Tuesday 28 May 2013

ISSUE 12a

Neon Highway ISSN:


issue 12a





















Hi readers!



I am happy to tell you that this is the re-launch of ‘Neon Highway’. It was Alice’s idea to get the magazine going online, where we published a good batch of poems and interviews but unfortunately after a while, we did not feel that the online experience in terms of publishing was for us and therefore we decided to return to the original hardcopy format. ‘Neon Highway’ will now be issued twice a year. Subscription information is at the back of the magazine and information can also be found online at www.neonhighway.co.uk





Well, where do I begin? We have now got two other editors besides, myself and Alice. Dee McMahon and Matt Fallaize will also be editing this magazine. Please welcome them aboard!



In this issue, the poet, Allen Fisher will be interviewed by, myself and Dee.

And we hope you enjoy this issue with a new bunch of poets, as usual some of them known as well as unknown. ‘Neon Highway’ is happy to promote the unpublished poet as long as his/her work is basically, good!



We will be running reviews and listings. The website is updated for subscription and archive information. We do prefer poems and artwork to be sent in via snail-mail but obviously if you are abroad we will understand email submissions.



Well, I’ll leave you to it. Hope you were as amazed as I was by the summer rain. I had one particularly strange experience where I just gave up and lay down under a tree and allowed the rain to just fall down through the leaves and branches upon me. It really was most exhilarating. When I eventually got up, soaked and bedraggled, a teenager walking his dog ran away from me thinking I was some kind of lunatic! Of course, I wasn’t, just simply enjoying the rain, like you do, as simple as that.



All best for now.



Jane Marsh















Contents





Note from Jane: Page 1

Poems

Joanne Ashcroft: p. 3-9

Iain Britton: p. 9-10

Geoff Stevens: p.10

Jonathan Timbers: p.11-12

Brendan McMahon: p.13-14

Carol Thistlethwaite: p.15

Robert Shooter: p.16

Kathleen Kenny:p.17

Allen Fisher Interview: p.18-21



Poems

Tony Trehy: p.21-22

Jan Oskar Hansen: p.23



Reviews

p.24-26



Poems

Graham Fulton: p.27-28



Listings

p.29-30



Note from Editor, Matt Fallaize. p.31



Subscription. p.32





Joanne Ashcroft









An Irreversible Equation.





0 + 2 = 1

- 1

you

can not still must be

somewhere

I no ‘we’ am

somewhere not home

a place expecting you

one hour

I saw you move speak

(the eyes die first)

willed life back

breathe

gone ?gone

__________________



left-alone dry-shock

words can lie think

written is done undone

is that you? the wind

mocks belief you are

‘are’ must be then but

no you are unspeakable

‘are not’ absented

in everything



did you know, feel

fear pain remember

me absent

one cheated one stolen

delayed

a cold goodbye





1 > 2 ?

drinking your smell

a resurrection

your hair on my chest

I wear you

to become you

sleep foetally in you

burned on your image

damp pillow cold bed





A Parlour

painted from a good likeness

I kissed you cold

left tokens

and you

burning





Graveside

you are not black marble, not green grass, flowers or plants

do not sit here alone

I bind you to me, make you alive, address you

unanswered

but not here. grey powder in a beach box is

grey powder in a beach box





Conjuring

you are dreams

soothing trick

my senses feel

your ghost

wake you gone

beating in fear

drink to sleep again





Trick of the Light

you phoned while I slept

existing in bliss

why do you cry?

a warning

love

must live in death





Buried Alive

erasing your name = redeaths

I resist

memory rebels you gone

I write you

write you into resurrection

non sense words

search for you

no voice no reply

too hard





Enchastened

only ever with you

in me no more

desire lives and is dead

hands and mouth putrefied

beyond touch

irreplaceable sensation

phantom simulation

can not re-place





Judas

is a smile is dressed is an unclouded sun

is wearing not-black is uncrying

alone





Necrosis

condemned

to solitary confinement

consequential

to loving the dead

I a ghost

haunt myself

meander memories

for company

in brain imploding silence

these wracking wounds

are numbing me

beyond existence



desperation = hallucination

a non-conversable you

gut slashing torment

no consolation

no conclusion

no definition

no you





The Maths

am I

an improper fraction

spinning chords in a broken circle

an unmirrored axis of symmetry

a dead rooted square ?





Workings Out

If

0 + 2 = 1

then 1 from 2 = a baby

therefore, 0 +2 + 1 = 3

3 – 1 = 2

therefore ½ of you

in real terms

0 + 2 = 1 (no + 1) – 1

= ?





Sum up

irreversible equations

are the whole

minus one

where one is the whole

the whole can’t be halved

I am half of one

can’t be half only one

zero became one

from two

two fused into one

defied logic

and died

leaving

not one

but the whole minus one

I conclude

1 – 1 =

0



Revisits

in lulls you

surprise me

a scent a song invoke

hair tingling horror

reigniting you dis-ables me

- rewounded

unerasable replays of

you = unavoidable





Not 0

I alone

can recreate

you

in that insane zero

nothing is non sense

reject that conclusion

I retire the maths

and spin yarns

in memories silk

for comfort’s sake you

shall not be dead

while I exist















Iain Britton







A Consciously Diminishing Equation



Quarried from a rockfall of disused angels

and put together to fulfil a purpose, we begin



to track my scent across town, lamppost by

lamppost - a town that flops in terraces



down to a river where locals, crouch, wash

and push away parts of themselves. They wait



as if for long-legged streaks of divine light

to touch them. In Anzac Park



we squash into the backseat of my father’s car,

listening to hedgehogs



grunting in the grass, the footsteps of someone

very close. We move like conjoined moons



in slow motion – touching, searching – and for a

while, we go into ourselves



consciously diminishing. A family

stares at us from trees pruned back



for the winter, the oldest male seems incomplete,

cannibalised – he sits at roots



bulging from the grass. The oldest female

is crumpled up, reshaping the branches, unsure



about the reality of resurrection - whether it works

or not. I’m alert to the pedestrian



history of this town,

the reconstructive touch-ups that begin annually.



Each year the streets look different.

I repossess sightings of the two of us



leaning against walls and fences, or standing

under windbreaks in overgrown sections,



behind a library, or amongst the framework

of a face-lifted church. I repossess a shrivelled-up



passion, the vapour of a faded hunger, two young

people trapped in their own artwork. In this park



there are lovers doing what we’ve done all along.

They burrow into themselves, become



inconspicuous, motionless. They stain

the grass, their intimacy only a whisper.















Geoff Stevens





GREY ROOM





I am theatre in reverse.

Front of curtain

the chaos of partially built sets

abandoned scenery

unfitted costumes

unapplied make-up

and rehearsal rooms

where mistake after mistake

is displayed

Backstage the complete play

slick and entertaining

a one man show

for a one man audience

a production deserving of success

But critics sit out front

amongst the debris



















Jonathan Timbers









Oh, No, it’s Andy!



He did not hunker down

in the carriage

next to our table or bow

his head to show off

‘a machete scar’;

I did not comment

on his hair loss;

or was he going

to a BNP march in Leeds

with an amateur boxer

because he was

‘a lifelong socialist’.



Likewise, the other passengers

didn’t notice him

nor did they glare at us

when we disembarked

at our destination

(undisclosed),

not minding that we

hadn’t said,

‘Don’t take any risks, Andy!

Don’t give them

Any propaganda!’















































TV Quick



Harbajhan traps Lara lbw for 11. Lara doesn’t agree and puts his head to one side and rolls his eyes. But walks. They’ll be sparks in the dressing room, it’s like Time is a tap that won’t stop leaking. Change channels. There’s whiskey

in the larder and chocolate soya milk in the fridge. Change channels. On the embankment, rosebay willowherb and bindweed, its white flower a satin euphonium, speckles of yellow-headed ragwort. Remember the marsh thistle, more blades than a Swiss ary knife, the way it rises above a barbed wire

fence and growls, ‘Go away’. Change channels. Feel the weight, there above your belly. Put it down. Pick it up. Change channels.



That one and that one and that

Until I hit white noise.

It goes on like it always does,

Around, underneath,

Just like the room

And silence.



Chanderapaul is stranded on 123 not out.

















Brendan McMahon









EVERYTHING



No future and no past. Just this

Attenuated moment which will whimper

To a stop sometime soon. Till then

Let’s practise nothingness, and sink

Our minds in wells of silence, so deep

We cannot hear the angel voices

Proclaim the end of everything.





