Five Poems by Mark Young

 

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

 

I am looking for a dozen or

so depraved artichokes so

I can spice up my dinner, but

all I can find are a few celibate

onions in the bottom of the

pantry that are well passed

their best-before date.

                                       I ring

the local equivalent of Uber

Eats to order something else

for dinner, only to be told

that the Department of Trans-

port is having a crackdown

on the permissible speed of

e-bikes & it will be an hour

& a half before they can get

something to me.

                               I head out

to the garden to see what's

there, but the fruit bats have

laid claim to the fruit trees, &

the snails & slugs & any other

ground-hugging beings have

taken over the garden.

                                         I go

inside, take out the Larousse

Gastronomique. Read it for a

while, then go to bed, hungry.

 

Tour toys

 

He was a victim
of exponential
decay, measuring
his life in half-
lives, in the hope
that Xeno's paradox
& the concept of 
infinity might some-

how let him live
linear longer.

 

A line from Liza Marklund (2)

 

She paused in front of a shop

window showing a selection

of candle holders & candela-

bra that cast shadows on each

 

other. It made her feel like she

was in an Escher drawing. A

man with bleached hair came

up beside her & said that "the

 

mirror image is likely to be some-

thing other than the subject that

is reflected. It might be a curve

on the Epstein surface or polygons

 

colliding on a staircase. Depends

on the distribution of monomers

in a coating of grafted & absorbing

polymers. Prepare to be amazed."

 

His words, & that Escher effect, kept

her company all the way home.

Sparks in the brain that did not

end until she shrugged off her coat.

The Unspeakable Foundations of Reason

 

Reasoning that
it would keep the
ants away, he built
his new house
on a base of
compacted aardvarks.
Completed without
a problem; but barely
two weeks after
moving in, he wandered
out to the kitchen
one morning
& found ants
swarming over every-
thing. He was struck

dumb. 

 

Mirroring is a real thing

 

Eating asparagus can affect the physi-

cal traits of your urine. It's not some-

 

thing that is grown in the garden. That

is another kind of green pee & is spelt

 

differently. Spelt — also known as dink-

el wheat — is a kind of relict crop, once

 

grown widely but now confined to a

much smaller area. Urea is odorless &

 

colorless, is the main nitrogen-bearing

component of mammalian urine. Urine

 

is not sterile, but talking about it can

sometimes be useful in breaking the ice. 

 

 

 

 

 

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 over sixty-five years, & is the author of around eighty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, non-fiction, & art history. Recently published books include Balance, from Neo-Mimeo Editions, Nualláin House, Monte Rio, California & From the Cave’s jukebox, from Sandy Press, Santa Barbara, California. 

Mark Young's most recent collection, synecdoche, came out from Sandy Press in mid-April.