tame (2009)

Frequent the small places. Boycott of giants. Armadas of battleships unable to turn. How many m³ of grey? Crime scene cluster: bank, supermarket, exchange. Do not buy my child a gun.

Go bush. Firetraps on the fringes. Generalised iffiness. Loose network cables the cause? Distraction industries. The simian cornered. Optimal yield. Hoard apps, plugins. Planned waste, inbuilt obsolescence. Planet E: renovator’s dream. Foreclosure vultures. Revolving door policies.

Unplug these futures. Are we ‘headed’? Facer, tone up your voice. Read the insane. Artist seeks larger mirror. Caffeine for possibilities. Adjusting the gain. Eating whatever falls from the sky. Insects fly through rain, never struck by a drop.


Below: Simian 40 virus (image by Phoebus87).

Avignon, July (2009)

‘Nevertheless, we’ll be gone from here before it begins.’

A city disappearing under festival posters.

That will be the memory.

I bought all my pronunciation could carry.

Le Bar Américain holding Wimbledon on an outdoor Bravia.

Table service ought to be sporadic, selective.

Show of authenticity.

Churches’ convenient distances (how many within bell-shot?).

‘Only of so much interest to non-Catholics, perhaps.’

The phrasebook covers us to the laundromat.

Tourist argues with the girl behind the desk: surely a gallery that only takes an hour should advertise as such(!)

Striding, intent on the next photo... only to gatecrash a raincoat group shot.

A grey sky needs a garden.

I don’t know a word.

scratches (2009)

Burb.
Bird’s call a greeting / warning / reminder.

*

Caged food.
E. coli.
Filed sewage.

*

Live a little less filtered?
Who has time for these experiments?

*

Crossword clue = ‘experimental’; answer = ‘tentative’.

*

Automatic door won’t acknowledge.
As if you don’t have a million things to steer.

*

Mouthing around for endearment, closure.

*

No recipient.

*

Scratch eczema till bleeding.
As if narrative were inevitable.

*

Monkish nest.
Fallen into the hands of Buddhists.
‘Bit too life-affirming for me.’

*

No audience for preachers here.

*

Step foot in these political premises.
Dogshit.

*

Public imagery.

*

Lowlife.
Shy collectors.
Sniped upskirt.

*

Airbrushed avatar.

*

Reach of the difference engine.
What is the quality of the search?

*

Futures sought, posited.
Fear the flashforward.

*

Default emotion?

*

Make no attempt.
Nothing to talk to.

*

Learning how to be uncomfortable.
Suffocating new scenery.
Who doesn’t attract weirdos?

*

Easy exit.
Must go, before we become friends.

*

Chickened.

*

Do not thank the owner when leaving.

*

What benefit of hindsight?

*

Milk-fed.
32, afraid.
Tendril of half-bitten mouthflesh at the jawline.

*

‘No pukers’ (a sign).

*

Imposed structure.
Trained garden.
Need poems.

*

Of uncertain authorship.
omnium gatherum.

*

Pump omens into.

*

You may yet prove interesting.
Or not.

*

‘We are happy to inform you.’

*

Dear Repeater.
You are a collection.
Don’t worry.

*

Pill wears off.
Nothing learned once that doesn’t need learning again.

*

Once desire is overcome, writing flourishes?
Dies?


Below: Brion Gysin, 'Calligraffiti of Fire' (click image to enlarge)

Sharps (Warding Remix) (2009)

Nathan Moore : 'Sharps', remixed by Stu Hatton


There’s a booklet called Patient Rights which no one has read. Ceiling-mounted cameras raise conversation from its natural pitch by a semitone. Count the kinds of innocuous: white walls; a small set of lies played back to placate. For some of us the timetable remains mysterious, opaque; it approaches the divine. Fluorescent tube flashes code; spasmodic pain. Clipboards held towards white coats, shieldlike. Conspiring to dull us; that’s my theory. Ticking off the codeine. The sharps (syringe, paper clips, knife) stored in micro-lockers. Some inmates bemoan the lack of music. Keys carried by orderlies provide semi-regular percussion. Padded footfalls. The door’s alarmed; red pulsing bulb. When a car pulls up outside we set our foreheads on the glass. We ogle with the sincerity of children. The muscled orderlies arriving to move us on, their strides replicated on the monitors. Such incidents are all we have. Sometimes manhandled, sometimes a needle pierces.


Process Notes:

I visited Nathan's old blog, Exhaust fumes and french fries, to choose a poem to remix as part of our remix exchange. The first poem I came across was 'Sharps', and immediately I felt drawn to it - the atmosphere it creates, the moods of the ward, the emphasis on safety precautions, the way the inner lives of the inmates are evoked in the poem. I read through 'Sharps' a number of times. I selected key phrases - phrases I felt were auspicious, which I could perhaps reshape or re-contextualise in an interesting way. A number of those phrases survive in the remix, altered to differing degrees. I'm not sure how I decided that the remix would be a prose poem. Prose has more or less become my 'default' form, unless I'm specifically aiming to create something that's more rhythmic and/or fragmentary - which isn't to say that rhythm and fragmentation can't be accommodated in a prose poem.

