I spiraled into a deleterious mental health catastrophe, and as this was occurring, I would sing Redemption Song through the Baltimore alleys, often ghetto, that I walked through on my way to whatever might be my destination.

 

4. Tell me about the untitled poem from 2017 that ends the book, using a quote from Dickman, and why it was included.

CSM: The poem of 2017 that I chose to include with a book of 2013 pieces confronts the nostalgia of the book: it was written the week the Big Bomb fell on a cave overridden by ISIS. It was also scribbled in the hour of my exchange with a friend regarding Trump, war, etc. My friend is a 100% Trump supporter. I am not.

(“Do I disagree with her because I am in pain, and she is superior because we
disagree?” – line from poem.)

Through this poem War enters the picture. World is no longer microcosm but
macrocosm. Gandalf is really necessary now. But it is not Middle Earth. The poem
indicates that the writer has not seen the irrefutable maple. They say the only ones
who love war are those who have not seen it. What president said this? And what
is the maple?

             The inclusion of the Dickman excerpt from ‘Returning to Church’ simply reinforces
the wish that prodigality to a world of absolute truths exists. Perhaps redemption,
even, perhaps God still exist amidst the dissolute fragments of the postmodern world.
God has been lurking throughout these pages with what Campbell called his many
faces. At the end the fragments might come to cohere.

  Here is the book’s finish — with a photo of Stella and Ben: “Look Ben, it’s a new window!” (A piece of furniture had been moved.) They are forced upon a new world;
a world forced upon them.

 

5. When you survey your work over a few years or a few decades, do you see a particular evolution, or is it more a process of circling around, with imagery informed by changes in your life over the years?

CSM: Although my work is deeply influenced by morphing of factors in my personal world, family dogs rescue self God or lack thereof,  I believe it also to be deeply imbued by my greater worldview, the angles taken by my involvement with the world at large in all of its dimensions, many of which i do not know. I have worked grassroots with persons living with AIDS in the late 80s, and later with a variety of persons of need, at present individuals living with traumatic brain injuries, nervous system disorders, or others. The section of the book called Drawing Hands feeds specifically from my experiences with the people I work with, for as I help them, so they help me.

    The imagery of my work can be seen, in part and under microscope, as a process of repetition, nearly of recycling. Just as I may photograph a dog or person over again at new angles new light so in poetry do I return to an image and if I do not use it I warp its resonance.  I’ve been doing this since I was a child and I’ve been told it was a poetic strength rather than failure, the comforting reliable stopping points in the lake edges sea river where I see language settling syllables once spoken. Stylistically my work has merged, although in these pieces I rarely evoke pause through intraline spacing.

     A circling revolution, evolution I mean. Each poem being a revolution of one’s own work. A mutiny of the poem prior as it were.

6. If you were teaching an English class in the year 2150, would the poetry of Carolyn Srygley-Moore be assigned to a particular school, or would it be completely idiosyncratic and stand on its own?

CSM: My first books have been placed into the classification of postmodern, and although my work certainly reflects the postmodern awareness, one manner in which it differs is this: that school espouses the absence of absolute truths, yet I am constantly in my work seeking those truths, almost as if I believe they exist.

     You’re funny — surely I am not boundary-breaking enough to stand alone in my own school:  I have experienced what it’s like to hang out with other poets and artists who held the same arguments as myself, smoking pretentious cheap cigars, gulping nonalcoholic beers: maybe I will have that opportunity again, although at present my efforts are extremely independent.
Yes, I crave solidarity, I also gravitate toward an almost autistic mode of working language. I want to be original, so much so that I expose myself to the written word in short spells, attention span also being a factor.

 

7. What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite cartoon? What’s your favorite song?

CSM: Color? Teal blue. My client says I cannot wear the shade teal green, so I have acquiesced to the blue.
Cartoon? Animaniacs, especially Pinky and The Brain. How wonderful to see a brilliant Laboratory mouse and his minion try to take over the world on a daily basis, only to be sabotaged each time, mostly by the minion’s ineptness. Anti-fascism, especially relevant in our time, in all times.

     Song? Bowie’s ‘Changes.’ Olson: ‘What does not change/ is the will to change.” I love the persistence in this song toward a greater meaning of self, of the relation of self to world. I like its affirmation of the voice of youth, that youth knows of what it speaks.
Also ‘Nautical Disaster’ by The Tragically Hip. Great song. I recall when I found this group, and realize now what a loss it will be, with the singer Gord Downie in the final stages of cancer.

Book:
Reading Backwards through the Yellow

Photo
Facing down Athena
The Parthenon. Nashville TN
Robert Srygley and Mary Pierce

Eve sees the End by Fianna (Fiona Russell Dodwell)

Eve sees

Eve grew Steve. They grew, Eve n Steve, tended bees; strewed seeds. Every street grew trees; seeded new streets. They expected resentment: Serpent’s sneery eyes between ferns; Keeper’s legs-knees-feet; grey-green jeers.  Elsewhere edgy Emmy hedged her bets, kept fleet feet, met every beetle-creep, sentry-sleep.  Ely’s elders tweeted, begged less greed. Sheets pressed deep red cheeks. Ely’s levees seeped.

The next events were never well remembered: Steve n Eve expelled themselves. They slept between tents; trekked, veered west. The clerks rebelled. Empress Ellen, never there when needed, left the next week. Her greedy cheeks, her greedy feet, her helpmeet Emmy, swept between the elders. The elders were entrenched.  Yet we knew when the defences went; when Ely’s temple fell: fletch-embedded, the Fen Decree flew news.

Few were left end Twenty-Seventeen. Ellen, Emmy, less well-dressed, never meet, knee western streets. Steve and Eve? They settled where they fell; grew fewer trees: these were replete.

Even Stevens

the End    

till then- by Michael Mc Aloran

I/

 

death cast

 

violent as the unknowing of it

all/

unspoken

 

sheared/

skinned

 

of the next till then

 

the breath broken in the half-light

 

my unseen

 

traces of naught

 

I/

 

nothing of

..

From ‘All Stepped/Undone’, published 2013, Oneiros Books…

circus- by Michael Mc Aloran

of the burnt bones and yet

the circular eye/

(absurdly)

 

in the drapery of

tears

 

sing gladioli

 

I shit

my skull my starry death

 

into a vault of

the redeem…

 

steel held

 

combustion of heart

burnt black

 

the scar’s breath given to take from absent lung

 

circus of clear blood

asking of the never/ more…

 

bound cries fettered by the obscene silence cleft still

 

till stillness

 

claimed/ undone

..

From ‘All Stepped/Undone’, published 2013, Oneiros Books…

what will- by Michael Mc Aloran

the night’s claim

sudden as

 

restless death in fields of shattered glass

 

and the reek of air

lest shadow be/

 

I asked of

 

the cadaver mist of silences absences

 

(claimed/ yes or no)

 

I take from the dogs what will/ what will feeding/

feeding

 

fucking the life

from the idle light’s

 

indifference

..

From ‘All Stepped/Undone’, published 2013, Oneiros Books…