New Poem by Alistair Noon

Glad to have a new poem by Berlin-based poet Alistair Noon this Saturday.

Kurswagen

There goes the clanking carriage
in its blue and white livery,
a stretched-out sans-serif,
an image that slices the mild evening,
striking out on a south-east passage.

It leaves from the Healthy Springs,
the system’s northern terminal,
setting off to discover Kiev
once daily. Along its sides
are four tongues in two scripts

that passengers at minor stations,
deaf to the slamming doors,
might catch and select
to name the one-night barracks.
Between the old formations

flies the well-aimed arrow
heading for squeaking beds, busses
in depots for lack of fuel,
monks and tunnels and candles,
and a flag striped blue and yellow.

Tomorrow timetables the change
when moustaches and some decent coughing
knock the Western wheels out,
wielding long hammers
while passengers flip their pages.

A man with a cap uncouples it
in the dark, and like a lunar module
it splits, while drunks and dogs look on,
and the resting crew are nudged
awake by a gentle shunt.

poem by Alistair Noon

New Poem by Joe Rosenblatt

Eyewear is very pleased to offer a new poem by Joe Rosenblatt this Monday.


Rosenblatt was born in Toronto in 1933. He dropped out of trade school as a young adult and worked at a series of low-paying jobs until he started working as a laborer for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1956. By 1966 he had his first book of poetry published and he also received a Canada Council grant which allowed him to leave his job as a freight handler of the old Canadian Pacific Railway and devote the next year to writing and traveling.  Over the years, Rosenblatt has written more than 20 books of poetry, several autobiographical works and his poems have appeared in over thirty anthologies of Canadian poetry over his forty year career as a poet. His poetry books have received major awards, such as the Governor General's award for poetry in 1976 and the BC Book Prize in 1986. For the past 30 years he has been living in a beach resort community of Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.
Predator

Affixed on an artist completing a sketch
a steely emperor on the highest branch stirs 

as from a partially-eaten dream, to fit
a curious repast inside a basaltic gaze. 

Talons ready, he’ll swoop down, seize 
what he’s mistaken for scrumptious quarry

And like some warrior god , he’ll swiftly jet 
skyward to a nest filled with fragmentary bones;

Yet Ken keeps on sketching that statuary bird
who sketches him in the carborundum silence.


poem by Joe Rosenblatt

New Poem by Chrissy Williams

Eyewear wants to offer 40% MORE poetry this weekend - so here is a new poem by Chrissy Williams.  Williams lives in London, has had poems in The Rialto, Dial 174, Orphan Leaf Review, Fuselit, Rising and Southbank Poetry and was recently included in The Rialto's Young Poets feature. She has poems forthcoming in S/S/Y/K/4, works on the Poetry Library's digital magazine archive and is Joint Editor of the world's first bespoke edible poetry magazine: Poetry Digest.


Beating the T-Rex

The alarm stretches out its arm
and grabs me. I am torn from

giant chorizo-style sausages in the Westcountry
roadtrip mystery I am solving with Quintin,

Julie and a small American Foxhound. I forget
how to stand my ground against the T-Rex

and instead of drifting six miles up into the sky
I turn and reach my hand out, looking for the sound in time.


poem by Chrissy Williams

New Poem by Joshua Jones

Eyewear is pleased to publish a new poem by Norwich-based poet Joshua Jones.  He edits Etcetera.  Jones has a debut collection forthcoming soon - more news when that happens.

Four Perspectives

(Movement; Hitch; Paint; A Skewed Perspective)

After Lynch’s ‘The Straight Story’

1.

Find the most static place you can and

stand, let the movement of scope make

moths of your eyes. The flicker, breath

of a photograph, like the heart

untroubled by the lungs.

It is a natural destabilising, a de-

familiarisation that only brings to mind,

at its core, fiction. Which is a lie – it’s just

so difficult to tear the outside

from the in. But on the horizon

closing in from smudged heat-air

come cars, scraping off the certainty

they were a mirage. Of course they

only shake past, but leave in the air

a kind of exultant exhalation.

It is boring at the side

of the road sometimes, but steady,

in-the-world like a bed a bit too big. I stretch

my ear to the grass and listen

for the sound of the sun.

  

2.

Stepping through a door in a dream

                                             the thud

                                             of a car door

                                                                     closed

undressing like a satellite

coming back down to earth – shedding

                                                      green & blue

                                                      for something less

                                                      tangible

but more soily, more soil, wet soil

sticking like moisturiser and meaning

like something that never happened.

If there is someone at the wheel            (not that that means it is another)

they talk to [me] in gull-                          

yelps, stalking overhead: removed.       

