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.