AC Evans, EXPLORING THE TEXT

Mirror This World, image by AC Evans 

EXPLORING THE TEXT

The structural arrangement of an urban eclogue

Unfolded in front of us beneath an overhang

Of neglected adjectives. We saw

Three towering stanzas in the grand manner,

Idiomatic, self-reflexive and embellished

With shiny, metallic neologisms.

A parental advisory notice warned us that

The lyrics were explicit. We wore dark glasses.

Ahead, the pathway was clear and the air was alive

With a distinctive cadence – a melodic pattern

Barely discernible at first, but soon to dominate

Our thoughts – our guides refused to go on.

We marvelled at the alloestrophic irregularity

Of nearby deposits, seeing veritable tangles of

Words in irregular rows, including

Many anisometric examples and several

End-stopped lines leaning over us at crazy angles.

My companion grabbed my arm, pointing in wonderment

At the sky above us: it was turning into an open field, free-form

Cloudscape both linear and non-linear at the same time.

We had never seen anything like this before.

A caesura appeared in the form of a black, cubic shape,

But we walked by without a second glance.

From a pillar constructed of in-striding lines of text

A sing-song voice with indefinable accents and stresses

Addressed us (or so we thought) in a word-flow;

Sometimes a sweet euphony, sometimes a harsh

Cacophany, a dissonant tone-colour that,

We later discovered, permeated the entire structure.

All around there were strange syntactic patterns and

Unfamiliar typographical conventions.

Gigantic capitals in diverse fonts towered over us

Like the sculpted arches of an enormous building.

The sing-song voice echoed in the recesses

Of this immense, vaulted, visual poem, while.

Beneath my feet I noticed a discarded epigraph,

Neglected now and covered in dusty, ironic, slangy

Fragments of forgotten phrases from previous times.

The atmosphere was uncanny, I sensed the surreal

Presence of condensation but my vision was restricted

By the gathering darkness as we approached the Aporia.

The chronotope had long since collapsed and now

‘Liminality’ was the only term I could think of to designate

Our situation, shuddering with the anxiety of influence,

Struggling to maintain aesthetic distance and perhaps

Even our sanity, in an extraordinary place where all organic

Form seemed over-determined – oh, how I longed for synaesthesia!

“The heresy of the didactic!” gasped my friend.

As though from nowhere a grand narrative, a slimy tentacle,

Wormed its way through the gloom, passing within

A few feet of us, but I knew we were protected by a magic charm,

A talisman, a Darke Conceit – we were the lucky ones.

—AC Evans

Nathan Spoon, Two Poems

Dr. H. Erico Nanist’s Tumescence, 
image by Daniel Y. Harris 

The Lord Sends a Wind

Flies on the baby | bird blown terminally onto

the trail. This is the life of water, triggering a

pinch of pain within tenderest fire; this is the

wall of confusion opening | a portal to a | world

scoured of unreal tragedies; there being no name

for what upholds the citadel or ground of the ever-

expanding song of our Homeric onanist, whose staff

greets the tide-line foaming upon these otherwise

vacant sands; and | yet, when | all of the contained

sand-grains have made narrow passage through the

almost-overlooked-middle, a whale’s fluke departs us.

A Cup of Coffee

An ambiguous I coexistent with a summer afternoon

breeze. | Of course some | quasi-poetical contexts

can make autobiographical trivialities seem to

be less tiresome than | they are. Poetry can entail |

such stuff as |

                            sweating through a t-shirt not with-

standing, especially | when your head is bent forward

slightly and your booted ankles are crossed; for yours

is the sorrow of a | pink-hearted and modestly-spined

seashell. Now a | girl surfs with her | left index to

her lips and then her | left hand twirling her longish

bangs, as the NASA craft gives Pluto | a reading flyby.

—Nathan Spoon

J. Karl Bogartte, Black Market

The Unspeakable Coitus of Mylius, image by J. Karl Bogartte

  

Black Market

     The shadow of a fresh kill is the end of silence, the ever-present ring of enchantment. The spark of rattling insects... Nothing is ever finished, it just continues, changing places with memory... A vague reference to a dance of wild whispering.

