The maths professor and her fashionista husband

Objectively, equals, it could be said,
their flesh pressed
and then they could be expressed
as a venn diagram,
their point of intersection,
well, it was a hard thing to pin down.

A Sestina (po-faced), by Stiglitz

"The Arthur H. Jellings Collection of Vinaigrettes."


I have it on the best authority –
‘It was a heartless bastard didn’t blub, become involved,
When Les, a ginger temp, his lack of airs…’
A shock to find: I only cry these days at TV reviews, and rue
Instead the indifference, the revenge I’m walked
Through. Fluctuations, periodic surges; must


We poach and diminish, in a centrifugal egg dance? Must
Parts break off? Better to defer to waterfalls, the authority
That shocks unchoked planets of river into icing on the rocky walk-
Way (over half-chewed pills of orange skeet). I became involved
Involuntarily, a curve of fate. Andrew
Was there sometimes, on the banks of the unreconstructed Aire –


That much I remember. And now there’s something in the air,
Which strikes totemic at my guts – a cry that must
Be heard: He’ll take me down, and
Ruthlessly at that. But the long-run is a misleading guide. An author
That too easy, too useless, predicts the ocean calm after a storm. Involve
Yourself in this bended life? I haven’t washed for months, just walk


Into the river and splash water on my face for prayers, walk
Out again unclean and thus: imagined agents plot the poetry, the air,
Of my demise. Riposte riposte. A gaggle of sneaker wings: involved
Moths at an ur-sun. And the fucking triangle, at which I then must
Die. Do you/she talk now that she’s sired? Do those old facts still wield authority?
Do sex-crimes stay your hand? Andrew,


My approach is tricksy, but how else to suggest depth? To turn Gepetto too, and rue
The three degrees? To never call a truce? Know this: I didn’t walk,
I floated, and to unthread the whole magnificent… The Authority
Of the market is no surprise. The very air
That swives these purple plant corns, is as mustard
Seed; or memory, whose price is felt but subject to inflation (is involved


But lacks the agency of waterfalls). I involve
You now, involuntarily – you do not know you are my enemy. And
Rules, like mustard, like cartilage, fathers, are also snaked. This much I must:
Your continued excellence causes entrenchment. I walk
Because I bled favours from your guilt. The air
Is never clear, only scented. You have this on my questionable authority.


Must we involve The
Authorities? Andrew,
We walked on air.

bumper batch of memory poems, by Egg, F.

Rocco




Rocco, aged four, telling his recurring dream:

running down the slopes of a spewing volcano

narrowly avoiding with desperate leaps

the myriad streams of lava.

Sometimes he does it driving a truck.







stray dogs song, Mostar

dogs reading in their magazines –
oh it’s just because they’re int-erested
- stray dogs
the muezzin calls us most periodically
to knees

dogs dip their hindlegs in their tea –
oh it’s because they’re mal-adjusted –
- dead dogs
the bell calls us almost eventfully
to peace

dogs licking empty margarines -
oh it’s because they’re no lon-ger prehensile
- free dogs
they seem to taste of all of our history
and ease


abuse
an upright man came to tell him
what he was eager to hear
that he could trace the footprints
that had led up to here

that life was like the database
the grateful policemen’s tryst
that memory was the couch
at the psychiatrist’s

that each line in the mirror
had been etched by this or that
that causality is simple
that the face is like a map

there was the click of typing
as melting responsibility
a depletion of funds went unnoted
and a bright day froze him chilly

an overflowing drawer was cleared
at home without a word
it was enough he knew
the report had been interred




in a sighed future declarative with conditional ellipsis


a polite warning of mess, a touching tacit warning of emotional incrementum
offered the threshold-crossing
fun suddenly became weighed as ultimata,
aborted the operation

scared of a change
and wondering if retro-fitting mouths were what was required
(it started with deliberately pissed jeans in our garden)
that might lead to the eyewandering day street

and confessing the pragmatic want to keep scumbag options open
and not be introduced as one of them

so let the fish flounder
tilt, jolt and slight shrink

and then a slow and silent shrink
whose awkwardness was not really awkward except much later when its moment crystallised.

sure, there was subsequent even fulfilment
even under a particular pale roman nose
but there was never another road not taken
Was this a real fork or memory’s highlighter –
Hollywood made its confident claim.
left wondering and ungrown since then.



