Chapter 3

My fingers are frying skillets slow-boiling water, with precision, your rivers & chasms, a vagina white knuckle rafting across your enchantment.

KIPPER, TEA AND ORANGES

Our lives evaporating as we talk, flypaper from cosmic ceiling--

We gather stardust, mnemonics, perhaps, re-arrangers of mystic twigs into a pattern.

Look to the sky, les nuages, l'ombre les arbres alla primavera "magnificio", said I with real relish & snap of ring-encrusted fingers, distant God, not quite Himself, behind a podium exiting the band shell.

TANK-TOP

I was playing sonatas on your skin-- no beauty & the beast scenario though the Tower pulchritude was intact with enough purple agape grape leaves and ivy for a fig-leaved Eve with wind wet at the windows (and later the willows), where gravelly, cloven hooves became party to my thoughts; for you, blessed with a triangular patch, --and something like strawberry-- lay moist & woven into strict tapestry like a mantle covering abrupt oasis of skin (the better to peer in).

I scaled the heights not castle vaults, mind you, but the elevator shaft and draw-bridge equivalent of a white charger-- fierce visor in place --armour gleaming-- a sabre rattling at my side be-jewelled & twinkling the key clinking there, to corner distance (time & space) dragons to be dirked and slain.

Fiery eye, forked tails donut-sized scales plastered as a calendar or shingler might a tiled roof --the empty spell Bellerophon spying his Lady in a belfry on driving home.

VIEWER MAIL

The sky was a ringed net of honeyed light, (colours from peeled apples) funnelling cloud ... tumbler over dice (the carrot throat lemonade pie) twin coins in a fountain brief lantern spark amid twittering noise.

The trees were awaiting giants gathered to fumble about the river noiseless bridge and, I, skyscraper man dangling a reflection, (afternoon tea) muddy me Jimbob expression water angling for dirt.

IMAGISTIC

There in the cosmos-- white dwarfs launch a black rooftop imagistic, clean as a pantry, the twilight roads with ledges lean like raw openings.

And coming upon stars in a country woodhouse --cold, big as frozen pears, each breath of light visible thru chinks & clusters of broken ceiling wood; hands raw & nipped sawing logs-- breath menacing the depths on inner space, something pale and profoundly suggestive.

LIVING ROOM

If anatomy were a contact sport, the stomach would be a football éstomac, hammock sagging . . . . the container of riotous living pried loose.

And the head-- a barrel of nails, binder-twine unravelled into knots; the brain a cauliflower for flavouring, precious little else.

Spare the heart its dagger pleasure inveighed from the start.

HIGH ROLLER

1 Terrorism-- left-wing nerd (twin grapefruits in his hand gives it away) winging a stiletto shoe, spitting on an ashcan to bring up a bruise or two.

2 Visions are steadier-- I see in the shimmer blue veins to target, a silhouette of the rich, fur wraps in their Bentleys time to bring up tar, kick ass in Knightsbridge with my holiday bomb blast.

3 Bag snatching can be dangerous let go if you don't want to be dragged over cobbles behind a Vespa.

4 The Harrod's sign, "please keep moving" meant business.

5 Pretoria calls as does Manila. Later, perhaps, Jerusalem, Beirut, Rawalpindi.

6 Closer to home (I am of the Red Army faction) is the Bologna train station.

7 Counting hours down my button line, three less then pay-off, squeakily clean.

8 London seems indifferent to my destiny; even the tube buskers and streeties see not a harbinger but another shuffling cold-assed long hair.

9 The wired whisky bottle in the airport locker will make La Guardia look to the Statue of Liberty for deliverance,

10 I'll send the Hotel Crillon so far up the Eiffel they'll have to sandblast the sky.

11 My mentors spic 'n span boys no wild-eyed radicals with socks that won't stay up, rather gumless wizards taking Confederate rain, mainlining a little to keep the nerves steady, orders direct from Moscow with money laundered a bit, beats haphazard work and petty contracts on local businessmen.

12 Cells (I like the word) master-mind co-ordinate and synchronize revolutionary inter-cooperation. A swine in Munich is the same swine without his leather jerkins in Santiago.

13 Brains coming apart on soles of shoes a pantheon of causes to choose, let's see, neo-revisionism counter-revolutionary criss-crosses with degenerate bourgeoise capitalist turncoat, (both must die) the urgency lies in which commands my holier dross.

14 Brothers in the struggle need empathetic eyes to square off the titanic quarrel.

15 Cleanse the body politic, reads one directive. Rub not ointment but horse radish over decomposed, societal skin, a brisk cleansing with your strigal but one revolutionary application.

16 "De-stabilize", the latest buzz word flies to the manure heap just kick in the door-- those planter's peanuts know the score.

17 "Property is theft" I'm lisping in the burning sun, Ethiopia done Tigré and Eritrea key components on the Horn's chessboard, mere human paste re-patched, re-worn.

18 Ditto, "take-out", liquidate. Run a new poker thru the rubble. A good anarchist's cathedral accomplishment is the chicken coop's destruction.

19 Make the rich pay. Squeeze the goose to the pips. All power to the people; a gun run is a good itch, works up a powerful thirst for Justice; good mercy disguised brother Lenin as a simple dock worker, the plague-bacillus quickens.

20 Orange filaments of smoke are better than the factory whistle, a good arsonist recruits his own flames, fans his own fire. The crackle of desire over hearth stones is reward enough in itself.

THE GARDEN

And like a cobbler at a bench I return to my musings why Kensington Gardens with its grand, theatrical entrance is gateway to London's poor --why the stiff Victoria and Albert monument or grand canopy to the Hemispheres has a bison for the Americas or sultry elephant of Asia fame (India being the brightest jewel in the Empress' crown); why other archetypal animals at their pleasure are carved in gleaming milk white when the rich at their leisure, to and fro, dine elegantly as tight buds arranged on a stem.

2 I've not mentioned the poor come to the Serpentine a little ways up in Hyde Park only to be chased out of Kensington at closing-- the cobbler at his bench, croupier at Whites, the elephant as a hatchet beast run amuck in the stellar pool of the eye's fixed poor.

CANVASSING

And I thought of things, things that come in small clutches, tiny memories, thoughts evoking the approach of time or footsteps about to open graves. More things than the troubled single entities we attach to them; things marbled with the elasticity of rain, rumours of war, pitch black leaves in the bottom of a pond where the whelp of a dog tries to outrun night.

COMMENTS

...Unrestrained, imaginative writing. Brown's magic is the vibrating universe, his sympathy is his ability to receive these vibrations. Sympathetic Magic captures the movement of life in its intervals-- his poems resemble stopped action photographs from a film.

THE TORONTO STAR

...The poetry is fine... rewarding reading... Almost every poem in Sympathetic Magic boasts an admirable image or two. Brown can write, without a doubt.

POETRY CANADA POESIE

...wry humour. The poet revels in image and can use it well. Paul Cameron Brown is capable of interesting, even arresting work.

CANADIAN BOOK REVIEW ANNUAL 1985

Le voyage exotique devient parfois fantistique... Se plonger dans les pages de "Sympathetic Magic", c' est partir pour un autre monde oil Paul Cameron Brown envoute par les mots et les images.

DIPLOMATIC OBSERVER

THE END