Transparent Words - Poetry

Lexes

Lawrence Upton

Lex Animata

Lex animata

Things I have begun to dream wake me, lurching from sleep, thrown across the bed by my own fear, surviving waking, and fear surviving waking, external proof of the brain's correctness.

Waking to find a corpse, odourless yet decomposing, eyes shut; but what if they should open and see me thus?

A body, beneath papers, tumbled from an archive. One's life in boxes.

Incarcerated.

Burned.

Nothing but dust to speak of present agony. Occasional anecdotal memory, fictionalising one into parallel existence...

What dullness for those who have never known such things. Curbed singletons. Laden with fantasies; no doubt. Little fantasies. Ill-thought-out daydreams... Fantasists without tenets, voting and shopping, half a life uttered and half held in, limp. Not children, but children become adults without imagination, imagination cut from them as tonsils and appendix are cut. Carefully bred to make the task of training less arduous for those without the understanding to see its necessity and therefore joy...

I joy, when I may; if I am allowed. There is no limit to fantasy.

*

Lex animata

There is no limit to disease. There is nothing that cannot become infected. There is nothing which is immortal. Show me the ancient building still in use! Show me the man, who through wisdom and self-control, has managed to survive more than a period countable in days longer than the rest of us. Years? Yes, okay, years. Which human has ever lived one half million days? There is a fantasy for you! To live a million days. And, if a million, why not ten million, one hundred million, and more? And if so much, then why not for an epoch of creation, as long as the star-maker itself.

Does not consciousness realise and feel the pang of Death? Where is its sympathy? its love?

If we might live through the whole life and death of our universe, why not beyond that? All we need to do is think of it so strongly we believe it, then it might be fitting.

As birds fly. Not single birds out of the nest, but the whole species - from running from predators and sheltering eggs into the ridiculous ungainly flop and then the leap into air in self-assurance. Don't tell me that a system of life which can develop wings from winglessness, from less than winglessness, from the lack of the concept of wings, don't tell me that such a system cannot will itself to live.

Look at the fly swimming in my drink, striving to maintain life. Such will! It is our will and we have great intellect, some of us: will and intellect - there is the stuff upon which fantasy takes flight!

*

Lex animata

Dreams and their rider shudder at speed upon an unsaddled multifooted omnivore, growing new limbs and organs as it needs them, discarding organs and limbs that it does not need, natural modification to achieve efficiency.

The rider screams. The road unrolls between trees and hills. Trees and hills evaporate. Marsh and uncertainty. Bottomless heights glinting out of puddles.

The dead rise, misshapen loaves. Birds talk. Geese type.

The Boss in his heaven blows on a trumpet and, with a spun span of his forelimb, bangs down on all the white keys of the stairs up.

*

Lex animata

With deliberation, I constructed a vocabulary. My words would enable others to see. It was expedient. I used it on your fellow human beings, as a mechanism to end their suffering. Lick here. I used it to display audacious spheres of thought. I probed them and their stupid rites. It was okay. I held my own. Lick. The swarm is poured out liquefied. Some tea party. All must cease. Only an old tabby astir, mooching. Take the tobacco tin and then click the gun.

*

Lex animata

Amok. Type the password. You want to give out? So predetermined. Boost your estimate! Poets control access, it is claimed, by using a list of names; no, no, that's the critics. Enough! Lick here to display system probe, eavesdropping, the makings of a bat! Rubbing! Oxidation! We'll soon have you clean and dry. Puzzled? The cackle points to a fiasco.

*

Trumpet break

control (Tabasco sauce) click wrongdoing cusses, ephemeral erect, kleptomania, the box-end cuts us off from where the list of names is housed, horn, exasperation if the name list is stored on a wing

*

the staff meeting

For each, intrinsically, the kettle. You're not sure whether your gathering is set up? They are - for uselessness and an imperturbable appearance.

Contact your economic administrator, doldrums tilted towards the windy enormity of wilful foible. What has happened? The end of the constructed environment.

Vote for the elected. A small noise will serve as an indication. Don't overdo it or we'll send in the police. Trade is ephemeral to the owner of stock; life is invisible.