THE CHILD



You can’t do endings, but might eat us out of house

And home, or come to love the river or the sea,

Or other dilute deaths.



Black mouth and eyes of glass, sleep

Broken by the heart’s dark captains,

Warm and dirty, how she bends to you,

Reeking of hay and the sun. Even

A small soul shines like the moon,

Like the stars whose feet the ocean washes.

















SYSTOLE



Membrane, the shadow of excluded rain,

old fight of borders to maintain themselves,

hands pressed to an encroaching dark.



Red rush feeds muscle, nerve, capacities

for action, hamlet-wise persist so long

as only this capillary tidal crash.



Listen, how it pulls and beats,

the song reverberates, the body’s caves.

The echoes, drumming shadow thoughts,

scurry to light and blink and best

inexorable rhythms out to worlds and stars.



















Carole Thistlethwaite

















willow warbler















hu-eet

hop hu-eet

leaves fluttering flit-shadow hu-eet

flutterigleaves hop flank leavesfluttering

flutteringleavesflutteringtwig flank shadow leavesfluttering

flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves hop tail hu-eet leaves

flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves flit shadow leaves

flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves shadow flit fluttering

flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves head flit fluttering

flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves hop tail leaves

flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves hu-eet flit tail fluttering

flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves willow leaves

flutteringleavesbranchflutteringleaves warbler leaves

flutteringleaves back flit flutteringleaves

flutteringleavesbranchfluttering hu-eet shadow branchfluttering

flutteringleavesbranchfluttering willow branchandflutteringleaves

flutteringleavesbranchfluttering warbler branchandfluteringleaves

flutteringleavesbranchfluttering flitting branchandflutteringleaves

flutteringleavesbranch further branchandflutteringleaves

flutteringleavesbranch back branchandflutteringleavesbranch

flutteringleaves hu-eet into branchandflutteringleaves

flutteringleavesbranch the branchandflutteringleavesbranch

flutteringleavesandbranchandflutteringleave



























Robert Shooter









Lip l-l-l lip s-s-s service



l-l-l labial, l-l-l letting my l-l-l lips c-c-c close,

or p-p-p partially, to l-l-l let it out,

p-p-p pray, kick-start p-p-p projection,

or the w-w-w word cannot f-f-f form.



l-l-l letting through understanding

b-b-b bugger inar-r-r-t-t-t ticula sh-sh-sh tion

b-b-b bringing us b-b-b back to the w-w-w word.

f-f-f phonetics demands it

l-l-l lips p-p-p playing b-b-b ball.



b-b-b but the c-c-c conundrum t-t-t to t-t-t- truth

t-t-t telling of

l-l-l living

t-t-t truth the

w-w-w word

l-l-l lies

enou f-f-f gh

c-c-c - nowhere near lips -c-c-c- cannot

s-s-s sp-sp-sp spell

oo-oo-oo u-u-u you r-r-r require r-r-r rounded

l-l-l lips - they l-l-l lie in t-t-t truth - u-u-u oo-oo-oo you - d-d-d- do…

t-t-t too

f-f-f for the oo in t-t-t- trooth lies like

u-u-u you and I d-d-d do

w-w-w which is s-s-s so-so-so- s-s-s sound

w-w-w wh-wh-wh- y-y-y- why?



























Kathleen Kenny



Day Trip





I’m going backwards

in an airline seat,

in a charabang,



The last strobes

of natural light

dashing through the sky.







The Editors ask the poet, Allen Fisher questions about his poems.





Brief Biography:



Allen Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher, editor and art historian, lives in Hereford, Crewe and ‘in transit’, works at the Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire, where he is Head of Contemporary Arts. He has exhibited in many shows including London 2003, Hereford 1994 and York 1993. Examples are in the Tate, the Living Museum, Iceland and various private collections. His last four books were Place, Entanglement, Gravity and Singularity Stereo.



http://www.allenfisher.co.uk/afwebindextemp.htm







JANE: Hello Allen,



I hope you are well and thank you for agreeing to have us ask you questions. I am just about to read your book, ‘Gravity’. I want this to be a spontaneous process without any pre-planning so I will simply read the book and get back to you.



Jane.



Ok, a very quick reaction to first piece titled Banda. I do want to read on and I am enjoying the book but can’t resist interrupting.

Surprised at how much I enjoyed this. I imagined it far more clinical and using a language that may be more distant and heavy perhaps influenced by the title of the book, ‘Gravity’ but it is surprisingly light and sensual. There also seems to be some hope for humankind in amongst the urban ‘big brotherish’ post war city atmosphere.



She bathes in rainwater at last clean

For the first time in decades (p.13)



You give the reader hope of a beautiful world. You bring in smells such as cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, (my favourite spices by the way) and then you somersault into a grocers! This just made me laugh. The image of someone somersaulting into a grocers is, to put it mildly, utterly hilarious! Thank you for making my day!



And then we have wonderful use of sounds;



Launch from the ramp and the joy

Wet zings say it as wasps



And I enjoyed your use

of irony





Bird carpets copied get copied p.14



Can I ask you, are these poems a kind of thought process of something you have experienced as you walk through Brixton? Do you jot down as you experience, a little like a diary or do you reflect and write later after the experiences?

The experience of walking through Brixton is part of what Gravity

includes. I make brief notes, research, accumulate and then

assemble using a system of transformational procedures. Sometimes this

is a quick process; sometimes it takes a long time.



Do you place a lot of emphasis on the editing of your poems?

Sometimes poems are radically edited; sometimes I get it as I want it

immediately.



How would you describe your poetry?

The poetry in Gravity varies, but most of it works through

transformations of previous poems.



What are you working on at the moment?

I am building a set of 35 emblems each of which consists of a poem, an image, and a commentary (it’s a Renaissance and then Baroque idea). In 1980 or 81 Brian Ferneyhough, the composer, wrote a piece called Lemma –Icon, “Epigram, which uses a similar

tri-part set. The images are all done, the poems are underway. The commentaries have only just started.



I know that you are an artist as well. Could you tell me of anyone who has influenced you in particular and in what way they have done this?

I was initially very strongly influenced by John Cage and many of the conceptual artists in the 1970s. Having rejected art as object for a decade, in 1978, Jasper Johns London exhibition lifted my spirits and I started to make paintings. He was able to show me how painting was about thinking and feeling and transforming as extended processes.



How would you describe poetry that avoids creating a dialogue between the writer and the audience and vice versa, poetry that creates a dialogue between writer and audience?

My aesthetic stance demands that the work is in process as soon as a

reader or viewer engages with it, I wouldn’t call it a dialogue. The work is made by the viewer/reader in responses to the work initiated by the poet or artist.



Do you write about your own personal experiences?

I include record of my personal experiences in my work.





Who is your favourite poet and why?

I read about 100 American and British poets. The idea of favourites varies daily. I usually include Denise Riley, Tom Raworth, Joanna Drucker, Clark Coolidge, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, Jennifer Moxley, Ed Dorn, Lissa Wolsak, Frank O’Hara, Andrea

Brady, J.H. Prynne, Gertrude Stein, Hugh McDiarmid and translations of Paul Celan in my list.







Dee Mcmahon





Questions for Allen Fisher, following my reading of



Transformed extracts from iDamage

using keywords ‘pattern’ and ‘damage’



1.



Here you explore your theory of damage in its relationship to visual perception and cognition, supported by examples from image in art, and poetry. Do you find other strong relationships between these two worlds, art and poetry? Do theory and concept in poetry inform art, and visa versa? Any other examples?



I do find a strong relationship between many of the arts. I practice

poetry and art, so I give these areas more emphasis. I find that theory and concept are to some extent embedded in the poetry and art, but I do go through a process that has a theoretical

and conceptual base. This base is partly derived from bases I have recognised elsewhere, in others work, and partly from my experience and practice. I recently listed a set of headings to

describe a practice as research process and showed how it helped with planning a calendar and it may apply here. The headings are: Enquire, Investigate, Accumulate, Analyse, Select, Transform. Like all analyses, this list unnecessarily damages it its small bits

from a larger whole, but it helps articulate the duration and space needed. How poetry or painting articulate 'Enquire' may of course seem to be widely different. If painting starts a one

moment in making sketches or collecting fragments of visual material, poetry could be, conceptually, doing the same. Anyway that may be now off the point you were encouraging. I know that I was very influenced by the conceptual art of the sixties and later,

along with the hole 'dematerialisation of the object' debate.





