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Author: 
lisa luxx

        1.  self-mythology; ruin

 

I knew to tilt the vinyl just enough to warp the sound

              but not how to dip my face under water

              to see the boy in me drowning.

 

when the bible said jesus walked on water

it meant every one of us stands

             with an ocean underfoot.

 

most of us sink half our soul to seabeds. 

 

in my coming-of-age

                                        I tethered my boyhood to a sunken ship.

            boy soul, the son I could’ve been.

 

at nineteen young luxx was all fur coats and lingerie

              bowie grinning off the record player,

kid-come-woman still learning how to swim

             preoccupied with being the opposite of men.

 

shaved bare and shitless, tits up and clothes strewn across the room

ain’t no costume colder than that of the young woman.

 

 

       2.  Carl Jung; analysis

 

i've seen you, big man, locking

          horns as if the world were closing

in. a single seed in both fists

             show me your overwatered harvest,

lady soul perspiring through your skin

 

(she always escapes, btw

an underwater with wings).

 

with a record skipping on the deck,

             you press yourself into a woman

you just met, lamplight pouring shadows

              round the room.

 

Jung named an animated foreign body

             in the ocean of each of us,

saw men clawing back towards the womb

 

warned us if we neglect our opposite

             sex-      soul could lead to death.

 

gender. the oldest weapon against ourself.

 

 

       3.  Amina Coming; disorder

 

bowie knew

when the tides come

her scent will intoxicate you

rising from drain holes

open windows

air vents blowing smoke

of thin cigarettes

you will drown in her

grinning too / unsure of why you’re grinning too.

 

big man, the abyss is always watching you.

look at us:

 

                        dusting eternity off our knees

                        rinsing shadows down plug holes

                        wiping soul off reading glasses,

                        we ain't clean right through.

 

she will be your living end.

 

my boy soul became suspended

beneath the record player needle,

abandoned song

 

                           humming haunt into my nudity.

 

water is how we measure fright.

if I had been all soil and winged,

I could've pretended I couldn't hear him

echoing through the emptiness, 

chasing me to hospital beds.

 

big man, you were in the bed beside me

no beetle cars, or musky scents.

we both swallowed too much sea.

you looked a lot like a part of me.

 

 

          4.   Amina Fought and Won; spiritual development

 

this small blue we shiver on

is a costume party

 

          but at 4am when the tides come in

          we’re tender, bare faced,

 

          clothes strewn across the floor.

          that breadcrumb trail of surrender.

 

          naked, walking round the room

          extractor fan blowing through a soul

          you can’t be told

          has always been chasing after you.

 

my boy soul was not my living end

I lay that belief on you.

 

the lady of your soul grins, laughing;

 

she will change your point of view

don’t be afraid of the shadows who seduce you.

flooding into this room

 

that grinning, half-sung, still singing

soul, will come will go.

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After Party / After Life An Underworld Conversation with Bowie

by
Mona Arshi

I say: Please… can I join you for a few moments in this sort of conjuring -I’m a fan?

 

He says: Sure. I’ve taken the pulse , I’ve taken the temperature here

in the afterlife, I’ve run so far away from myself and your hot bodies

I’ve parted  the willow trees hair pained myself in the water

I’ve studied the breathing moss

sampled some of  the delights of the underworld

all its potions and charms their versions of  snails 

and the true earthworms and the  hollyhocks and I’ve 

tamed my ear brought it down so close to hunt down

the  music and it’s all so inhalable and bright and all it’s all so so so

 

And I say : Tell me more, those are totemic lines…

 

And he says: You poets. You poets are all the same…

So much for your stomach-churning ambiguity

and your personas and sad fishing performances 

here the poets  take off their putrid costumes 

this is a party with a commitment to the 

afterwards where  the errant rules,  where the delinquent poets

are outed and placed in the middle of the treeless field 

naked as dusk -this is the afterlife after party

of  course I’m not going  hand it to you on

a steel  platter in  all straight lines.

