Béatrice Machet # 341 Something series .... addendum

# 341 Something  Series    (addendum, January 2017) 

Something. Approximately projected on the windowpane. Without or with glasses obviously one can see it. A mirror would be read. This reflection instead is just surprising, leaving one still if not dumb. It’s no writing it’s no image and one’s eyes try their best to accommodate … could that be the lines to be followed in a near future… or is oneself this blurred light trace though glazed and shinning … Better to close the lids. Better to cover the ears. Better to listen to what is shuffling and seething inside. Better to feel the reassuring beat that says: a-live-a-live-a-live-a-live…

Quelque chose. Approximativement projeté sur la vitre. Avec ou sans lunettes on peut le voir c’est évident. Un miroir serait lu. Ce reflet est plutôt simplement surprenant, il laisse coi si pas bête. Ce n’est pas de l’écriture ce n’est pas une image et les yeux font de leur mieux pour accommoder … est-ce que ce ne sont pas là les lignes à suivre dans un futur proche … ou bien l’être n’est-il que cette claire trace floue bien que glacée et luisante … Mieux vaut fermer les paupières. Mieux vaut couvrir les oreilles. Mieux vaut entendre ce qui bouillonne et frissonne dedans. Mieux vaut sentir le battement rassurant qui dit : en-vie-en-vie-en-vie-en-vie …

Robert Verdon, #409, tombstone

naïvely, I plan a vertical garden in my head

220 storeys high, claret-hued, through it wind and rain blowing

the terraced sun falling on each balcony and seedbed

and floors of meshed rods with cucurbits growing

this is a green tower

in which only gardeners live

every green hour

like Yggdrasil, it shall give

it shall be a monument

a living tombstone

to dead gardeners everywhere

 

Agora Garden by Vincent Callebaut 2005

Rob Schackne #209 - "How dramatical"

How dramatical
when the music fades away
and the birds fly off!

Rob Schackne #208 - "Invited today"

Invited today
to feel someone's space cotton
my grandmother's cheek

Rob Schackne #207 - "To be healed again"

To be healed again

until I'm feeling myself
then leave me alone

Robert Verdon, #408, Beyond Banking

walk into the bank and up to the counter

a smile forming on my lips as I walk up to

the counter

the counter with someone in green behind it

who is me in a mirror, and I am confused

(from a distance I look like a superannuated ’80s radfem)

till a lady comes up and serves me with a trace of apology, at

a computer on the kind of table once reserved

for

people to fill in deposit slips

not a counter at all

and I hope the shareholders are happy

but then this is the co-op Beyond Bank and I am a shareholder

and I head back to my friend absorbed in the bookshop

wondering how they stymie robbers

but then maybe I am just getting old

and I can’t

counter that

can I?

Kit Kelen #371 - epitaph

he died of milkshakes but a long time after

that's all his tombstone said

Efi Hatzimanolis #278 still here ii

broken rubber thong
stethoscope
heart beats in toehold

Rob Schackne #206 - "The trucks thunder past"

The trucks thunder past
the music schools and factories
I don't really care

Robert Verdon, #407, when you are twelve

they had a ham radio mast in the back-yard

with the station in the garage

it was the mid-sixties

so everything felt modern

progress was assured now

we were nearly on the moon

my first fumblings

with either sex were unpromising

nuclear annihilation was not assured

when you are twelve that’s what it’s like

Rob Schackne #205 - "She taught me gentle"

"She taught me gentle"


She taught me gentle

I'm forever grateful
for how she laughed
when I said I love you
and how I remember
whenever I am brutal
her big blonde body
riding high above me
her dear nordic face
smiling while I came.

Robert Verdon, #406, apostrophe fie foe fum

O thou lissome strands of pearl barley,

frolic with orbital weather fit for tacking sail,

lace up my gravied herds of dace and fellow cyprinids with extruded square planetoids

and filibuster in a hot cathedral all the sage’n’onion weekend

with magnetic boob tape and the queasy rendering of spoken mumbles and ship’s biscuits —

be gravimeter-shy of Gulliver when probed like a crescent on a pink Wednesday!

Kit Kelen #371 - green

371

green

(for ataraxia)

the story of sunshine

is all abounding

love when it stops in

through the rain

tin of the tap

grey roof

cloud gone

so the colours show

green of the grass

and leaf green up

lichen and moss

moist green

not much to us but what we touch

everything within its means

beginning here

beginning there

stories of how

a certain height was planted

grew sky tipped

leaf pointing

wings have twigged

nesting in the all-around

one can still remember the tune

here's an eye out for

and here are paws of on-the-way

the words forget us as we sing

I call this being-here

the garden

you see

what little gods we are 

 

Efi Hatzimanolis #277 Fridgedom

3 days
in with feet
sunning in the third
movement of a concerto with strings
we our fridgedom of fruit filled with
anytime eating cakes
Italian Greek orange and lemon almond
with berries like rubies black grapes done to a sapphire
raspberries like my old pet's chin worn and sparsely
furred with folliculitis
blueberries possum scat
long soft blackberries who knows what
strawberries of no confidence in the year with no cherry
on top in the beginning

