wednesday newstrip

Australian Opposition leader Putrid Dustbin attacks Prime Minister for including calls for ceasefire & de-escalation in motion reflecting on 7 October · Bunnings Australia shoppers go wild over $15 item for transforming dirty grout: 'Holy grail' · T.®ump spoke with Putain at least seven times since leaving White House, Bob Woodward reports · McDonald's Australia brings back beloved $2.50 menu item after three years · Evangelicals for Harris claim Franklin Graham is threatening to sue them · classic Aussie phrase — 'mate' — offending people in 2024 · Notjustanyahoo says Israel has killed late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's successors · T.®ump stuns social media as he dances along to YMCA at the end of speech about October 7 attacks.

Conjugation

It was the afternoons he enjoyed the most at the Summer Palace. Spent doing grammar lessons on the lawn with a succession of tutors, always male, often English, occasionally consumptive.

He discarded his mistakes with the arrogance of a child who had never picked up anything in their life. Someone was always there to do that for him. Some times some thing. Here it was the ducks who swallowed those errors soft enough to digest. A groundsman with a captured Uhlan's helmet to which a handle had been attached gathered up what they left.

It was an unreal life. But that he only realized years later when the Revolution came along. A flash of insight in the darkness behind the blindfold, reality hitting him just before the bullets did. It was remarked that until then his pleas for mercy were endless, pointless, but grammatically precise. Just like his universally disliked decrees.

A couple of new books

Mark Young
The Magritte Poems
Sandy Press
ISBN: 979-8-9898666-3-2 Amazon URL: https://a.co/d/65ZzzPr
648 pages
Paperback: $US24.99
Kindle: $US12.00

This is a book 21 years in the making. The first Series Magritte poem — three words, three lines — was composed on the front step of a motel room at Yarra Glen, about 50 kilometers from Melbourne. It appeared on the As/Is blog in — I think — November 2003, was followed by another twenty or so at the same blog, & then, in March 2024, the following post appeared at my then main blog, Pelican Dreaming:

I have decided to start a blog for my Series Magritte poems. The URL is https://seriesmagritte.blogspot.com.

As I write this, there are 547 poems up at Series Magritte. I have included all of them in this book. Interspersed among them are a number of other poems — the Florence Foucault centos, composed of extracts from Michel Foucault's book on Magritte, This Is Not a Pipe, & the 1860 The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, by Florence Hartley, some of which actually appeared under the pseudonym of Florence Foucault, & also included are other of my poems that reference Magritte, including one that dates back to 1974. My admiration for René Magritte goes back a long way!

This is a collected, not a selected, so it may be uneven in quality. I would also have liked to include some of the Magritte paintings that inspired the poems, but that would undoubtedly have raised copyright issues as well as ending up as a seriously expensive tome. I have no intention of stopping writing Magritte poems, but I've decided to bring a dotted line to the venture so that I can see what it looks & feels like in book form. For those that don’t like the heft of such things, there is also a Kindle edition which Amazon warns may take a while to download.

I want to thank Javant Biarujia for his introduction, which is up at Sandy Press, & Sheila E. Murphy for her blurb which can be found on the Amazon page. Their words are more than I deserve.

I also want to thank Bill Allegrezza & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen for publishing earlier selections of my Magritte poems. I want to thank harry k stammer for publishing this collection & for doing the covers of some of the aforementioned smaller books. Lastly, I'd like to pay tribute to René Magritte for making the invisible visible.

There's also a recently published collection of my non-Magritte poems.

Alkaline Pageantry
Serious Publications
Lulu URL: https://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-young/alkaline-pageantry/paperback/product-rmenkpq.html?page=1&pageSize=4
76 pages
$US4.82

Alkaline Pageantry is the latest collection of poems by Mark Young that reflect — like much of his previous work — the insanity & inanity of the modern world. 'Give me a seagull with a / positronic brain & I'll / give you the next leader / of the modern world.' The poems come from the last six years, before, during, & after Covid; touch on the duplicity of world leaders; use search engines as a creative tool; deploy humor as a weapon to lay waste to civilization as it’s currently presented. 'Sorry, / nothing / matched your / search terms. Please / try / again with / a different fish.'