 

And then he says:  

I’m going be wearing

my best version disguise painted  

in madder root -like  those quick footed clowns

all oozy like the mushrooms we picked

and I’ll tell you something else 

I find new  words here, language 

for the word when you ready yourself

for a photograph  tilting your head right back 

just so and a new word for the  moon snug in its pocket

embalmed and drunk in its bright yellow liquor 

 

I  say: ok  tell me about lyrical beauty again

I say if feeling is first then can  you tell me how it is for you

bring me out  poem if you can..

 

And he laughs says: all the sound engineers have gone home but 

Ok ….

I’ll attempt something in this dharmic frame

In the  blind moments of this insane 

Uncoupling from the breathing world 

It kind of feels pure and pellucid as pain

And yet writers reign

In full rhyme

 

And I say-thank-you. 

Thank you,

Aladdin Sane

 

And.. he goes quiet and says:

It was brave of me right to try on

the other parts myself right

all earthy and sweat and 

so blurry and the audience  there

bright or brittling like icicles 

caught in the mouth of a cave?

That’s the version of a life  I’m re-Sampling ,

it’s so beautiful and insane, the fire ants in their fedoras 

travelling along  the delicious veins

of the flowers …what a fucking party.

 

Then he says: 

You poets are all the same 

wielding your knives in the rafters 

practicing your moves 

but have you truly  watched  that man, 

there in the shadows 

are you watching him cut out his heart

not  content for the music to  resolve itself

sympathetically ..syntactically-unfolding -long cord of breath 

watch that man,

feed him the question to the answer 

we knew all along  

when the song begins to sting you have to stop.

Arts & Sciences
Human Experience
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Red or Let’s Spend the Night Together

by
Richard Scott

I move my lips without really even realising I am doing it 

so there is something of him in the red of my mouth, a 

vowel or hoo molten and coating. The voiceless ‘h’, exhalation, 

reoccurs silently in my mind as if he were breathing over my 

tongue. Hunky fusion machine. 

 

 

 

 

Interconnectedness – 

his cupid’s bow arching over mine, non-local particles 

reacting, orbicularis oris phasing in, out, orbiting – is a kind of 

physics. Interdimensional kiss folding in on itself like a star. 

Supermassive neutron collapsing in hot gloss bomb colours. 

 

 

 

 

Blood rich lyricism. 

He’s been on my mind – live in Hammersmith 1973 

pulsating in a cut-off unitard. His limbs are nebula-like; bars of 

gaseous red under the gel. Blowing kisses, I catch one fifty 

years on. This is for me, he says. By which he means this is 

for me, Richard. 

 

 

 

 

Inflections, mantle, his sexiness form a zodiac constellation. 

7, 1, 83, Small Magellanic Cloud – of flesh. A piercing through 

the red-black flank. Out of my head. I’m h-h-h-high on this 

ventriloquism. Erasing. The lyric I is an alien. Pink river 

dolphin chirping in syntax. 

 

 

 

 

Jaunty piano sharps, 

occasionally pentatonic, lighting up the auditory cortex like a 

comet’s tail. Like ionisation. Neon red and lit from within. 

His voice, a solar radiation. The tiny bones of my ears. The

belt, the parabelt receiving direct input. Fuzzy centaur. 

 

 

 

 

I cannot adequately translate my mind’s arachnid locomotion 

as it reacts to his song. Hibiscus-hued nerve impulses, a 

miniature and internal lightning. The redness extinguishing 

ambivalence is need. My yearning. A kind of gravitylessness. 

Maronite electricity grazes the Kármán Line.

 

 

 

 

I ask my friend about his song and she says, oh I don’t know – 

sexual healing or something. Shards of red howlite melt down, 

are recrystalised, within the furnace of his mind. Space-red 

rock. Lattice system aching, rebranching, stave-like. I’m often 

moved, rarely healed. 

 

 

 

 

I am night. Red night. My fooling mouth deciding on need. 

Him, transcendent, guiding us around and around and around. 

Together is no excuses. Together is hey, hoo, h-h-h-high. 