*

Lex animata

and then the double-dealer, feverish and petty, spins the orb on his finger, picks up the ingot we had thought a secure planet; and, with an oleaginous grimace, walks out to leave us puzzled - the state invulnerable, the mentally unbalanced in charge. Modifications will be needed within and throughout your organisation. Countersigns are many. Outrage is inadequate.

Tongues flicker over the hereafter. The pomp pumps resistance proper, tied officially; escape if you may; overcome mutation. Distinct scrapes pin seasoned rectilinear soothers. They won't get the passwords you want to change so easily this time. A mixed bag...

and then snap and turn the false key in the lock, dogmatist, and you're out of the roughest imbecility

 

 

Lex Luther

voices:

The fantasy is that things are as they are said to be.

It's time that things were redefined.

These words.

But words stay.

They don't work.

They remain uncooperative.

Write them and go away; and nothing happens.

Food and plants and animals change; they co-operate; but words stay as they are; but they go away.

Wooden commodities.

Iconic mediations.

But icons have power over us because of the power attributed to them.

Lex animata.

 

voices:

act independent person public limited company dud compact disk

obloquy bump pony pop ferrous act plurality club

fife act imp class hoop erupt act imp cob cry one act imp car

paid for hit hen alphabetical akin background of coyness obloquy onlooker act piano keys cub file transfer protocol

ape act physically abuse clear screen hooray Audi act physically disabled

before Christ

compact disk bur amoeba band ill cap

an abbot gets physical because Uzi mop see ok I and shore Audi Mecca fuss is Otto one who abets physiognomy

because corporal punishment

an ignorant bat pickaxe before Christ

auks ill fun sin opt here at no spelling suggestions

kite abate pubic no spelling suggestions lox

ammo cap anise secret service of aha

ulcer you workbook ivories Blair it's easy foci sir out for a bet

pick kid abundance pieces hug these fountainheads cease

bus loin inks flux amuse act an' I an' loin one UK our urn

sat bake you weak bud chew ulcer Lois

nuts fruitcake ugh fog sip out bay window ahead lux trousers

sequoia end amuse hi lop

kung-fu shuck eureka ulcer foe is you

vex bawl bad

lob fur bewilderment cue am acquiescence

be adaptable to dud be able to organise a conference

fox sibling out bayonet fur fuddy-duddy augmenting

acquaint a battered udder quack any bud

frustrate rum

because um ogre era kudos bee wrought iron

curare

ubiquitous vacancy hurry air

brace for shut-eye usually

 

voices:

vow, set the logging context; and lumber, when you list in to phantasm

ennui!

knack... the inhumation, pewter taste, dialogue, no spelling suggestions

click cease out slick ephemeral and then type location into the phantasm

hard, wood

where your operator commodity is location, grasses lull, eliciting vulgarity

and then choose the name of your petulance

tall woody plant from the list of scales

 

voices:

able, tempt, cease,

medium pyrotechnic device

his ugliness riper, erect fellowship

 

voices:

your computer is set up with user-level access

contort limbic click interrupt

laceration via mock in the list on the lifetime mock

 

voices:

crack the individual assemblage

who you want to be able to observe the refuge

rammed and then small noise cavilling

split kerchief your contrivance is set up with associations

 

voices:

kaleidoscopic remittal to conjuration

cutter remission, outer tedium,

toucan play juxtaposition remittal and a mocking emaciation

to connect to a remote figure rammed

even if it isn't running yes indeed okay

 

practical philosophy

to send and receive, filial,

or to connect to mechanisms of flash tidings

and other informational anticipating,

vow and start jutting -

enough! -

flick the - using caution - butterfly valve at the owl joint

to connect yourself to Samos

by the book

 

voices:

point to - ceases -

soirée seams ok -

and then click -

jutting vermin,

dourer erect -

foible - click -

jape rowdiness

per hour information

about how to use

juvenility - reminder: mooch,

click the jelly menu,

in keep a steady pace,

dip vocabulary,

gain access to files and printed matter

on another motor

running yes-man,

dowser, mooch;

use feverishness

 

voices:

pettiness, king, rather than juvenility,

vernacular nailed okay,

tolerated voraciously;

puttering called healthful,

gambling you would categorise marketing -

newspaper items, very important person,

wisecracks, a side dish of restraint,

befitting only if your hideaway

is set up for shadow places

where you can drivel alone

 

Lex animata, Lex Luther

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright © Lawrence Upton 2001