Hampton

 

Beachcombers inspecting what amounts to Hampton Beach glance inland occasionally, wondering amongst themselves, Hampton, does it exist? Travellers, diverted from their usual Glenhuntly, or rather Glen Huntly, route to a replacement bus to Moorabbin via Brighton Beach, wonder to themselves about the track less travelled, the stop they may never visit, the proportions, if any, of so-called Hampton. An answer, if here is one, quickly vanishes in the rear vision mirror of the replacement bus that has other destinations in mind. Rumours and stray indications arrive, nevertheless, of somewhere that is in substance what is referred to in geographic and socio-historical terms as Hampton. Artists, like Clarice Beckett, have rendered scenes with placenames very close in proximity to what is called Hampton, paintings suggestive of a village in the distance, respectably getting on with construction of residential dwellings amidst ti-tree and sandy outcrops, with period cars parked at a straight right angle to the camber on a road vanishing into trackless bush or opaque bay. Ongoing historical postcard suburb series on Google Image confirm the presence of the Lido Tea Rooms (ca. 1920), the Hoyts Cinema (ca. 1950) and Hampton Street, Looking North (ca. 1980) interspersed with frames of verifiable Hamptons in Middlesex and Virginia. Hampton Court Palace is a distant prospect. A colour piece from an old newspaper scan declaims that one of the pluses of Hampton is that it’s adjacent to Brighton. Coincidentally, I received an email from a friend who claims to live in Hampton. Quote: “Hello Philip, I would be very interested to read your suburb pieces. Hampton has changed considerably since we moved there in 1976.  More high-rise, along Hampton Street and adjoining streets. Our church has 17 attendees on a good Sunday. I don't meet anyone I know, in Hampton Street. Still, it's only a 25-minute train ride to the city, with great Bay views between Hampton and Brighton Beach.” Evidence accumulates, but still not sure exactly what to say about the existence of Hampton, it was thought opportune to make an idle detour along the track not travelled to the epicentre of the question. Half a dozen Jaded Bayside Commuters (JBC) sat at half a dozen equidistantly separate windows, staring blankly at the medium high-rise dwellings that had replaced the ti-tree dwellings of Beckett, when not staring blankly at their iPhones. From the safety of the open carriage doorway, photographs were taken as evidence of Hampton for future reference (pictured), but in haste as the doors starting beeping to remind everyone of their existence, then slid shut again. Beachcombers from distant and equally unverifiable parts (it could be said) can be assured, there is life south of South Road, a home amidst the sprawl where bayside rains fall then stall, a place of being that has survived the postcard age.

Twitter

 

Image: Chapel of the Upper Room, College House, Christchurch  Ōtautahi

These flourishes of signature ending written letters, transcending the mere guesswork of the blessed receiver with a positive name and perchance kisses, today are tied in ribbon in Shoebox 2021-2023. Now there’s talk today of mail deliveries every other day, as electronic correspondence supersedes copperplate, or scrawl even, its metallic signoff the best we will get, and a hard keyboard kiss. X, formerly known as Twitter. These emptied woodland spaces subdivided for appliance-friendly maisonettes on the plan render no regrowth for insects and peripheral birdlife. Scrub is laid low and removed, scenery turns into density suburb, the soil a polished surface crisscrossed with tyre prints. X, formerly known as Twitter. These day markets where need is met and connection is made in raucous birdlike conviviality and the smells of ripe fruit and vegetables, find the checkouts a warble of ‘cash or card?’, and bellbird scanners chiming with timing. Yet too soon come the legions of self-help gnomes, reducing transactions to the power of 1, converting the buyer and their need into a franchise’s slave and a password at a blinking screen. X, formerly known as Twitter. These skyways where migration catches everyone unaware, winging it again for dear life from here to the neural landing pad the far end of a transcontinental ocean, formally known as eggs. Byways trailed over by great surfeit weights of jet plane, satellites Leonardo-like networking the ancient star patterns way over the top, before turning to space junk in a comedy of comets, falling to Earth where they mark the exacting exact spot. X, formerly known as Twitter. These brave village habitations turned bravura by nature that today are one megacity upon another, talk the talk of unending expansion, their millions needing food, their fossil masters buying up fuel. Such megabooms and megatrends blow the megaminds of myriad visitors to megastores, crossing one wire with another for the latest fix. X, formerly known as Twitter. These sizable bytes of English, set out as if lapidary from a reader’s distance, borrow certain ringtones, certain prosodic methods familiar to Quiller-Couch Edwardians, as if in the belief the common reader had the patience to listen to this someone emulating at some level the birdsong cadences of the uncaged ages, sent from their iPhone. Whereas meantime the grammar of machine, a compliant regurgitator of unimagined humourlessness, compiles empty empires of text, turning them into a running nose of prose, sans rhyme, sans assonance, sans performance, sans experience. X, formerly known as Twitter.