My mind smiling now. Young and ephemeral amalgamation. 

We hang above the lunar occultation of Mars. Strong. Defined.

 

 

 

 

I listen to Let’s Spend the Night Together 

continually for one night so do we spend the night together? 

His tongue, my ear disappear into each other completely. An 

event horizon. Red luminosity humming itself into me like 

quasar light penetrating the singularity. Aperture finally visible. 

 

 

 

 

My imagination is quantum. 

I am fragmented by resonances, intention, flowing from his 

mouth and the associated Brownian, red, noise. Annunciated 

waves that roll like firework theory static. That will not be 

stopped on flesh. Fixated glam queering. A futuristic patina 

scabs the wound. 

 

 

 

 

Connection to him – 

persona, lick of gas giant pink darkening to red – is a ghost

particle, unphysical state. Clavicle. Accretion disk. Red 

mouth. Red tongue. Retrograde motion. The red dwarf of his 

body satelliting towards me. Red life. It was such a clear 

invitation to have sex. 

Family & Relationships
Human Experience
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Get Back On It

by
Luke Kennard
After Jean Genie / Jean Genet

                 There are worse fates than falling in love with a tightrope walker

                  but I don’t wanna hear em. My third wish was that I wanted 

                  to be really, really stupid. And hideously ugly? And hideously ugly, yes.

 

Like statues offered to the dead, statues of chimneys, dreams nursed in the limited world, dreams

slapped out of our mouths like cigarettes in a dressing down –Hold on that expression, cut to the

window. Back to the bed. Arm draped across the balustrade. Deep in the gulf of vice and woe –I

dropped you off an hour ago. 

 

                  We’re very concerned and amused by your actions,

                  a waiter eating our orders in the houses of illusion.

 

Let’s say you’re so lonely you hire a professional friend for £28 an hour. After several hours driving

around with him in a van, selling limited edition denim from industrial estate carparks to queues of

worried looking men, it occurs to you that you are paying £28 an hour to work. Worse yet he’s not

even particularly friendly – when you try to start a conversation he makes a little talking mouth signal

with his hand and shakes his head. So you ride in the back with the rare jackets and jeans, some of

which retail at thousands to the right buyer. They smell of oil, they smell embalmed. They have names

like Lost Circus and Instant Princess and Sore Afraid and Sufficient Boyfriend. At the end of the rail: a

pair of dark grey jeans with rusty studs and a patina of red dirt. The price tag says £15,800. They were

buried in the Colorado Mesas. You ask your professional friend why people pay so much and he says

They just want something real and slides up the divider.

 

                The first thing a narcissist will tell you is that you’re such a good judge of character.

                The best protection is total silence.

                The difference between a smile and a grin.

 

The van has been motionless for some time. Your friend has fallen asleep at the wheel. You open the

back doors of the van and you start sliding the racks of denim onto the road, over the verge and into

the river below. You watch a bleach-washed jacket float away then collapse on itself like an ice shelf.

 

                 You must go and meet some real people – it was your second wish;

                 The first was to be lonely. An establishment folk hero

                 in the advert before the advert. But I do love life, I do.

 

It is possible, with a little discipline, to replace suicidal ideation with a long-term inner life as a space 

pirate. Picture instead pulling back on the thrusters, the ship wobbling as it leaves the bay, leaning into

your massive chair as you cruise past Neptune, jettisoning eight hundred tonnes of nuclear waste near

the Kuiper Belt and then being gunned down by police ships. You ruined it.

 

                  It doesn’t matter. We’re all a little torn

                  between the sermon and the ode,

                  hagiography and reprimand,

 

It’s the same whenever we have the microphone, as if there were a record to set straight; let me tell

you about what he tells you about, what pleasures he shall ever find, his brands and sorrows. When he

wakes up he will scream, My jeans! My jeans! What have you done? And you will say, I had to get the

jump on you, I thought I did, I knew I did, I had to get the jump on you – besides, betrayal is so

beautiful.

Human Experience
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