ABOUT ABOUTNESS
omnicide or superhuman cosmicide
long lived areosols war of the trawlers
seabed shreds bots triffids
a glass house menagerie
we will open all doors to take away
moments ever had writ now on tabloids
which will be erased
our experience about & present
in our crooked corner of the world
as indifferent as day & night
head on all the hype a tattered flag
a battered form signal & sign before ruins
a monolithic artefact the grain of yesterday’s tears
vanishing on a whim in a whirlwind of dust
in multiple dusts
every day the fumes rage print the page
we rise from with hands of clay
hang the numbers out to dry a bag of tricks
A WINDOW ONTO THE SILL
enough bread on the window sill to feed a thousand birds
goat shit in the air we walk on fetid sewers
like the rats that inhabit them immuno
O noble savage
what lies beyond the heart of darkness
bonobos!
Elon Musk thinks we must be in a simulation
otherwise we’d have gone extinct
& he’s footing the bill
we can’t object
to being disembodied brains in vats
on clipboards anymore than dinosaurs!
like a long dead insect
motor cycles in electric windows gleam
as if trying to get on to get off a swerve
on the hill jammed in the valley
houses stacked like egg boxes
cloud & smoke at the interstices
traffic drone pedestrians cast like shadows
at night orange electrics
hang out converging symmetries almost ephemerally
i am its inmate its identity
a dark amorphous mass
turning towards a lighted doorway
to scrawl its signature
a fictitious identity effacing present
with a replaced distance yonder
where the moment drifts
a wandering mind on a happen stance edge
like light on the sea
an ephemeral instance of memory
a dazzling illusion of tongues
stained with the dust of ages
where i walk on sand
hearing those voices fall over the horizon of this flat world
our mirror neurons reconstructing a past
as a theatre of ghosts a semblance
clinging to the threshold of the present
on the precipice of nothingness
a lottery tumbler of memory
we choose at random listen to the echoes
of our idiot dreams address the parade
of paradoxical masks sink into our
straight jackets that bind us to tomorrow’s sky
with its empty promises from before
nothing is resolved to be continued
things just get further away a distance lost
in the translation of the moment on a qucksilver sand
where memory betrays the mirror symmetries from before
on this landslide life where all the riddles remain
which i cannot fish out from the pond of meaning
to dazzle the day those enigmas
that have shaped me up to the intangible now that i am
as unexpected their appearance & disappearance were
they can mean no more purpose for me
but that i was not their cause on looking back
COLOURS
gray is no one’s color by fire
the color of the color of soldiers
heralding both blandness and doom
rendered not in white it lingers incognito
gray the color each one hides
a pang of mourning for all colours fall
gray wars are therefore all of life when consumed
gray plague in this saturated world
the dampness of dishwater and disappointment
gray god beneath white
gray gods industry and uniformity
gray people & their dogs in the wild black-and-white gray scrub
five hundred colors fade into a once drained leaden sky
gray beer on the wind
desaturated version the texture makes all the others
speak the human eye
perceives death of trees the death battleships
despite its dullness it cubicles and winter camouflage
gray apocalypse gloaming its liminal color
gray meat gray stew
because the world into which it is the color of gray
gray cloud
gray hair
gray teeth
gray meme
gray dream
in the theory of gray
by shades of gray
gray money
gray is every color
emissary
gray joi de vive
gray sex
gray Armageddon
gray is all theory
is the one that
is the one that
AVIALAE
i’ve no plan for my next poem
the phrase flashed across my mind
(swamped out under a deluge of indifference)
in this scene
i could be just a pixel on a screen a fractal an algorithm simulated
on a quantum computer & replayed in the year 5000 & something
the car that just now crosses my woodland tracks
could be an inserted programme by the simulator
altering the space time context a possibility
as there would be no
real time just the configuration of the spatio temporal order
but i doubt that’s the reality of my (now) more likely
i’m under surveillance
& we haven’t yet
reached the
Brave New World era
where we’d still prefer
to be inside the Panopticon
than without with the weirdos
& wild beasties
but right now i figure
we’re not even heading that way
& if a comet doesn’t blow us away meantime
think that all the birds in the sky were once dinosaurs
& that we too could possibly shrink
until we disappear through our own
mythic phantasmagorial leaving
only our relics for the next arrivals
which won’t be UFO’s
spinning in interminable
space as they’re
just crashed quantum computers
the only thing in the Demiurge
that changes are it’s laws
regularities from time to time but isn’t it true
once upon a time
we sapiens
walked in forests
a thousand feet high
with the wild avialae streaming
in our flowing hair
MOSAIC
Outward bound
harvest bales
yellow bundles
a day’s heart’s blaze
camouflages the human EyE
Hay fly EyE of the fly
a pin cushion of air in spin
a darting mosaic
over
cacophony of machine
on asphalt clay
our monuments of decay
out of the absence
EyE of the fly
photoreceptorcontractor
entangling the speed of light
a mosaic out of the shadows
out of the insect & their flowers
out of the insecticide
desicated plastic
on the rusted barbed wire fencing
shattered glass in the ditch
our pink bacteria
Robin Ouzman Hislop’s numerous appearances include Cold Mountain Review (Appalachian University, N.Carolina), The Honest Ulsterman, Cratera No 3 and Aquillrelle’s Best. His publications are collected poems All the Babble of the Souk, Cartoon Molecules, Next Arrivals & Moon Selected Audio Textual Poems. A translation from Spanish of poems by Guadalupe Grande Key of Mist and Carmen Crespo Tesserae, the award winning (X111 Premio César Simón De Poesía), in November 2017 these works were presented in a live performance at The International Writer’s Conference hosted by the University of Leeds. UK. A forthcoming publication of collected poems Off the Menu is expected in 2020.
You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author. See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)
unpublishable 