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Hazel Smith

Lit-Mag #46 – Madrigalesque

The wrong Tom Jenks

I looked him up on the Internet but it’s the wrong Tom Jenks
histories banged together,  homepages for high jinks
it repeats as it permutes, but it also rejigs the past
welcome to the mix and match of discombobulated planes
to cross is not only to traverse,  to cross means also to conjoin
organisms tear apart the niches they construct
earthworms are proto alchemists, they switch the soil to gold
a jumble, a mosaic, a mix-up, a montage
conversations build a cartography that maps an alien field of art
nations bounce back from combat into an adaptive ache
agendas pulse erratically, expectation swings its chronic beat
she amputates accusations, screws on prosthetic myths
he felt attracted by her one day and repulsed by her the next
variants are deviations that play bad tricks on genes
revamping your story is unwise but it doesn’t mean certain guilt
a treatise resolves as tealeaves, fragments disarm her fists

 

Also see: The Blue Bus

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Tegan Jane Schetrumpf

Lit-Mag #46 – Madrigalesque

How can you?

With the pop, pop, of apoptosis in your ear

weave and dodge words

you’d rather not hear?

There’s a pulse.  Diastolic da-dum.

The beat of a drum.
Empty skin.

And the dong.
The dignified chime
of some grandfather clock
measuring time with his hickory switch.
You bare two timid cheeks
and receive the cuts.

Shaping lies
with your lips
carving soap with your tongue
in playing card housing
for that’s how it’s done.

Do you know?

Each day that you swallow
dab with your napkin
you waste
hasten

your final thought.
You’ll be angry then.
You’ll

wish for the Orphic voice to call another lifetime.
(The one underneath that you should have been living)

regret

(each mistake)

(those times you left the ache to burn inside instead of howling)

But you danced, didn’t you?  Danced – cha cha cha.

One, two, cha cha cha.

Your moves,
but learned steps.

When you cut out your tongue
thicken ear drums
blind eyes

You make it dark.
Silent.
Mute.

One more to sing rhymes
of ‘The Way Things Are.’

One less to imagine
the best of our times,

to outlast the whisk
the tsk tsk of fear.

Can you hear? It approaches.

Pop, pop. It approaches.

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Nova Longhurst

Lit-Mag #46 – Madrigalesque

Three Poems

Her

Lips burning of subdued embers,
Her words brand you, inescapable.

Eyes as old as amber,
Her gaze tells your story, unwritten.

Masked by the mud of her mother,
Her power precedes her, enthralling.

Rokkr Náttar, shadow of the oncoming night,
She destroys me, inescapable love.

 

Purified Asphyxiation

Cast me down in the cleansing blue.
Breathing frozen soliloquies of you.

Fractals ossifying mangled fetters,
Seeking freedom in profligate letters.

Clutching at greener pastures,
Fertilized by the efferent heartless.

Cast me down in to the cleansing blue,
To extirpate afflictions of you.

 

Taste Buds

Bulbous buds of brilliant senses
Taste your breath, your life, your soul’s existence

Wine glasses shattered on your lips
The life blood of which bitters your kiss, your caress

The perfume of carbonated city streets
Nestled against cement bridges, your nervous-systems.

Leaving dust upon Zemí’s ancient tongue.
Your breath, your life, your soul’s existence, you are mine.

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Roger Dean / Greg White / Hazel Smith

Lit-Mag #46 – Madrigalesque

The Blue Bus

(written for The Blue Bus experimental poetry reading series in London)