Today the post
woman brought
me a trans-
Atlantic passenger
liner. I tried to

sail it in the lagoon
at the bottom of the
street but when I got
it in there it wouldn't
budge, something to

do with Newton's
unpublished fourth
law of motion which,
in précis, posits big
fish / big pool. I've

decided to leave the
liner where it is,
open it up as
an hotel. The
pelicans are pissed.
  

A note on the mandrake

The irregular
black bands down
its side allow a
small force to over-
come a larger
one. Otherwise
it is blue, &
draws caricatures
of the effects of
technology 
on a modern society
where the houses
& temples are made
from hardened
steel. They are
still intact, a
modicum of the
Machtpolitik of its
massage, although
the latter is ex-
pressed as a ratio
of load to effort
& its form rarely
avers its content.

Closed Environment

aug
mented 

black & 
white movies 
that color 
the mind 

songs 
sung of 

Saint-Saëns' 
macabre dancers 
animal carni
vals 

Once a month, in early spring once a week, he would 
drive up to the mountains, then walk for about thirty 
minutes to a small creek he had discovered. There he 
would pick watercress & dandelion leaves, wild straw
berries in the spring. The dandelion leaves he turned 
into wine, the watercress he added to his sandwiches 
& salads. In late evening, in early spring, he would sit 
on the small balcony of his 37th floor studio apartment 
eating the strawberries, looking out across towards the 
mountains, bridging the gap between. 

thought 
étude 

* 

étude
iously 

he worked 
knight after 
knight on ways 
to destroy the 
temple of 
the policiers 

but was dis
poemed by 
the tracts he 
read during 
the day 

"Have you a gold cup….?" 

san greal 
sang real 

holistic
ally 

* 

holistically 

he was unable 
to conceive 

that the concept of the particle accelerator 
he was working on to destroy the palace 
of the templars would eventually 
become the template for another temple 

forgot that                   (the 
pure science                catapults & 
begets im-                    burning 
purities when              mirrors of 
applied                         Archimedes) 

forgot the 
unforeseen con
sequences 
as he re
played the 
foreseen 
sequences in 
the games of 
Capablanca 

beneath a 
poster 
of Dali's 
burning 
giraffes 

* 

giraffes 
eat the 
higher 
leaves 
of the 
McArbres

   im 
part
   ial 
to any 
   part 
of the trunk
   below 

animated 
animists 
practising 
self-love 

leaving the 
ground 
cover for 
et in arcadia ego 
romantics & 
other past
oral 
lists 

leaving 
the temple 
empty the 
songs 
un-

aug
mented 

A halieutic

In small-scale 
societies every-
one carries the 
same alleles as 
everyone else. 
Many have no 
eyelids. Those 
that do are cut
in corkscrew
shape & support 
the extradition of
drug traffickers.

wednesday newstrip

DoNuts T.®ump encourages Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear sites · the NSW Education Standards Authority has announced that teaching of the Aboriginal past prior to European arrival will be excluded from the Year 7–10 syllabus as of 2027 · A-list star ‘horrified’ as alleged Diddy sex tape gets pushed to media outlets: ‘he feels like he was victimized years ago’ · Sydney woman allegedly killed & dismembered husband in ‘bizarre’ murder case, police say · a scorned Canadian wife has opened up about how she ate her dead husband’s ashes after finding out about his string of affairs · a year into the Israel-Gaza war, the Middle East is on the verge of chaos. How does it end?

While opening the gate

I sometimes wonder
what birds did

before powerlines
were invented.

wednesday newstrip

T.®ump praises Russia's military record in argument to stop funding Ukraine's fight · Murk Suckerbug says Meta AI has nearly 500 million users · fatal stabbing of Japanese schoolboy in China sparks debate on the country's patriotic education · Israeli politicians across spectrum praise assassination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah · Just Stop Oil protestors arrested after Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers splashed with soup · Australian Broadcasting Corporation crew becomes subject of Russian criminal investigation for crossing border from Ukraine · thousands attended Auckland's Eden Park in an attempt to reclaim the Guinness World Record for the largest haka. The attempt was successful, decisively beating the previous official record of 4028, inexplicably held by France since 2014.