Five New Ideas - Part Three, THOMAS DELAHAYE

Civilian

Treatment of my first time out in plainclothes

Still at attention, more toward a window

Than a drawer, rendezvous with the middle

Steps with bad footing

For coinage, costs closing in

Making good on promise on arrival

Arrangement argument

Skin specific of networks

Stood up as flaxen reeds

To a tied together meal

Leaves gobbled

Why wait amazed at people

Never arriving to see them?

When on that current of drowning

Or desperately saved, will standard operations

Begin again? I must see to this business

You may give me one penny to do so

Reel ends flapping, people depart theater

Quick to tuck their skin back in

To wait for limousines 

Far away seems impossible

Scratching your no-name knees

Distantly lie on a bed

To be tickled

Evacuation

I’ll talk, I’ll talk

We live by the sea

Evacuate by land

Friends appear ass-backwards

In the corridor

Think this is a joke?  Stocks are 

Down, ruminants run free

We’ll all be fed something

Pre-chewed

And no buildings will remain standing

The weeks will wisely go by

Before our assembled husks are shook

By sudden rainwater

We are heading south

On lumpy terrain

We’ve stuffed our pockets

With produce past its prime

To swallow would be to retard our progress

Wipe out our ETA

Groundwater is property

Man Dying

Ahem thank you I love this bed

I want to lie in it and look out

My childhood window

And there’s my seventh dog wagging

It’s my smell she smells

What you told my face was right

It’s the moon that wakes you up

And gets you going, not you

Or maybe I’ll take your face outside

With my blanket and tent

And memorize it

After that you could leave but I won’t say I’m sorry

But anyway you’re not included

In this thing like my knees are

Like mountains in bed

As blue as a blanket

My sister knows just enough of me to talk to

So I listen

I have a timer it’s buzzing

Have you noticed my birthday only lasts a few days

I received a card from an insurance agent

Thanks but I have plenty of horse sense

Little plasticine horses that live on the bookshelf

Just in case I get sick (no prognosis)

But gnaw on this donkey bone

The blood moves to a catchment

First lunch

I love peanut butter and honey

But what about almond butter and mixed pickles—

Have you even thought of that?

On white bread naturally

Before you stop breathing

Race you to your stomach 

Regency

Preparing for a great comradeship

Or being pushed into it

Hot sand

Hot peppers for dinner

Night and day

Many opportunities on the front lawn 

Lakes filling up with water

Terrible fear of quicksand or sandstorm

Fear of sleep

As much as anything

Moving further down the beach

Pushing all the sand to one side

Got you first prize

A crown of hot peppers

Making you a regent

Excellency

Comrade

What of our friendship?

Yes, Thomas

We’ll always be friends

Let’s invite those who have already eaten

To dinner

Nothing can stop us now

Wind of It

What’s in a computer?

People are developing around me 

They must be confronted and stopped

Same here

Listening is the problem

Oh, sure, there’s always the courthouse

Why don’t they stick me in there?

I am without peer

Murderwise

If it’s a case of what I do or don’t say

It’s already on Broadway

New Haven at least

Or just tryouts somewhere

You’re invited, so are they

Personal and civic functions not far apart

Unity of place! 

Everyone comes from somewhere to here

You are one who knows

On your own with a megaphone

It’s time you moved over

What not to touch in the room

Paper, lamps, me

General public line up here

Tell me about the places you’ve been

Other than the airport

I’ve been there too

So long ago

And I’m there now 

Good for you, Louie

Thanks for asking how I’m doing

What else did you want to know?

Kraftwerk, Sydney Opera House, 25.05.13

group shots

footpath

Janice Kngwarreye

Evariste Luminais

Ugo Rondinone

Gregor Schneider

yellow dress

in the kitchen

me

heart

Five New Ideas - Part Two, RICHARD CHAMMINGS

“A”

Efran sat listening to the Goldberg Variations while gazing at winter constellations through his upper-story window. He knocked over a glass of wine just as the pianist splintered a passage Efran had never admired. After sopping up the spill, he spotted a man tacking up signs on posts across the street. It was public property. A uniformed guard from the padlock company nearby ran toward the fellow with the staple gun. Sensing trouble, Efran threw on his cardigan and ran down six flights to head off the guard who, it turned out, was a friend of the man posting notices.

They sang in a choir and told Efran there’d been a concert the night before that. Chuck, the stapler, had missed it due to laryngitis. Samuel, the security guard, advised Chuck that the freezing air would aggravate his vocal chords, and since he was also the male soloist, it was unjust not only to himself but the community that looked forward to the concerts. Chuck defended his stapling by holding up announcements for future cantatas.

Efran chimed in by stating he’d read “A,” the epic poem by Louis Zukofsky, inspired in part by Bach’s compositions.

“A what?” Samuel wanted to know.