2. Do you wonder what other abilities and skills such as writing music could bring to the development of theory in poetry?





I have tried 'other abilities and skills'. I find that aspects of one approach to method can be applied to another and often this exchange of method within the parameters of appropriateness, can be efficacious. In 1975 I used Bach's The Art of the Fugue as a pattern-basis for a sequence of poems (The Art of Flight). I followed this in 'Birds Locked in the Roof' (in Unpolished Mirrors which used Beethoven's last Quartet, then in other poems used piano works by Schoenberg and by Stockhausen. In the early eighties I wrote Defamiliarising ____________* which used the note pattern in Brian Ferneyhough's Time & Motion Study I. More recently I

have been using his Lemma-Icon-Epigram in a similar way. These pattern sources have been the basis of musical compositions for Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Ferneyhough, and through my transformation of them have become patterns for my work.

They don't lead to poetry that is recognisable from these patterns, what they do is to break my pattern habits, my own speech patterns for instance, and encourage my invention. There's a sense in which poets using a riming pattern encouraged their own transformations from song and proportionate design. You could think of Spenser and Sidney and their use of spectacular arithmetic

and pattern in The Fairie Queene and Asphodel & Stella. Patterns can provide the bases for conceptual understandings of what to plan to for. The use of large and small patten can be as readily available from architecture or design. When Bartok composed some of his Sonatas he had natural elements in mind which in turn could beinterpreted or analysed through Golden Section ideas in

Euclid and then Fibonacci. Rather than taking the easy option of repeating a natural pattern, I prefer to transform into a new pattern. You could say that has a metonymic dimension, a kind of requirement not to repeat, that stands for the ethos of not repeating.





3. Transformed extracts, is very detailed. What allows you to have such focus? Is full immersion necessary?



I think your implication of immersion sounds about right. It's possible to recognise an overview or conceptual preparation, which may not be immersion, but when the engagement starts it becomes necessary and effective to stay there.





Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions, Allen.



Yours.



Jane and Dee.







------------------------------------------------------------











Tony Trehy





Calculus









0. monotonic the fall. In the cot, of equilibria and reducing

complexities, the baby recognised my death as our eyes

another reason to avoid the butchery of children’s

moment Cut, a form of transitivity when the engine stops

and you can't go on, but you get out of the car and go on.

A prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage one

experiential state of the body to another implying

augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act

She reminded me of what we could have had - and it was

remarkably paradisiacal, only less so. The dynamics

hovering bird wings, the public are mad those that aren't

found in any species in city park ascriptions of method.

Two opposing points connected by positive and negative

charge tired but it was there, something about never

getting there – the slender margin language object – daily

routine of back and forth sine wave study to the quaint

notions of windswept steppe and desert’s unequal

presumption of innocence without fear of retributive

access will be the end of memory: 1







Epigones









0. Second-rate or loosely prehensile, our heroes forgotten,

the principle of least privilege delegated accrues for sun

kings, sons richly apprenticed His, corrupt variance

toward the meaning in its use; the universe of all small

types, which contains names for all the attributes

forgotten; facilitating removal of exotics as nonalgorithmic

monuments: telomeres thin between every regeneration.

Children haunt with the smell of butchery, cost and

elections deplete memory of us, heroes, our movements

recorded and forgotten, from one traffic light junction to

the next top of the range sports car accelerates

ostentatiously away to wait to surge by system of

apologia-inertia by proxy’s excluded other, middle and

below, effectiveness derogating to ‘the same point in space

repeated times’ as last season’s telomeres thinned toward

brown, became fashionably black, decisionally

incapacitated by golden lineage, modelled proudly by

Akhenaten’s daughters, with tanned, luxuriant, pierced

bellies, the statute delegation: we were all epigones will be

again, singular in the infernal drilling noise of extractor

fans. A changed voice would stand out saying: one day you

will be someone who lived long ago: 1









Jan Oskar Hansen



The Reason



The bells you hear, when busy voices briefly ceases,

are made of brass and polished, at dawn, by the spittle

of seven deeply religious monks in the far away Tibet;

where they use yak butter in their morning tea.



When first light strikes the bells there is and explosion

of the colours, blue and green, that lives inside the sun,

without these tones the seas would have been dull as

a rain puddle, outside Gare de Lyon, a fall afternoon.

































Reviews



Purple Patch no. 117



An enjoyable edition of Purple Patch with many scene setting poems such as Leaving Vyrnwy by Jane Moreton, and Empty House by Michael Newman. Landscape imagery throughout but the imagery is more striking when used otherwise, for example, in the return to childish speech ‘melt like a lolly on a hot day’ in For Glynn by William Burroughs, and the description of an impoverished scene in Arts Centre by John Denham:



‘with the impossible heroism

of the one kilowatt convector heater

as it strives alone in a dusty corner.’



Some flashes of unexpected language, for example Kate Edward’s ‘snarling’ in Absence. Despite that many of the poems are predictable and conclusive, leaving little to the reader to work with. The Most Depressing Day of the Year by Frank Burton is an exception, as is Paul Walker’s A Kind of Freedom. Probably the editor’s intention, but there was little in the way of experimental poetry. Interesting concepts were explored in Paul Walker’s Long Year of Unreason, and Gordon Scapen’s A Certain Age.

The review section cuts to the quick and looks for the positives in each publication. It is informative rather than patronising or overly critical, and a reasonable basis for choice of reading, I felt. The gossip section is interesting and controversial.



50 Heads by Tony Trehy



From a striking cover to a hugely enjoyable set of poets prose. The cover shows the mid-section of a high rise glass and steel structure, appealing in its mathematical, ordered image of contained clarity, appropriate to the poetry within.

Trehy’s set of 49 poems are all in the same prose format, and take up space within the centre of the page with an overall square or rectangular shape. They begin with 0. and end with : 1. I was unsure of the reason for this during reading, but Trehy explains that he has invented this ‘Head’ form, and that it relates to Mathematics, where ‘the probability of something happening is defined as a number between zero and one – with zero meaning that the thing didn’t happen and one meaning that it did.’ The titles are arranged alphabetically.

There seems to be within the poems a mathematical as well as poetical approach to the possibilities of language, and recurrent themes are mathematical theorems, linguistic concepts & syntax, and a sort of reflection on human nature. Within quite dissociated texts, phrases appear in more than one poem, and the reader recognises as old friends. There is a sparseness of imagery with some exceptions, such as in the first half of Poem. The poems are predominantly temporal, although there exists in many of the poems a type of mathematical imagery which leads the reader into, out of, and around part concepts, as in Content. The concepts, thoughts and images are presented fleetingly as part phrases, phrases leading to further phrases or concepts presented within the same sentence. Perhaps this is the way the brain links things instead of the formalised order imposed by societal systems, including commonly used language phrasing and syntax.

Most of the poems are made up of phrases rather than sentences, with only an occasional complete sentences within the text, occurring at the end of the poem as a possible conclusive sentence. In general there is permission to interpret the phrases and group them as the reader wished.

Tony Trehy makes up relationships between words and phrases and presents these relationships as texts that can be read and re-read, interpreted at a moment in time a first instance, then again. These are poems to be taken in small doses like 80% cocoa solid chocolate – they are intense and immensely satisfying, if you like this sort of thing.



Dee McMahon









Review of ‘countersyncopationyeah’ by Mark Sonnenfeld



This is probably the fourth time I’ve read this piece of work, written by Mark Sonnenfeld in collaboration with artist Jose Roberto Sechi. A line on what I’ll call the title page tells me its ‘about electricity and THE DOORS’. I have a basic knowledge of each, but am happy to have my belief that poetry contains no truisms confirmed here. For me this piece is quite simply about art and text and the relationships between them.



This piece of work spans nine pages and appears as collaged columns from a Spanish newspaper, possibly from the ‘looking for’ or ‘for sale’ ads, overlaid with short sequences of letters in alphabetical order, and black dots of varying sizes in varying positions. There are text and symbols, or collaged text above and below the columns on each page, and these columns never exactly fit the page. The overriding result for me is stimulation on a poetic, conceptual and artistic level. The relationships between the various texts on the page and from page to page is well disassociated although I do form an impression of both snapshots from daily life, and occasionally, an approach towards a moral commentary. The fact that the font is different for each line of text on each page and page to page, makes for more and more dislocated reading. For this and other reasons the work is unusually compulsive and draws me back to read, re-read and observe it.



