Joyland Poetry

a hub for poetry

The Persons (excerpt)

The Persons was originally published by information as material in a limited edition print run (York, 2011). Reprinted here with permission.

Gary takes the hat on mountains, always. Khandwawala calls the Earth a mother, saluting her and respecting her. Robert isn’t seeing Kristen. Robert invented atom bombs. Bram rode horses. Anselm means you and you and you. Vik makes poignant and complex work. Fredric argues. Poppy disregards work, hygiene, and common sense. Fernand stood before the machine. Gavin inserted his own face into well-known images of Che. Ian puts on his vintage leather jacket. Jack almost smashed his guitar in rage. Frank and Karen got divorced after almost 20 years together. Jacqueline feels very comfortable here. Taibo goes to school in Kiribati. Mama fishes nomadically in Mali. Juliana herds lamas in Peru. Avetik drives a bus in Yakutsk. Christian herds sheep in Switzerland. Abakar farms in Chad. Rinchen farms in Ladakh. Azizul labours in Bangladesh. Wanee fishes in Thailand. Chai herds sheep in China. Chris vends organic produce in Colorado. Abdallay herds cows in Chad. Miguel runs a vinery in Spain. Lisemelo toils without betterment, and persist to no avail. Marcello is a lifeguard in Italy. Yusnoval is a public health worker in Cuba. Billy hunts and traps in Tuktoyaktuk. Michale herds cows in Australia. Bian herds horses in China. Karotu farms coconuts in South Tarawa. Scott superintends a golf course in Las Vegas. Adham weaves together soundscapes of the ancient and the immediate with tribal dub grooves. Jacques points out that there are far too many sightings required for simple alien surveillance or research. Robert wears white cotton. Robert wears white cotton. Jackson looks at light. Sherrie copies Juan, Walker and Edgar. Jay eats mushrooms. James explains his role on a daytime soap as a form of performance art. Carla imagines roasting wild artichokes and fish with a bit of pungent sage over a fire. Miriam sees a man and woman sitting opposite each other and sewing by the same lamp. Seamus escapes from prison aboard a hijacked helicopter which briefly lands in the prison's exercise yard. Melanie wears a grey jacket and matching trousers with boots. Laurette plays with economic forms as if they were lines and colours on a painting. Pierre presents an interview with John and a film by Andy side by side. Palaniappan wants citizens to change their “aggressive” habits if they want to have any hope of being considered as decent hosts to aliens for Her Incomparable Majesty’s Commonwealth Games. Betty follows the flashlight beam through rain on an autumn night. Annika wears blue cotton. Anthony curates. Ernesto hangs. Rosa replies. Arthur glimpses a transnational utopia. Ed photographs gas stations from Oklahoma to California. Amy dreams of an embedded chip, her son’s induction into the matter market. Adrienne jerks astart in a dark hourless Hiroshima. William appears in an advert for Nike. Ernesto acknowledges an original trauma, an impossible kernel which resists symbolization, totalization, symbolic integration. Jenny enjoys it too. Shena has the trait of getting the job done, yet her creativity is always niggling at the back of her mind. Sid reads that the gods are angry volcanoes. Jessica likes that it is “a sprit driven gift of the heart.” Patti’s believes her life experiences have provided her with proof of life after life. Diana cleans up with tears. Jim rips a line drive to left field during a big slo-pitch tournament. Dino does not know if her pale face appears to him among the rocks, or if she is the smile of distances unknown. Gilbert practices a geometry which works on the assumption that when one is stumped one can insert Identity. Joe buys chips. Candice isolates short fragments of images and repeats them. Donald labels. Alfred moves to Hollywood. Bannerjee is eager to ensure socially viable projects. Marge remembers the premier, a fabulous event attended by all the big stars including Charlie, Shirley, Douglas, Judy, Ginger, and Clark. Antony visited the Maldives, where he promised measures to bolster defence cooperation. Vikram has pain in his eyes, an ear infection, and rashes on his body. Paul thought it difficult to engage in any form of public dialogue without offending someone’s sensitivities, whether right, left, or centre. Ayman sues Sasha. Christina sues Nicolas. Trim shouts. Guitiérrez wants to die when day is fading, on the high seas and with his face to the sky, where the agony may seem like a dream and the soul like a bird that soars in flight. Joe is always cold it’s sinister. Stefan meditates. Felix uses the formal vocabulary of Minimalist art almost thirty years later to suit his own political preoccupations. Bernard alludes. David shields his eyes from the sun with his baseball glove to look at the spring’s first geese. Sharmilla fears sinning at every point. Mário saw the deputies, tall hats, under the afternoon canopy, made of red mangoes, coming out hand in hand from the congress. Ed reveals a good deal. Derek won. Terry starts brightly. Dan recounted how the building of vast computer networking infrastructures was driven by profiteering on the privatization of publically owned telecommunications industries. Richard resigns, and finds himself on a helicopter, thinking not of the past, but of the future. John eats mushrooms. Gary works as a logger, merchant marine, and fire lookout, and then moves to Japan. Dan feels the breath of life rise and fall with the ripples of the bay, and sees the Golden Gate slip into darkness as the gulls cry. Lindsay denies kissing Jessica’s husband Cash. Mamta says special trains would be arranged. Emmet visited a madhouse in America and saw, beside the chief poet of the age, young women of pleasing appearance and young men of slender body, with fire in their eyes, and he heard them sing songs of their own invention set to an exquisite music, sweet and sad but all the same joyous and strong. Kris shares