Tony
Kitt
Hostilities
Those beautiful deadly things...
A bomb rain
or a bursting night-sky mushroom.
An imploding mind...
If your religion is vandalism, your god is
in pieces. Your consciousness,
hillock upon hillock...
Even your language isn't your language.
The empire of dreams macadamises you
with images. The sun is
unbuttered bread; life gets oily
under a sunflower.
Taste the insatiable kiss of déjà vécu.
Silencers have a thing for your silence.
What do you say to a dynamite ape?
To a multi-knife scarecrow?
Questions, queuing up.
Satiety, pencil-bodied.
An abyss inside the abyss.
First published in Blaze Vox Magazine, USA.
Eyes at Their Zenith
Feel fire's breath. When your heart
comes home, every sparkle
is a flower.
We look up the chimney to check
the uniformity of non-being.
We disaster into the newsreel gehenna.
There's no truth to distances.
There're only ashes,
with their mad fragile calmness.
First published in Blaze Vox Magazine, USA.
Spare Parts
A man goes to the post office
to consign his flattened heart
to a voice in the receiver.
There's a queue inside; blood is dripping
from manila envelopes. An open-jaw container
stands ready for mutuality.
The man listens to a mirror.
The man lip-reads
his imperfection:
You are a quadrangle among circles.
You no longer exist
in your 360-degree entirety.
It's my turn now.
Which part of me should I send –
and to whom?
The postman whispers in my ear:
You're a writer.
Help me. Writer me.
First published in The Café Review, USA.
Eclipse
A man trapped a star in a jar. The sky squinted
through the serrated hole in its blueprint.
The star, buzzing and gemmating.
Numbers, their personalities.
Richochets. Sparks. A jarload
of stars, limboed.
The man petted a gigantic
navel orange. This is where I'll
resettle the little brats, he thought.
He wondered if it's possible
to fit all the stars in that orange. The jar
scorched his fingers.
He somehow managed. He became
the owner of a starry orange,
a nature's wonder.
It will rival the Sun, he thought.
But the Sun truanted
from the atlas of ignorance.
First published in Blaze Vox Magazine, USA.
Invasion
The sun showed up sizzling and unelected,
and they seized it hostage. The moon was still free
on its mooring.
Vowels, we said.
Vowels made of wow.
Clouds were a symbiosis of smiles
with darkness contrails,
less and less transparent. Everyone
was looking downwards trying to unview
the big pulsating nothing.
First published in Blaze Vox Magazine, USA.
Limboed
I move, I am the release clause
of a pea pod, a skylark, a planet.
If you call me the world, will you provide
a fitting cradle?
These non-existent "for no-one/for everyone" things:
a faucet of emotions, a window mist of yearning...
I could be a rain river,
I could be the jettisoned air.
Petrichor. Trepidations. The greener
the sleepwalker, the steeper the roof.
I've got no identification to write upon.
Don't catacomb me here.
The mirror fogs the future us.
The time is now. The place is
placelessness. When I scream,
out comes a sea fret.
First published in Axon Journal, Australia.
Motherland-In-Law
I discovered a judge in a journalist,
a jail in a journey.
Things are untheorised.
I am my motive, I use a borrow snail
to attain stealth.
My sophistry is sleeping in the rosary.
Welcome, my nineteenth objector!
Our fruit eyes picture the planet
as an ice globe, a melt.
Every pear has a pink heart.
Men who exist in written form;
a night wrapped in "what you are not."
Which parts of your body are owned
by the department of nonsense and which ones
by the mind military?
Withering ideas linger
in the fear-brick kennel. No eyes
burrow through their fig leaves.
Do we need a dogma in a tall skirt
or a shot of sanity?
No one hedges us into being here.
History freezes our breath.
Lemongrass never says never.
Who will sing us
into the season of no season?
First published in Axon Journal, Australia.
In Mid-Air
I once stumbled across a man
dressed in information. He antennoed
his hands, as the trapdoor of space
opened for him. Nothing
but sparks of disinterest,
or disinfection of statistics.
What was mirrored in his irises?
In his zen-book?
He logged in to emptiness and watched
the circumstances fly by. He
followed them at his peril.
Away with the leprechauns!
In mid-air, frightened wing assistants realised
they had an Icarus on board.
An undocumented one.
They wouldn't be allowed to land. They began
rationing oxygen. The flying device
was called philosophy. Everybody
was asking his ozonised mind,
Estne equus credibilis?