I felt the phrases I'd selected didn't constitute enough material to work with - I needed to draw material from elsewhere to make the remix 'my own'. So I messed around with Googlism, and happened upon some other interesting phrases by running a search for 'sharps' and a couple of other words which seemed relevant to my purpose. Then I began assembling sentences by expanding upon the phrases I had, twisting them around and free-associating.

I worked at the remix sporadically, usually spending no more than half an hour on it at a time, adding a sentence or two per sitting, and tweaking what I already had. Several sentences didn't make the final cut, and a number of the phrases I'd gathered weren't used, but the majority were. I swapped a few sentences around as part of the editing process, but mostly the flow established itself without too much interference.

I figure I've kept pretty close to the thrust of Nathan's original, so that this isn't a 'wholesale' remix (the face of the original is still very recognisable in it). Probably my favourite part of Nathan's poem is the reference to seeing the crotches of people in cars from the vantage of the second floor, but this hasn't made its way into the remix. In Nathan's poem this image was unexpected, startling, but struck me as completely authentic. There's an honesty to it that I admire; for me it opens up questions about the 'innocence' of the gaze (can a gaze ever be innocent?), and the assumptions we make about the gaze of the other, especially when we perceive the other as 'childlike'. This aspect found its way into my remix in the line 'We ogle with the sincerity of children.'

hybrid (2009)

birds siren across hard water. where the girls were to be used nothing is. our business the best protection. major counterfeiters' hedge against disaster scenarios. eye warns against thinking again about. the stress state at the mid there’s someone out there using some. don’t look at what i’m wirebonded. bring your tools and screen-glitch. all comes when it’s not meant variation on this design. as if text chopped of different fonts. a sampler knowledge is to take place at. remixer rendering trees again as strange as they are. under stress a sexual placement of pollen upon the stigma. lean times don't have money to be asking questions

ways out (2008)

Don't we fear we have already left it too late? Can't bear to watch. It's not so much that the horses are whipped, but that they are used up. Running out of context. Like a good labyrinth-maker, give them ways out. As in, you can't just 'get off' the plane. Perhaps a hallucinogen capable of de-storying. No landing lights. People look well in the dark. Again primitive and unknown. Something underheard. Consider the rights of trees. That the diagram we make of the world is rooted in their architecture. The latest iteration. Despite appearances, we haven't been in this part of the complex before.

Logical Positivism (2008)

Blind faith’s the only kind? I don’t believe that. Here intuition is the tailwind, though something injures our hearing, electrically high-pitched. The windows were closed; there was the smell of a closed room. What were we waiting for? What weren’t we waiting for? Daylight was promising. Nightlight too, but in a different way. Of course our interests are too close for us to see. What if every morning we could improvise? Unblock the air? Well, now we can. I’ll begin: “taking the usual precautions, they managed to cut her free from the car.” Soon enough we'll have a book. When will you be available?

stoppages (2008)

A closer look – cycling 'brings us closer to the landscape'. Streak of a roadkilled rainbow lorrikeet. How to get hushed.

*

Sunken face. All craved out. What variety of blues.

*

We don't do truth here. Look busy; act well-briefed. This fails like all double disguises.

*

Continue. Despite. Recoil.

*

A poem irreducible to paraphrase. A retreat, a shelter. Extracting voice from voice.

*

A love of chemical. Bugs me. What is meant by 'once' in 'just this once'.

*

Wake late. In bed you soft like a towel; I play apologist. ‘Define vanilla,’ you said.

*

You binned old photos - friends smiling back at me, bathing in foodscraps. You were blocked, needed to purge unneeded objects. Clearing your throat.

*

A fatal itch. What we seek we already have. Voice that insists, “You’ll be closer when you’ve covered all these.”

*

Hard to get anything done here. Let’s get lost at home. Smear memory across tiles.

Berlin (2008)

The West controlled the U-Bahn. Underground train lines passed under the wall at certain points. Passenger trains from the West would pass through 'ghost stations' in the East, never stopping at these.

*

The communications tower spiking out of Alexanderplatz still casts the old omniscient spell at night, red eyelets flashing over the grey grid below. Socialist system a torn web still dangling from housing blocks, the eastern Ratthaus. In the former GDR, kids were herded into group potty sessions to sow the seeds of collectivism.

*

Chunks of city scattered amongst derelict blocks, may never be de-fragged. Temples falling into disuse. Underground clubs in abandoned vaults and warehouses; strobes spray lightning on sweat, shaved heads, concrete.