One of the most compulsive elements is created by the presence of black dots on the newspaper columns, always two per page. I wonder about the balance of the dots themselves, if one is large on the page, must the other be small; do they equal the same square area in each case; are they sequential; what text are they hiding; is the point the interruption of the column text or the size and position of the dots; their relationship to the text outside the columns. They engender a gracefulness, and artistry in the piece that is outside of the texts but at the same time part of the whole. In a strange way I feel related to the artistic nature of the work through these black dots, and in their simplicity and movement through the text, they make me happy!



The relationship between text and art works as counterpoint, the text dissociating, the artwork uniting. Constants are the newspaper columns, the presence of black dots, the presence of text. Variables are the black dot size and position, the content of the text, its font. It becomes apparent why countersyncopationyeah was chosen as title to the work.



That this is a work is both poetic and artistic in nature does not mean it will necessarily command repeated reading and observation. That it is stimulating and interesting on many levels means countersyncopationyeah will interest poets and artists alike.



Dee McMahon









Review of ‘A Fiery Sunset’ by Omar Musa Ballouta



A Fiery Sunset by Omar Musa Ballouta

ISBN:0-7951-8671-1

Watermark Press

3600 Crondall Lane

Suite 100

Owings Mills, MD 21117







‘A Fiery Sunset’ is a book of love poems, beautifully written from the heart. Read it all in one go and you know where Omar is coming from. For most of us at some point in our lives, we have been there. It reminded me of those relationships you have, no matter how short or long, you never forget the fleeting magic of it all, even though quite often there is pain and loss involved. We don’t know why it may sometimes end but that is the mysterious side of life. At least we can capture these memories as Omar has in this interesting and sensual book of poems. I enjoyed this collection.



Jane Marsh.

















The Life of Fergus in the Hall Cupboard

During the Very Wet Summer of 2007





The highest shelves

are full of dad objects such as

a birth certificate in Spanish a flag

of Chile a strip of photographs

of a young boy in a sailor suit

smiling up at his father

on a street in Valparaiso each one

a small epic a heartbeat more

than the one

before letter

about an earthquake in 1906

a snowscape in the Andes

a Panama Canal souvenir brochure

stories still lifes poems

cigarette cards film star cards

Brigitte Helm Loretta Young

bats of the British Isles cards

famous Scottish people cards

David Livingstone Thomas Carlyle

carefully pasted cowboy scrapbooks

carefully written bicycle diaries

diaries from the war he shouldn’t have

kept in case he was captured killed

without having seen mum

without having made love

without having ridden the pulse

of longing completion creation a ship

in a bottle

Made by a German soldier

in exchange for cigarettes and chocolate

I can still smell the cork pieces clipped

from victory sheets I can still smell

the V flowers pressed

in a heavy book I can still smell

the perfume letters

about love

threads a framed picture of a sailing ship

slicing the waves of an imaginary sea

braces glasses a shaving razor

the blood plugged with tiny papers

cufflinks armbands lists of things

lists of worlds lists of music he loved

lists of music he needed to love list of things

to lift him a heartbeat more a letter

he wrote the week before

a death certificate in English a photograph

of a young boy smiling up at his father

turning into his father

on a hill of ferns in Argyllshire

who has to make the list of everything

on the highest shelves because

I can no longer be sure of

what he laughed like what he

sang like what I look like beneath the dust





Puppy Love





A weekend redneck

with his boot on a chain

transforms

his Alabama drawl

to a Greenock snarl

mutters

fuck off

after singing

every second line

of fuck off Freebird

by Lynyrd fuck off Skynyrd

to his chocolate-

coloured fuck off pup

as it plays growls

shakes

his tatty-coloured

guitar-shapped bag

scatters

his earnings

all over the slabs

looks up at his fuck

off face for approval





Graham Fulton























Listings



Purple Patch

Editor: Geoff Stevens,

25, Griffiths Road,

West Bromwich

B71 2EH

England

www.geoffstevens.co.uk





West House Books, 40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1HN

www.westhousebooks.co.uk



www.poemsinthedark.com



www.thewordtravels.com



www.mslexia.co.uk













http://ac-cygnusx.blogspot.com



www.Stridemagazine.co.uk



www.cinnamonpress.com



www.publishandbedamned.org



www.writeoutloud.net



http://www.planetmagazine.org.uk/html/contrib.htm





The Measure: an email magazine of poetry and prose

http://hometown.aol.co.uk/jumpcatrod/myhomepage/writing.html



http://www.poetsletter.com



Trespass

trespassmagazine@yahoo.co.uk





The Journal & original plus

Sam Smith

17 High Street

Maryport,

Cumbria CA15 6BQ

UK

http://members.aol.com/smithsssj/index.html



See also The Select Six - www.bewrite.net/select_six.htm



The Book Of Hopes And Dreams: a charity, poetry anthology, published to raise money for the Medical Aid, Afghanistan appeal of the Glasgow-based charity Spirit Aid.

www.rimbaud.org.uk/bookofhope.html



The anthology features the work of many well-respected poets, including Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Heath-Stubbs, Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Tony Harrison, Alasdair Gray, Edwin Morgan, Penelope Shuttle, Anne Stevenson, Jon Stallworthy, Alan Brownjohn, Ruth Fainlight, David Constantine, Moniza Alvi, Cyril Dabydeen, Elaine Feinstein, Vicki Feaver, Michael Horovitz, Tom Leonard, Robert Mezey, Lawrence Sail, Jay Ramsay, Charles Ades Fishman, Geoffrey Godbert and Ian Duhig, amongst others.





http://www.ginoskoliteraryjournal.com/



www.stimulusrespond.com.



POETRY KIT (www.poetrykit.org)



http://www.thunderburst.co.uk

davidcaddy.blogspot.com

http://www.onthepremises.com/

http://www.incwriters.co.uk/





Points of Reference: cd by Edge Hill University Poets Alice Lenkiewicz, Andrew Taylor, Cliff Yates, Angela Keaton, Matt Fallaize, Dee McMahon and Robert Sheppard. £4.50 p&p from Alice or Dee





Stories of the Line: cd by Dee McMahon. £4.00 p&p 14 Tower Hill, Ormskirk, L39 2EF







Message from Editor, Matt Fallaize.





Neon Highway – Here to help



With the vast array of poetry magazines in the marketplace, it’s not always easy to send your work off confident that it’ll receive a sympathetic reading. Each editor has their likes, their dislikes, their pet hates, their secret loves. Every poem deserves to be given the best chance possible. Likewise every editor needs to spend less time sorting through submissions pile weeding out work which simply isn’t what the magazine wants.



So to make your life, and our lives, easier, let us clarify:



Here at Neon Highway we want work that is, for want of a better word, experimental. We want innovative poetry, we want interesting, engaging, poetry. We want poetry that is trying something else. We don’t care if you’re published a thousand times over, or if you’re submitting for the very fist time. We’re committed to breaking new work.



Experimentation can be linguistic, it can be thematic, it can be procedural, structural, topical. Experimental does not necessarily mean obscure, high-brow or any of the other narrow descriptions writers use unnecessarily to define themselves. It is a freshness, a state of mind, a willingness to take a risk on behalf of your writing.



What is doesn’t mean is formulaic, polemical, hectoring, old hat. A political poem is fine, a rant is not. A love poem is fine, yet another poem about how sad you are because your partner left you is not. Descriptive work is fine, work that groans under the weight of its own adjectives is not (remember what Bunting said about them bleeding nouns). Simple poems are fine, obvious ones are not. Poems about cats will be going straight in the bin.



If you think we’re the ones for you, we’d love to hear from you. If you don’t, then relax, there’s someone out there for your work. It just isn’t us, and you’ve just saved yourself a lot of time.















































Subscription







Neon Highway, the magazine for experimental and innovative poetry.



Submissions of innovative poetry to be sent to editors:



Alice Lenkiewicz: 37, Grinshill Close, Liverpool, L8 8LD

Dee McMahon: 14, Tower Hill, Ormskirk, L39 2EG

Matt Fallaize: 67, Lea Crescent, Ormskirk, L39 1PG



Neon Highway is available bi-annually, with 2 issues costing £5.50, or a single

Issue available at £3.00. Order your next issue by sending a cheque to Alice Lenkiewicz 37, Grinshill Close, Liverpool, L8 8LD.