“Damn,” Chuck shivered. “It’s getting colder.”

“Go home,” pleaded Samuel. “I’ll meet you in the rectory before the concert tomorrow night.”

“Boil water, drape a towel over your head and inhale the steam,” Efran prescribed.

“Already tried that, didn’t help” Chuck responded as the men parted.

Efran, who was actually shitfaced from his 8^th glass of wine (he’d spilled the 9^th), slipped just before the 3^rd floor landing and went ass over eyebrows down a flight, winding up in the ER with a ruptured spleen.

Anita Baker in France

Journal Entries

Tuesday: The conductor set the portable steps on the station’s platform. He offered his hand to steady my balance as I stepped down. A few minutes later, the train’s couplings rattled as the whistle blew and it lurched forward. I was greeted by an odor of algae mixed with Fiat exhaust.

A man and woman leaning against a wall sensed my disorder and pointed toward the shuttle

stop. “Merci,” I spoke my first French.

From my window cerulean remained the backdrop past 8:30 p.m.

Wednesday: A resort town with a surfeit of untranslatable expressions makes a visitor feel welcome. Diminished by this observation into ludicrous exuberance? I’ll try not to be. 

Thursday: Breakfast at an outdoor café with Delacroix’s journal and a French/English dictionary: Baudelaire saw Delacroix at the Louvre one Sunday morning expounding Assyrian sculpture to his attentive servant, Jeanne-Marie le Guillou, a Breton peasant woman, who came into Delacroix’s service in 1834. She oversaw his domestic life in Paris and at Champrosay.

Located brioche. Ate one too many.

Friday: “Sardonic” brought to mind sardines, the sharp metal band twisted around a key, exposing the can’s oily contents, which I detest.

Saturday: Ugliness any day over beauty; pretense mustn’t be tolerated.

Sunday: Slept poorly on my last night. “You said it was too short, so I shortened it.” This from a dream I wish I hadn’t had.

Monday: Bought a copy of Annie Ernaux’s La place as a departure gift for the trip home.

Our State Fair

The fair deflected attention from the highway with its rising tolls and trucks that hummed deleterious tunes. It left everyone to his or her own compulsion. A retiree awaiting the start of a demolition derby used his cane to point out the arabesques made by a biplane before it burst into flames near the Ferris wheel. The pilot crawled out of the wrinkled cockpit, waved to the crowd and proceeded to a side tent where a documentary on duck hunting was being shown. The narrator repeated “participatory obscurity” until a clown, still in costume after selling his supply of cotton candy, stood up and challenged anyone to locate the blind where the hunters were hidden. Gun barrels peeking up among the reeds were a dead giveaway. Meanwhile, at the horse show, an equestrian was thrown off her mount when her skittish sorrel balked at the penultimate jump. “Ernie!” her mother shouted when she saw the horse’s ears flatten as it approached the railing. The rider, uninjured, jumped to her feet and ran to scold the horse. It snorted in the dirt, reins dangling from its bridle, satisfied with the weight off its back. “What is your problem?” Ernestine demanded as she stroked the animal’s mane. “I’ve totally misjudged our compatibility, you immature sack of meat.” She was a levelheaded, perhaps intelligent, girl who realized an object’s aesthetic value is predicated on its functionality. Her mother arrived, grass seeds stuck to her slacks. She reminded Ernestine that the exhibition of ambidextrous gunslingers was about to begin on the other side of the fairgrounds. Ernie let the horse graze and hurried with her mother, arriving just as two cowpokes from Gulper’s Gulch appeared. She realized actual gunfighters never drew their pistols with both hands as shown in Monogram Pictures. Soon afterward, an octogenarian dressed in an antique baseball uniform was drawing considerable attention at the dunking tank. He wound up and threw with a velocity Bob Feller would have envied. The Fire Chief perched in the chair didn’t have a chance, and splashed the crowd with one plunge after another.

Petey

Petey made a pair of stilts and practiced walking on them. He’d seen a picture in a magazine of Giacometti’s sculpture Man Pointing from 1947. The caption said a companion figure was planned but was never finished. Petey couldn’t find a mirror tall enough to see what he looked like on stilts, so he went to a lake and stared at his reflection with an arm outstretched and an accusatory finger at its end. This pleased him. He threw the designs he’d made for the stilts into the water. On the way home, he took a shortcut through a park and into a clump of trees but struck one and fell. He dragged himself back onto the lawn. The stilts became entangled when he tried to unstrap them. Finally, having freed himself, he threw them under a hedge. No more stilts for Petey, he thought.

That night, discouraged by his failure at trying something new, he took himself to the Mocambo lounge. He knew one of the waiters, Bret, from the old days. They’d been extras in forgotten movies. Pleased with his table at the room’s center, away from the glass cages along the walls with their squawking macaws and parrots, he ordered a Singapore Sling. Faces of bit players he’d met long ago were scattered among a few of the surrounding tables.