Pencil

 

Pencil Role Call. Camlin Graphica Drawing 1031 5B (India) filled whole notebooks with brainstorm. Chung Hwa 6151 HB (China) inscribed erasable call numbers inside flyleaves of borrowed library books. Columbia “Copperplate” 700 2B (Australia) added to the endless shopping list that, once ended or misplaced, 2B began again with a new list more copious than the last and equally likely to be left somewhere in the rush to get to the shops, and then a third list, and it was ever thus. Conté Crayon de Couleur (Clichy, France) took to fresh sheets of blank paper with all the spread of the spectrum and detail of a prism’s pyramidal edges. Crayola Deep Blue (United States of America) was worn to a stub making depths of the ocean and miniatures of sverdrups, waves of fine wood with deep blue edges curving from the sharpener. Derwent Pastel Pencils (Aylesbury, England) conjured childhood of immense shapes in a short time, completing hours with primary highlights and muzzying backgrounds with leaflets of soft blotting paper. Eyeball Janome “Golden Sword” 780 (Japan) underlined choice phrases and entered observations in broad margins and empty end pages, an entire extension of the poetry in the book itself. Faber-Castell Watercolour 352 (Germany) outlined haloes, tea saucers and grass blades. Farb-Riesen Lyra Color Giants (Germany) heightened the graphic drama with colossally impressive results, bumping about the place. Kirin 940 Yellow (Japan) combined with Kirin 840 Silver resulted in a folding screen ensemble requiring tissue paper inserts to avoid smudging. Koh-I-Noor Progresso woodless 2B (Czech Republic) left carbon footprints all over the place. Marbig 2B (Australia) voted Yes, in a word, at the Referendum. Micador College 4035 2B (Australia) mixed with Metallic Mauve from the same stationery company delivered the customary and desired design. Mont Marte Signature Water Colour 4000 (Australia) coloured in the sky that wasn’t cloud over several hours of close attention to graded sfumato. Rexel Blackedge No. 218 (England) builder’s pencil did the job very well, thank you very much. Smiggle three-sided colour pencils (Australia) coloured our world with sunshine yellow each day, coloured our world with happiness all the way. Staedtler 110 HB2 (Australia) saved several thousands of dollars in tax. Tip-Top 319-No. 2 (United States of America) figured it out in a lined school exercise book. Toho & Co. Godzilla merchandise pencil (Tokyo, Japan) wrote the script that sank without trace as other ideas came to the surface, a sustained mixture of reason and dream. Wolff’s “Royal Sovereign” By Appointment HB (England) wrote miles of perfectly level script ever since the days of mileposts.

Christmas

 

Reflection for Christmas Day, 2023.  Written by Philip Harvey for the pew notes of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne. 

Words are spare and essential from the people in the Christmas stories, if they speak at all. They are too busy about giving birth. Or else they are terrified, when they aren’t watching, sorting things outside their regular experience. They follow signs and ask directions. But really they live in response, absorbed in wonder. Words might get in the way. No one is asking for their opinion. 

Their attention is being drawn to the Word. This unlikely assortment congregate around a newborn child, like a scene off a Christmas card. Their example of adoration may be adopted by anyone, as congregations through time meet again in proximity to the stories and the all too human person generating this wondrous activity. Because this is always simply a beginning. We have the rest of the year in which to hear what this person will come to say to us, the Word speaking words that keep revealing our lives. The Word is abounding in gifts. 

Nowadays words can be cheap about Christmas. Everyone has to have an opinion, usually being all too ready to share those opinions with others: ‘December, it’s the most stressful month’; ‘I’d have it every second year but my family says, no way!’; ‘It’s just a rip off of some pagan holiday’; ‘What’s to be joyful about with the world in this state?’; ‘I can’t wait till it’s all over.’ The clichés do their annual round, as people settle for grumpiness over gratitude, consumption over consideration. 

