Five Poems by Mark Young

 

emotional consumption

 

A stolen swipe card, not

so smart. Information.

Technology accessible to

anyone. Gated communities

left unlocked. Inside. Smart

drugs. Intensity. Intrusive

turntables, their scratch &

DJ patter a sampling of

other people's bass emotions

best left alone. Witnessing

worried him. He left

when the drum machines

began to talk in tongues.

 

Part of the military budget

 

Fans of 20^th century

soap operas routinely

go to the rosin bag.

They'll turn down Apple,

dreaming of working for

Quentin Tarantino or

else making low-budget

horror films. They have

 

become a lost people,

crossing constantly back

& forth between reality

& fantasy. Much like

Civil War women, they

wine & dine farmers.

 

A letter to Matsuo Bashō

 

Each morning, in the later

part of the season, two

rainbow lorikeets arrive &

perch in the upper branches

of the mandarin tree, sitting

there, couple-comfy, until

I have finished my garden

duties. Then they move to

the lower branches to eat the

ripest fruit, piercing the skin

& attacking the flesh. Some

skins & segments fall to the

ground. Other leavings remain,

stalks stuck to the wood, hollow

orange shells, miniatures of

those lanterns you like so much.

 

Purple Rain

 

Function trumps form. Dance

has become a derogatory

 

term. Downloading Michael

Bublé is indicative of

 

marked turbulence in

 

local blood flow. No

American artist, Jasper

 

Johns once said, invented

more than Mr. Rauschenberg.

 

A line from Amelia Earhart

 

I always display @Component
at large scale exhibitions & trade
shows. The procedure, the pro-
cess, make the doing of it incred-

ibly simple, even if you don't
know what type of seizure you
had. Water falls in static displays
of painted-by-numbers. Birds

of prey circle looking for edu-
cational opportunities. My cell
attempts a mournful rendition of
The Streets of Laredo & explodes.

 

Mark Young was born in Aotearoa  New Zealand but now lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. He has been publishing poetry for more than sixty years, & is the author of around sixty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history. His most recent book is Songs to Come for the Salamander, Poems 2013-2021, selected & introduced by Thomas Fink, co-published by Meritage Press & Sandy Press.