Magdalena Ball #11 Nearer this dawn audio in response to Dominique Hecq & Béatrice Machet #1 – Nearer this dawn – collaboration

This is an audio recording of Dominique Hecq & Béatrice Machet’s #1 – Nearer this dawn – collaboration

https://soundcloud.com/maggieball/nearer-this-dawn

Kit Kelen #12 - 17 Avenue Road -- after Ian Humphreys

12

17 Avenue Road

after Ian Humphrey's 'First Poem'

https://conversationinpoetry.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/ian-humphreys-2-first-poem-in-response.html

So they had the boy baptized, and as they baptized him he plunged into the sea. And immediately when he was in the sea, he took its nature, and swam as well as the best fish that was therein.

-- from Math, son of Mathonwy, in The Mabinogion

I remember the bottle-top

green of the bay

ferry whiff

bounce of a wharf

that was the harbour side

ocean a hill away

the world was quite unmapped

(as I found out later when I ran off)

off to America at an early age

from Balmoral Beach

I would learn to swim on the way

you'd want to get into that water

it's all summer here

the population salted

sidere mens eadem mutato

they kept me quite literally on a leash

how could I have suspected a poem?

clouds and the blue

and everything clearly

splinters in white paint

the tram came down the middle of the road

I was still coming into the world

soon I would write 'A Day at the Beach'

much later, still a lifetime ago

North Narrabeen -- sauterne from a milkshake container

and throwing up in the surf

that was a dizzy experiment!

I do remember things before

goanna alongside, the plumber coming in

without knocking, and winter

burnt my bum on the radiator

don't remember crying

but I must have done

so many things I could and would be

but mum would say

'don't drive in the rain', 'not at night'

'don't sleep over there in the dust and the cold'

it's not what you remember

it's getting back to there

all those fears of some primitive difference

make me who I am

love of rose fingered dawn

(so seldom seen)

it doesn't matter that they've gone

you are what you have always been

the 'green grass' was bamboo

in those days the world went as far as my aunt's

and I hid the lettuce sandwich

in the sand next to the driveway

no one would ever find out

growl more of late

I call that atavism

still the day's not quite washed out

plenty of beaches here

it's only in the mirror you see

the one on the shore who sets out to swim

with the parents still on a leash

Dominique Hecq & Béatrice Machet #1 – Nearer this dawn – collaboration

Nearer this dawn

Pick up the day by the scruff of the neck
homecomings have sharp teeth

though ignorant of meaning they bite
taking puppy fat            for puppy love

and dark      soft     words
melt in ink swirl we call
survival

drop by drop it is
your very self reflected and gathered
as dark as breath  when it sneaks out
between fangs

under the cross-eyed sun
so hot        you creep       inside
and scribble at large
                       about interstellar
                                  encounters

a rainbow bird—which
doesn’t belong to you—
is your hand
wavering
what could it grasp that wouldn’t escape
through scrawling 

but an i
with multiple voices
and personae salvaging
scenarios and pieces of time
                                  or death

which amounts to the same thing

but an i
ceberg standing for the ship
claiming its outsiderhood
fermenting till swollen till
prematurely split open
yet trying to be more human

as iceteeth crash on the shoreline

Odveig Klyve #1 Transformation

I am rising
to the clouds
to find out
where the water turns into
snow

Cui Yuwei #6-- A Translated Poem of Yi Sha: "Poetic Truth" responding to Ali Jane Smith

Cui Yuwei #6-- A Translated Poem of Yi Sha: "Poetic Truth" 

in response to Ali Jane Smith' Trio

Here is the link: 

https://conversationinpoetry.blogspot.jp/2018/02/ali-jane-smith-trio.html

Poetic Truth

Written in Chinese by Yi Sha 

Translated into English by Cui Yuwei

38th Parallel

is not a line.

Four kilometers wide,

it's a demilitarized zone

demarcating North and South Korea.

Six decades later

it has become the world's most successful

animal sanctuary.