He flagged a waiter after tasting his cocktail. “Pardon me, too much grenadine,” he held the glass at arm’s length.

“Of course, sir.”

Brett came over. “Sorry, Petey.”

“No harm done. Has Bogart been in?”

“Away, on a shoot.”

“I’ve heard he wears lifts in his shoes.”

“Could be,” Bret replied. He kept his eyes on his tables. “What have you been up to, auditions?”

“I tried to walk on stilts today.”

“Really? Bataille wrote a raven on stilts/goes into the eye.”

“Where do you come up with this stuff?” Petey asked.

“I like to read,” Bret shrugged as he took the menu to a scriptwriter new in town.

Road to Utopia

Phil Waynefil sat in his sled holding a compass indicating the magnetic North as a reliable direction. He was yanked by impatient huskies across the tundra with a vision of a baby seal disappearing with sea bubbles in a polar bear’s jaws. Finally a structure appeared. An Inuit woman with an ivory hair-band answered the door. She kept her radio tuned to a progressive jazz station as he slept on a futon. When he awoke, inadequately rested, he referred to the “pyro-specific walls” that the woman concluded were riffs on something he had experienced in a former life. She reconfigured the futon into a couch so he could sit up “while the sun’s glare does its dirty work,” as he put it. The woman hung a hand towel over the only window to fend off the light.

“Would you care for a Caesar salad?” she offered. “It’s been vacuum-sealed.”

“No thank you,” answered Phil. “A glass of Gatorade would be nice.” He could hear the ice shifting. Ribs of a portable heater’s elements glowed orangely in a corner. “How is it that, without fail, I anticipate what I’m going to bluster before switching on the tee vee to channel surf.

“Applicable signals prompt us to locate the remote while we sleep,” the woman suggested. She handed him the remote.

“Quel installation!” Phil belched.

“Exactement,” she responded as she filleted a violet grayling. The initial incision was precise as the wet gills shifted, shiny as mica, on the cutting board. His ichthyology lacking, Phil couldn’t ascertain what would be on his plate. The slices recalled the grotesqueries in a Grimm’s tale. Perhaps “The Juniper Tree,” he thought.

The TV screen was disproportionately large for the iglu’s size. Robert Mitchum appeared in  pinstripes. A ceiling fan circulated billows of smoke from a peroxide blonde’s Pall Mall. Blackened eyelashes spanked her sockets. She addressed too many questions to her empty glass and woke up the lush sitting between her and Bob, who was on-the-lam. The bartender juggled olives and mocked the girl’s insinuations with “ baa la do o say.”  The Inuit woman flipped the fillets in the sizzling pan. “This iceberg is nothing but one enormous sound-scope,” she explained. ‘You think what you like.

You’ll never get a response.”

“It’s even emptier than I think it is,” Phil blustered. “Can I use that towel in the window for a shower?”

“It’s only a hand towel. Anyway, Monday night—no water,” the woman removed the band from her peroxide blonde hair. “I’ve seasoned your fillet with ginger and scallions. Are you an ice fisherman?”

“I used to install satellite dishes,” Phil answered.

“Do you know anything about microwaves?” she inquired.

“Only that they scramble thought patterns.”

Five New Ideas - Part One, DIANA ADAMS

Culina

You were alone

You fixed the problem alone

Now the house is crowded

& everyone needs to be fed

A ladle in each hand

The problem of boredom was solved

Because you used your head

When in Rome

Rome of curtains, gardens and Augustus

& these delightful people

Who have been hunted down

& bound & gagged

To entertain us

With what passes for new

Frenzy

Do I need a governess

to prove I am a child?

Here come The Furies

Their drums remind me

of my mother

jumping out in front of the TV

The Furies are naked

& stinking

they have knives

Don’t move

or they’ll stick you

again & again

Who let these bees out?

I am stung & stung

with other children

A snake too

beaten with a club

by the aimless one

Lights on the Way Out


This galaxy makes me thirsty

I was hoping for a darker ride

with a few turrets

these cities think it’s all about them

they could have been ordered online

all those heads huddled over the same book

for me it’s different

I like my light grainy (ecru)

Fighting in the refectory

& powerful storms

that shook the bricks

& froze the burning candles

cities in black

thinking it’s all chemical

The Composer

The man in my dream

hands me a hammer

it reminds me  

of coconuts

too bad he’s based

on a photograph

in the police museum

a young man  

murdered with a meat cleaver

& stuffed in a freezer

part of his brain

under a simal-focal microscope 

revealing his musicality

his notes on copulation

his fear of disappearing

before singing something wonderful

Bat

little umbrella 

with a hell fetish

dried-up

on the shower floor

the dog ate you

like a potato chip

you could have been 

my kid brother