Yet all these passing words too congregate around the surprise reminder, made steadfast in places like churches, of the Word coming amongst us. Far from sliding from view, the Christmas stories and Christmas itself are sung and preached and celebrated and emulated everywhere, as though they were a regular experience. Love is placed at the centre of everything. The Word that can explain the truth about ourselves, changeable and desirous as we are, comes into being. 

Like the little congregations in those stories, we arrive to be here now, to try and understand the nature of this inexplicable event, ever an abiding mystery, to attend as they did to something more than just the same old same old. Waiting in silence, we listen to what the Word will tell us next, in word and deed.

Richmond

 

The green-light button slides Made in Melbourne door to attention bump for passengers onto elevated platform before reverting to beepbeep door, they alighting into morning sun, bright and semi-cheery. The peppercorn crush underfoot scenting the city side ramps at North Richmond station, here accountant and shopgirl go again down to reality. The golden gateway of the migration boat floats firmly above winding stream of trams and talkback breakfast motorists, street kids about with nowhere to go but a vape pipe and bad phoneline. The transcendent techno orchestrating from wound-down windows in Victoria Street traffic, focused DJ behind his wheel revving oblivious to line dance of street walkers. The Mekong digraphs for grocer and lawyer running up rundown Edwardian shopfronts peel with time’s heat, their named humans unlocking glass doors and setting out A-frames on chains. The eucalyptus pods bursting red flame filaments in murals between dim sum cafes, background to rough sleepers getting their bearings where they sit on the footpath, in Tiger beanies. The cut-price tuxedo warehouse windows reflect passing pedestrians in daily denim and tattoo punkoid and sensible tie and cotton tie-dye, their reflections lithely outpacing stilted showroom mannequins. The lime helmet, near the brewery’s Great Wall of Abbotsford, atop a buckled road sign separated forever from its hire bicycle alone, where schoolboys too busy raving computers and the weekend would think of kicking it down the street. The Skipping Girl with timeless timing descending ascending her neon bar at her new address, that maybe the passing tram passenger, receptionist or brickie, looks up to contemplate now daylight has brought her to a standstill. The blue building foursquare of Baltic build-alls in big boxes, the monster complex of Victoria Gardens beyond beckons the hungry and greedy and lost and gainfully employed into its cantilevered entrances semi-cheerily, their hasty shopping lists look. The facadism warehouse conversions and postmodern apartments layered undulating named for premodern riverine idylls, wherewith random appearances at an upstairs window or burst of convertible from gutter level garage make for signs of life. The eights balancing on Birrarung water their oars winging and wading the sepia surfaces, last December laps downstream dreaming of future autumn carnivals. The peripheral vision cliffs of Barkers Road cutting ivy over stone, a tram driver passing through the looking glass east. The moneyed walls of jointed stone and dappled iron set emphatically against the streets of Studley Park hill, occasional front gardens with referendum Yes placards at fences, unremoved in place remaining Yes for the foreseeable future.

Iniquity

Reflection for the First Sunday in Advent, the 3rd of December 2023.  Written by Philip Harvey for the pew notes of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne.

 

Iniquity is not a word we hear every day. It is not the first word we use when complaining about something or someone iniquitous. It would be unusual for someone to say of another, that their problem is their persistent iniquity. Yet, when we read the paper, browse the browser, glance at news screens, a main theme is a world of iniquity. 

Wickedness, sin, vice, lawlessness, the synonyms are familiar to all of us. Though when Isaiah uses the word he seems not simply to be talking in such specific terms. Iniquity is a state that we fall into, easy to do and much harder to extract ourselves from. Our hearts are drawn into this state, such that we find excuses to prolong the condition. At its worst, “we all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” We live with our wrongdoing, persist quite willingly, while longing to be free of it. Isaiah discerns this as separation from God: “there is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you.” 

Far from treating this as a simplistic equation of righteousness versus unrighteousness, Scripture takes time to describe the intrinsic relationship between ourselves and our Maker. It’s not just others’ problem, it’s our problem. Those who “remember you in your ways” will be aware that “we are all your people”, we may be forgiven and known, where our iniquity will not be remembered forever. 

