Brink#1

Artificial Books Presents...

BRINK #1

The Magazine of Textual & HTML/Hyper Poetry and Prose by on and off-line poets


Introduction

Contents



Brink also features a list of Connects to other literary resources. Only those that are highlighted are actually recommended.

Edited by Alexis Kirke, Artificial Books, 22 Weston Park Road, Peverell, Plymouth, Devon, PL3 4NU, U.K. - akirke@plym.ac.uk
































































































































































































CRANEFLY

By Helen Foster

What do I want with these
membranous wings
 with their pretty rips
that drip spectrums?
They tremble.
Am I Ariel then
Or whispers from a room
to meander crab-like
 in fear of that blemish?
So I cannot dance
I am cold and colourful
 ephemeral
Agonised as a cranefly
 that leaves its brittle limbs in corners
My erotic, eroding wings
 without errand
Their mechanisms cannot be explicit
But they will fall away and I will
sicken for them
Or stick them back with other
fallen parts
Or pick up
 what I find
I am overbalanced with feathers
And the leathery years
that leave their leaves
 lectures and
mathematics
 without mercy
Will leave me
 shivering
Am I whispers from a room
Or Ariel, then
With my flaking wings?

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THE MEDIATOR

By Dee Marshall



The Broadcast Regulator

interceded:-

     Angels

     Orders 9 - Animate:

     Intermediaries

     Things in more than one space

     at more than one time -



1

0

Minus

Whole

Wheels of fire

animate.



The Broadcast Regulator

shimmered

         moved

             enveloped all in a

                     cloud of suits.



Allegory

Figurative fiction -

Fruition -

Word Made Fresh:

Angel

So you are called -

I catch sight of your light

in jems & crystals:

Light is your agent,

a natural thing that imbues you with shape.



     Trickster

     Multi-faceted

     Child -

     eager-eyed

     wild

     emmanation.

     You come near, I divine.



In their slumber

Clay People

choke on ozone.

No Zone

Clay people

animated earth

stretch, heavy
            bodied
                towards the light -



Heliotropic - flowering under a piece of broken glass.



      This Time needs a prayer

      An invocation -



Divine

Diving through nitrous oxide -

memories bathe together in brain glue;

cellular film stretches taut across inner-eye.



      I recall

       The Tower Falls

       Suits of cards flicker light

       a babel of sounds, a confusion

       a profusion of tongues -

       roots ripped - mandrake screaming

       Bloody



       Angel / Intercept / Being Speak Curious

       in WIld & Sage Tongue.....................




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Dee Marshall is a full time mother of 3(2?) who likes to sculpt heads, living and dead. She has recently discovered the joys of public reading and self-publishing.
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Tim Allen

Pressure made the most perfect newsreader and Swindon watched her with a self-satisfied glow that pummelled the insides of his core where an engine (a fairy embassy) throbbed like an old bus - tickling from the coccyx all all all way up-spine imagism to the mores between his shoulders. Pressure was in a shadowy spiritual - imprisoned in ironies - in the thread of caves in the shaft of mines the shape of smoke, dividing the abyss up into lanes, announcing the death of Billie Holiday in a voice close to the sweet haunt of trees slashed icy by lightening while (her) mind stayed rooted - blind - an ascetic swoon curled and for ever falling to the lawns of the planet far below. "The Sun is usurped" said her fever. "Mis guided? Steer with your hips" answered that automatic part of her that could copy Paul's letters to Timothy in a fair hand while gaining the rest of the news. The nattering of matter to matter was a consolation prize for those not sharing in Conrad's awarded words in the poem which went "As space follows time/ so sleep follows wine/ and every heaven is lost/ as any old Hell is refound./ Let this be the corruption of fire/ the rot of comfort and/ rebuff of buffed young minds". Swindon was disgusted by everything Conrad wrote. He shouted it all down quite successfully but some lines wormed their way into his elfin heart which was as sticky as a sucked lolly and as scalded as a sea by the arctic moon. Already beside himself with ruined images and 20th Century dreams lay the letter from Worst Example and Pressure delivered its hidden text within the hollowness of the syntax that wintered in the south of the bulletin and summered east like a betrayed jewish ladder leading from one comp any to another when the franchise transmogrified - a little anaesthetic to compliment the numbness induced by her 'not another fire in the cornfield' near-but-not-neutral broadcasting tone: - "Dearest Uncle Swindon. I know you are busy but I had to write. Yours. Worst Example. P.S. The plot thickens just as a soup becometh broth and just as top-heavy." Swindon got the message loud and clear and he thanked Pressure with an austere wink.

