Category: Rescue Tuesdays

Mayday Mayday, it’s Rescue Tuesday!

I rescued this week’s piece from My Life in Advertising by Claude C Hopkins (p 205) and The sea by John Banville (p 143).

Freeze frame

Summer afternoon pocketing thunderous idleness in the dark.
Erotic encounter
covert kiss
black-and-white screen
flickering
fading
ghosts of desire sitting in pitch-dark intensity
for hours,
manic fumbling,
twitched satisfaction
deprive primal intensity;
confinement
reputation,
balls for breakfast
conscious phantoms lurch
from joy to grey
approve to disreputable
filled fingers to wanton waste,
picture-house main feature to forgotten poverty.

It’s Rescue Tuesday! I rescued this week’s piece from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières (p43) and Sons and Lovers by D H Lawrence (p107).

Convalescence

White-skinned daughter
simple embodiment of profound good
soul scattering naked comfort
like snowflakes in your presence
secretly swallows
your subversive blackberry words
from the black of fallen fruit
to the whiteness of snow
as wet as warm touch
softly
slowly
beloved feels
healing faith
scar of peace.

This week’s rescued piece is from The true dynamics of life by Mike Robinson (p472) and The pleasure of finding things out by Richard P Feynman (p137).

The observed effect

Listen stillness figured
atomic healer
how arranged life then
human mass
spiritual machine
self-knowledge synthesised
principled pay-off seduces life forces
chemical copies
mysterious physics are forces exactly as I observe.
Violated hidden parasites
inspire silence.

This week’s rescued piece is from Notebooks 1970-2003 by Murray Bail (p272) and Mind Lines by L Michael Hall and Bobby G Bodenhamer (p75).

Lines o’ the mind

Fingerprint painting meaning-maker
imprisoning metaphors
in small boxes
in hollow palaces;
command your queen
to initiate distinctions,
to understand magic signals,
liberate meaning
from difficult reality,
walls of limitations
determine casual grandeur:
smell your reframing choices
enrich your own box of magic.

This week’s rescued piece is from Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane (p105) and Flying the Kite by John Button (p31). Enjoy!

Dark kite

Fifty of the fattest
clumped hands
grabbed
petals of roses
on sacred rolling waves
in California.

An economy possessed.

Broken spirals
dashed arms
whirling in whitedown waters
clean cheeks
and fuck the flatter father
shocked the children.

Brothers, mothers, sobbing
a million marines marching
Jesus’s sacred tabernacle
angrily stripped
pickaxed
in red cement.

In Australia
an array of undernourished millionaires
panic.

This little rescue-ee is from Eva Luna by Isabel Allende (p217) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (p207).

Curious room

Beneath the hoping measured
narrow echoey train
was roar roar
was stutter stutter.

Machines in rows,
silently fluorescent.

Spindle factory,
quota weighed.

Damn bitches
in windowless cubicles
served the silent treatment.

Lipstick, ribbons, makeup, hair creams, boots, skirts
never paper-wrapped gestures.

Unappetising lunchroom leftovers:
beans and custard creams.

Walls that wear eyes.

I rescued this poem from This is not a novel by Jennifer Johnston (p33) and If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino (p148).

It’s that time of the week again!

I rescued this poem from Disgrace by J M Coetzee (p27) and The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (p193). What do you think? Or maybe I should ask how you feel.

Disgrace

Beer fingers pressed
his face towers
leaning like a lover
whispering wary affairs

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspmurmurs &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspno
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspwhispers &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspno

raise sweater
rip singlet
kick shoes
slip stockings

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspsays &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspno
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsprepeats &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspno

wracked forehead, mouth, shoulders, arms, hands, wrists, fists, buttocks, legs, ankles

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspsnarls &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspno
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspcrying &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspno

clinking movement
honey drinking
warm unfurled crushed will

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspno
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspno

heavy hands stroke folds
looped to bottles of misery
snake uncurled, hard against belly
intoxicating rock of female
clasped to a basket of heat
perforated prisoner

twitched, transfixed, then flicker
suddenly the idea of ice, blackening, double-towered, in waves
reared storm tilting soundlessly, quickly.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspRepeat &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspno.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspMeant &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspno.

Dead-man’s-fingers cover absence.

I rescued this short and sharp poem from End of the Night Girl by Amy Matthews (p61) and Mastery by George Leonard (p122).

Mastery of the night

Sometimes we breathe miracles.
Sometimes we thank black larcenous fuck
chewing curiosity on the couch,
lacking dark remorse
strangling charms
peeing persuasiveness;
every phony Einstein
catches nervous villains and depressed psychopaths:
from drunk to superhuman
let’s toast the holy hero.

I rescued this poem from Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt (p115) and Secret Wisdom – Occult societies and arcane knowledge through the ages by Ruth Clydesdale (p148).

Note: ‘jakes’ is pronounced ‘jacks’. It’s an old Irish slang word for ‘toilet’.

Asylum renovations

Her alchemy torments the planets,
his philosophy:
sour sweepings
from desperate universal truths pamphlets;
the lunatics, understanding divinity, drink hard.
Meanwhile,
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspteihr wolrd reraangred
their asylum
protected
they throw themselves reality
bake &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspflour &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspbake
pints &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspdrink &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsppints
loaves
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspand
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbspdrinks;
now, drinking champion