there are days when no one knows where the blue bus is
but there are always times when you know it will arrive out of the blue
then you are riding amongst colours only, gone with the winding
saluting the destinations as they pass you by, making passing your destiny
the blue bus doesn’t give you the blues, but the blues was banished by segregated bussing
the blue bus is neither bone nor skin, neither fever nor shivers
you remember other buses, the bus to school, the fears of being late
daydreams scribbled like automatic writing on muggy windows
the moment they lock the doors I want to jump off
it seems (though no statistical data can nail it) that more people claim blue as their favourite colour than any other
while The Big Blue Bus is a municipal bus operator in the Westside region of Los Angeles
today I decide to pretend that everything is what it is and is no other
it’s odd the way we relish titles even though like people they are divorced from what they hope they are conveying
you remember all the buses that came and went, the ones you nearly missed, or deliberately let slip, but most of all the buses that though appointed never appeared
it says on the blue website that blue symbolism runs the gamut of emotionally-packed meanings
some of us have to write at speed to turn our recalcitrant wheels
the blue bus is what you imagine it to be, what you paint it to be, what you desire it to be
or so they say and as we know the saying is not the said, especially where performance is in the playground
sometimes the blue bus is just itself, pure blue, open to the seductions of sound, ploughing through the traffic jam of reason
sometimes it falters and becomes bus-like, reigned in by timetables and bus-stops, borders and controls
Rosa Parks stood up for sitting down anywhere on a bus and for the rights of all African Americans
but there are those who say she appealed easily to whites and could be smoothly assimilated by them without any shifting of position
to write is to move, to think is to mutate
it’s even a film, Blue, Kieslowsi,  about a musician
the blue bus is sometimes made of clay, sometimes made of silk, sometime made of feathers, but it always erects itself like a genie from a transmutable yet sustainable bottle
run by an invisible collective who have hidden histories of bizarre steering techniques, unorthodox gear changes, and tyre-kicking
usually when I ask where I can catch it I am greeted by incomprehension bordering on suspicion
but it is the blue bus which takes me everywhere, even to locations I will never reach
and even into this excuse for an improvisation which is not improvised but draws on an improvisatory aesthetic
the blue bus, the horse and carriage of sparring avant-gardes, whipping with abandon through the galloping streets of black Britain
it’s a funny thing, you know, but I can’t remember what the colour of the buses in Australia is

Hazel Smith (text, text performance)
Roger Dean (piano)
Greg White (electronics)

The Blue Bus was written for the Blue Bus experimental poetry reading series in London: I often like to write poems for specific occasions.  Originally it was conceived in a words-only form. This version employs an acoustic piano improvisation by Roger Dean and electronics by Greg White, including trumpet sounds by Phil Slater.
This recording was mixed and mastered by Greg White.

Note by Hazel Smith 

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Justin Clemens

Lit-Mag #46 – Madrigalesque

I wish I didn’t wish I wasn’t dead: a madrigal

Me n me trumpet are lying

 

in a nest

of bedding watching
Our Premmy Minotaur
Like a sweating tub

o rot n putrescence fester
under hoof lights
in clusters

of roach eggs

O pestilent importuning gibberish!
O necrotic bovine abomination!
Cleave to your cloven chancres like the breast-milk of evil!

Someone’s lost the remote
so we won’t go changing.

Gobbets of sweat hillock
The Minotaur’s brow;

Seething lice robe him,
White tongues lave him.

The glass labyrinth
Clones furious avatars

To cloud through
Swarm the sky.

The coroner who commands
The threshold of the dead

Hides in the blue gums’
Fury to let him pass.

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Bev Braune

Lit-Mag #46 – Madrigalesque

Introduction

Francesco Landini

Poets were asked to think form, counter-form, refrain, cacophony, celebration, protest in an invitation to submit a series of poems of many voices set in their own or a borrowed matrix based strictly or vaguely on the Madrigal, that short lyrical poem that Italian composer Francesco Landini was so gifted at composing in the 14th century.

The Madrigal focussed on its multi-voices as singers without instruments by taking up emphases of tone, cadence, point and counterpoint in poetic conversations. Poets were asked to send poems in the strictest Medieval Madrigal using the traditional Madrigal’s two or three three-lined stanzas with a certain syllabic count per line; the subject, often pastoral or about love or, if they preferred, to send contemporary re-interpretations in your own ‚mother tongue‘ or matricalis as a play of opinions, solicited or unsolicited points-of-view on any subject-matter. They could do so as audio recordings or as an image of words in visual formats that manipulate multi-voices, riff and segue.

