Mark Wilson Contemplates The Phallic Oar, The Fugue Flux Odyssean Complex, And The Sirenshrouded Houdinis

                                                    Mythopoeia

(i)

The phallocentric epic enters

the gynocentric counter-epic,

& is all but swallowed up.

(ii)

Modernity, Myth, Sign are a fugue-

experiment, trying hard to forget

that flux is Necessary Angel

who arrives: ironic, blunt as Asrael.

(iii)

Parian, plastered, admiring ‘rosy fingers’;

marmoreal is my liquor-dark ocean.

(iv)

Slough off Mauberley’s skin,

shed your Odysseus complex.

A phallic oar suffices,

marginally better than limited

edition print-runs to the elect.

(v)

Literature’s no friend to sinecures,

Mr Nixon advises from his gilded deck.

Friendship only with equals,

opines Kung fu Tcheo with know-how

of the obvious; so take down this memo

which still mesmerises millennials:

We dock with little-known circumspection,

latterly dine with asphodel-ridden scops

during the lock-down. Why not turn down

that radiophonic poem because it carries

on appalling your sensibility?

(vi)

Helen’s currently in high definition,

all her hermetic traces are occluded

by the airbrush’s scythe.

(H.D. faints in Elysian cornfields).

The Mysteries are common or garden lore.

No-one manufactures ethics or a praxis any more.

Indiscretions are de rigueur.

Confessionalism is the condign currency.

The Sphinx plays Chinese Whispers with Tiresias

eye-deep in the Tunnel of Net Gains.

Before you have time to climb

this rusting tree of your theogony,

Surveillance, juridical flamingo

of the state, issues your subpoena

not a micro-managed second too late.

                                   Sectioned

Inside White Mariah: sirenshrouded, her inmate

mot-swinging at windfarms in gloria excelsis,

tempest-tost your mind out-Houdinis its internal

triple-locked schoreograph, claims only an End-

gamer’s phanic-zone in paradise of slycensed fools

& zanier mountebanks. Inside the Cream Mariah’s

futerus are padded walls which aerily enwomb

your antic-dispositioned scop, whose only hope

for taolvation’s to be twice-born in the nicodemus

of time, to samsara thru the swarm-maternal cavern

& re-hibernate through wintry-jiscontent season;

hopefully emerge a sans-formed monad: Lazarus-

seawildered, staggering out of antiseptic kinema-doors

conscious only of a fulti-framed sweetholymarie

vision, absolutely lantern-elided & unleathered; who,

in the oapposite mirror, is that alien shaven-headed?

Mark Wilson has previously published four poetry collections: 'Quartet For the End of Time' (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), 'Passio' (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), 'The Angel of History' (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and 'Illuminations' (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is also the author of a verse-drama, 'One Eucalyptus Seed', about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review and Le Zaporogue.