Kit Kelen #369 - eternity a word (for godsbother)

369

eternity, a word

that eternity is in us

lacks name or personality

it is a faceless thing, forgetting

there's no having been before

the rain comes, goes

in the rain-between, kookaburra

whose to call?

the bones revealed

mean just one thing

solidity and gumleaf ground

the ages see in that soil as written

all this ceasing to be

no more mysterious

than coming along

and as for thanks

bring palms towards

the raw applause

the mind's-a-blank

is going there

inward or out

the vanishing?

is there one to say?

life, the long question

not a series

because forgetting last asked

watching rain fall

after the dry

among my wonders

this most

knowing that no one is watching

how often I dance with myself

to this tune

Robert Verdon, #405, Modernist Revival

the history fairy was

raisin toast at a white wedding

a eucalypt bole

that kissed the walkway fence

that yard-broomed morning

on the sewing-basket lawn

brimming with complacent dew

a dawn with a trace of Trump hair

Rob Schackne #204 - Anyway You Want It

Anyway You Want It

Slam it

judder it
hard against
the tunnel
upside down it
spinning scythes
sleep well child
a foreign mist
zooms like Alice
there is a hole
avoids the blades
anyway you want it
there is a dream
of chainmail
strange songs
why do you ask
and who would you ask
the everlasting tongue
slides down the throat
the private thing
goes to work

Kerri Shying R - # 176 - Gan Bei

Gan Bei

 Take the time to take the time

so wrapped in rapt adulation here the current

holds us up  it goes unseen  who teaches  where

to see the   pinions  of the rip tide  there is

still such  a thing   as too late  no chance

finality  uneradicated  yet here where the world

whorls of zero one zero one wonders

Maxime Banks #9 - Blight Beginnings

Blight Beginnings

Origins can be corporeal or spiritual. 

Dark as soot

blight beginnings

cold as space. 

The sun devours a million earths 

while scapula revelations feast on soul food. 

Rice, gravy and biscuits, 

teacakes too. 

This land is burnt

acid intestines spirit 

red clay dirt. 

Where is freedom for the famished?  

Living this This land is burnt

blight beginnings

dark as soot 

cold as space.

This land is burnt.

1-2 January 2017

Making Things - Day 31 - Sara Dowse

At the Brezel Bar in Manly

upmarket bakery whose specialty

is pretzels I held out my hand.

The woman at my table – grey-haired

neatly cropped, blue-eyed,

remarked on my girdle of Venus

and the shortness of my fingers

in relation to my palm.

Practical, she said, though I was sure

she meant peasant, which is what

I’d always suspected – no aesthete me

nor even a skerrick of refinement,

a fire hand is what I have, which means

emotionally intelligent and surprise!

a tendency to manipulate.

Manipulate.  Now there’s a word.

How did it get to be derogatory?

thought I, munching on my pretzel,

pondering hot dogs as I did so

like those they sold on Coney Island,

under the Ferris wheel, next to

that creaking roller coaster.

It used to mean skill,

from the Latin for handful

and I believe in skill as I believe

in hands, more specifically,

in making things, I’m truly

in awe of making things,

and fixing things,

above all, with one’s hands.

We’ve lost that, maybe forever,

the wily machines we’ve made

will soon be taking over,

baking bread and pretzels without us.

It’s all in the head now,

bugger the fingers, the fiery palm

the touch of a calloused hand.

Kit Kelen #368 - after the heatwave

368

after the heatwave

how still the ranges sit

suggesting haunches

the orchard is thirsty

we all are

a little skitter goanna up

the ants are still wild with the heat

hope against hope they go

this end of the year

all beginning

so tainted with time till now

we have this mechanism prayed for

but I doubt that's enough to do the trick

hydration followed by immersion

that's the plan for today

I'll just be wherever the lines collect me

Robert Verdon, #404, equanimity

my mother holding me in the old railway tunnel

back to the wall

as people poured in out of the rain

on Mumbles beach near Swansea

and a huge-voiced man yelled out ‛Baby!’ in warning

Dad had got lost momentarily in the crowd

not reacting to this sudden shower in Wales

as though it were an air-raid

Mi Se- the mysterious colour by Emma McKervey #16

Mi Se – the mysterious colour.

The crackle in the glaze is no accident and would have taken days to cool,

days to complete the fine contour lines through the dour iron-green,

gently clinking in the quiet of the potter’s store as another living crack migrated

across the surface, the feathers of the phoenix merging with twinning leaves.

When ready these pieces would be passed on in secret, allowing the olive grey

celadon to become legendary in the dark of the Emperor’s hoard, the final pieces

remaining underground for 1000 years,  held by Monks who locked the Buddha’s

finger bone in with them after it had rolled  from the cleansing fire to rest at their feet.

Now in the museum of that cache are displayed many fakes in the cases alongside the true

of both bone and bowl,  but the true ones can be told by their nature, even if at first sight

the porcelain seems plump and unstately and the bone small and mean.  

Always the truth is told by nature when time is taken to look.