*

      There’s lightning in the moth house, ghost glow in the underground, and the light from when to dazzle the almost then, mindful of radiant anomalies. And even through the windows of ambiguous desire. The enchantment of one who interrupts your gaze…

*

      Through shadows of the face, of more light, swimming pathology, pausing in the runes… You spread out like a mythology. Shadows of lunatic endgames. The XXIII key, missing link to her voice of glowing loam. Time-warp to skeletal maze, burning a window in the garden. Owl-turning, dust-making. She lamps out, dividing the spoils.

*

      Night with its terrors, leaping through hoops. Nagual trapeze. You are upright panting and sleek. Marked. But cunning and random, drawn into a circle. Always an unauthorized approach. Consciousness passed through eyes… and at night, from mouth to mouth. Breath to breath, passage through the skin, to transparency…

*

      The desire to kill someone is equaled only by the desire to bring them back to life again... the rest is immoral.

*

      A girl infected with candles, mirror of the humming. In a cloud, leopards, for the revolver, braille, a semblance of movement, long-stemmed invoking of ancient wiles. In that landscape you are fog the color of bees in sunlight, in cinema, a doorway for binding spells, broken into glowing.

*

      A language of water opens the door to illusive interiors, in the field at night, when the walls are costumes begging to be worn, sheer and unsettling, effortless. Cause and effect grappling with the energy of presence, the hidden... If you spread your legs, for light, there is the candle dripping darkness for sleep and spell. The first spell, the primal incantation that takes you by surprise, even as it exhausts itself. 

*

      “The wind, leopard...” “The rain, assassin...” The book, sister to the bell-tower, gathering steam, remote from the forest, burnt by moonlight into a long-limbed calyx that spins around in circles, repeating your name, a coupling of numbers, kissing only water, savage computations. Shadowboxing with consciousness. Life is that breath of Jívaro dust blown into the face. A clockwork scent drawing blood, where indigo climbs into darkness. 

*

      Marvelous derisions begin to pass expressions of love between masks and triangular numbers. Paradoxical bedouins exchanging keys and mannequins, measured with subliminal eyes. You sleep like lit candles in many places. Eyes of torture and trapeze, softly humming. Light-headed passageways. The least resistant stepping-stone, axis of negative. For the time remaining, against what might be expected. You take your leave. It troubles the heart. You go with fire...

      Grace is the art of luring ravenous dogs into a state of springtime.

*

      Candle entices the fabric of a violent glance, draws Masque out of reverie with sudden leopards that guide the pleasure principle through walls of an ancient wailing. Masque suckles the ashes of invisible sacrifice. Rain condemns Spell while releasing her words of love. Candle spreads her legs, inviting the tall revolvers into compelling shapes, clues, devoted whispers. A fountain of antibodies switching analogies with night, escaping without harm.

*

      She has not been spoken of for many years, she is mything vitreous and tapping pawns for tallow, she is quickening her fluidity, to divert and disguise. Light poured into lacerations the way shadows enter clothing, for only a moment, or two, only a hidden space. A translation, for throwing phantoms into invisible walls. She is myth-ratcheting amorous, chiding brutal structures for mountainous beckoning, to corrupt with pleasure.

*

      Amethyst of exchanging blood that ravages equality in the mother tongue, when the moon is a cat’s cradle in the sea of consciousness, of civil war in the telepathy of rebellious spirits, lovers in the fields of lunacy...

*

      The daughter of glow-worms painting portraits of mysterious females and the reindeer’s ghostly double, all perfectly cracked like glass, like an intrusion, like a flight into the obscurity of uncharted whispering. A slight touch on the shoulder, the movement of an affair between invasion and emanation, the pitch of bone against bone, faces merging in the moisture of a single word chosen among all the others. A vampire word...

      Starlight is a liquid used to power a whispering machine.