More rats and denty

That rough boy was right about how they fuck you up
and now holds a sardonic professorship.
Think about it daily on the trudge
at the third lamppost, look down,
at the oversize shoes that drew blood:
resentment has conglomerated on these, their successors.
Your life is like this, memory meanders on itself
or oxbows off stagnant.
Ask: why is an eyesore’s prominence on a map of misery
such mitigating cold comfort?

poems on the theme of memory, pt 2, by Fugaz Egg

The Rat Romance
-a melodrama-

hey man of steel, early adopter,
never without your airbrush gadget
your ears, electronically de-haired, yet such adept filters;
your girlfriend has learnt your official adolescence
like a history, or even a grammar.

Odd: to speak for
something so banal as truth
or at least against these lies.

I realise I am at stake: you are stronger and I disappear.
It would take a real effort to compete, for which I would need hostility, which would of course not endear.
I am checkmated, and burn neatly along with your plans.

It disturbs me that this surprises no-one.

You have just one in your inner audience –
that is true romance, to narrate and be believed?
She holds the clap-boards, and you carry a pic of her cunt.

There are those who could contradict... they must be kept friendly or dismissed.
I come to the conclusion, as onesuch, that I must have been discredited.
This theory marshals its facts instantly!
Every time I have contributed it is part of your plan.
It has been impossible for me to surprise, all I do is confirm myself (my new self, my self) – jealous, delusional.

mine leans to your side.
should I try to gain her ear?
This is an obsession.
D-cup storm–

she is for objective truth, what a time for an anachronism...

I am already without friends:
your revenge (were bullied) now enrolls me, I can't help but bring melodrama to my part...
[gasps]
One more thing – soon I will be subsumed, then as good as dead.
This writing is coded, but that for once has its justification.

You – reader – you must uncover its meaning
Passing my headstone, please
scrawl anything over the words there.

Poems by Strompeter

“To my last beautiful stranger, Love Maggie” (tranlsated by Stiglitz)

For our penultimate date
I took her up the Fish Bar
On Whingate and Barden Green,

Suggested to her it was working,
Would she like to meet my folks…
She murmured

What I thought was scraps –
A subtle grace –
But turning:

What if death is beautiful, regardless?

For a first date, well I…
Interstitial.

Years later took the bus with Blessing –
The smell of anachronism
Pressing autocratic Saturdays, there

Mike’s Carpets, splaying subprime, felt-tip
Exclamations: “What We Were!”
A tyre shop nearby?

Regardless:

The clenching, the asbestos that
That lifts away!

But on a first date.
And my broken wrist.

Now, hereat
The Cheeses Shop in Hawes,
Your own homophone pejorative’s why I dwell,
(till Facebook tells me who you married, that you bore).
And the loop (the flue) of half-requited illiaisons,

Jacket dedications…

If someone had told me that kids won’t diminish,
These sidling cock-thoughts;
But that nature, in trickle-down relief, a pact with God,

Well I…
My purpose sheer and splendid.

Plumb sadness
Disdaining ghosts
Beautiful compost.



"OU"

Will history forgive us buildings,
Like it does terrorists?
I stand on squares, a red-brick square,
An open flank, dog-hose quarters.

A curve-ball rots in the roadface,
Gravity-fed thermostat,
It’s pomegranate, ratted pearls, gravel-printed,
Knowledge quarters, ‘clever
And a superb skier’, devolution.

Here, the hedge. Rain-forest encroachment.
And droplets lodging like
A tipped spoon,
A water-feature,
Or a shoot.

As Peace beat War.
It’s always so,
The home support are most obliging.

My back-seat with infrequent forays.

The 25 pound matchball deflates.
Their hefty striker breaks my hand.



"Shift"

We lie back together:
My head above the water,
Toes at 10 to 2 on the overflow;
You bopping, gasping, refracted,
Pitching from the frosty stickle-down.

If death is real-time,
Then I’d prefer the truth of my inconsequence
In other futures

Than to watch (again) the grip I had
(that toadying internal rasp),
The silverfish,

Your unprepossessing eye…

You;
Of all the appendages I mistreated.


The water, unsullied for her.

Poems on the theme of memory, pt.1

Try to hold water in your hands



Try to hold water in your hands -
it’s obvious -
with time -
increasing volumes exacerbates this problem.

Our carry-bottles are full, no doubt, but-
the labelled essence is diluted
until it is nothing but water which we regardless pour cordially
on drought-ground that is ever-thirsty.

Better to rely on some familiar pools -
they lie in the shade of concurrent elms,
replenished by hidden springs,
enough hopefully to keep them from stagnating -
and maintain the illusion that it’s the same water.