《事實的詩意》

  

                 伊沙

三八線

不是壹條線

它有4公裏寬

南北朝鮮劃定的

非軍事區

60年過去了

成為世界上

最成功的動物保護區

Ali Jane Smith – Trio

After reading

BéatriceMachet # 9 GOODAFTERNOON

KitKelen #11 - heart (for and after Kerri Shying, following the bulbul)

MelindaSmith #3 DIY after Angela Gardner #1 Three Fragments

Peace upon the thing.

When you can't choose between

the filing cabinet and the Weimar newsreel

there's no law against both.

Peace upon the thing.

And also upon the other thing.

I can listen to anything I want

anything digital

as usual it's hard to remember

what it was I was thinking of

she did that cover of a Roberta Flack song.

Well sure, but WHICH ONE?

Bill Evans, perhaps

because there is nothing going to be better than

'Peace Piece' if you're in the mood

not for love, for wandering aimlessly around the kitchen

or lying on a couch and deciding whether or not

you should do that thing you should be doing.

I don't do it, then I do it.

Memories are insubstantial

unlike plates used in early cameras.

Sometimes a memory comes hurtling past like a frisbee.

Was that a pointe shoe? The prawn and mayonaisse rolls I used to like?

After 'Peace Piece' I listen to 'Some Other Time'.

Then stop.

Da dum. 

Magdalena Ball #10 Attachment is the Cause of All Suffering after KA Nelson #1 Things I couldn’t throw into the skip

Attachment is the Cause of All Suffering 

in response to KA Nelson #1 Things I couldn’t throw into the skip

dripping with kitchen steam

a domestic dream gone slippery

knowing what’s impending

pretending it’s fine, good

but the corruption has begun

in spite of the accumulation, all these things

conspiring in the lie

another day the deaths we carry

bite marks, scars, little halos tightening

against the scalp, undermine digestion

remind us how much

has been lost already

what was promised

not delivered

years ticking in, leaking out

into the soft pressure of pillows

the mouldering paint

the light globes, the dust, it all counts

the worst is the papers, a filing cabinet full

documents and receipts

purchases long redundant, lost

an indentation in the mattress

the mess of clothing on the floor

a buzz in my head competing

with the noise of crickets

it’s crowded in here

thoughts have heft

your hand, a pressure against my arm

sunlight moving in slow lines along the

swimming pool, the hammock

all things with mass

holding, pulling back 
creating gravity

Béatrice Machet # 9 GOODAFTERNOON

To follow in Ali Jane Smith’s footsteps

(https://conversationinpoetry.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/ali-jane-smith-nish-manjunath.html)

# 9 GOODAFTERNOON

And now it is today. You emerge from behind what could be seen as bad dreams.

            (And you know many would understand this screen of yours as a beautiful life). 

Today is when you whisper in my ears telling how good my hair smells. But this you, even though somebody, is no one or anyone: this doesn’t count although felt as hitting it off.

         Now today tries to stich outside and inside together so as to unfold the screen and play the dreams.

                                  Bad and beautiful are the borders beyond which now is today. 

Today is a day to consider a method in order to measure wounds and pain when not suffered under torture.

                                     Now is a period of time inside which people are “suicided” and others “genocided”. It’s a period of time during which my heart leaks out black blood to become red voice in my mouth pouring white words of peace. 

                                                                                                    And now a door is blown open by winds in numerous threads like undone nests. No possible rest: which is precisely the reason why now and today expand till the coincidence of time between birth and death as it is said to accept and conform to, whatever it costs you. It might scratch your skin: memories that forgot to be neutral.

                                                                               Today is a high tide day of storm: when land is flooded and it’s no daylight and no night either. A dark now of elevated waters. It might be a moment to reinvent one‘s self through trespassing. As if bad and beautiful in this renewed now were lost in translation but woven with waves for unseen braids to form a mat. And now sailing away today loses any taste for autobiography. 

 

It’s no self-surrender but rather existence. The aftermaths of a lightening that stroke to a certain agony: a high quality of tiredness. Exhaustion and a weight on the chest stealing your last breath. A quartering allowing some suspension back and forth between life and death that produces an alternating current: the power of today.

Now: a horizon as hard as a wall like a whitewashed bone inside me. No flesh for today’s tale. No paraphrase and no quote either. Just a ray of light for a basic beaming. This will make my day.