– That’s not important               (doctor-in the lens flare

                                                        on the windscreen, it will

                                                        feel more authentic)

The bugs in here are blacker, behind

the eyes, clambering against

the corneas still as dead moth wings

                                                                    But the sound

                                                 oiling up the skull

                                    so you can hurl

                                    yourself in, like

         you’re blindfolded on ice

         & maybe aiming at

the sharpened bones of branch

or some drop

                         that is the only flight

                         the only thing that never stops

            you never knew

                                         you’d ever want or need.    

3.

Paint it on – chugging along

                       like spending a day

                       putting in a comma

                       only to take it out.

If the sky is wake-up-with-purpose blue

that doesn’t mean it’s because you saw it in a film.

But it doesn’t mean the opposite either.

I am not alone out here. The heat

is buzzing like a swarm of insects.

Even if they leave me to go

about my business in peace.

This view, this

ever moving always static landscape,

this flashback to a shot you may have missed

with the front of your brain

but not the back

is like bones – bones

that carry dust in the grooves of their insides.

Bones like old no longer used engines

you glance at, tight in their silence and bursting

with the heat and kinesis of all the roads

it’s stupid to believe they could remember.

                              

  

4.

Deckchair weather, strongarm

sun, letting it pass with elbows

entrenched in bedsheet dust

and warm, swimming pools

around your blood and in

the cracks of your eyes.

Cars in the distance, un-

seen, mosquito screeches

in the night, carried

away like sand and thoughts,

pupils slumped

on socket desks, as hometime

approaches –

                          But school

finished long ago, enough

to know that nothing

has a source, a skewed

perspective can branch-bend

back to what it

wasn’t in the first place.

                                              Breathe in.

It’s somewhere between evening and night.

You wonder what the moisture of your eyes

tastes like when they’re spending themselves to focus

on something that makes them wonder, as if they could

see right through to the centre of all things

and find something other than an image

of themselves finding an image.

The sun buzzes like a fly

around its own face.

                                               Breathe out.     


poem by Joshua Jones

New Poem by Ben Mazer

Eyewear is pleased to have a hotline to Ben Mazer, American poet.  Here's a new poem.

Wrong for Years

I wish to inveigle my way

into English society.

The lure of the Oxford chair

reaches farther than County Clare.

Another Oxford Don

has visited and gone.

The river of books rolls past

the socially miscast.

Forgotten unborn refrain

unknowingly insane.

From Dorset to Buckinghamshire

expire and then inquire.

Need not be greatly felt

but meaningly misspelt.

Return to go away

incomprehensibly.

poem by Ben Mazer

New Poem by Adam Sol

Eyewear is very pleased to feature a new poem by North American poet Adam Sol this hot (yes, sunny) Monday in London.

Security Camera

     for Alex Porco

Sweethearts in school uniforms spoon froyo

     into each others’ mouths on a bench across

          from the Korean consulate.

              Death to the infidels.

Down the street some boys shed their aprons

     to practice skateboard flops off an abandoned Buick.

          We shall bathe the streets in blood.

              Someone’s mother drives by,

sipping bourbon from a spill-proof mug.  The nose-ringed

     cashier says, “Moulin Rouge has layers

          that you miss unless you’re on X.”

              Revenge revenge revenge revenge.

A kid in an all-terrain stroller prefers his thumb

     to the pacifier strapped to his collar.

          Die you fascist pig.

              Gravel gathers in the curb,

with stubs, shards, and other garbage.

     The bones of the filthy will burn forever.

          There’s nature around here somewhere.

              The bus slows for an expectant mother,

but she’s just catching her breath.  

     The godless will be torn to pieces by dogs,

          and crows will gorge on their eyes.

              A businesswoman in cowboy boots

fields a call between drags.  It’s an offer she may refuse.

New Poem by Ben Mazer

In what may become an Eyewear tradition, I today present a new poem by American poet Ben Mazer, on a Sunday.  Enjoy.

The war veteran sitting by the pool

has mastered the experimental school.

Negotiating his experiments

has learned to make a world of difference.

Experimentalism hits the target.

Doing away with honour and intent

knowledge itself does nothing but invent

new ways of screwing up the global market.

I only scream to see what I will say.

Beethoven only was expressing silence.

There is no need for visiting the islands

since you arrived here day before yesterday.

The mooning debutante in isolation

is the implicit spirit of creation.

The atomic and the atomizing

reducing and seducing and surmising

may manifest the truly surprising

worn like a flower in their button vest.

Suppose the violence of the personal scars

disrupts the circle of the formal discourse.

The protozoic eye swings from the stars

by which the anarchic imagination steers.

From A to F by way of Z and B

excluding E sails straight across the sea.

All of our experience repeats

in what the grand inquisitor deletes.

(The panting conversion images in clutters

the total curtain's climaxing of tatters.)

The repertoire is formal and concise

whatever pirates anywhere devise.

The truth may often be revealed by lies.

It is by intuition we revise.

By knowing we experimentalize.

poem by Ben Mazer