Invite others to drink a draught only,
whilst keeping the secret;
they are led blindfold to the water’s edge.

Water’s secret: it only lends itself to us for our mass -
a transubstantiation devoid of significance.

Let us not be disconsolate:
we can redraft; be as free from the story-past’s taint,
from guilty templates and invisible scars
as this empty air,
which shakes out a formless laugh at remembrance.

Sachs - some poem

“Float”

Tommy, who was selling them the boat,
Pointed to the horizon,
Where the Clyde, beyond the Erskine Bridge, atlantic, where

That yacht, he said, that’s Franz,
He’s sailed around the world and hates.

What struck me:
Not the semibreve,
The Trappist artist sky, but

Cholesterol, his caulking,
Pitching stars and stripes in shit, his,
Like a Lodestar in succession;

Read disorder –

Read swollen mid-life odium;

(The children! The children!);
Arterial buoys.


"Snow"

Russian snow blows in across the Astroturf:
A beautiful rolling numerical panorama,
With prime numbers as goalposts,
Cuts us to size;

Bequeaths,

Limp vulpine tread –
Scalene fox-holes
And a slither
Between the flats.



"Harehills"

I’d rather it be something,
Janet ran it, or a nod.

But the toast.

Unswerving when it does come.

Lazy-eye Rapunzel,
Scarborough phenotype,
Putative earth-ma;

In her concrete postcode,
Face-dripping windows,
Solitary bombast,
Hex imagined bitch-slaps
And sending the cats for jewellery.

Which?

Every thought-bubble has agency
(lurching, like fifty-sixes from the park);
And would that I had swap
This qua qua bower -
Two parts of a church (Oxford, Lit.) -
For the Queen Veronica:
Furbished,
A volcanic postage gable.
The only boozer around,
And I large in it, and present.

The magic bullet I could have become.
This quirk, opprobrium. The feline spoils.

More poems by Stiglitz

“Joseph A Ceremony”

Words, the rheumy catseye of a heavy magic paintbook,
A judicious reading from The Prophet,
Deftly humanist, and fudges choice: your

Children are the will of life
And not the will of self –

Co-opted, mooned and mangled cooed your name

You, raised by wool.
The glasnost of your soul
Soprano to my porous ethics.

15 months a mute (the time inside, remember)
Still inhuman to me, and less ghastly for it,

Like the pair of queenflesh we saw:

Silent monogamists.
She gliding five behind as if the first were saying:

“Opal, emblematic though you are
Of all the love a man should want,
I…”

An old boy flings some Sunblest to the water
Breaks the contraposto,

Their wake overtakes
And peck as one.



"Geography, our Accident"

Sheep run through snowy fields
To afternoon feeding;

Man banned from carrying pens.

Cars,
Create ice-sculptures
As puddles sluice and expand
Through Lancashire branches.

Can we all think of her today –
When birdnest chandeliers
And piano-fingers silhouette
Against the co-efficient blue.

Tissues of flight-path. –
To help her on her way?

Undeterred
We rut and issue;

And the Pennines, zen-like,
Plump their health through
Morning’s dusting.

Quaquaverse poems by Stiglitz

"Self-love. Feeds the hive"

The old man’s words,
His city state,
As though the bible
Were glamrock, and we

Were not unduly foisted with this
One-fifty idyll,
Glittery purview
Physiocracy.

“If my sons don’t find a wife...”
He’d say, like we were
Mandevilles’ bees -
“My sister has three daughters”.

A hiatus in Bishkek.

Slip the supertanker
Of public rage.

Time for a nude erection.

But then reminded,
The vice of our writers
In double-spread
Colour-coded entanglements:

He made a pass at her,
Rebuked him for liking Beckett’s prose;
Their agents now fucking.

But when you see him

In the flesh,
Five-five in ferrety
Smirking jacket, vampish
On the step of the seat where he is,

Showboat seminary,
You forget he once moved you too
With a relative truth;
Paean to a stiff father.

And that bliss is
Sideways, not lineage;

Sisters,
Not muscular prose.


"Cosma"

Romance and dismal science –
Little corpses at teatime.

Sunset strikes like a possession,
Damning, and consigning blue
To the longest prison.

Flames clothe back-fence branches in violence;

And pink clouds effervesce.

This comes:

We must evolve post-haste,
Or gently peter out.

All else between –

This blinkered growth,
This progeny,
This deck of self,

This toxic grid of mastery…

Ahh.