*

One dark dividing wall to split the brain of a city. Graffiti coats the surviving segments.

*

The opening of the wall was a bureaucratic slip – a rogue document inserted to sabotage the machinery. Paper jam. At the press conference, without pausing to consider the words or their meaning, the official read out the memo.



Published in Shadowtrain #23, October 2009.

Night of the Living Dead (2008)

(after the 1968 George A Romero film)

Boarding up all windows and doors, using whatever we can find. Breaking up furniture. Lock ourselves inside the house. An excuse to break taboos. The sick little girl turns into a zombie, consumes her dead father’s flesh, then stabs her mother repeatedly with a cement trowel, killing her. The moral to the story: don’t make fun of the dead, especially in a cemetery. They have us outnumbered. Tom & Judy burn to death when a gasoline spillage causes their car to catch fire. Zombies feast on their barbecued flesh. Recall a fast food advertisement, the glowing family trying to out-excite each other across the table. If you’re waiting for the real enemy to show up, damn it, you’ll be waiting all night. If we lock ourselves in the cellar there’ll be no way out. What, you think it’s sexual? The deep, glossy black of blood in black & white films. Reflective liquid. You won’t find a better man than a black man. Trust you to mistake him for a zombie… Disaster in the middle of nowhere; a haunting lack of sirens. There’s always a token naked zombie whenever we see them marauding as a group. Not even thinly veiled. The radio & TV emergency announcements are so, so camp: “Thousands of office and factory workers are being urged to stay at their places of employment, not to make any attempt to get to their homes. ” Shoot on sight. A situation where ‘anything’ can be justified, or where justification is moot. We see a slap across the face on screen; it matters that it’s simulated? She’s hysterical & therefore of no use to us. You have to laugh: it’s a horror flick. The zombies massing to devour the woman, leaning in, stretching their hands through holes in the wall. We know a ghoulish hand when we see one – but how? The zombies are hideously slow, but strong enough to overturn a car. Thankfully they can be fended off with fire. Walking political allegories. The men have an argument about the best options for staying alive until help arrives. You call these survival instincts? An abject failure of the system.


A previous version of this poem was published in Otoliths 14, August 2009.

Night of the Living Dead on IMDb.

the masculine (2008)

poor sad masculinity. spend the whole day jerking off. would opt out if you could. what awaits discovery here? no black gold. what's a man without it? downing a slab of mid-strength. what’re a few uncried tears? while diving in ink. don’t bother looking down there. it's nothing, always nothing. who’s alpha? is this what you have left to offer? even your pen refuses to write. the bastard. what you will resort to. you shop around. in hell's name. for endgames. is speed chess the game for you? they queue for your time. ‘not for sale’ sticker attracts attention. you’d love to crack. somewhere bright & crowded. with family units. michael douglas in falling down. a good career move. tear their smiles off. c’mon you’re far too meek. take it out on an ornament. assault by proxy. hurl down a galaxy of glass.


As published in Otoliths 14, August 2009.

Seven Concentrations (2008)

1. Entrance

This should be easy to enter, like a building. Not that all buildings are easy to enter, but the idea that they could (or should?) be. "The complexity of philosophy is not in its subject matter, but in our knotted understanding." Ha.


2. Retreat

Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking, not unlike a holiday which doesn’t include a single digital component. Our thinking became less mushy once we exited the city. For a moment our bodies felt lighter than notions. A tingling of safety. But ads gave chase, behaving as do subatomic particles, which the physicist can only know by inference. They surfaced even in the most private of spaces: the pimples of the tongue, the shield of the retina. There was no longer a question of where – therefore escape had no meaning. There were arguments already and we needed other channels of conversation to erupt.


3. Reading

No amount of reading will ever be ‘enough’. This does not require a diagram.


4. Coding

It wasn’t the effect I wanted; this made me especially happy. Inelegant code. Widely-circulated propaganda: shots of webs supposedly threaded by spiders in various states of intoxication. Two flat whites. Dark promise of an uncharted mineshaft. Or open-source; an open-cut mine.


5. Mythology
Overheard: "... your money where your myth is." The study of contemporary mythology. Where science ends, where we begin... to feel... unspoken? We can only hope.


6. Art

Too many artists (moths) at this 'soirée'. Their code is elegant. Pretty in black, sloganesque. To be one of them, one of theirs. Shaping to be unexpectable.


7. Meditation

We take smoke-roads out of town, until we rise from morning meditation. A doubt: were we meditating this time, or waiting? To think is to stray. Slipped and cut. The mind is overcharged, wades in all the gone and unwritten. But to return to the point… return after return is the practice. Returning to the one point is the practice.


Notes:  "The complexity of philosophy is not in its subject matter, but in our knotted understanding" and "Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking": Ludwig Wittgenstein, as quoted in Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein, Allen Lane, 1973.

