Issue 29: John Havelda

She Tends Words

or

A Noctivagation through a Nether Edge Garden

Camouflagedfoliage

Skyjuice

Backchat

Haggaback

Fatlipped

Fumb/rin

Ferreting

Cyanosed

Hissling

SUNbalanced

Oceanscenting

Dreamdrip-backdrop

TrembL

Hhhrt

Sp/l/it

Hellbender

Delico

Sunbled

Maggoty

Umbras

Emberglow

Grape-quash

Shushnow

Angrr

Wind-butted

Buttercross

Sinlovers

Berry-reds

Mal

Selfbent

Neck-a-neck

Flexiwings

Daffy-mads

Stumb

Throbbity

Slowth

Skirl

Hummock

Devildiscos

                                                                          Tib

Cravedaze

Inturn

Gun-games

Mist-loops

Seggy

Withershins

Pin-winkled

                       Big-boned

Do-dah-lah-di

            Nametakers

Speechutter

                   Upslung

Flickt

           Godglitz

          Jazerant

Breeze-blocked

Klink-glass

                       Flitter

Faux-mad

                       Cheeky-chops

Curdled

Lukad

Finglan’

Lamp-leaning

                                    Strangesobs

Purpureal

Natter-flack

Convolvulaceous

Chantcasters

Succoured

Drunk on White Noise and Red Pessimism

Switch off the seminar music

Do not let children play with American superstitions

Sing for a dog in a mirror of eyes poor school

Stock houses and empire deserts with all you can eat piano bars

Lunge langue urge to understandable marionettes as unpretentious as glanced meteorites

Put it in a vat of home wired misanthropy

Do not overlook the grumpiness of broken blues chords receiving life affirming graver evils

Predict specific subhuman sub-genres of acoustic instruments

Simplify the bleak and bereft sheer frost of this putative taste boundary

Peel a slew of heretofores of births and rebirths fatally unreadable and terminally unpublishable

Emulate immaculate bulk and mountainous undergrounds

Snip the ego off the syncopated kick drum

Rather than merely hear a tear drop, stake a patch of parched land available for download

Trouble aesthetics with flight and pursuit

Avoid blurring fusing flecks and flickering particles

Stir dots with curls and calligraphic gestures rather than yearning arpeggios

Walk just one street away from the obstreperous clusters verging on psychedelia old and new

Engage in slow slurry conversations on an ankle or the like

Grope at a man-made mandarin movie

Broadcast limited tender buttons, rising stains and whirling dervishes

Except in close-minded silence and stoic crafts, pluck plot turns from the famous using small sombre sounds

Poignantly drizzle the unacceptable once upon a time share

Package gold and green boredoms

After a string of buoyant disquieting settings cash in two black gloves for arcane chansons

Let’s just not say that relentless vocalising underneath muted brass protocols caused brooding sentient beings

Now see it now don’t

After three days of diffusion reverb distortion and delay “Float My Childhood on Rural Norfolk”

When a Palestinian pianist persuades a wave of buoying congas breathe more freely

Never impose chimes on nocturnal creatures

Mangle the plain truth

Scatter squeaks of alluring numerals

Gaze straight into the sheaves of concrete poetry falling back on weak cucumber humour

Whether or not the Quack Quack Gallery exhibits its boisterous ebb flow and haphazard plonking unsettle digital debris

Sample road drills coffee grinders and acoustic computers with pinprick focus on a brass outburst

Under another name hack and saw at rickshaw spokes

Work in gargantuan yard sounds

Beware of mumbled utterances that rhyme with “it’s a rich metaphor for the inner landscape”

Wander on a docked ship or an elongated drum sculpture

Unless a plum job comes up perch between smeared frenzies and unrest

Stock up on delicate dialectics or twist and shout

Watch out for saxophonists with hair on the wrong objects

Settle for vulgar sensationalism or the rough and righteous but pay no more than ten lacquered pieces

Only flinch if perfect and polite

Wink at the soulless meld of the bleakest moments when the darkest thoughts descend

When twice the age of a mental fiddler spare the scratchings or rattle the box

Gurgle on the doom laden

With race now based in Southern Italy bolt on Chinese boxes

After a boppish turn of phrase jab the caps button

Sitting at a forlorn piano burble away and call it impressionistic audio collage taken to transcendental aesthetic edginess

If the dialogue becomes exquisitely subdued call out “Adieu les jours”

As soon as the bucolic chirrups glimpse through the heaving and excitable crowd don’t hear the notes

Strum erratic junk culture

Reflect that Australian flavour and pack up your samples in your old kit bag

Careening around a small stage display shamanic multiphonics

Capsize the sound of big ugly orthodoxies

Hotly debate a drizzly grey day of composers drunk on white noise and red pessimism

[John Havelda's  poems have appeared in magazines such as Chain, danDelion, West Coast Line, Open Letter and Oficina de Poesia. He is the co-editor and translator of the anthology pullllllllllllllllllllllllll: Poesia Contemporânea do Canadá. His publications include mor, a bilingual book of texts and visual work, Unparalled Candour, and Know Your Place, a collaboration Fred Wah. He also writes for the theatre. Os Considerados, a play on cd, was published by the Teatro Nacional de São João in Porto. He lives in Lisbon and teaches creative writing at the University of Coimbra.]

Copyright © 2022 by John Havelda, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.