This God, “who works for those who wait for him”, remains present. In this, the words of the Gospel are insistent as those of the Prophet. To know neither the day nor the hour of his arrival is to be on constant alert for that moment. Distractions and diversions, excuses and tiny litanies of iniquities, are not going to cut it. Overcoming separation, keeping watch, staying awake are imperatives. It is a message repeated often enough for anyone to hear. 

Given the choice, this makes sense of the ecstatic opening to the letter to the Corinthians, residents of a city not unfamiliar with iniquity. Thanks are given to God for the grace given in Christ Jesus, “for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind.” They are told that “he will strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord.” 

Isaiah 64: 1-9, 1 Corinthians 1: 3-9, Mark 13: 24-end.       

 

 

 

 

Airport

 

From the plane: 

snow on the mountains above Christchurch.

Crossing into the Drop Off lane is half the battle. Swerving taxis have a mind of their own. Climbing the ramp, the airport comes into view. Missing are the old signs for International and Domestic. Muscling ubers behave as if you’re competition. Parking is miss and hit if you’re not careful. Finding a vacant opportunity, we signal into the gutter. Lifting the one piece of luggage permitted from the hatchback. Recalling the Vietnamese driver yelling from his tram at a pushy car: okay, you want hatchback, you get hatchback! Sliding doors invite you and your wheelie-case onto the concourse. Looming are squadrons of robots squat in squares on the bright marble. Swirling travellers negotiate the robots, attentive but anxious. Sliding your grotesque passport photograph into a cradle, the robot lights up. Greeting you by name with instant recognition, you wonder how the robot knows. Curling luggage tags snake from an aperture. Whirring of luminescent slot delivers your very own boarding pass. Stunning as it seems, you recognise what it is. Checking its seating arrangement, you learn you will sit near the cockpit. Half-wittingly you search for a human to approve the one piece of luggage. Smiling, someone in Premium asks if the case go on the conveyor belt. Winging it, you had already slid the curling tag through the handle in a quadruple Möbius strip. Lifting the case into place you hope to see it again at the other end. Disappearing through rubber veils it’s a weight off your shoulder. Ping go phones some areas, and more ping tones. Missing the old customs already, communication for example, the human voice (to coin a phrase), you head in the direction of customs. Resembling a production line, it is approached via a labyrinth of queue cordons on posts. Rotating with rolling cylinders, hand luggage and coats and other hard objects whisk off in containers towards the unflappable x-ray. Removing your belt (buckle thereof), you hold up your pants as you enter the metal detector. Glowing, according to the monitor, is something in the back pocket. Arresting is the officer’s objectionable request to pat your backside for what is glowing. Annoyingly, you temporarily lose your unflap, by the official public threat of being handled. Turning all your pockets inside out, they’re empty. Calling for the supervisor, the officer is disconcerted by this “difficult customer”. Feeling his way, the airport customs supervisor explains, as much as to say, they have  a job to do. Knowing you have nothing to hide you offer to stand beltless again in the scanner booth. Astounding, the second time the scan cannot detect any solid evidence of soft inner glow in your back pocket. Wondering, as you walk towards facial recognition, what that was about you are shaken by a close thing to a frisk. Sliding your passport mugshot into the recogniser, you long for Wilde times, when it was enough to declare your genius. Standing on your dignity, the feet outlined on the floor, you must face the truth, you cannot recognise yourself in this tactless robot hell.

Helmet

 

