In the beginning, man coined poetry respecting a heavenly father: an artistic God. Spurred by vanity; in His once upon a time, was His happy ever after…
Emerging from countless chrysalides of His own potentiality,
He awakens, immaculately conceived from a motherlode of myth.
Top filled, to a blindingly bright brim, with youthful vigour.
Like a frolicking March calf, fey amongst the buttercups,
eschewing boredom at the solid foundation of His consciousness.
There, awaiting imagination, He pants impatiently, exuding jealous desire,
while deep in His fiery bowels, time chugged, & monadic humours giggled:
primed, as bashful as a quixotic firing squad in love…
His heart, a vast pumping powerplant oozing light, space, & free association,
EXPLODED!
Spinning surreality, flung outward, unto a notionally unbounded infinity.
Behold! A stream of seminal consciousness; the shape of things to come…
In these first moments before true knowledge of Good & Evil, claws or defect,
preceding the un-tabulated fall of original incompetence-
God stands, insanely beautiful, as tactless as a scintillating orgasm.
Blood erecting His crumpled form, the translucent membranes,
of His quadrifid ears, stiffening into divine configurations.
Holy lugs flap a whispering atmosphere & in response a terrible wind arises,
billowing thru the humid fundamentals of a prehistoric age typified by inertia.
Beating clouds of mathematics from His trouser cuffs; so aroused is He,
that sunlight, resembling thick-cut marmalade plasma, shines out of His bottom.
God raises His head, His teeth chatter, His toes curl, His magic tail frisks-
thus, attentive to an unravelling knot of whims, & fancies, He speaks!
Clearing His throat of polystyrene, & bubble wrap…
Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmm, He says.
Let there be such a thing as a Heap! And a Drawback!
Let there be Fragrances, Mirabelles & Destinations! Herbs & Hubs! Inflorescences & Osculations!
Gardens, Fountains, Coronas, Shrews, Indignations, Hippopotami, Magnoliales, Ginkgoales, & Chlamydomonases!
AND LET THERE BE ME!
Incapable of abnegation, or unselfishness, with a hop, skip, & a jump,
He ascended into a primordial haze of soft purple skies, flying for joy,
around His gibbous moon, He handcrafted from smelly green cheese-
artisanal haughtiness was God’s natural element,
alack, insufferable conceit fostered the inception of His sticky end.
As performative aeronautics created He then: the Barrel Roll, & the G-Turn.
The Scissors, the Split S, & the Immelmann Manoeuvre,
the Jink, the Aileron Roll, & the Victory Loop.
Then God U-turned, downwards, from the superfluity of possibility.
With hysterical passion, He invented the Out of Control Nosedive.
He saw the base of His consciousness, beckoning His steep descent.
He adjudged that it was bonkers, but good, & chiefly risk-free.
He witnessed antelopes’ gracile scatter over the spilling pampas,
the misty mountains’ crumpled satin spines,
the wildly spread canvas of everything; tantalised, He viewed,
the widening darkness of His own sly shadow, materialising to fill-
the horizons cup, within which He formulated infidelities, trust issues et seq., money lenders, mercenaries, monarchic territory, subjects, compound interest; environmental catastrophe, pruch & plunder. Doubt rooted in gripping niches, cheek by jowl with disaster, as toxic propagandas spewed from jagged clefts.
At this point He devised wrath, transference, coercion, & metastasizing violence.
He produced tumbrils freighted with condemned souls bearing second thoughts, stressors, disillusionments, despairs, fear cum trembling onanism; furthermore,
the horrified imagination of posterity also seemed like a reasonable idea.
Irony, art, metaphysics, & state sponsored religiosities occurred to Him too,
just in time to be deferred, yet in vain, as He hardly hit the final line of His poem.
(This one)

Evan Hay exists in Britain & rather than follow spurious leaders – over the years he’s intermittently found it therapeutic to write out various thoughts, feelings & ideas as short stories to be examined, considered, & interpreted by clinical practitioners who may be able to offer him professional psychological assistance.