ISSUE: 2

Neon Highway ISSN 1476-9867


Issue 2



September 2002
























Contents:





David Grubb: two poems: 1/2



A C Evans: three poems/three images: 3/4/5/6



Ken Edwards: poem: 7/8/9



Robert Sheppard: poem: 9-15



Mark Mendoza: poem: 15/16/17



Helen Berry: two poems: 17-22



David Clemson: poem: 22-23



Rupert Loydell: two poems: 23-26



Adrian Clarke: poems: 26/27



Jas Maddock: poem/image: 28/29/30



Alice Lenkiewicz: poem/image: 30/31



Sheila Murphy: poems: 32



Trevor Landers: poem: 33/34



Jim Bennet: poems: 34-36



Matt Fallaize: poem: 36-38



Bill Griffiths: poems: 38-42









Cover image by Jas Maddock



With special thanks to Ken Edwards and Bill Griffiths for contributing towards this issue.





Copyright is retained by the authors







David Grubb





Learning to Fly



My children fall out of the wall into dreams

where flying is the first thing you do. They already

know that this is not possible when we are around. They

also know that some of the animals cannot be mentioned

or it leads to questions, frowns, disbelief and even harm.

In church they see saints doing the fantastic and beasts

wandering between miracles and battles and all the animals

fall down in front of St. Francis when he commands them.

The nearest we get to this is in stories of walls that go for

a walk and zoos where the people are in cages and when the sun

and moon speak in sonata-form. Ballet also gets near to it

but when the adults try too hard you get bad sculpture

and long poems and operas where the small bellowing heads

of ugly females fog-horn rapture above mossy bosoms

and the sight of unicorns makes some of the men cross their legs.







































1











OTHER



And when he had hurled himself at the mirror

in an attempt to discover other

we found his two shoes beneath the mirror frame

placed as if he had just exchanged them for boots

and had walked out into the wilds of Dartmoor

to be with the singing stones and the women turned into

trees and the places where children would sometimes be heard singing

and in the letters he had left all of the words had become

birds and his books stank of berries and old orchards.

This being a dream of course so that we may believe

in it. This being a fable so that we can refer to it

and not let the silence hide it, giving his two shoes

to the Oxfam shop, his letter to the zoo and his books

hurled into the compost bin until they were quiet.

This being what we stuff between the prayers and the

orthodoxies and what we wish our children to discover

after the singing detectives have been and made

comments about the size of the mirror, big enough

to swallow a man whole if the truth were told.





























2













A.C. Evans



IN EXTREMIS







In my suffering

I looked out of the window



Far blue evening sky of clouds

Lit from below; a flashing, red light

From an aircraft overhead-the scene

Reflects my mind, or

The images in my mind,

Arising- how?

















3







In extremis, I feel convulsions

Taking my singular presence

Beyond, or among, the clouds above.

So-in this uncertain space where

A cold, burning mist shrouds

The remains of ancient buildings

Abandoned carcasses scattered

Across scrubland hillside, rising to a

Monumental crown of stones

Standing motionless in time,

I see that I am dying-slowly,

And in pain.





I also see, with another sense,

A white, slender figure approaching.

Perhaps we can talk,

Is it possible

That, without words, there is, at last,

An answer?

But no-I hesitate-and

Quietly, the figure passes into shadow.

Everything fades slowly from my sight

As, without a sound, I drift

Into oblivion-into darkness.

































4





WAITING HERE



Images of star death.

Polished flooring, waiting,

I’m waiting - jazz music – impressions,

Mistaken impressions – Elektra, still

Waiting, child’s voice, silhouette,

Figures – plate glass vistas-all

Around me, while I wait, here,

Still-and outside the hothouse,

Not my time, light-bird waiting

Here sleepmask cool, the sky

Reflected-no, I am…waiting













5





LOOP DECAY





1. Dawning Sickness

Legend-time-love-remorse

Endless-loop-loop decay

Endgame-future-memorial-hope

Deny-time-love-decay





2. Death Inventory

Comprehension tonal-trial-black

Ignorance-ecstasy-life-decay

Help-smile-deny-endless loop

Legend – endgame – time-decay





3. Loop Alarm

Away-thought-remains-remorse

Help-time-legend-decay

Save-deny-alarm-loop

Endless-future-love-decay





4. Picturesque Concordance

Dust – ecstasy – mem-orial – hope

Past – l e g e n d – decay

Sa…ve…(deny – alarm – lo-

-op – t I m e – remain – fall…ing – d e c a y





5. Sick Decay

Unkn-ow-n…) remain – hope – endless

Loop – loop – d e c a y…ing

…unknown…u n k n o w…n…///

]legend – love – re-mor-se-









6









Ken Edwards



Four poems from Eight+ Six (from a much longer sequence consisting of 98 poems due to be published as a book)









THEY DIDN’T GO HOME





The poets and their entourages, appendages,

Readerships, theoretical props and absences

Are variously and severally assembled.

A shows pictures and reads the words.

B takes seriously the notations in cowboy comic balloons

C vacillates, and comes down on the side of externality

D demonstrates conviviality (again).

E emphasises the smallness of the audience.

F is quiet and has with him a pair of roller blades

G, as usual, enigmatic.

H waxes shaven.

I have had my hair newly cut but have forgotten about it.

Sound travels from the street below because it is a warm

Night & there is no reason for folks to go home.





THE POETS GATHER

(Theory of poetry 2)





The poets gather. They, like poetry itself,

want to be, not seem. Which is seemly.

These are their stories, and the summation

of them is this: that they reject story.

Why, they are paralytic with joy: on their plastic chairs

they identify the depth of field of such paradoxes

and exult in it – they presuppose no need





for emotional closure.

That was then. And now?

Well, only you & I are left, and we’re engaged

In refutation. Yours is a pint of bitter,

mine’s a Guinness. This proposition is true. We raise

our glasses, we refute it

and refute again.







SHIFTS GENRE OFTEN





The poet is one who commits

acts of barbarism out of

social urgency. She babbles

and is a rejection of the

language of. She keeps the context

problematic, pivots as often

as possible, which permits

the tide. This is kind of lingo

phrase for those sorts of people lost

in “the water of the river”

when the water is the river.

Its maps are metamorphic not

atemporal, a comedy of

metonymic chains, of logics









*For Lyn Hejinian, some of whose presentation in the King’s Talks series, King’s College London, April 1998, I have paraphrased freely here.







BECOME GEMS HERE



The map has got scrambled & we are all

delighted. My foot is ambiguous, it has

locationality but not

positionality. Don’t stop. “Those useful choreographies

can easily become a baleful aerobic”* and

once the stultifiers have a hex on warp agencies

who knows where it’ll end up?

But I am certain of a noble uncertainty, it’s OK



now I see that you in your way

radiate and this is legal & good

And everyone says you got the look

of the artist formerly known as god.

We are conversant with our glorious plangent mess

gazing rapidly past this which into here



• The quotation is attributed to Chris Cheek in New Hampshire, September 1996









-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------











31 Basalt Wind-chimes for the Window-Box of Earthly Pleasures







The End of the Twentieth Century 2

Implosive Samples 2

Human Dust 5

Twentieth Century Blues 64





O







Not a book of ayres not a solid monotone. An eye. An ear. Willed to pleasure, let's take a note for a walk across the humming strings. Human



O





Human dust on which history overdosed twice (at least) in one century



O







This dance means bumping into things, yet jump back from the path of Creation's clockwork





O





Atheism does not exist because god invented it! A force to vent: Velopoesis



O





A single voice on a single page - there's music enough. The newspaper vendor cries: ‘Echo ... Echo



O





Plonk (see plunk); his rush of pleasure haunts the paths of sense with sensation



O





But that spooky charm is not earthly goodness as one would want to know it!



O





The fat, melting, dissipates more energy than it conserves. As does repeating the spiky line that unravels into a force larger than its parts



O





‘There ain't no way they can replace this vacuum I created in human history



O





The discipline of hazard and high quality shoots aloft the victims' pitiable admiration that builds under the crust of pain while Creation adjusts its ancient braces



O





The Author of Bangs, against which we nuzzle the footnote of something like human justice. If he is condemned to time, push the eye out and climb out, as from a shell into the bright dream of tomorrow. Obtain your liberty and fiery scope, a phoenix of ‘Socio-Pleasurableness’!



O





Routes bloomed across bound wastes: up to off and over and out until they feel like jelly: ‘Your faire lookes enflame



O





A sensation that is almost an emotion an aubade an algorithmic simulation



O





(a vacuum



O





Suck parody? Constituents of pleasure are not to be taken for granted



O





(sings:) Dear, if you change, I'll melt away like lard!