tips on the only way to look good—by being unconventional. Robert lets traces of sand remain in the car trunk after vacation. Bongekile is a broken pot. Naomi reveals how the link between the consumers of a product and its makers has been sundered. Che had his guerrillas read Don Quixote. Nissim drowns in inner silence. Allen comments. Jean claims. Vito associates. Emily argues that the picture of egg and sperm drawn in popular and scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes. Michael sees himself as an author of situations, not of the elements involved in them. Elaine believes she glimpses something of what was lost to conventional Christianity. Yusef sees a blue halo of flies around the corpse. Gerry plays guitar and sings. Richard describes vibrational medicine. Leanne contributes to Lonely Planet. Janet edits. Barbara edits, Holbrook edits and introduces. Alan illustrates. Barbara selects. John can’t get on the train. Charlize talks about her tragic past, getting naked on screen, and keeping the love alive with her beau Stuart. Akilah tries on egos in justification of the planet’s continuance. Batstone thinks that their ideas took root a thousand years ago on opposite sides of the same valley. Lalita lived in an ashram for several years. Jack listens to Classic Rock. Andy works at Random House. Mark immigrated to Australia. Nureet lives in Tel Aviv. Camille spies on the patients across the way from the corner of her eye. Johann plays the accordion. Louis chose only his own recordings to play on Desert Island Discs. Ted thinks of his grandfather, standing at his open well, the smiling host to a squad of well-armed foreigners. Deeta hogged the front row during London fashion week. Haaning transforms art centres into import-export stores and clandestine workshops. Jacques spoke off the cuff. Nils and Sean make catalogues. Judson sees the long ropes of the window washers float in the wind. Bob died in Hospital. Najmul stared at the tattered remains of his passport and swore never to return. Ollenbach recorded a hundred different species. Jack wears orange cotton. Huang had no idea the visitor from California might have a disease. Ben warns. Ichiro fights. Kishore saw the western model as tainted. Ali has enough to worry about. Thaksin lives in self-imposed exile. Cheryl likes making Christmas romantic. John reads through Finnegan’s Wake. Laura shoves the beautiful actress roughly down on to the bed and started roughly undressing her. Marc samples a baseline. Steven argues that the early books are haunted by the failure of language. Ezra was direct. John smoked. Carl represents zones more than sculptures. Molinari fights without honour, with a bunch of twigs in his hands. Graham remembers everything: the murmuring trees, the sunshine’s zealotry, its deep unevenness. Filippo cobbled. Della presided. Donatella collaborated. Samir wakes up grumbling. Roshni wakes up before it’s too late. Doris makes sculptures out of furniture that once belonged to people who “disappeared” in Columbia’s long civil war. Rakshat sees the bare legged boy on the sunlit patch lost in a game of marbles, eyes bunched for grit in the howling thatch of wind-hunted autumn. Scott builds on this. Helene posits female access. Anne describes a spiritual genesis. David delineates differences between men and women based on the distinctive function of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Luce offers critique. Ed designs the Altair 8800, a microcomputer which is widely recognized as the spark leading to the microcomputer revolution. Ananda encourages. John and Joe travel to Vermont together. Robin traces an arm. Jonas tries to structure her essay with a velvet hat. Pierre refilms Pier. Marcus wears white cotton. Idries is highly curious. Pablo raises a flag into the air and leaves it draped from the firmament, from the stars, from clear light and darkness. Jiddu wonders what we mean by beauty and what we mean by truth. Eric defends. Yoshiaki heads business development. Clinton wants to write as easily and spontaneously as Bukowski. Petra went into hiding. Renato says the alert level will remain the same, but that if magma continues to rise below the glowing crater, it could erupt within weeks. Timothy uses a 270-kilogram ammonium nitrate bomb, mixed with fuel oil. Jean feels sad or relieved at night that the kids are asleep. Lisa pleads guilty. Feng warns of a huge panic. Li doesn’t know whether typical doses have similar effects on sexual desire. Robert died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Paulo sits in a restaurant a block from the sandy arc of Copacabana beach. Edison says there are problems with the power lines. Claude feels no pain and he cannot see. Rudolph denounced the “sick stuff.” Dakis collects. Erik offers cautionary flags. Dee hears the quickening of hammers towards dusk at summer’s end. John wondered what to do for years, and now, at last, he thinks it better to write a kind of rhyming letter. Dan said the choice made him uncomfortable. Roddy struggles to find safe haven. Max never saw it coming. Jones took responsibility. Danielle travels the expanse of that theatre, with wetness, a fray, an apparition’s grievance. Jack sees someone’s newspaper drift with the snow at 4 a.m. Lobsang writes in bed, closely monitored by his Siamese cats. Sheelagh went on the lam from a marriage that didn’t work. Allen asked for a “good vibe” audience for “lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us.” Josh walked to the shop down the lane. Taylor outwitted his political foes by hopping on the train. Kurt grew up in Cape Cod. Mark worshipped John Coltrane. Daniel appropriates logos. Nicolas lays a wreath. Yoko attaches data loggers to six young northern elephant seals off the California coast. Bob propagates cuttings taken from a lone healthy tree discovered on a farm. Larry rows out of the mist into bright colours. Graham solves the mystery. Benedict dreams that it’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party.