These fierce quotidian illusions:

That I am man enough to make
A categorical pact;

That peace is a prison of crashing finality;

Dissolve in the trade-wind
Of your tessellating brow.

more ended revels, by Fugaz Egg

Teacher.


Lately, fallen to recalling times
when scorn wouldn’t resound after dark in an empty room,
and a stray glance meant something
at least in its own soft dumb pawing, asking.

Now, the last five years:
images of crooked fangs recede like horizons;
pad around Europe, haunt the margins of scenes
with imitation stuff further diluting memory,
for times almost drained.

This all drips (sometimes) into the vital Schrödinger ears,
poisonous, you might think, but their antidotic power is still such
even the cynic void is for them real, it
nullifies itself with meaning; and they
(redemption)
paint me anyway in those narratives I denounce.














Dolphin song

The time we saw the dolphin
From the harbour ferry
Arched back glistening with wet
And possessed of more steely symmetry
Than another two beastly backs
Humped against cold and bent amid
Drowsy winehaze, dimmed the then encroaching tide, black
That sharp suffering that gives way, skin tight, back, water
Clumsy, unerring but, plashless
Collapsing back into waves of sleep more pressing need
Undextrous as a fin as yet unimagined
A sunny day gave way to cold immersion
And a glimpse of dolphin back –
What sense of audience possesses us / them?

Quaquaverse poems by Jack Tile

"Prism"

Misty morning
gyrated colours found by spite
mixed and split

heavers grovel
sponge copter floats in glass
and launches light

grievous strength
powers the seven of them
out to air piles

eyes see it
colour be thy power
i see it


"checkers"

Manly twitches of curtains
saw that fracas
in the street

salty man breaks a bunch
always hurting
in the street

hide away you checkers
in your abodes
from the street

checking all the other lives
always hurting
from the street

not what you wanted
hiding this way
from the street

check this one check that one
now check yours
from the street.

more poems from ended revels, by Fugaz Egg

Isle

A state intent
Concentrate:
Moated by water from competition
And only familiar teeth to prey upon us

Fat Mantel feeds on what we exude
There are rich pickings amid that ooze

gratuity, take it, but

Our own teeth, when tried, may be sharp.
We are (not) communists
We are (not) scientists


Dedication: Denty

~I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about him. Of course, that’s what all this is about. A disjointed idea, but that’s the nature of the beast. I was saying: he’s a cultured fellow. A smattering. Typically. His one ear is like an upside down i. Quoth he: ‘full fathom five thy father lies, those are pearls what were his eyes, [and holding out his unspeakables, of which, nevertheless, we must speak] those are cats that were his toes, and that’s a bus that was his nose’.

[interlude and murmurs]

"Such a shame, his famous end though,I'm sure its how he wanted to go!

Oh reader daily coming.

If you're a nobody our crimes the laughable situation today, that's called no justice



denty. (denty #17)

but god man christ it was
littlejohn’s denty
(I think it was he)
took me aside and said
fuck this too short
tart
let’s go and pull some cheap
horror rubber
awfulness
to throw the book at one
to serve the sentence I will
in answering that there’s no rhyme nor reason
and receiving one’s marks
and disappointed or embarrassed
and there she is still
smouldering
inexpensive
with hair like seventeen
into the net
bargain
and dimples; breasts
how to cut sex
the erotic is implied
why then her breasts are white
still not done
a deal was going down
in our parlance
yes sir
it was
freeze frame on denty
he’d have [intertitle]
head back greasy back, laughing
and she still sitting at table
an invitation from glendinnings
a knee
mrs gunderson, are you trying to..?
no
outside, rain.
man, that was a time
but denty was no match for the overlord
his crushed knuckles
and the red paint,
daubed, and
I, nothing but a-hounded from town.

Quaquaverse poems by Sachs

"Fancy Dress"

I dreamt of a fancy dress party
I’d thrown but then wanted to end.
I’d gone as myself, only older;
Nobody came as my friends.



"West Leeds Junction"

He swam in God-consciousness;
I tread water.

The smokescreen democracy;

The Aireside stacks –
Their Perspex oblongs
Blazing open-plan disuse;

The phosphorous burns;

The Catholic in my parting;

Arrest my strokes.

Quaquaverse poems by Lux

"Middle E"

In the clock of carriage,
Reassuring, metronomic
Fundamentals slat and agitate below.

Through the pane, slow-light,
Velocity as flicks of landmark,
Suffocated in the hedgerows and the force.