Lime helmets bestrew the urban landscape. Separated from their lime bicycle or lime scooter, even more elegantly, e-scooter, lime helmets rest quietly as tortoises at the juncture where their motorist bestrode the beast and bestrew the headgear. It is what it is. What it is, is it. It is it, what is. Like other exotic imports, lime helmets pop up randomly in unlikely locations, a wonder or a weed depending on viewpoint. Their outsize appearance is what? A Martian mushroom, a smoothest cactus, a globular bulb, a football triffid. They roll roundly in the sunshine, they catch raindrops when left upsideup. The legal requirement to protect the head is a nicety of the ninety percent. The other ten percent have forgotten, if they ever learnt. We, not being there at the time, assume they possibly didn’t care, one way or the other. If the hat fits, don’t wear it. It is a case of leaving their brains behind, as the 10% wheel off into a future that is ever before them, void of basic cover, freely hair flowing. The Newtonian collision of cranium with bitumen, forehead with foreground, mind with matter, is incidental. And, just as they dismiss the law on mandatory wearing of helmets, so e-scooterers defy the laws about taking their beast along footpaths and crazy roadways. They weave along the wrong side as trucks heave into view and road-ragers veer around corners without warning. The question of whether lime vehicles have laws that apply to them is moot when their riders have sidetracked all commonsense, leaving their helmets behind them. There it remains, solitary and significant, a canopy for green thoughts in a green shade. Such thoughts circulate under the braincap of lime helmets, an air that’s its own small atmosphere. We can only wonder at the fresh green shoots that ping like neurons in that sacred space. Were they meant for the age of penny-farthings, are they actually as lonely as they appear, or reminders of care and protection? It is what it is. Count yourself fortunate. This, strangely, was not the destiny of o-bicycles. Lemon yellow, these imports were visible beneath brown waters of the Yarra, whence they had been ungraciously hurled by mindless card-carrying layabouts. The glowing frames of those sturdy beasts accumulated beneath the tidal flow, their cause not aided by a lord mayor calling them “urban clutter”. Steady income flow was unforthcoming from the yellow tangles, murky bubbles rising from their lemon helmet vents. The vagrant layabouts needed to invest in a thinking cap. Lime helmets think back to those days of 2018 with a certain relief. Left a while in unusual places on the board, like pieces in some game with evolving rules and a rotation of users, lime helmets await the next shift in their fortunes. They dot dull patches of Melbourne with hardy iridescence. They keep their own counsel.

Internet

Iso-mandala No. 177 (October 2020)

Each person their own internet. Sometimes I wonder about my internet. My little corner of the internet, I mean. Not that it’s a corner, given my reach extends in seconds to all the world’s “imagined corners”. The only corner in this exchange is the corner where I am found at the time, in home, library, fast-moving Mitsubishi. Surfing like a Californian, objects pop up in my path, products I lack interest in, reminders I long since chose to forget. Waves may be a long read, idle interruptions, a mean meme dumper that tempts me to shut down. My path is dripping with clicks, but to what extent this is my act of will, or the waves’, it’s a matter of guesswork, of calculated chance. My invisible path closes over each time, like a lost line of Keats. My internet was a sandpit, before it became a desert; a paddle pool in the days before it was tsunamis. It’s a relief to meet someone who has never used a computer. I try talking about my internet in the third person. His internet is a dragon that daily may flaunt colours extravagant, or then breathe a fire of dismay. His internet is a toy, a dream, a rest, it will bury him in images, or weary him unaccountably with geometric melancholia. It's useless keeping these grammar games going when war breaks out into my internet. Live updates turn events into sports coverage, as each news flash corrodes my hardy emotions. Dozens of reactions to updates by friended friends lend to the corrode, as I effortfully try to meet them halfway. The corner of the screen is the centre of my minute-long attention as I try to think of what to say next. War is over, if want it. Left to its own devices it would become more storage. It takes me to make it get up and out in the morning. When the power zeroes, when servers crash, when I’m feeling bereft, I simply remember my favourite sites and then I don’t feel so what do I feel but the blank screen and the view outside my Windows 10, the common explanations that my internet calls home. My internet is but the everlasting threads that trace from thereabouts, home. The giddy bytes that bring transitory luxury, a plethora of postcards, will turn to rust. My internet seems so transfixed by selfish motives, could it ever be reduced to selfless giving? A huddled attention-seeker seeking what I might give, is it much more than a tireless exposé of directions home? If home is the comforts we find each day where we belong, now? Or the day of the plug arrives, the day when the plug is the server serving up this multiverse of imagined corners, the plug pulled on my little corner of the internet too, as it happens, so that home must be found somewhere else, beyond my Windows, the upgrades of my Apple, somewhere that is there anyway, having been so before my internet was ever tiptoed into, as if by some accident.