O





Jaunty now, where the lyrics are dainty. Its opposite, in semantic counterpoint, a miraculous parliament!



O





Keep Creation dramatic and didactic, that's the trick! Each single eye is plugged tight with transformations



O





The strange persistence of the meanings of certain words through centuries. Which syllable shall we elongate to quench again with love?



O





The right to pleasure, as under statute. A unit of pleasure, its animus (Who needs devils with gods like that?



O





Born again, to free Poetic Fury? Dust caught in bees' wax. Turn your lamp up in unbelief. Pleasure has no balance



O





to catch the almost-involuntary spurt of semen or the spiritualist who contacted Bradlaugh after death to catch his confession! Weightless epiphanies



O





‘Shine him off that window!’ This goes with saying



O





Who said purity wove their words, advertising just one admired synthesis?



O





Has an oath truer currency for being underwritten by fear and by stone-eyed defenders of monuments? Cease to be pleasuring response is lost until it sings far from a said



O





Shifting rime that easie flatterer a cat chasing a fly



O





Pleasure's twin. Standing by his word, a god of flesh she forms



O





Clocking form, the infectious eye catches pleasure being caused. The unhasty song when responsibility descants as response



O





The sigh of a cosmos, cooling, expanding; the resurrection of an idea of the word as



O





Unseal the lid at last! A chamber of twentieth century echoes rings. Soiled prose-songs of Velopolis











June 1999







Robert Sheppard

































-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------









Mark Mendoza





fringe saddles





unsaturated

student disaster oils rated/reacted

from the smeared throne exchange heat

system freezers firmly- the compost

surface scrolled fingers reduce & protract the pie

induction in this matter unusually absent



investiture harbours

herbivore grades blest

professions or social shorts

profoundly refunded



tune general tardy

demand smoke

function pull off



with traveller’s joy/ a child of 7 years needs

testa splits) to bury for nothing:

46firsts.com

place & appliance a-

greed with the employer

in funding the deep fringe saddles as follows:



1) production of the Basidium Nexus Plan (BNP)

2) deamination of isolate force-pump & graft

3) storage of cupped garden soil will do- essence

of yellow torch; &

4) regulation of the chromolume in plundering



equation of the last

items ad valorem advert expenditure

whereabouts & come smaller

assigned a fiscal place in a tokonoma rivulets

& droplets react



without throat rate

looking like homozygous

or vestigial wings war

on worthwhile



wear on any cut godwottery

not yet raised to a yodel

multiple asset tubers

& polythene side-lines sovereign clap



largely backward or handicapped for the secular

chambr´e at the momentary canal they turn

thyme-eaters to credit

“dust yourself off there

let alphas decide weather a headlong stop-gap

or warped flax engine will cross inert phenotype

suicide in the same

ludic counters to a prejudice

chin up” you can wig out

if you wag trails





-----------------------------------------------------------



Helen Berry









THE TASTE OF THE ONION





OUR nation is at WAR



OUR ECONOMY is in RECESSION



The civilised world F

A

C

E

S UNPRECEDENTED DANGERS



YET



THE STATE OF OUR UNION



HAS NEVER BEEN STRONGER



OUR NATION HAS



CAPTURED



ARRESTED



AND RID



THE WORLD OF THOUSANDS



OF TERRORISTS



SAVED A PEOPLE



FROM STARVATION



FREED A COUNTRY



FROM BRUTAL OPPRESSION



A $$$ BILLION DOLLARS $$$ A MONTH





TODAY * * * *

WOMEN * * * *

ARE * * *

FREE





OUR PROGRESS IS A TRIBUTE TO THE



MIGHT



OF



THE UNITED STATES MILITARY







(THEY) HAVE DELIVERED



A MESSAGE





YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE



THE JUSTICE



OF THIS NATION



SEMPER FI MY LOVE



OUR CAUSE IS JUST



TENS OF THOUSANDS



OF



DANGEROUS KILLERS



SCHOOLED



IN THE METHODS



OF

MURDER



THE MEN AND

WOMEN





OF



OUR



ARMED FORCES



SPREAD

THROUGHOUT

THE WORLD



LIKE



TICKING



TIME BOMBS

SET

TO GO

OFF



WITHOUT

WARNING



AMERICA IS ACTING



AMERICA AND AFGHANISTAN ARE NOW ALLIES









LET’S PASS A STIMULUS PACKAGE













Girl from Ipanema



Carnival carnivore casting worms

Jewelled watch, sleek chic bait

A gluttonous feast of flesh

pretty,

preened

and primed await



Metre high plumes on glittering crowns

Fandango frippery

Fringing flickery

Hormones transported in

sweaty rivulets

Amazon rivers coursing



Maraca beads

swirling white noise

Tom-tom pacing

pelvic thrust

Native rhythms evoke

lustful swelling

Wave pulses to the edge

Hairs twitch





In-breath

held

waiting



Heartbeat re-sounds

throb

Crescendo approaches

Pace quickens

Pupils dilate

Flesh judders

Globs trickling over

glistening skin

pulled

translucent



Precocious gutter child

re-turned

Chicken bones

line

the Street









--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------





David Clemson





Before reconstruction



Horsetails whipped by the hot wind

as the crocodiles scrape their scales

against the dead oaks

blistered by the Sun

desiccated statues of forgotten shade.

Brown-eyed deer flicker

through the tall golden grasses

laden with fat ticks,

scenting the water,

fearing to drink

under the lion’s, snarl

over the dead lambs.

While pink, grey and green

lampreys suck the life from

the great salmon as they

lie in the gravid beds.

All must come to this course?

This Eden where the key

is jammed in the lock.

Overwound climate?

Broken Spring?





-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Rupert Loydell





HOUSE OF GLOOM



I flew home each night from wherever I had been

To watch my father die, slept on the floor beside him.



Colours bleached out while I was away, everything

turned to brown: ochre, tawny, mustard, spice.



Death continued about its secret business;

no-one ever spoke about what was going on.



Stumps of bushes are sending up shoots,

Often in the form of prophecy or story.



No-one listens. I am somewhere else by now,

at a standstill. Waiting for Dad to arrive.



I must stop turning to see if he is following,

must learn to speak in the past tense.



Only the hardiest can stand the present;

I do not understand the word memory.



At the bottom of my heart it is proven:

melancholy makes everything right.



Turn on the light and play music til daybreak;

Loss must be burnt into the world.



My father is now cross-referenced,

a man no longer in the public domain.



‘Don’t pull that innocent routine on me’

is something he once might have said.



I twitch and fidget, pace the field;

he zips and flickers through the world.







River of Breath



Already, I know

some of my clothes

will outlast me;



and that there won’t

be time to read my books

or hear my CDs again.



Past and future

stretch tight between

loss and promise,



an intersection

where topography

becomes narrative:



a dangerous turn,

hills, bridges, towers,

an underpass



all possible routes

through the woods

to where clear skies



and rivers wait.

We have drifted away

from the moment…



I wish for nothing

to change, should

probably worry more



as ambition slips

out of sight. Time

is not my property,



the end of the work

is in view. I snuggle

into a tent of words.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Adrian Clarke

from Skeleton Sonnets



the age

of what

to input

profiles idem

a fleur

not inflated

full face

in your

one step

from the

edge pretty

as a

puncture’s high

pitched collapse







“Who will ever read these slips…?”

Li ho (trans J.D. Frodsham)





tips windswept

neglect stirs

a flicker

within silk

sheathed speckling

leaves illegible

pits beetle

drilled piecemeal

deliver the

insinuative image

scenting drizzle

spirits twitter

a relict

bled script



















Jas G. Maddock















I USED TO FEEL INTENSE IN MY DEFENCE OF MY DIFFERENCE- NOW I’M COMPLETELY INDIFFERENT. A study of dreams…



I met two floral decked boys on the way to nowhere

They greeted me with a bow and a shower of fragrance

Shrank to the size of small and crept inside my eyes

Stayed there beautiful and danced until I died



If you look closely at things far off you mistake them

Splendorous pretty youths bedecked in dazzled flowers

Asters, camilias, dahlias, passiflora purple divinity boys

Then as they draw nearer the magic sours



Rotten carcass pickled sickly malicious men and women

Smell of burnt flesh and goats, dressed in the same coats



All humans are covered in boring skin and inside are boring bones

Corpuscles, muscles, kidneys: heartless marauding drones.