You can find more of Evan’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Sent from my iPhone whilst dieting, a cosmetic enterprise divulged herewith to vindicate this effete 9-point-font

Sent from my iPhone relieving myself in a client’s water closet, clad head-to-toe in hardwearing mustard coloured corduroy, while finetuning pianofortes along the Cotswold Way; pitched perfectly- thus, forgo superfluous middots my dear confrère

Sent from my iPhone amidst a senior moment, so with all due respect Missy- overlook any spelling mistakes & spare me from grammatical criticisms

Sent from my iPhone iTyped with iThumbs: correspondingly, I’m implying one’s recipients sanction brevity, & furthermore, absolve my random spelling gaffes, or irregular punctuation

Sent from my iPhone as one melancholic constituent of an illiberal, self-inflicted Kafkaesque Concentration Camp, wherein fellow inmates doth foster conformity, stasis, & drudgery: this lame text transposes apathetic listlessness

Sent from my iPhone whilst flogging schtrops inside a NW-London eruv: it’s not just some unwarranted clever Dick legal trick, conceived to avoid rabbinical rules

Sent from my iPhone: metabolically struggling to project winning performances that will increase quarterly sales volumes by 20% in accordance with an inflexible corporate strategy; hence, excuse one’s justified anxieties, spelling mistakes etc.

Sent from my iPhone binge drinking Dr Pepper (without any valid prescription or exemption from tooth decay), what’s the worst that can happen?

Sent from my iPhone scunnered by 5-decades-of-wage-slavery: forgive self-pity

Sent from my iPhone having been curtly advised to place personal feelings aside whilst learning for a fact, that I’m not receiving bonuses I’d quite reasonably imagined I deserved; now, apparently, I need to envision our trading team’s big objectives first & foremost- so prithee, friend, tolerate these narcissistic tears

Sent from my iPhone- currently enduring trouble & strife, shackled & chained to my missus, as she tirelessly seeks ever more inventively onerous opportunities to break hard rock’s together- shoot me!

Sent from my iPhone whilst navigating from wife to girlfriend (via a stopover with concubines), onto one’s transgender lover: have a heart cock, do excuse brevity &/or insinuated STDs

Sent from my iPhone undefended as I have my undershirt lifted in the infamous Cock Ring Nightclub; excuse double-Dutch spelling (gasp my arse, how exciting)!

Sent from my iPhone while I’m being digitally probed-cum-prodded royally by Prince Hisahito of Akishino (this imperial boy’s a rough little bugger); pardon me for inscrutable Japanese sexting

Sent from my iPhone perched painfully upon a spinning fickle-finger-of-fate; so rhetorically, excuse me all over the place why don’t you?

Sent from my iPhone inspired by Bruno Manser: get naked FFS, camouflage your face, start blow-piping lumberjacks (excuse brevity, bad spelling, & punctuation)

Sent from my iPhone seeking portals to deeper connections with the essential sphere, & sentience of our planet; feel my extenuating material shortcomings, seen?

Sent from my iPhone during black mass at an agrestic coven- until next time: merry-meet, merry-part, & merry-meet again fellow pagan xx

Sent from my iPhone endeavouring to neutralise negativity by way of palliative creative catharses e.g., ‘meaning’ in the form of poesy, etchings, a jolly song or jig.

Sent from my iPhone riding a crested warthog, bareback thru dense spires of foxgloves: if this fugly pig’s day isn’t enriched, excuse one’s casual animal cruelty

Sent from my iPhone running naked across our neighbourhood common, closely pursued by energetic police community support officers (ignore typos, & brevity)

Sent from my iPhone while wanking excuse typos, brevity, & spilt spunk stains

Sent from my iPhone as I’m dishonourably discharged from my internship with a local coastal Edelweiss Pirates Group, excuse brevity, spelling, &/or punctuation

Sent from my iPhone at home alone, listening to Carmina Burana on full blast; my leggy wife Carla’s literally gone berserk, incinerated one’s candid apologia, before running off, & leaving me: does this condone typos punctuation or disorientation?

Sent from my iPhone reflecting belatedly on my wastrelsy & unforgivably bestial behaviour, increasingly concerned that an attendant, unmitigated public shame, shall long outlive my private trials & tribulations

Sent from my iPhone immersed in fever dreams, presently nailed inside a coffin buried beneath a chalk cavern near West Wycombe alongside supple sources of terror of unknown character, & extent, with only 9% of phone battery remaining, plus perhaps another hour’s oxygen (I know I don’t have to explain myself to you, but I feel rather inclined to do so)- if I ever do dig myself out, I’ll respond fully tomorrow: but for now- thanks for keeping me au-courant with your debauches. Please excuse absurd typos, farce, tragedy et al

Evan Hay exists in Britain & rather than follow spurious leaders – over the years he’s intermittently found it therapeutic to write out various thoughts, feelings & ideas as short stories to be examined, considered, & interpreted by clinical practitioners who may be able to offer him professional psychological assistance.

You can find more of Evan’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Fleeting

A Tuesday like the last,
sauntering not jogging
after peddle-bikes with hope
dangling from a green stick.
Forever it stretches in the distance,
far from my grasp, yet always flickering,
refusing to merge with the night.

