Alchemy (2007)

(the third of 3 Brett Whiteleys)

... he became his admirers. - W. H. Auden, 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats'


You’ve succumbed. Tall Poppy,
they crave to say you’ve over-stepped.
Don’t go too far. Stay too far. Settle
your petals against the sand; today’s
a hot one on ego beach. Where we
can see, between the flags!
Swim on a rope.
_________How’d you expect us
to eat all this? What,
weren’t you thinking?
What weren’t you thinking?
_____________Too long
in the kitchen, sniffling;
we want to feel your pain
but not forever. Brett,
it seemed someone was missing,
was not listening.
___________Your rockstar
mirrorgazes; hallucinating
momentary masterpieces,
blown away as studio dust
or shot up as lunch.
_____________You
painted our waiting,
expectations in exquisite detail.

We’ve been tailgating you,
true, your faulty tail lights.

This was a painting of ambition,
Icarus flightpath. Ambition is there
on the canvas, waving, screaming,
drowning in world. It writ large.








Alchemy at brettwhiteley.org

videopoem #1

the books - smells like content

vindictment (2007)

all about you I guess, snapped pencil freakcase who know all & better you awkward as source code you hyperverbal / you question mark in parentheses / yet another tangled wizard’s sigil

[Sure, let’s all erect vindictive monuments. (Maybe this is yours.) Depicts: your retreat into desert. Lived off sand. Thought it through your fingers. Read visions off the moons of your fingernails. Pursued by built-in bestiary. Juiced all gately cacti in sight but still a raging thirst. Only so much the eye can plan and prepare for.]

but in fact i love you yet again you the poem lived / thinking in tongues

[An error has occurred. Start with what you have. Could it be yours?]

you once troubling precocious, nascent psychic talents intimidating highschool teachers (we go way back) / always your scarf stitched with cryptograms, formulae

[I don’t have the patience.]

careers in prophecy? ditch day-job to contest/corrupt all assumptions

[Software is not for you: it does things you’ve asked for. You realise your mail keep bouncing?]

time to resign yourself to fallout, the recluse's winter? but you persist repairing dead philosophers / philosophy as repair, beyond repair & yet life in the beast still dehydrated gills / dabbling in junk gather skulls unzipping peripheries

[Squeezed prophetics out of manga-dreams. You the hero / a thousand traces. Such an immortal. Statue of light.]

you’re not the only delusionist flexing to grandmaster the Web / yours just another unseen site / face the fact I am half your traffic

[That’s right, ring the psychic hotline. Don’t like the forecast? So… ring another hotline.]

two aspects

"... the idea of portraiture and the idea of the recreation of the word. I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word, and at this same time I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense. It is impossible to put them together without sense." - Gertrude Stein, 1946.

Pictured: Picasso's portrait of Stein.

telltale (2007)

bloodshots (red cables cross my eyes) –
_-telltale,
______obvious I’ve used

_________________lip-cracks / foodless sta-
______________________sis / cold-core bones

_____________________-afternoon: slight OD,
________________-fell asleep online

___________________evening:
__________you arrive home /
___________my straight act:
_______________________no trace,
_______________________paraphernalia locked away /
_____________________affectionate lies