The moral machine entertained the passengers
with a quiz:
Is there a hunter fond of unhunting?
Is it so hard to believe in phlogiston?
First published in Axon Journal, Australia.
Note. Estne equus credibilis? is a paraphrase of the line from Virgil (Aeneid, II. 48-49): equo ne credite (don't trust this horse).
Ninety Years a Grove
Our articulate necks, our sap friendships...
It's ninety years since we cross-specied
into trees, ninety years
since the rooting out of movement.
First came bobtailed bonuses for staying put
during the national discharge. Then we
let out leaves to elevate oxygen levels.
Now they cut off our limbs for fire.
The parenthetical god, his
trial rabbits...
Why can't we make our future
incubatable and reusable?
We dare not speak of railways
or airports. We speak of fire ways,
instead of fairways.
Roads speak of the absence of dust.
Bulbul birds soil our hair; bush-baby drizzle
laments our dead buds.
The spiders who study the bark
can't cobweb our hollow heartbeat.
After ninety years, genetic memory
won't save us.
After ninety years, who can
resurrect a race?
First published in Axon Journal, Australia.
Weather Forecast
Dead warriors of the wind;
their eye sockets
full of typography...
They pocket hailstones
of denial. They spell Draco's New Law
with their bodies.
Death is the way to avoid
further punishment,
spurts the oversized voice.
Billboards; the weather forecast
for tyrants. The silky breeze
of invasion, the clouds
of zero doubt. The thirty-first tyrant
breathes a black candle in his bunker.
He's busy writing uninhabited poems.
First published in SurVision Magazine, Ireland.
The Ides of March
I kill you by naming you.
Because people are all breath.
If one speaks against autocrats,
his autobiography will be kept
in a cage.
Man is the sum of postures he
dreams up. Every vigilante
carries a weathervane.
Your mutation can be tried
in a juvenile court.
One who wields an edge
may get wedged. An ex-emperor
sings Blue Moon backwards
as he delivers his apostrophic empire
for a post mortem.
First published in SurVision Magazine, Ireland.
Down the Grete Stern's Well
Women are flying trees
wandering hands of the world
Crosses dream of becoming ladders
The weight of the moon is
too much for you
let's bleach our
biographical blotches
We giraffe through the continent
and take a trainsnake
to the eyes' coast
we fall into somebody's nostrils
and find our way onto a billboard
A spy in the sky
the self-evidence of cages
Hello this is your inner tiger speaking
without a mouth
How far can you go
if you carry non-being with you?
Cages break
into smaller cages
First published in SurVision Magazine, Ireland.
The Cornerstone of Tomorrow
Life you've been wading through, its
calligraphy... The boulders behind your back
practice the baby smile of footballers.
You collect church seashells, you invite
every dogsbody to your misbalance day – all this
plus the whisper of chrysalids will lead you
through this green parallelogram, the trapdoor of sleep,
to some "more often than not" place.
Thinking is a malady of our own interjection,
the stratagem of bewilderment.
Do you know all your "not-yets" yet?
We can see you, otherness, your eyes climbing
that cliff, following the path across abstraction.
The sea always sings goodbyes; the waves' mouths
gasp for phraseology. Tomorrow is a chanting megalith;
today, a building under destruction.
First published in SurVision Magazine, Ireland.
Mühlheim am Main
A place with no climate
Every eye sees the world
in ectopic blue
Sit with me by the river
on the pillow of fog
A body that smells
of no body
A loaf of bread
baked with consolation
Rivers are knowledge
rivers are sorrow
mirrors that hold us all.
First published in Shot Glass Journal, USA.
Dear Journey,
think of me as an appleless cart.
Think of the Brownian motion
of idealists.
Of glass, think broken.
Of stars, frozen.
Everything regresses to its core.
Every time we arrive at defeat
it is greater than a victory.
It is Laplace's demon,
maître du monde, your
friendly "self."
And who are we losing to, anyway?
First published in Shot Glass Journal, USA.
Not Supposed to See It
Endless, reality approaches me
the way Thanatos comes for a mortal:
not in person.
I glimpse a pelvis turning into pulvis;
I perceive a mind as a body part.
The ecstasy of annihilation...
The future is already here.
We blink the dead pulse of today's
news. We swim the bloodstream shanty.
The three Moirai wearing ragged flags
dance an earthquake.
They chant in unison:
You were born too early.
We'll hold your eyelids down.
First published in Shot Glass Journal, USA.
