Friday, September 1, 2017

David Russell - Five Poems


David Russell is a writer of poetry, literary criticism, speculative fiction and romance. Main poetry collection Prickling Counterpoints (1998); poems published in online International Times. Main speculative works High Wired On (2002); Rock Bottom (2005). Translation of Spanish epic La Araucana, Amazon 2013. Romances: Self’s Blossom; Explorations; Further Explorations; Therapy Rapture; Darlene, An Ecstatic Rendezvous (all pub Extasy (Devine Destinies). Self-published collection of erotic poetry and artwork, Sensual Rhapsody, 2015. Singer-songwriter/guitarist. Main CD albums Bacteria Shrapnel and Kaleidoscope Concentrate. Many tracks on You Tube, under ‘Dave Russell’



***
1. Crossword Adventurer
Isn’t it great! The chessboard gone wonky,
Thrust into eddies of new clusters –
All-dimensional vistas.
Isn’t it great to peel and pave the words,
To lick their sounds,
To hone the code letters with your pencil sharpener.

Happy jump from ‘right’ to ‘dream’ –
City breath pause,
Gurgling word-chain.

Torture, hiatus of connection;
Now predator inverts to bloom.
Find the emphasis load for the key –
            Dropped aitches
Happy insertion – sure, innit?

Passive/active flip.
Broken inversion with another inversion.
A pun is a trouble-maker; that’s good.

But it sometimes blocks the association
Conditional insertion.

You can get from New Orleans to Sloane Square
By anagram cable,
Snap into the indefinite article. 
***
2. Computer Virus
Gulleted  in spark glint veins
Flabbering circuits in floppies
Print-out piled high, choking, crimped;

Programme busy; not applied;
Insufficient memory.

Germs swallowed ink;
Myopic suction

Greek symbol coffee grounds
The winking green a vaccine

The quantum got under the mouse

Insufficient disk space.
We crash the orbit.

A spiky cursor jams backlogs

Danger: Programme Overloaded.

Blacked flash; inked screen transferred;
Teeth in the bytes

And have you seen a paper jam
A heated crumple coming strong?

Graphic rings blotching

All could explode –


The old typewriter’s gone to rust.

***
3. Electro-Magnetic Love

She said – you are my current, my three-pointed plug
Yet I am the wound flex; the wiring behind the walls is mine –
When I say ‘Halt!’ go no further; the wiring is dislocated from you

The very suggestion of a movement of current, a sense of desirability
Is itself physical.

You place shields of copper around yourself, hoping to oblige me
To build up the voltage to a point
Which my wiring-system and wall-covering cannot contain.

The build-up goes on; there are multiple redirections for the circuit –
All the world converges here – but if we try to merge,
We may plunge beneath everything we rely on.

You love me not, you love my pole – turn round;
Yes; one can see everything clearly earmarked in speech –
Polarised vowels and consonants – back to their predecessors
Or else pulled through eyeholes to their successors.


 ***
4. Common Sense

The sea turns sound to touch
The wind blows touch to smell
The sun turns sight to touch
The grasses smell taste to touch
The animals taste smell to see

The setting of sets charge to five together
Yet there can only be a holding of two –
The sign for a straight line
Is negative.

Two intersections against purity
Thought’s stopgap substitute for a positive
Like skin the filtering wall,
The consonantally splintered phoneme.

The sea waved the hail to touch
The wind hailed the wave to touch

Hello: life is a shocking coil. 

***
5. Action Paint Stripper

He did it:
Bared around as a torn poster –
Slashed in irrigation, blatant in life.

Squeezing out worms, slugs
And snakes ablaze;
All burst to flood
Then blended underlay –
A laminated rainbow.

His luminescence crossed exposure’s edge;
Flesh writhed erogenous,
Prime canvas scrubbed.

Paint frames contorted
To every edge and corner,
Intestine centre
Rose to a shining swell –

Over he jumped – my razor bleep of terror.
Treading on sound’s soil,
A clogged, bunged, throbbing dub,
Whence life’s six oozing hues.