I believe in nothing, I live out my lifeless days dazed

But a tiny pinhole of a crack screams out inside of me

Not very loud of course, cracks cannot shout very loud

That I must carry on drained, pained and maimed emotionally.



I dream of bees, of wasps with cigarettes in their arses

In pink lipstick rooms with strange men by white windows

I dream of mazes and of running feared I feel the beads of sweat

Palpitating excruciating; the scare from which I froze



I see men with teeth like waylaid graveyard tombstones charred

Walking silent; prowling, the growling; it might be their empty stomach

But they might just growl as that’s what weird men are supposed to do

To scare young maidens and princes and leave them wary and flummoxed.





I hear my name called over the waves of the sea by the beach

Echoing, dancing over the fresh, white, salty foaming milk

The mermaids and men protect me from the human scurf

Pox-like and wormy they spread disaster from old age to birth





The birds talk their bird language all full of mystery and riddle

Provide a kind of company and punctuate the silent nothing

I listen and strain to make sense of the twittery flittery

But after a while it gets me feeling a bit jittery.



I block out the sounds of the past in my present head

Threatening to take me over and pull me fully back into pain

I think of golden boys, winged and fragrant with dark hair

They fight to banish the morbid memories, of more I will gain





-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------





Alice Lenkiewicz



















milieu







now she’s back again

inside the illusion

preferred this time

maybe you should persuade me

that insects fly

all i see is the earth move in waves



when this is over

will you consider me or

will it change



something vacant



blue glass blue snow

something perhaps

another random ricochet



…so we lit some cigarettes





kissed

despised each other

laughed

walked our separate ways

in-between artificial displays

of glass fish



transparent gaping heads

one or two reflections



i gave the visitor directions

yes over there

then watched her search her bag

as they played that song

… thought I was someone good



she still couldn’t find what she was

looking for

put her hand over her mouth









31

Sheila Murphy





Aggravated Asphalt





Time and against the granular induction chevrons placed their amber laves where

Chipped rock seemed intact. For all practical precipice, there seemed a comely

Avenue to fake. Tensions modestly enveloped see-through evanescence. Mainly

From the spun confronting shack presiding near the temples. Brains [dry] before

Beauty. Age is the retort by vitamins, the lock of pear, the whole meal caveats that

Lank into comportment. The coronary altar cloth ′eclairs that any mandible will

Do. Maintained by birds of prey still skivvy although posthumous. That might fray

Semblances before the bake themselves into a twist. This rightly shakes the

Veered foundations into mountable renewals. Plagues come back to haunt what

They have taunted once. And then the sway, the showplace and the cult.



Pronouncing the death sentence in a nice way, the surface as altimeter











Nary a Ration





She kept using the word natural. I was very tired. The afternoon seemed to have

Shelved energy that might have been within the spigot and eventually fallen into

Use. I could not hear the altar in her humdrum range of motion. Tentacles were

Aching to give back to Morse Code tincture of a ravishing and soon-to-be

Announced young fact. The mercy of this wish waltz was its semblance to the

Known. A welding class would have fortified. Likewise, a modest sum of clash.

The penury in which her limbs were steeped made soak time seem inanimate.

Then the worry of the free, the timber out in back, the mere thought of a coast.

These intrepid shoulder-length reflections on a dish of vindaloo were nearly posh

Compared with petty actuals that graced the nearby boulders. All one would have

Wanted was surprise to be indicative of rest. But this seemed creviced with

Invasion. While telling the tale, one reminisces brilliantly until the headrest won’t

Include the dromedary motion sickness one considers as an antidote to a learned

Severity.









Roan latitude, a vague sense of the nest alongside promises





Trevor Landers





House on Oeo Road





Paint runs from cracks in the ceiling

as if the room were wounded –

This body, and we inside.

perhaps it is running

from a spear-pierce into our own

visional vision.





Where words and burgeoning

shapes fail

The birth of painting is reflected

From color above the ceiling.





the black backing shows through

where a mirror has been partly shattered –

scalloped edges of glass fallen away,

so that there is a central

sculptural night

surrounded by the day lit

reflection of trees

that sway

at the edge of the anxious mind.





In fine heat

two images flash,

one into the other:



a ceiling of painted stars, pale-blue fluorescence

and an unkempt lawn,

glistening

from a recent rain.



By the curve of the earth

night’s depth is amplified

as from the sill

of a bay window from the house, on Oeo Road.







-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------





Jim Bennet





City of Culture



start on bricks

add the people - the I who have



then I who have nothing

there is something

see if a people see

looking for a city's strength

looking good

trivialised

because trivialise is in the viewpoint

see the city of us



Liverpool



we work writing

human for ourselves

and of pieces a side of a face

a face of subsistence

of where the desperate

bring misery



so you mostly take on

the form of squalor

shut sad as if ashamed



Liverpool while first aside

accept reflection

a struggle in diversity



raise another state

at stake the state

that inhabits kindly

but I and us have

no direction home

lost because

people lost hope

turn don't position

don't do snapshots

one shot failure

write of the problems



the homeless

protect people

create underclass

what is not should be

the Liverpool that is





who writes of the system

and worth of city

cries for Liverpool

everyone from people

drug foisted everywhere



history induced

and who is history

it's crap money but it happens

need your eyes and everywhere

talking only of architecture

banks own the wit



we have been the way of poverty

suffering people

living think say

what this picture is



Liverpool

city of culture



__________________________________







when the cold wind blows



there are places we go

in the southern end of town

where decaying ships

rust out a wasteland

we walk back alleys

the weather against us

hands with woollen socks for gloves

coat collar turned against the wind

this is the reality

the crackling

ark cutting

weld flashing night

and here we rut

bum fuck the future

and cry sometimes



yes cry

when cold winds blow







-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------









Matt Fallaize







Ad-Ban







Took the colours emphasised, looking changes

into the mathematician, invariant climbs eight

to the schemers, where, believing sunlight made

separate perception dream burning myself.



Beneath next, a gate, hinged white singularity,

a quicksilver should, better surround the

objectification, smothering the improvisation.

The super-structure examined, type fixed.



Clarity sighs into realising peripheral, glanced, indefinite euphony

until analytic dropped, shifted, lowered, pushed

over reflex record.



Recollection: lying in a eucalyptus, the gravity opposes the lot.

Water to our walkway, scattered sonata co-operatively subsiding.



The trumpet rolls

hits

and one wall blows. Rush the damage.

Your black fingers roll temporal air and the

force felt increases. The shared hole,

the switch.

37

Two, three, carry two. Face dancing visitors, see

the stationary shadows, under a field

calls out, exhausted. The untimed unified uses

signify filling, exhaling in the between so hurts.



Balcony shatters, erupted windows. A walkway

where fire, the fact, came. We wanted retrenching, the open

through telephone-cross. Listen. Wings before resistance

the functions fraught without possible

following drops and background, in noting glass colour.

Broke, the congruent roof. Bird wood. Silence. Haywire.



Began once, precise the start. I,

knowing, upright

just steel, run the directions, the market,

incapable curve, jerk. From notions before

Perfect you. The shoulder circular, just

passing your moving: poetry.

It takes it’s surprises, it takes changing a rebound

labelled “unattended”, marked “decay”. The eye

with a shouting someone calls physically, the walkway

with tearing, the energy of the distance.

Silence, a doubt passes, regarding discarded zero



Sighs in his page, eyes vigorously drawn. The crossing,

knowing anger. Momentarily in blazes, his bright sirens

in the inescapable reflections call the dust.

The utility sends winter to the alternations on the imagined,

realised sword, and the price.



Dancing down in turning digits, a Fireman in

unliquidated blank-screened yesterday necessity.

To the weather, and a history.



Lovely light, the sky strictly duplexed

with the freedom, measured down their wheels.

A torch, light circumvents description. My

time in each moment marks still potent, unbroken. But you

become another arrangement. I, my uneven changes moves

it selectively. Self-love flattered a new folded past, sprays the

pepper- my pillow perception.



The notes are gone. Clean the sign. Beware the distance.

Accompanied sighs secretes cloves. My somersault flurry

hit the city, opens on where it’s hesitant sound launch, say

our distance was copied. Value for reality, simply the



disturbing violins. Watch, fixed, the cordon from distance.

I, outside. One desire, with glass.







