Exegi monumenta
The monuments to ignorance and to reason have been staring at each other’s recapitulation from time out of mind. Ignorance is measurable in monuments; reason, in moments.
Momus chooses a moment—and clay comes into play, so one can sculpt something meaningful (occasionally called Auris.) This is a susceptibility experiment. Some have called it palliation; some have called it abductive inference (Intel inside.) Watch possibilities caper beyond the buoy.
Monument huggers live bronze-coloured lives. They grow lemons of embarrassment; they lag musical flags. Note the smoke of their vigils, the mouthful of kisses. Some others travel, but they sprout where they’ve been planted. Only and only.
All questions bow before this: are we prepared to kill somebody to prove that our imaginary guru is better than theirs?
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Red Lights
We hide from our naked past in our see-through garments. What can they reveal, anyway, if not what makes us all look like banana fingers?
Somebody shows off his big red zero. Somebody gets diagnosed with BDSM. Marine mud gets rather gummy on a muggy day. If the mud had a brain, would it be deep-brown or see-through? If a womb had a brain, would it nurture an Einstein or cheese crisps? And what if it suffers from misperceptions?
Wherever you are, the world sees your bare blossoms. Here’s a portrait of your confidence as a younger ape, the age of prunes before they wrinkle. Innocence is pleasurable, sex profitable, control very pleasurable, murder extremely profitable. Never bite the tomatoes of my lips.
This is libertinism, it withers and museifies. This is destiny, it excels in making evil from good and good from evil, especially where there’s nothing else to make them from.
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Fairy-Tale
How easily heads can be detached from a dragon! All those young men hypnotised by grimaces and tail movements… Don’t be so cheesecake! Do it! A simple chop-chop—and new borders get puffed out, already proof-tested for spelling and spillage.
Out there, watch out for ideology bonfires: you can end up in one if you don’t supply a flamethrower. And this is where dragons come in, short-fused but quick-blinking. What’s not to like about a bouncy walk along the border chalk?
As we powder our reflections’ twin noses in double-glazed mirrors, a brand new yesterday gets shoved into our windows. This is beyond comprehension, like thirsty shadows or torrential trees. Like an egg with a flag.
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Hauptwache, Frankfurt
I like talking about salamanders and goblins. I feel a little like a toy; sometimes like Tolstoy. I’ve put my last 100 clams into betterment, but the upper-crest accent eludes me. You can’t change yourself on a budget; you need a shipment of paint and pain. Your time is a deadwatch time; your medical condition is fiddling. What are you going to do about it?
Look around: your city has always been a moveable beast. Yesterday it worshipped the Holy Randomer; today the Eiffel Tower grows atop some heads. Angels have invested in yellow vests; they are busy with portfolio rebalancing. Wherever you go, ethical judgments stare at you from the local cloaca. Jack Wolfskin appears from around the corner and says, Howdy doody.
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By Way of Introduction
Meet the serial killer called progress. Read his book called Backward Induction for Dummies. Note his frozen eyes, his despair. Nothing dies on this planet; this muddles the streams of perfection. Survival is a black aroma; the puddle of choices never dries up. Passing caracaras wonder if they’re seeing an extra-long worm or history in the making. They are not sure, and neither are we. After all, there is something nematodic about thinking.
Somebody said life is an overture. To what? Universe opens little apertures – and here we are, transparent on every side. Happy motherless day! Still, some of us have a positive altitude, while some others conceal their thoughts in ten-foot-tall elephant grass.
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Anatoly Kudryavitsky lives in Dublin, Ireland, and in Reggio di Calabria, Italy. His poems appear in Oxford Poetry, The Literary Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Prague Revue, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Plume, The American Journal of Poetry, The Honest Ulsterman, The North, Ink Sweat and Tears, Cyphers, Stride, etc. His most recent poetry collections are The Two-Headed Man and the Paper Life (MadHat Press, USA, 2019) and Scultura Involontaria (Casa della poesia, Italy, 2020; a bilingual English/Italian edition). His latest novel, The Flying Dutchman, has been published by Glagoslav Publications, England, in 2018. In 2020, he won an English PEN Translate Award for his anthology of Russian dissident poetry 1960-1980 entitled Accursed Poets (Smokestack Books, 2020). He is the editor of SurVision poetry magazine.