A cycle repeated, the same street
never forged in memory.
Despair pooling and festering
like weeds, fungus, and disease.
Feet blistered with miles forgotten.
The blinding glimmers and aspirations
that leave a view forever unpainted,
wasting in thick blue light.

But all wells run dry
and all memories retire.
Look here, look now,
travel the coast with your gaze.
Breathe the yellow and amber
scorching the waning sky.
All is reset by the morning.

How do I mourn the living?

It’s not your body or flesh that has decayed,
It’s my ability to stand next to you.
It’s the conversations weighted in your favour,
a son who carries his father.

But how do you mourn
a heart that beats twenty miles away?
Do I throw dried petals to the earth,
clinging only to the good?
Do I walk across the sand
where my footprints
once lived within yours
and drown in the tainted memories?

Whatever it takes,
I have to mourn you,
not because you can’t change,
but because you won’t.
I have to grieve while you live,
accepting that one day
the guilt will fill every ounce of my being,
when I have to mourn you for real.

Benjamin Parker is a poet based in North Wales with works published in publications such as ‘The Uncoiled’, ‘Free Verse Revolution’, and ‘Nawr Mag’. Benjamin graduated with First-Class Honours in English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University and is now studying an MA in English Literature. 

From the field agent’s manual

Let the light pass by you
first time around. Take
nothing in. There may
be windows of which you
are not aware, with marks
on them you do not want

to hear about. Climb into
a car late at night
& let it take you where
you do not want to go. Give
nothing away. Not yet. Let
the light come round

on a later sweep & then
step out into it. Tell all
that is relevant to this
second position. There is
a certain liberation to it,
but you still retain your secrets.

The implicit burden of discourse

Do not look overhead for a true
pipe. That is a pipe dream. Be
warned that those who profess
such a doctrine are themselves
practising the deceit they con-

demn so much. Contradiction
usually only exists between two
statements, occasionally within
the one. Here there is clearly one
with no contradictions. How to

banish resemblance? Any higher
pipe lacks coordinates despite a
certain attention to forms & cere-
monies; & even about this ambi-
guity, I am ambiguous. Give to a

woman the knowledge of the forms
& its implicit burden. The polished
surface will then throw back the
arrow. Thus the spirit of politeness
exists in some form in all countries.

Sources:
This Is Not a Pipe, by Michel Foucault
The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette (1860) by Florence Hartley

Profiler

Claimed he could
categorize a person
through a random selection
of their words. Put some
together for him. Was
assessed as being
an unmarried male
between the ages of
twenty & thirty-nine, white,
of average intelligence
& with a childhood spent
masturbating whilst I
tortured small animals.
I fit the profile of a
serial killer. Am left
wondering which is the
more inexact science,
poetry or profiling, &
extremely glad I didn’t
show him one of my
really dark pieces.

Mark Young was born in Aotearoa New Zealand but now lives in a small town on traditional Juru land in North Queensland, Australia. He has been publishing poetry for sixty-five years, & is the author of over seventy books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, memoir, & art history. His most recent books are Melancholy, a James Tate Poetry Prize winner, published by SurVision Books (Ireland) in March 2024; the May 2024 free downloadable pdf to your scattered bodies go from Scud Editions (Minnesota, USA); & One Hundred Titles From Tom Beckett, with paintings by Thomas Fink, published by Otoliths (Australia) in June, 2024. His The Magritte Poems will be coming out from Sandy Press (California) in late 2024.

You can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Bubble

The bubble reflects
my dream so perfectly
it could be made of glass.
Perhaps it is made of glass
as the sharp leaves don’t break it.
it just rests there,
waiting.

Birdsong

I close my eyes
and listen
to the birds.
I can’t name them,
but I can still feast
on their song
for now.

Some sing beautifully,
others need to learn.
I sympathise with them,
I can’t sing either,
but It doesn’t matter.
No one will hear me
if I join in
now.

Cloth of Gold

I called it my cloth of gold
it was so special
with a bit of this
and a bit of that
remnants reclaimed
and woven with love
woven with tenderness
into a cloth of shining colours
making memories to wear
wrap round memories
like threads of time
for all our time,
memories
that
in time
became
our shroud.

I didn’t know it then.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues
of social justice and events, places and people she has known or
imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of
dream, fantasy and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud
‘War Poetry for Today’ competition and has been nominated for a
Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many
publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Capsule Stories, Gyroscope
Review and So It Goes.

You can find more of Lynn’s work here on Ink Pantry.