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.
