SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue
Nine
LES WICKS
Clarity Now
No tragedy here.
Sure, there's steam from gaskets but
I guess that leakage is laughter
intumesced from disaster.
Victory – even if it ends up as a puddle.
A Master of Ceremony has been overthrown.
Our flagrant bread wraps the lunatic cheeses
kale fans the sweating ham.
The mob is hungry
but after an earlier private feasting
judges sleep off their excess,
proclaim their dreams as decision.
Why worry
if you were never on the menu?
Abandoning the baser needs
there was pilgrimage to an ageing expert.
Above his door
Hair & Money.
Maybe so,
when walks & sex & empathy all have use-by dates.
If you squint, don't navigate.
The Way of Things.
I'm a sourpuss
been hiding angels.
My fingers comb a cosmos
test for feel, for flaws
any turn will stir a hurricane
in our modest town of Preconception.
Sure, there's steam from gaskets but
I guess that leakage is laughter
intumesced from disaster.
Victory – even if it ends up as a puddle.
A Master of Ceremony has been overthrown.
Our flagrant bread wraps the lunatic cheeses
kale fans the sweating ham.
The mob is hungry
but after an earlier private feasting
judges sleep off their excess,
proclaim their dreams as decision.
Why worry
if you were never on the menu?
Abandoning the baser needs
there was pilgrimage to an ageing expert.
Above his door
Hair & Money.
Maybe so,
when walks & sex & empathy all have use-by dates.
If you squint, don't navigate.
The Way of Things.
I'm a sourpuss
been hiding angels.
My fingers comb a cosmos
test for feel, for flaws
any turn will stir a hurricane
in our modest town of Preconception.
Everything Must Go
They're
selling all your things.
You've been moved into a cage called care.
The meals are okay.
A photo of you in a sari, 1985,
wearing that bangle that's still a favourite
but stored now for safe keeping in the office.
Your Ralph Laurent chair cost $8000
then got wrapped in so much fabric
because the cat was tearing it apart.
It's now a thank you gift
for someone who was perhaps a friend
or a chancer.
One painting went for $3000,
no, I never liked it anyway.
Another canvas by whatever happened to saw no offers.
Tina and Adrienne buy 2 nearly-full bottles of booze
come back an hour later to wrap themselves
in scarves & faux fur giggling over their $20 remake.
Out on the patio spring cockatoos harass
the queue of river. Clouds prefer barter.
Eucalypts have heard rumours of a fall.
Everyone asks how you're going
some of us tell stories,
cry or laugh... know both are sacraments.
What have I bought?
What do I take away?
This amputation, this homage.
Seems so many are ejected from this world in stages,
I dial your new number,
take some pills.
You've been moved into a cage called care.
The meals are okay.
A photo of you in a sari, 1985,
wearing that bangle that's still a favourite
but stored now for safe keeping in the office.
Your Ralph Laurent chair cost $8000
then got wrapped in so much fabric
because the cat was tearing it apart.
It's now a thank you gift
for someone who was perhaps a friend
or a chancer.
One painting went for $3000,
no, I never liked it anyway.
Another canvas by whatever happened to saw no offers.
Tina and Adrienne buy 2 nearly-full bottles of booze
come back an hour later to wrap themselves
in scarves & faux fur giggling over their $20 remake.
Out on the patio spring cockatoos harass
the queue of river. Clouds prefer barter.
Eucalypts have heard rumours of a fall.
Everyone asks how you're going
some of us tell stories,
cry or laugh... know both are sacraments.
What have I bought?
What do I take away?
This amputation, this homage.
Seems so many are ejected from this world in stages,
I dial your new number,
take some pills.
An Edge of Our Plan
This beach is not dreaming.
It writes with an algal care
then loses control in high tide.
Dark gas, poisoned walls
nothing better than barefoot.
Minor leakage in the corners of a boy,
the weight of his hair
that hangs like an exhausted mango tree.
Beneath the ropes of surf
sand
Everywhere.
When fingers open they grab blindly.
Each heart is a crater
the breast & arm
A moment, please
Shatter my back like a rock
on the available space
that is your love.
Deeper isn't purity.
Fifth, granular.
We are difficult situations.
Les Wicks is from Australia. His work appears in multiple magazines, anthologies and newspapers across the globe, as well as in translation. He runs Meuse Press, which focuses on poetry outreach projects like poetry on buses and poetry published on the surface of a river. His latest (14th) book of poetry is Belief (Flying Islands, 2019).