What emerged from that call for submissions for Madrigalesque is an amazing, varied collection of well thought-out and moving works from Jordie Albiston, Justin Clemens, Roger Dean, Nova Longhurst, Philip Norton, Tegan Jane Schetrumpf, Hazel Smith, and Greg White. The works, some making their world premiere appearance in this Lit-Mag, do justice to the early madrigal in the broadest sense. They are witty, funny, dark, loud, gentle, challenging, irreverent, committed. They tackle emotion, reason, aesthetics, politics, philosophy. I hope you enjoy them as I do.

Bev Braune
Sydney, September 2014

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Jordie Albiston

Lit-Mag #46 – Madrigalesque

The plane angle poems

5/52

five years old with the smile & the special
fifty-two years with the miracle grin
& the little & the place & the warm
& everything is fine ticketty-boo
when someday soon is huger than never
when someday never came a day too soon
time in an egg-cup funny runny time
time to crack those tiny heavens open
September is a long way you can’t wait
September gets here quicker every year
shake the blossom you-are-now-in-Snow-Land
shake yourself to make yourself believe it
all the toys are happy in the cupboard
all the clouds are murmuring in Latin
a cicada is as big! as your hand
a night is not as loud as your alarm
you talk to it softly the cicada
you talk through it talk until dawn arrives
—        peace a kind of gravity & private

 

infinite/finite

I remember I wrote in my notebook
I remember it was November’s end
how somehow the future might be revived
how somehow the moon & I bumbled on
the watch pretending to tick on your wrist
the kitsch of December somewhere in there
time a dim idiot’s legerdemain
time swimming upstream to spawn in the past
my sickness this a counterfeit of days
my mind too skimpy to quite apprehend
you amaranthine in my weightless arms
you can’t stay put inside one deathless month
nothing a clock or calendar could stop
nothing outwits the horologist’s trick
despite them carefully clanging away
despite how mighty how merciless love
life spiralling spiralling just for us
life clicks its punch-card straight into the sun
—        a forever an ecstasy error

 

line/curve

we are straight lines aiming for redemption
I tread the edge between skyline & sky
remember the dictum don’t quit the path
remember the horizon is rounded
there are gazillions for heaven to fix
there is proof peering back down from spaceships
if we all were to go where would we fit
if what the astronaut says is the truth
it is jotted all over our school-books
it is drawn in diffused spirals at dawn
the rule states clearly onwards & upwards
the trick is to dislocate every joint
one takes two points & joins them together
one finds a spider-web stuck to the air
call all the digits click-click into file
call it a thing of immeasurable grace
this is the world we’re leaving our children
this is the imperfect circle I love
—        pi makes sure you always fall short of God

 

mind/mind

you have no idea the mind you’re in
I have seen this mind through an unclear world
that is a black ecumenical cube
that machines my vertices lovingly
a spear in each of its triple six sides
a leaf in the garden of memory
each face a geometric corruption
each piece fits inside another like this
a space perfection will never survive
a tesseract dear one! a Chinese box
which cannot contain a cosine of truth
which equals a relative endlessness
to enter the error is recklessness
to feel it deeply austere absolute
it is sent to murder us in our sleep
it is a bitmap of all that I am
what can be learned from the rickety mind
what can be learned from a glittering shape
—        children & gods beseech our instruction

 

walk/walk

you begin your random walk from the land
I begin my random walk from the sea
where an ill-defined hill subsumes the heat
where surfaces reel above sunless space
& your feet purchase distance step by step
& my feet feel toward each future blind
between troubled trees & the beasts beneath
between choppy fears of fangteeth & such
with their orange thirst exist/unexist
with their weird deep lives extinct/unextinct
turn left next volcano fire-in-the-world
turn right treading water as I was taught
circumvent jungle both green & concrete
circumvent/navigate all seven seas
then loud as America quiet as ice
then shout out Ahoy in earthliest voice
incline to horizon eyes full alert
incline to arrival therefore until
—        smash-smash softly o astonishing shore