23. Rhubarb Rhyme

Apparently the human condition has remained consistent through out history according to page two hundred and thirty three of ‘More Golf Secrets’. I wrote most of this at the ages of 17 and 29.

It wasn’t until much later that they noticed the crows had begun to inhabit the tree.

She went away to live in the Arctic circle,

but, knowing too much of icebergs,

he stayed home to watch the archways and wonder of his Mother’s nightmares.

He saw a man fall foaming into the waves. Shading the air like a mushroom’s under gland spore shower.

He was in his pyjamas.

Pulsating at the end of a pin to a nocturnal rhythm. Moth’s wing coated with a film of flying powder.

She asked him if he lived there.

They learned how to send reflections from mirrors along wires making public announcements every two weeks through the ‘Old World Times’ on the results of using chocolate chip biscuits as bait for the whales.

This must always pirouette;

“No, I can’t do that because it’ll cut my profit margin to six dollars and fifty three cents.”

Raining into the cellophane chalice.

Spotting, that night, a red beacon light on the surface of the Moon, clearly visible to the local citizenry.

The radio stations were inundated with calls and kept an all night vigil of up to date reports.

A squadron of jets were dispatched from the local air force base on a reconnaissance mission in an attempt to return the public to a state of mental security.

The stars were plays between spectral alien ships and search crews trying to find a place to crash land.

But none were found until many years later.

A rook lies bleeding under the refrigerator, stifling his heavy breathing to elude the knight and his accompanying pawn patrol.

Three people were pegged to the clothes line as it turned over the bonfire fuelled by broken crates and furniture.

There was a girl asleep in front of the fire, her shins turned sausage red from the reflection of its intense bed of coals, or from the illusory haze of the flames.

He was reclining on a banana lounge and it was all happening at night.

In three blinks every part of the scene he observed had changed from a crowded frieze of gardening tool javelin throwing into the fire, to a sparse cluster of talking people either sitting cross legged or lying on the lawn.

Three huge trees hulked the corner by the shed opposite the bonfire and the clothes line above it.

They were giant blots of darkness watching everything and deciding they could not understand what they saw against the biro ink blue of a summer night sky.

A river of light flowed over the reeds,

there were thousands of stars, moons and suns.

I’ll meet you at the old house.

He doesn’t look at the sunglasses.

I’ve seen you before some where.

Two people looking at one thing.

Twenty four hour deja vu.

Vortex of tunnels in the curves of the grey sky, against the ridges of the mountain’s crow black crest.

Twenty one to twelve.

Bonsai darkness.

Parasols above the bicycle wheel spokes.

Two backgammon boards operating in the room behind a florist’s shop in Cuba.

They travelled from one end of the land to the other following on the paths made

by the interconnecting meadows

to the cottage

on the sea

where the man was laughing.

Acknowledgment attack,

robots, monsters, vampires,

aliens, psychos, wise cracks.

Pause for thought.

Who’s who misprints.

Rhubarb rhyme.

Petal ritual.

Scientific double talk,

songs, nukes, clichés, kids.

Spacemen in the jungle.

How many wrong numbers have called you?

One hundred and one difficult questions.

Take one word from each book on every shelf of the library on consecutive days,

Using the date as the numerical reference point for which pages are used.

Pepper these collected random words with your own thoughts and observations.

Take one thought from each person’s mind at a particular moment.

Dress like a derelict so no one steals your idea.

Keep it safely tucked into your sleeve.

In this, the way the individual subsists in a structured society can be reflected.

Anything, just get me off this bus.

The reluctant prince crushes cinders, but only the cold ones.

We have come to a fantastic distance.

Ice cream melting on the ground in a parking lot.

Where did you go?

Every night we blast off from the roof of the hotel for views of the Moon.

The birth of a cosmic hit man in a pressure base of steam and heat.

Winter eloped carnival stall carnivorous.

Speed cartoons nineteen hundred and two to nineteen twenty six.

Remember,

never forget,

memory.

Door bell,

no noise,

no one there.

You win,

I lose,

leave the room.

The door bell rang.

Several days out of reach of children.

How do you come back?

The love and trust of a particular person.

The reasons for staying more attractive than those for leaving.

Eliminate the greater than expected situation.

Mortality tables,

obscure imbalance,

avoidance of thinking about time.

Million bird, gems, blue skulls.

The television is a horoscope.

The acquisition of products has become an item on the evening news of the world.

A glacier falls.

Urgency overwhelms emotional security.

The celebration of youth pathalogicises adulthood.

Processed in one hour.

Donkey fawn sea horse one thousand years old.

Twenty years later, zero.

Urgent bounty hunter

experiencing school.

Every thought conceivable permanently recorded in cellular representation.

A show piece,

married to a rich heir,

restless jeopardy.

Four international agents,

two of them in the research lab.

There are the desperate who want the supplies,

Muppets at Walt Disney World.

Greece, nineteen eighty six,

married beauty and relinquished her function,

masquerading as respectable.

Sumptuous jealousy

water tank chariot

in the desert valley.

From the first summer

the run continues,

used in industry and commerce.

Momentarily the vapour whirlpool was opened

and the TV screen became a portal

to an ulterior dimension.

It was a secret he’d open on pay day,

licking a cord,

off again.

Sweat moves reason.

The face that had lead my sleep.

A clock spring bell.

Nothing to see.

Now they hear

the solar wind.

Ice cream

against the dark world.

Wonder,

gold,

tender,

bloody gold,

drinking coffee

and moving.