*

      The ancient horned flower of your psyche attracts the devoted milking machines, the aboriginal veins of a fabric that propels your footsteps as determined as her threads slipping into light, vanishing in the blink of an eye.

*

      Dark and greedy, the always secret and ever vanishing body of torrential mirroring.

*

      The perfect alignment through the axis of its twin, quartered and shelled in the gasping for breath and emerald, adored and pandered for pleasure and sight unseen, she licks herself in meadows of ermine and chimera, aching, angelica posing in the likeness of her bees sipping, through every sense of pulling ravens out of her body for kindling.

*

      Slowly dying insects power the molecular light of surprise endings. You are not waking without roots, without sipping blood, without that urgent female timepiece erupting inside a bewildering city ever so slowly landing in a body abandoned on the highway, emitting sparks.

—J. Karl Bogartte

Daniele Pantano, Excerpts from Mass Graves: A Confession (Book 1)

                       We Fuck Alone, image by Daniele Pantano 

Excerpts from Mass Graves: A Confession (Book 1) 

TRANSCRIPTION OF SELECTED MARGINALIA

FOUND IN SPEED-BIRD, 1909

p 14             the blue czars

                    soon realized

                    how to manipulate

                    the rain

p 15             ready to follow

                    the southern boundaries

                    of energy

p 17             I cannot see the difference between hunger

                    and feasts

p 19             drawing the shadow on

                    an insect body

                    that like a machine     

                    is trying to adjust itself          

p 44             it is the muscle that constructs the four triangles

p 57             The surreal basement of the purple

                    house

                    The white stain on dark trousers

                    The crime

p 61             I do not recall the taste of youth

p 67             a woman lowers her skirt

                    we are moving faster

p 68             without a safety net

                    I read the border

                    you rise

p 77             meet the hierarchy of scavengers

                    they appease us with alchemy

p 78             by midnight rivers

                    by post-menstrual academies

p 80             they recover rapidly

                    acutely aware of their surroundings

                    just two seconds

                    they slammed into the wall behind me

p 85             they placed the tangerine tumor on her chest

p 96             moments after the lecture I will

                    destroy myself

p 100           the blood of Christ, the cheap wine

                    they will be injecting

                    in a dark corner of my paradise

p 105           the senescent baby faces

                    are still playing the silent ball game

p 109           fear is a source of constant amusement

p 110           genitals dipped in blood

                    aroused astral monastery

p 113           beautiful morning

                    child’s death

p 114           he is as specialized as an insect

                    for the performance of some inconceivably

                    vile function

                    centipede cancer

p 119           the machine is served

                    he is a writer

p 120           perhaps he died

p 136           chaos enables rejuvenated

                    anomalies to penetrate the reflections

p 168           out here memories are two seconds

                    shorter and the girls yell

                    when they’re done

WE’LL GO DANCING––WE’LL BE SAFE

Chämi uff und niän-ä-n-a    .    You wanted to go so fast    .    In den Kronen    .    A muscular contraction    .    Listen    .    It takes three beggars    .    Das ist mein Satz    .    Being    .    In den Kronen    .    In this strange and marvelous state    .    Sieht keiner denkt keiner    .    In its other logic    .    Turns immense    .    Whether they give us back our megaphones or not    .    In den Kronen    .    Was steht in den Kronen    .    Listen    .    Ich habe keinen andern    .    Four in the morning    .    Der Tanz    .    How will it look    .    Listen    .    In den Kronen    .    With your escape mechanism    .    You whisper    .    Listen    .    Das ist mein Satz    .    Others move to stop    .    What do you want    .    This is my sentence    .    No one sees someone thinks    .    Strange and marvelous    .    A nurse’s nose    .    Ah, there    .    From today on it is as we think    .    How strange to be    .    In den Kronen    .    Turns immense    .    Listen    .    Another stone    .    More prizes to be won    .    Instantly    .    The hair grows back    .    In den Kronen    .    Mechanism    .    Ein fremdes Wundenmal    .    But what about the flesh    .    Discalced    .    Der Tanz    .    Don’t whisper    .    We should say    .    Listen    .    It is as we think    .    Sieht keiner denkt keiner    .    A muscular contraction    .    This is your sentence    .    Chämi uff und niän-ä-n-a    .    Didn’t stay still    .    Dein Wundenmal    .    Now everyone whispers    .    In its other logic    .    You’re doing it right    .    Listen    .    A sentence is    .    You whisper    .    You wanted to go so fast    .    Strange and marvelous    .    In den Kronen    .    Was steht in den Kronen    .    Give us back our megaphones    .