All dark and rush;
But looking in,
This high-speed warmth and purpose
(Electricity luging oilseed)
Must seem a locomoted frieze –

Of frame on
Frame… I paraphrase.

His look is autofilth.

The smoking railway carriage,
Fans into the shadow
Of a gunman.

This ego, flesh and cruelty –
In antitrust cahoots,
And tantrum.


"Morning"

Morning comes -
In our own radio ideologue,
What silent vitamins my 4 shirts cannot parry
(undrawn corporate swatches, sweating in the white wind hours),
Linoleum pebbles pecking this voided hulk,

And a trembling edifice of leaves:
Orchestra of fingers
Behind my eyes.

Quaquaverse poems by Bandar

"Black box"

A conversation (with the springs.
And laugh into your armpits).
You (in my) yawn (describe tomorrow’s stroke.)

But (lately, then, I gently delve
And sense
A) skulk(ing intimation of essence
Tied) behind (the nose-side of my eyes).

It is no glimpsed epiphany.

A silent cohabitant;
Like the spiders that we airbrush.

A hedgehog that is self.

My black-box recorder.



"Hyde"

The park in intersections.

A sweating pen of pound-stretch fire, and
The whole identikit circle, there,
To wolf sheep.

I try not to envy
Their constitutions,

Brief protrudings.
Jaws to fuck and panel up, and fetching squaws.
Hands, glands on my primark, my maudlin thicket,
Post-anecdotal,

I may as well return to that old Slazenger I once turned,
Into what I thought was art
(That clenching time)

For all the chips I now hold.

Children of Boris.

Indifferent to the painted lady, cabbed and pinned, and timely cos we know
Your true address,

Your deeds and furnishings...

Their flaxon ethnie,
Daddy’s toys, untimely Christmas,

Become my glass-house

Conversation tax-break.

Quaquaverse poems to neither disturb nor entertain, by J. Font

this short pet.

how do you do? I am trying to answer to the words
I am not thin in my face
When I stand next to the window there is a thought:
There is a pillow; it is drying

I tried to joke just now about my pillow
Sometimes I write as if I were an American fellow, I think
Don’t pay any attention to it. This is our cool Moscow.

My son:
A reflex. He showed me his temporary tooth.
It hung on the threshold of his on the thread of his skin near his lower lip in front of other teeth.

He said:
My pillow teased me so I bit it.

The dentist told me to repeat this story about a disobedient pillow.
A woman of about 40 of such skill that we were on our way out when-
something wrong in his mouth
‘Where is the good brother, but a broken one, of others?’
‘Where is this short pet of mine? It was hanging here.’
Who would not weep?

In the north part of the Caucasus where her mother lived we (glad) went for our holidays during the summer and the (sometimes) velvet autumn.



germany

twilight missed the rave by a day
and walked the Rheine and sat and soaked
in uncertain light looking for a greeting
ignored waiting in a cafe, days pacing,
and wrought headboard to left and right





The Dog and the Monkey

The dog and the monkey went out on the river
In the shivering light of the moon
The dog plucked and strummed at the strings of a banjo
And the monkey hummed softly a tune

They floated all night till the cold light of morning
Awoke them from out of their trance
Then the dog plucked again at the strings of the banjo
And the monkey started to dance.

Quaquaverse poems, by Fugaz Egg

Bus

If I were a bus
I wouldn’t charge a fare
For the fee of just a smile
I’d take you anywhere.

If I were a bus
I’d replace ‘no smoking’ signs
With signs that said be groovy;
I’d do away with fines.

If I were a bus, sure,
I might run a little late
But wouldn’t stop to routes and stops, I’d
Drop you at your gate.

~~

I’ve become a bus!
It’s hard to quite believe
I’m ecstatic – but starting to accept
That I’ve been quite naïve.

~~

Now I am a bus
Uniformed in red and gold
Scrupulously clean because
There are standards to uphold.

Now that I’m a bus
I arrive right on the dot
If I catch you misbehaving
I fine you on the spot.

Now I am a bus
I charge you 50p
But 50p is fair enough
I am sure you will agree.

Since I’ve been a bus
I’ve come to realise
That you have to make concessions and
You have to compromise.




girl, your private luminescence


unwilling to comfort you with the neat
end-stop you’d like,
these lines file
through customs,
eyes down

small stashed (to avoid duty)
amongst detritus and souvenirs
the quaqua-saw
us a beast
teeth bare