H

 

[H]

 

birdsong Harp could transcribe were fingers that swift magpie wren lorikeet

squiggly words turn Hard rubbish into sublime rejects line nature strip

white wands of number nineteen primavera Heatwave cherry blossom

another anther cipher tumbling black dots collect Honey in sum

long sliding brushstrokes saying Horizon in words what cannot be said

fuji t-shirts hats sunfilled undies Hoist lines aflutter upsidedown

sloppy words ask how many points does it take to make a Hakea

a fleeting resolution never to write even one more Haiku

 

grounds leaves cabbage compost Husks their ragged ends black soil rich with promise

rooftops treetops full moon whitened up quietly, the Half moon blacks out

ink squared inhabits House exhibits elements reasons for building

bumps in the night mouse Hen fox tawny frogmouth? inkwell isn’t saying

window on garden nightfalls when Hand grand with words clicks the bedside lamp

even then lavender wet leaves oregano cense clean night air dreams

 

Halloween

 

Lawns are being turned into massacre sites. Once more it’s the season of faux cobwebs over fences, but this year the spiders are three times larger than last year, spreadeagled across windows or crawling artistically from letterboxes. It’s familiar weird, but this year feels different. Consumer excess has multiple skeletons dangling from porticoes and eucalypt branches. Skulls emerge from soil requiring the attention of a host of forensic pathologists. By the time the frisky kids in superhero costumes hit the streets on the 31^st, it’s a wonder what they will make of their normally death-denying neighbours who have turned their front gardens into graveyards. It’s a question that hangs in the air, skeleton-like, as I walk the streets on my constitutional. How many gravestones must they navigate in order to ask trick or treat? Gigantic plastic pumpkins on footpaths are another hurdle, several times larger than any known pumpkin and seemingly the results of a nuclear accident, they come in a lurid orange more excessive than the hair dye of the erstwhile American president. What are the young witches and draculas and ballerinas and gladiators to make of their neighbourhood, as each place they visit competes in making their home the bestest horror movie set in the street, dripping with blood. The other week was the referendum. It reminded us that the entire land of Australia is a graveyard, where the dead are many. At least, that was an underlying reality of the referendum, which in simple language terms was about giving people a voice. Remembering those who have departed this life was an essential, though largely unmentioned, reality behind why people said yes or no to a voice. The autumnal resonances of Halloween in our consumer culture have been transformed, necessarily in Australia in October, into a springtime funtime for children and occasional adults. They run the odd side, the even side, more interested in treats than tricks. Neighbours oblige. They dash unthinkingly over the land of roadmap grids and ‘creepy’ front gates, over the land where (see above) the dead are many.  The tricksters and treaters seem capable of believing anything, even that consumption is eternal, that cobwebs will be rolled up and stored for next year and that their cut price skeletons will find a home in an op shop. Yet behind all the friskiness and ‘scariness’, oh so spooky, other matters are waiting to meet them. Matters that the calendar in days following has already had in mind long before the frivolous decades of K-Mart craniums. Questions, like what exactly is our relationship to all the living and the dead? Can they be bought? And anyway, what is a saint?

J

 

[J]

 

Broken handles cracked cornices ended cities

Jeremiah was a committee breathed aleph breath:

stand behind this line, backend blown out tongue!

How do committeemen say, bulldozed into the sea?

 

Aim in this crushed context, their job in a word

to push rubble into airshape, restart knowing.

Overnight be exile, over again, all over

razed to the ground not once, twice, centuries.

 

Would you say Jordie they’re the first book

distress signals from inside the nowhere

I can’t breathe, spoke in their own version?

 

Centuries to unchoke, to unbroke buildings

letters of tears flames rags eyes closing

heat and force wouldn’t you say, curling fragments.

E

 

Drawings of neurons by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934)

[E]

 

Effervescent neurons electrifying eons

eking selfsame connects, eeking extra effects

evoking impressions, provoking expressions –

ask a question and get an equation.

 

Endless their fibre ends gloss touch-and-go eros

etch tiniest scars, each network of stars.

Emails send consequence, emails receive sequences.

Energy, eternal delight, softens at night.

 

Extraordinary minds! Every one finds

yes and yes to guess, formerly just suggest.

Neurons become errands, clustered events unerrored

 

light years under skull dome, brightness beneath bone.

Cell emitters the factors, the exclusive actors

beeping low beam in dreams, steeping broad daytime’s schemes.

K

 

[K]

 

Prague. Autumn Twenty Twenty-Three. Dear K.,

the lid lifts on the world, but what’s for supper?

I reply to yours of the 1st inst. Suffer

I have your number so have a nice day.

 

New paragraph. The cravat is back and very.

Bureaucrats have bungled again alas

glass newspapers call their faces faceless.

Archduke is a word in a dictionary.

 

Next year is your mortal centenary.

Bravo to all your unburnt manuscripts!