                                                     Afternoon already…

Melinda Smith #3 DIY after Angela Gardner #1 Three Fragments

DIY

(after Angela Gardner #1, 'three fragments')

Trust is getting more expensive. I know

how those people in the Weimar newsreels felt

(except that I don’t) but I kid myself I can empathise –

How barrows-ful of cash were required, and yet

insufficient

Never bring a screwdriver to a drill fight, you will only

go down, under-spun, orphaned by light

Every moment so irrevocable, a nail in a nail-gun, and yet

we live our whole lives pretending otherwise,

extenuating

At the going down of the sun, the cashbox must be reconciled    the greasy coins

laid out    we are short      there are dozens of zinc-ed

lips insisting, they will not be silenced, and so I

heave myself into the promotional wheelbarrow, naked but for cheesecloth

artistically arranged   I am moon-like and perfectly bruised, but with

no means of locomotion – perhaps I am hoping to be

grabbed like a dangling handbag, possessed as recompense

for all the uncalled debts, the collapse of

Rome, everything taken and sullied – OK perhaps as the first instalment

only, just enough to cover one tree, one creek, one family

man-handled

(the above is an acrostic on Angela’s last line ‘the hinge we all hang from’)

Ali Jane Smith – 'Nish Manjunath'

after reading KitKelen #11 - heart (for and after Kerri Shying, following the bulbul) 

first thing in the dream

I'm standing on a giant giant cane reed

arundo donax

the grooves are enormous

thoughts do what they're supposed to do

when you don't want to have them

kind of melt

it's the heat maybe

or the hot chips

the two black coffees

improvisation, Sue's tshirt

this old thing!

the adrenalin dump

after a morning of ordinary

exhausting wrangling

second thing is, it's not a dream

it's music lending me a trampoline feeling

good afternoon goodafternoon

goodafternoon

Kit Kelen #11 - heart (for and after Kerri Shying, following the bulbul)

11

heart

for Kerri Shying, following the bulbul

https://conversationinpoetry.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/kerri-shying-3-and-bulbul-means-heart.html

on the upbeat

on the down

heart means country

take it to here

hello

with first thing

from the dream

for magic

there's no further journey

here in all the years at home

yet found

a swirl of world

knocks it about

up trill

must be a birdsworth

it's long since we agreed to this

and always sniffing out

you'll follow

sit, heart

beg

give me your hand

nestle in chumpup

tummy for rub

brave as brief

these are words from

up above the mud so high

you neither see nor feel the lice

you won't find crossings out

we breathe again

and it's this country

mattock shaped

and hammer, saw

it's we who stood it up

no one scratched the land before

I was always here

you're the pill

dissolved in it

sun shines from this

other stars

catch each as it falls

by heart

peace upon the given thing

it's all of us reaching

all of us trapped

in here 

 

Kerri Shying # 3 - and bulbul means heart

Kerri Shying  # 3 after Magdalena Ball #8 High Wire Step in response to Angela Gardner #1 three fragments

 

and  bulbul means heart

songbirds  woke me

this morning   absent  the alarm

no wonder I forget things  

I look down

into a clothes morass 

 see my brain pill

nestling there    

a small synaptic fowl

doing    not much good 

to torn pyjama pants

all of us who take them

wonder

why  make a pill so small   to treat

the loss of feeling    in your hands

sometimes the skull

is a bone cup

holding words

on paper slips

my big dumb hands go diving

in Awabakal

bulbul  means heart

 

Greg McLaren #3, White-faced heron, After Judith Beveridge, The Herons.

 

White faced heron

After Judith Beveridge, The Herons

 

Crooked River’s tidal this close

to the sharp wind’s Pacific. Stone-

still, among cragged oysters, dipping,

stalking pale shadow, lost as you

 

look away, found squinting again,

neck waving the way bobbed wind makes

the reeds move in these small cool gullies

of rush, spattering the river’s

 

silvery twist of neck, scalloping 

bright thousands of shells, just as the coast

road tears through the flat few ks of dark

arched blackbutt, of sand-sound bangalay,

 

the shining black curves, they fatten

and taper, curl away into

the late sun’s needling light, the fade

overhead now loose grades of sky, of cloud.