You listening.

Irresponsible commodity naming

exerts subconscious psychological pressure.

Sixty quandaries,

exertion,

closing date,

page unknown,

fifty seven steps up town,

title and dates unknown,

celebrity predictions down town,

magazine page unknown.

Resource claustrophobia,

finger tips of flame.

The science fiction people,

catch phrase answers, just testing.

Love and marriage, food and drink.

Late night helicopter ritual.

Thinking out loud.

The invisible link to the spectral dimension exists in the interior of the living body.

A drawbridge to the ulterior universe where each is the numbing opposite to the universe in which we find ourselves. intersecting.

Tragic death resolution.

When he spoke huge tracts of the landscape changed,

between the shouts, inside the centre’s hollow,

as he spoke.

No one lived there any more.

Nothing remained the same,

remembered always.

After glow,

feathers shudder,

doors open to reveal darkness behind the eye.

I remembered them.

Words appeared beneath my eyes as I read.

Ululating ravine,

valiantly injurious vanity,

perspiring, fighting, drinking,

scorning convention.

It is considered garbage.

Novelty,

tall pine trees,

pre-season suntan.

Tomorrow’s lilies

embrace

your head,

as they climb

with the pace,

of sleep.

Long night,

dig, lonely with intent,

thirst, genuine,

future to be prepared, sliced,

scheduled, among the vines,

flashes of ancient memories

on the tragic road,

winding away.

Close a door

or open a door

upon darkness.

My head is a foot.

Infamous fifteen second cataclysm.

One drug death.

To serve and protect.

Virtual reality hard copy.

Honesty a song,

swinging,

roaring,

lyrical rhythm.

Cloth metal

undulating skewer.

The sensual. Reason for birth.

The musicians continued to play,

(despite the brawl).

Past present,

endless beginning.

Sleep, the new land.

Suddenly,

consider yourself special.

Car,

buffalo,

car.

The Four Rocks of Transition.

The first you do not see.

The second hurts your foot.

The third you carefully avoid.

The fourth blocks your path.

And the fifth rock of transition

is the one that crumbles

when you lift it up.

In the vacant lot next to the pizza shed

they identified the old man from his wrists

which displayed the blood flow time blurred outlines

of his once, world famous tattoos.

Thrash music flying from the wound down window

of the parked car

containing one

of the onlookers.

A man who did not want his life

attacked a melon

with a home shopping channel bought

reproduction Samurai sword.

The man in the car

was from the country.

To surpass the oddities he discovered

in the unfamiliar urban environment

he imagined surgeons stitching back together

the remains of the melon

with nurses wringing melon juice from gauze swabs.

It was all over the table now,

the juice filling the cut grooves

of the ancient, meticulously carved frieze

in the table top.

A few more people joined the crowd

watching from the footpath.

No one dared venture

into the actual lot.

Running,

never really

going any where.

There is a view from here,

standing at the top

of the sixth rock.

He walked by the scene, solemnly.

Low side slice.

Apparently the human condition has remained consistent through out history

according to page two hundred and thirty three of, ‘More Golf Secrets’.

Caste in bronze magenta.

Mistake learning.

One computer thought,

the other spoke.

Screen emulating society

mimicking the desired image.

Unwilling, or unable, to meet at the stone columns

beside the gate

to rot

and decay,

pan out.

Sun times five.

To be rich,

to be drunk,

to detest one’s self.

Disruption as popular tonic.

Machines designed to liberate.

Railway canal,

bridge collapsed in dew.

Machine gun semaphore,

telegraph, electrostatic telephone.

In the bay,

commands,

torn envelope,

final dismissal charge,

bayonet,

whole oil kernel.

Disruption,

elimination,

special secret,

long forgotten.

In the north,

elected,

part in shadow,

thirty six tonne freighter port hole,

two hundred and sixty five seat aircraft,

helium balloons teeter at the edge of the Earth’s gravity,

machine clock,

every fifteen seconds

we could be free.

None of this is true.

All relation to the real world is purely incidental.

This is how the maturation process takes place in human beings,

at instantaneous moments where knowledge reaches conclusions.

Now, it is time for pizza.

There were stains on everything.

He had a reversed copy of his signature

on the rubber sole of his boot

and he signed his name

by kicking people.

He thought that air was poison because

the result of breathing it was eventual death.

Every street corner has a spy on it.

The manifesto of the organization was secreted

within the program of a portable chess computer.

Their goal was to reverse the effects of 'The Screen'

upon the human consciousness.

They proposed the simultaneous sabotage

of all power stations on each continent

to turn back time.

The light of the moon slowly traversed the base of the pyramid.

I stood by the water

and remembered the supermarket.

They were standing around the hearth log fire

feeding bundles of one hundred dollar bills into its flames

and singing choruses of, ‘Death to the Poor This Christmas’

when suddenly,

on the jellyfish’s back...

creative burn outs.

Filing the bronze monolith eagle.

Making a sculpture from the pieces of smashed wooden furniture.

Toxic psychosis

spider’s web in the barn’s rafters.

Dolphins in blue stone.

Shoveling steaming mud

from the hosed down

freshly caste sculpture,

veins of renegade metal

in the mud.

Men in overalls

under the rain laden tarpaulin

burnish the metal swans and storks

and pause

to light their cigarettes

with the ends

of their oxyacetylene torches.

Eyes like baubles
composed of some material
which gives them a hue
unlike any other
occurring in the natural world.

We look into them.

Leaves are blown.