-----------------------------------------------------------------------------





Bill Griffiths



BEE-BIKE





For unto us

we are sluggish

in honey-diesel

a chamber a six-facet fruit-transparent



SLIF SLIF SLIF



beat and a

BUMB BUMB BUMB



finding we are unemployed again



slif at a shiny rim of wax

float

booling boon and hint

no Royce no north no land-fill



extra-ordinary

revolve

and but a tiny tube of living contact for passage



pleases like low-apple syrup

rods of flavour

shook to lemon dust

slight sips fat-water

in fret-strut



solid burgher

but glow-in-home a lamp

of wings

and will we see Mother?



the wall

of slow soapstone

rice-glum hinting light

what these mysterious barricades

I eat



I emancipate



wing-leg

arm-head

leached in the rain

of loose liquid food our

first bath



or

euphoric

deep-root

plum

a-rotted snort pip



a fellow hum

to preen

crawl explore

foot each-over

the melody today is ‘Dargomel’



the chant

a tumbled walk

for we are to pay our respects



and the Queen



roseate and bile

love-fur fire channel of



mill of the loving she-workers

and we too shine



gold and global



rasp-castle rigs

on leg

a rude mark

we wake to

as prussic glamour



stripe



a grow, crèche

glow to growl



they shake

sting









SPIDER MAN



long

bus-stop



man maybe



shiny as new



only the dull plaques

sockets

if you glance, catch a glance

stands perch-rigid



preternatural thin, long



still-stannary pipe-crunch clamp-hog-teeth

hidden



How!



After a familiar while,

an elegant leg

seems to almost shuffle

a beginning of a little dance

(I do not know what---

Galliard? Bootlegger Shimmy? Country Jig?)

lop-sided



A terrific burst

Rustle and rush up to,

tear away from

bald beserk aggression against a nearby sky-wall

up and up

we say, “Oh no! he’ll fall!”



But slapstick-stylish

then he rives his shirt open

and SPINS



something to web him to safety



that gluey confusion of middle

(waving, behaving, saving)



all because of the bus

well, we run



well, he knows

Spider-woman is inside



acrid

svelt

snaky-necked



she rides



and her neat bundles beside her

























Publications





Ken Edwards: Poems published here are from a forthcoming collection: Eight + Six



Sheila E. Murphy: Most recent book-length collection is from Stride Press, titled THE STUTTERING OF WINGS (2002).



AC. Evans: Forthcoming collection of poems from Via Dolorosa Press.



Cory Harding: memories of air: Collection of poems and images.



Robert Sheppard; Patricia Farrell: The Blickensderfer Punch: Ship of Fools 2002

Fucking Time; six songs for the Earl of Rochester: Ship of Fools



Robert Sheppard: the necessity of poetics: ship of fools, Liverpool, 2002







Journals



The Radiator: a journal of contemporary poetics. Editor. Scott Thurston.



Oasis: Edited by Ian Robinson and Yann Lovelock.



The Paper: Editor: David Kennedy.



The Journal: Editor: Sam Smith.









Gallery: COLLECT in Liverpool

Art Exhibitions

49, Lark Lane, Liverpool.

http://home.btconnect.com/collectgallery



















43





Contributors



Sheila E. Murphy’s most recent book-length collection is from Stride Press, titled THE STUTTERING OF WINGS (2002). Murphy’s work appears widely in literary presses. Her home is in Phoenix, Arizona, where she and Beverly Carver founded and coordinated the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series for twelve years.



Robert Sheppard has now completed his long project Twentieth Century Blues. The most recent parts published were Empty Diaries, Stride, 1998, and The End of the Twentieth Century, Ship of Fools, 2002. Senior Lecturer in Writing and English at Edge Hill College of Higher Education, he has also published widely on contemporary poetry and on the discourse of poetics.



Ken Edwards was born in 1950 and lives in London, where he works

as a journalist. He is currently editorial director of Reality Street Editions. His own publications include: Intensive Care (1986), Good Science (1992), 3,600 Weekends (1993) (collections of poetry); Futures (1998) (novel). The poems published here are from a forthcoming collection: Eight + Six.



David H W Grubb. B. 1941. Poems and prose published in UK, USA and Austria. THE MEMORY OF ROOMS (new & selected) published by STRIDE last year. New collection due in 2003 as well as a novel.



Helen Berry: Has worked as a systems engineer and business analyst. Currently on the MA Writing course at Edge Hill University College. Interested in Drama and Poetry.



Matt Fallaize: Lives, works and writes in Ormskirk, Lancashire. An MA graduate, he is a member of the Poetry and Poetics research group at Edge Hill University College, where he is in constant fear of being found out for the chancer that he clearly is.



Alice Lenkiewicz: Artist/Poet. Brought up in Plymouth. Presently lives in Skelmersdale where she is studying her MA in Writing Studies and editing Neon Highway. Published in Fire and Smoke.



Mark Mendoza celebrated his twenty-second birthday with a one-man Mariachi band in a cactus garden close to Brighton and Hove. He is currently writing the critical autobiography Finder’s Keepers: The Life and Work of Aaron ‘The Animal’ Gill. Network information and material

containing the words ‘host’ and ‘explosive’ may be forwarded to markmendoza64@hotmail.com.





Jasmine G Maddock: A surreal, imaginative and quirky artist/writer. Graduated in 1996 from John Moores University in Literature. Has undertaken a cornucopia of art/poetic work, including work selected for unesco. it (poetry) in 2001, poetry in ‘Twisted Shadows’, out now from ‘Spotlight Poets’, winning the society of All Artists (SAA) 2000 Experimental Professional section with ‘Manwoman’ and work on www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/j/jasmine.



Trevor Landers is a Lecturer in Communication at The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. Trevor’s recent publications are in Never Bury Poetry, Poetic Hours, Pierian Springs and The Voice of the Turtle. He is currently reading the lesser known books of the French surrealist author, George Bataille, and intends to write an academic paper on them.

Jim Bennett is a writer, poet and lecturer, who is married with six children and living in Merseyside (UK). He has over forty books published, covering many subjects including, transport studies, marketing and poetry. He is a lecturer at the University of Liverpool where he delivers courses on such diverse subjects as, travel writing, science fiction, journalism, and other aspects of creative writing.

Down in Liverpool. A new CD of Music and Poetry from. Jim Bennett. "an authentic voice bringing the sound of beat to Liverpool" http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/1127/

David Clemson was a teacher and University lecturer in mathematics, science and education. He now makes his living from writing mathematics and science books. All of his previous experience and qualifications have been in mathematics and science. David is now taking the MA in Writing Studies at Edge Hill and having the most exciting time discovering new things about himself.

Rupert M. Loydell’s writing has appeared in hundreds of magazines in the UK, Europe and America; in many anthologies; and in several solo collections. New work was recently commissioned by the Bath Literature Festival, Devon Arts In Schools Initiative (DAISI) and by Exeter Health Care Arts. Rupert Loydell is Managing Editor of Stride Publications, which he founded in 1982. He also edits the associated Stride magazine-now an online journal at www.stridemagazine.co.uk



Adrian Clarke’s collections include “Ghost Measures” (Actual size, 1987), and “Obscure Disasters”, “Millennial Shades & Three Papers” and “Paradise Gardens” (all Writers Forum). Work anthologised in “verbi visi voco” (Writers Forum, 1992) and “foil” (Etruscan Books, 2000). He co-edited four issues of “Angel Exhaust” during its two incarnations, and “Floating Capital:new poets from London” (Potes & Poets Press, 1991) with Robert Sheppard. He currently edits “And” with Bob Cobbing.



A.C. Evans

Born in Hampton Court in 1949, A.C Evans lived in South London until 1963 when he moved to Essex. Moving back to London in 1973, he currently lives in Mortlake, near Richmond. His artistic activities include both poetry and visual art. His drawings, collages, reviews, articles, translations, poetry and poetic fictions have appeared in numerous magazines including Stride, Fire, Fisheye, Cold Print, Memes, Penny Dreadful, Angel Exhaust and Terrible Work.



Bill Griffiths



Bill Griffiths, born Middlesex 1948, now living in Seaham, Co.Durham. Mixed career, from odd jobs to poetry publishing to studying Old English to (currently) dialect research with the Centre for Northern Studies, Northumbria University. Poetry first published in Poetry Review, 1972 (when edited by Eric Mottram) and subsequently booklets from Writers Forum (Bob Cobbing) and many other little presses. Recent publications: A book of spilt cities (Etruscan Books), Ushabtis (Talus Editions), Durham & other sequences (West House Books).













NEON HIGHWAY. POETRY / ART MAGAZINE

Neon Highway publishes, poetry, poetics, art, reviews and letters.



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