An earlier version of this piece was published in otoliths 12.

Zero Summer (2008)

Sapless days. We should be wasting time,
talked-about. Shamed into games
of silences as we grow older,
our mouths shaping zeroes. But come,

this is an age of prose! So, a
grandiloquent party at the summer palace.
We accept its maze: corridors at random,
sunrooms of caprice. Morning

decanted through, heat hard
at the windows. Come wrap
the throat of a vase with the blue boa.

Viola music. In the fernery you say
what a pity it is that beauty lifts
so early. Blood beats
on our underchin and palms.

A train, outbound (2007)

It takes minutes to leave the city. But to leave the city, mentally…

There are always nervous questions prior to departure. You must peel these off.

See this industrial district? It has fled nature.

Likewise I sometimes believe writing is an avoidance; you opt for a conversation with yourself. Living very far apart.

The houses have satellite dishes as standard; ears to the wind. Powerline towers, like posts of an enormous fence. These are and are not life-conductors.

Fields in which to expand, cease? As if cities were centres of forgetting. Gazing out the window, I swim the wild grass.


Published in Shadowtrain #23, October 2009.
 
Below: 'Powersource' by Patrice Lynne Young

refuse (2008)

(after Silliman... sort of)

A day under repair. Remember my foot dead as a book. Was trying to type but the window was ghosted. Coming down with something: perhaps a poem. My turn to cook? Half-life: blurs of transaction between us. Go through phases, moods, like some old moon. Naming will not keep pace. Downloading Derrida. I just looked as it ticked over. All have a tic about time. Distraction blizzards. Dwelling in the centre of your hand. You’ve lost me. Cherry-fingers blemish the page. A guilt that grows back. Comedown. Log out and log back in again. Need to work back late, keep watch till dawn. As the market clouds. Subtler words leave exit wounds. Remove nothing from the scene of the theft. All this slowdying. Emissions. Heavy myself with. Punjabi pop music strays from another apartment, as if dappling me with colour. I wasn’t quite full. Was deleting old songs. The crouched hand of love (from a song of Creeley’s). New window. Drawn to stories of failures. Driver error. Lab rats in lab coats? They were subtitles for a different film altogether. Photograph these powers of persuasion. But does he look happy to you? Shooting animations in Timezone. Heroic dopamine flow. The doctor suggests closing both eyes. Hyperrealism of high definition. Have fun with it. Happy snaps, sad snaps. Exit the bed as if this were the only exit. Bivouac: noun; a military encampment made with tents or improvised shelters, without protection from enemy fire. We have overslept. Just one more snooze before we assemble. Living faceless, mouth grows pretty dry. Keep meat away. Touch of the air, air of the touch. Refused endings. Everything’s not you in one sense, but in another: come home. Swim your body for the first time. Untie these roads and lift them from you.

Forkhead (2006)

(After David Lynch's Lost Highway)

There there. You’re tired. Stressed. Have collected no victories. All your curfews. Even the sax hasn’t let you out. Of the house. But I’m there right now. Call me.

*

This must be super-rare, but the first time I saw Lost Highway I was stoned. Foreseeing a headfilm, I’d shared a preparatory J outside the Astor Theatre. Finding my seat, I found myself quietly toasted.

*

Forks in the road, in the head. Highway by night; snaking lights. Lost in forks.

*

An ancient book on the art of feigning death. Unquenchable book.

*

From early in the piece I had Fred Madison figured as a fellow forkhead. A real channelsurfer. My suspicions were confirmed (bigtime) when he forked into parallel identities, Fred Madison becoming Pete Dayton becoming Fred Madison becoming, etc.

*

More questions than answers: He wears black or black wears him? Who’s tailgating who? How would he hide his body around himself, resurface out of the corners of her? Whaddayou mean, “What?!”

*

The phone’s ringing. (Again). Odd,

*

Hello… pick up?

*

LH was on a double bill with Dead Man. Lynch’s film came first, with its rapid eye movement. The good confusion. By the time it was over I had little energy left for Jim Jarmusch’s film… in my sleepwatching was left to ponder whether LH could equally have been titled Dead Man.

*

Sleep is not entertainment. Broadly speaking. Ink runs in drawers. The woman who isn't a doppelganger. (Where is she?)

*

Plant cameras in the dark, rich soil. Houseplants that require no natural light. (Pupils dilate). Footage blooms in the night.

*

We’ve met before, haven’t we? This is one of those movie quotes I always quote 'in character'.

*

Impossible to say the story's over. Just as it’s impossible to say, “The story’s over there.” Still, despite everyone’s best intentions, the story may be put to rest with a cliché. A time-marker. The post-film cigarette, with its rush of switching back to some kind of

*

“David! Shit! I think you left the gate open!”


As published in Sein und Werden, Spring 2009 (online edition).