Saturday, April 1, 2023

Three Poems, Mark Wilson

 
Initiation

Mug’s game
ludo-swirl
textual
reconnaissance
through the
subterrain
of ledger:
its recto 
stained verso
calibration-
dance of
de-cluttered
pagination
choreo-
graphs
breviary-snug
moveable
feast-board
slides the cuts
sideways
upcycling
found refuse
to installation-
ideograms
What method?
Don’t be too
methodical
& laboured
in welding anew
scrap metal
stamp coin
with impression’s
style Lear’s
snubbed profile
nosing grass
ant-as-centaur
boils down
grande basse
don’t take
yourself for
anything more
than mug-visaged
as you whirl
ludo-hemisphere
at Fortuna’s
tart behest
for one
final waltz
in the piazza
of burnt vanity
inhaling only
from ink-
stained digits
this amulet
of a smithereen

of ash 




Recital

Applause as life-sentence.

You’re only democratic
with the dead,
a tyrant to the living.

Recital is self-execution,
to their strained laughter
(still it will be performed).

Present in body, absent
in every other faculty.

Automated & enunciatory:
jaw-clamped , oesophagus
of sandpaper, murmuring
your sheet-music tirade

prescribed to the point
of proscription.

You are mouth, pure
unadulterated mouth.

Applause as jury-trial.

On the razor’s blade
(Occam’s or the drawn sword
of your Hari Kiri?

Who can readily discern?)

Preamble more oracular
than the composition itself.

Hardly sibylline,
your collocation
of fragments & shards.

Gists, sauced piths which are
rag-bagged, then dropped

into the goulash.

Intoned with Epicurean
indulgence, this: 
your cuisine-macaronic.

Language is an armoured 
vehicle, bringing menace
& wholesale atonement

in all its inky contrail.

Applause as solitary confinement.

Won’t someone pass me
the hemlock through this

semantic-grille?



Book Contract

Contractual in ink’s
haemoglobin legalese
masking the mutual
exploitation leases its
dead-hand clowns gadfly
signature-piece formal
overtures undercut brio
of imagination’s paradigm
traces ironia steel-serrated 
laughter excruciating

Covenant’s spilt
blood cursive’s
momentarily

pristine



Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: 'Quartet For the End of Time' (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), 'Passio' (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), 'The Angel of History' (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and 'Illuminations' (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is the author of a verse-drama, 'One Eucalyptus Seed', about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two, as well as a tragi-comedy, ''Arden'. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review, Rasputin and Le Zaporogue.

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