I have to answer this phone call, okay?

Public statues praise entomology.

Every room in town somehow comes to grips.

Until next time, as they say, they would, K.

R

 

[R]

 

Last week I dreamt aisles shadowed in volumes

a sortie of bees deluged me to the floor finite

an oaken door led into vast Raged night

great Rings of light in skies geometric allumes

fading sideways replaced by Renaissance

constellations crosshatch forms Scorpio Aries

the end of all things, in a word Redundancy

the all-known lost (again) prospect of absence.

 

I dream tonight of a boy in Rising fields

learning the unfamiliar names of colours

his book of wonderful the first Read of its kind

how language yields, appeals, offers up shields

he walks a Real metropolis of others’ private valour

free only in the first instants of ties that bind.

O

 

[O]

 

O the great O that today is unlettered cloud

emerging and merging from horizon irrepressibly

familiar hue rhyming with true inexpressibly

expressing the oceans, continual and prowed

 

that yesterday was something hour upon hour

words could not describe or art redesign

and tomorrow apparently might be just fine

though later in the day 95% showers

 

meets the O of the eye immense in its place

sensation surround secure from the ground

teaming spectrum multiplying forms

 

blinking away specks bright light darkest space

searching out abound discerning astound

picking up letters words before the storms   

 

X

 

[X]

 

a time of unbend a time of expend

a time for inhale a time for exhale

a time of insane a time of explain

a time to secrete a time to excrete

a time to withdraw a time to explore

a time for homestyle a time for exile

a time to revolt a time to exalt

a time of accept a time of except

a time to repress a time to express

a time of meagre a time of extra

a time for bedroom a time for exhume

a time to forget a time to expect

a time for efforts a time for exits

a time to retract a time to exact

 

B

 

[B]

 

His thoughts about her, her thoughts about him

as much a mystery as anything said

bitchin’ in the kitchen, together in bed

intoning on phones, taking life for a spin

minutes days years lost to Biography

as the best of times lives behind closed doors

not even hid in a subordinate clause -

all that writing still forever Plan B.

 

Inexplicable, their very presence

their friends their secrets their hither and yon

earliest memories, latest diversions

their voices their faces the so-called essence

the happily ever after the once upon -

all Biography’s but the Beta version.

Y

[Y]

 

Yes is the start of possibilities new talking new walking a face

you look at again anew & faces anew words crossing forced borders

that change boundaries untick fences ways of being that do not have

not worked a long while put aside with yes memories generations

of how that way did not work that by asking for new ways

is yes saying Y of a seedling the Y of together possibilities

bless into being listen to the hundred you & me tongues change

death places into ‘deadly’ places meeting in a word start to replace

 

No is going to get you nowhere maybe you like going nowhere

a place where you don’t need to know anything much at all

as if you will learn something & find yourself agreeing with yes

no is not seeing the landscape in front of you not listening

not seeing others not hearing them just other names N of blank

N of fence from here to horizon dead no time to listen  

Z

 

[Z]

 

Z is for Folly. Z is for Blindness.

The president who acts thus plays the Fool.

His walk-on has Kyiv in its sights, like cool.

A walk gone zigzag, stranger to kindness.

 

Laugh at him, he’ll shoot you out of the skies,

a streak of Z flames for no good reason.

You question his script? So, what’s your poison?

All in the delivery, zillions of lies.

 

Z too, was class clown turned president

inheritor of the oblast Wormwood

inventor of the stunt where he dams the gash

knows it’s for keeps, infinite incidents

go nowhere fast as only farces could

stare at the end, the Z, the dead, the crash.

Image: ST(Z)P WAR. Graffiti in Shoreditch High Street, London, made by Matt Brown and posted here at The Londonist: https://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/ukraine-street-art 

The

 

Ode to The          

 

The, The Table of English vocabulary

each object placed there in all seriousness

The Very Definition of Veryness

The Be-All of Given, End-All of the Ordinary

The Trumpet of Terms, tongue’s tone most timely

inaudible almost amidst consonant currents

genderless bender of converse’s torrents.

Everything stops for tea, then starts with the.

 

Shall I compare the to a summer’s day?

The’s reliable, the is The Genuine Article

able for The Holiday and The Catastrophe

autumn’s survivor, winter’s thorny stay

spring’s eternal surprise each every particle.

So long as we can breathe lives, so long, the.