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What are you going to do With what is left of yourself Now among the rustling Of your maybe best years? This is not an auto-elegy With me pouring my heart Out into where you Differently stand or sit On the Epidaurus steps. What shall I say to myself Having put myself down On to a public page? Where am I going now? And where are you going Tricked into reading Words of my later life? Let me pretend you are Roughly of my age. Are you a boy or a girl? And what has happened to you? Look at the chirping various Leaves of Mr Graham’s Spanking summer. Where are You at? I know my face Has changed. My hair has blanched Into a wrong disguise Sitting on top of my head. Beside each other perched On the Epidaurus steps. Where am I going to go? Shall I rise to follow The thin sound of the goats Tinkling their bells?

I saw the garden where my aunt had died And her two children and a woman from next door; It was like a burst pod filled with clay. A mile away in the night I had heard the bombs Sing and then burst themselves between cramped houses With bright soft flashes and sounds like banging doors; The last of them crushed the four bodies into the ground, Scattered the shelter, and blasted my uncle’s corpse Over the housetop and into the street beyond. Now the garden lay stripped and stale; the iron shelter Spread out its separate petals around a smooth clay saucer. Small, and so tidy it seemed nobody had ever been there. When I saw it, the house was blown clean by blast and care. Relations had already torn out the new fireplaces; My cousin’s pencils lasted me several years. And in his office notepad that was given me I found solemn drawings in crayon of blondes without dresses. In his lifetime I had not known him well. These were the things I noticed at ten years of age: Those, and the four hearses outside our house, The chocolate cakes, and my classmates’ half-shocked envy. But my grandfather went home from the mortuary And for five years tried to share the noises in his skull, Then he walked out and lay under a furze-bush to die. When my father came back from identifying the daughter He asked us to remind him of her mouth. We tried. He said ‘I think it was the one’. These were marginal people I had met only rarely And the end of the whole household meant that no grief was seen; Never have people seemed so absent from their own deaths. This bloody episode of four whom I could understand better dead Gave me something I needed to keep a long story moving; I had no pain of it; can find no scar even now. But had my belief in the fiction not been thus buoyed up I might, in the sigh and strike of the next night’s bombs Have realized a little what they meant, and for the first time been afraid.

If we could get the hang of it entirely It would take too long; All we know is the splash of words in passing And falling twigs of song, And when we try to eavesdrop on the great Presences it is rarely That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate Even a phrase entirely. If we could find our happiness entirely In somebody else’s arms We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s Yammering fire alarms But, as it is, the spears each year go through Our flesh and almost hourly Bell or siren banishes the blue Eyes of Love entirely. And if the world were black or white entirely And all the charts were plain Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters, A prism of delight and pain, We might be surer where we wished to go Or again we might be merely Bored but in brute reality there is no Road that is right entirely.

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested. By some inexplicable oversight nobody jeers when I walk down the street. I have been allowed to go on living in this room. I am not asked to explain my presence anywhere. What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and are any left unexecuted? Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking certain jobs? They are absolutely shameless at the bank—— You’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non- chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested, but I know them. It’s like this everywhere—— they think they are going to surprise me: I, who do nothing but wait. Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up—— very clever. They think that they can scare me. I am always scared. And how much courage it requires to get up in the morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates you! At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and refuse to go on, it’s not done. I go on dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip, accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white laughter and applause, past a million unlighted windows, peered out at by the retired and their aged attack-dogs— toward my place, the one at the end of the counter, the scalpel on the napkin.

Terror is not – Ed – sitting in one’s piss. I know – I’ve sat there – I’ve slept there and did most of my childhood. That was warmth – in fact – and comfort – in spite of the unconcealed unconcealable smell. Terror? That was and always will be Mother cursing Dad and there there I am alone in that night hearing that door slam.

Mark Young is a New Zealander who has lived most of his life in Australia, and he is known primarily as a poet. As a visual poet, he brings a vibrant literary sense to the text as visual object. He has arrayed phrases and individual words upon a field that takes the form of a traditional chess set, compelling the reader to construct meaning out of the various ways a string of words can be constructed. The reader can read up, down, diagonally, and even in a continuous spiral. In the end, the poem becomes a textual movie—every block upon the page a single frame in that movie—and the film flickers before us, sending our minds in different directions, exciting the retina, and teasing the mind. Meaning is not easy or certain in this visual poem. Instead, it surges toward us and swirls away, both brazen and coy. This is a poem about thinking, meaning, and the isolated and collective beauty of words.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry > >

Go, dumb-born book, Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes: Hadst thou but song As thou hast subjects known, Then were there cause in thee that should condone Even my faults that heavy upon me lie And build her glories their longevity. Tell her that sheds Such treasure in the air, Recking naught else but that her graces give Life to the moment, I would bid them live As roses might, in magic amber laid, Red overwrought with orange and all made One substance and one colour Braving time. Tell her that goes With song upon her lips But sings not out the song, nor knows The maker of it, some other mouth, May be as fair as hers, Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers, When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid, Siftings on siftings in oblivion, Till change hath broken down All things save Beauty alone.

But it is not our wish to reproduce ourselves through you the reader, nor to reassure you that these words are true or where the line breaks           there is a meaning stabilized           by that news speech is                        assuring you our plans are still the same as when we met original in formal theory by the fridge on the streetcar beneath some baggage of your satisfactions. Over this our patience supports you beneath the topical tuck which is basic to a sand ruse for writing through these intervals between our disagreeable achievements signed in the triplicate stage of the plainer style moved on (not much of it)             to where the shade from the ilex soaks the officer in charge by the octagon in august more or less.

I have tried to say that, although Love is not judgement analysis too is a style of affect since the scale that rends me vulnerable has cut, from abundance, doubt (not that identity shunts civic ratio or consequence) Sure — I would prefer to respond to only the established charms (and forget inconvenience) but her hair was also a kind of honey or instrument. All that is beautiful, from which I choose even artifice, which I hold above nature won’t salve these stuttered accoutrements

Go where those others went to the dark boundary for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize go upright among those who are on their knees among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust you were saved not in order to live you have little time you must give testimony be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous in the final account only this is important and let your helpless Anger be like the sea whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten let your sister Scorn not leave you for the informers executioners cowards—they will win they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography and do not forgive truly it is not in your power to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn beware however of unnecessary pride keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring the bird with an unknown name the winter oak light on a wall the splendour of the sky they don’t need your warm breath they are there to say: no one will console you be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain repeat great words repeat them stubbornly like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand and they will reward you with what they have at hand with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes Be faithful Go