KATZENJAMMER

Nothing you need to know is still missing. The desired principle

in your hands you ought to chase right now.

On one page you don’t remember writing “I don’t remember.”

SIX OBSTACLES

I

SWISS CIVILIAN CAMPS: including Aarau, Bad Schauenburg, Camp di Lavoro (near Locarno), Cossonay, Fallanden, Felsberg, Hausernmoos, Inkwil, Kemleten, Langenbruck, Lausanne, Les Avants, Leysin, Rheinfelden, Schaffhausen, Sumiswald, Zurich.

SWISS MILITARY CAMPS: including Bettenhausen, Elgg, Ellikon Thur, Langnau, Lutzelfluh, Matzingen, Molondin, Zollikon. 

II

Zum anderen Geschlecht fühlte ich mich schon sehr früh hingezogen. Die Stellen, die mich am meisten interessierten, waren die schwärzesten.

Nr. 208, Landschaft XV, 1972–73

Acryl auf Papier/Holz,

70 x 100 cm

Nr. 219, Landschaft XX

Acryl auf Papier/Holz

70 x 100 cm

Nach den 120 Tagen von Sodom, 1968

Transcop

21 x 24 cm

Nr. 232, Passage XXIV

Acryl auf Karton/Holz

100 x 70 cm

Back to Mother, 1986

Original Steinlithografie, einfarbig, 3, Zustand

57 x 46 cm

III

Claimant, born on 5 November 1934 in Austria, was denied entry into Switzerland in late 1942. Claimant attempted to enter Switzerland with a group of children at the French-Swiss border. Upon her arrival in Switzerland, claimant was immediately separated from the other members of her group, who were deported and perished, and placed in an orphanage. Claimant states the police beat the children in the group and shaved their heads. She subsequently escaped and traveled to France, where she went into hiding in the country and forests until the end of the war.

IV

. . . the Swiss chief of police suggested to the Germans the placing of the J on Jewish passports . . .

WF: I have not spoken of this for fifty years. But I am convinced the Swiss are guilty of terrible crimes.

BB: Ten other children from my French children’s home crossed the border but were sent back by the Swiss border guards, straight into the arms of the Germans.

. . . it is our duty to take children with us, to remove them from their environment, if necessary by robbing or stealing them . . .

V

Some of the flutings appear high up on the walls and ceilings, in every chamber, simple lines, shapes, crude outlines of faces, a specific space for them, by children between the ages of three and seven, with many paintings believed to be the work of an eight-year-old girl, it’s impossible to tell whether the flutings were made for play or ritual.

VI

J. L., 2006

Wax, epoxy, wood, metal and showcase

197 x 181 x 80 cm

Pascale, 2003–4

Wax, horsehair, epoxy and wood

140 x 50 x 45 cm

Jelle Luipaard, 2004

Wax, iron, epoxy and wood

174 x 36 x 64 cm

Lost II, 2007

Horse skin, epoxy, metal and wood

98 x 151.5 x 164 cm

We Are All Flesh, 2009

Wood, wax, polyester, steel

105 x 110 x 203 cm

CITY OF NOW

More profound than reason,

More profound than perversion,

Bestiality, does she, determined,

Absorbed, think and connect us,

Larger than a common grave,

The dark trying of her fingers,

Counting these pages?

—Daniele Pantano