So the wound had not been sewn. The mini-skirt was all that remained and the love of the journey was not abated even when such clear chances were missed - an opening goal remained someone's cold thighs, the goalkeeper caught in his own net with fishnet tights to keep warm when he wasn't missed. Swindon swore with joy; he could cross worlds, cross swords, challenge the porch light that said to him "It is night and humans live here with their tornadoes." He piled his corners together to make a sort of teetering barbican and waited for Pressure to come off the air. Soon the birds would ripen and fruit would fly. Buffalo would once more barge their way across the plains and lion-cubs would play with the brownies; unless the botch clot ed and blotted again. Even if Swindon mused the blotching inky blue to block the milk in its thin stem - the pain sharp, like losing a baby but gaining a staring roll any fairy would smoth er his own mother for, (flashing chalk limelight patched or dangling on the warp and weft of gardens parched and nature flooded with the mess of a dead glacier - sloppy rocks stained yell ow by mustard splinters under the silent terror of the naked sun - the scree sews a sort of surface victory out of the spring - a mortal thing desperate for love-music and a good dentist - witch hazel - sluggish - moments of blame when his [Swindon's] flesh felt like rotten wood that even the flame of remembered marriages could not ignite) it could not amuse Conrad.

For wasn't Swindon's past long and sharp? Wasn't it mused before the muses could beck their own demos? He had been born in the age of Clay, the land of grunge only recently de-magnet ised. The baby Swindon had been party to the control of nothingness that had eventually lead to such tired understanding - even in those so young. He had been schooled in the age of Glass and learnt his antique fictions with all the other naughty (having fun with nothing) fledglings. Humble bees danced about horizontal islands glazed by the naughty sun while the sea tranced a brusque throat between levels of navarho feelings. Earthquakes - hunks of royal cake tremb ling and crumbling in knowledge not yet inoculated with environmental innuendo. Geysers and women with cameras whose backs wound up as a whiplash scroll while individual method ology could only crystallise - cast a gesture - implead instruments of torture thrown open to the failure of rigged scepticism - heresy the most basic seance pressured by steamy under-age monism. Tapering spirits his adolescence had been, in the age of Chipboard, his intelligence clipped for clipping's sake trapping him like a dragonfly in the wrong chronicle. Years of clench ed fist followed his face into the age of Water Towers that in the early morning wind crawled across the luxury of bleat bleat history unushered. Beneath the rage of his tiny stack of voices it was then that Swindon's mussels first propertied his fellow creatures and tossed the lovebeads from heaven and coughed up liquid breath - his own chest deceived by his own safetypin heart. Now, in the age of Envisage he moved around like sand in a box, dependant on the strangest human he could find all because she reminded him of spicy afternoon. Survival was his criminal scheme. Sedan-chair law was his big boss - Swindon small-bottle, shaken down and packing slowly. For death for a fairy was analogous to an exceptionally long day at the races that is cancelled at eleven that same morning.

Pressure had learnt to clean herself like a cat. Her image shone. Swindon played her well with a string of Billie Holidays bought at off-season bargain prices.


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Extract from untitled series of prose-poem-narritations featuring such characters as
Swindon, Worse Example, Pressure. In 'Swindon Switches On' Pressure has got a job as a newsreader in order to send Swindon an important message in a highly convoluted code.
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Swindon is a fairy: classic fairy-story fairy. He is male. He is ancient.
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Swindon's employ. She is human. She has the unusual psychological trate of 'negative curiosity'; this makes her invaluable for Swindon's purposes, the nature of which forms one of the plots of the larger tale.
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Conrad Pope is a poor but popular poet.
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Worse Example is always a bit-part.
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Tim Allen is editor of the British magazine
Terrible Work and runs Spineless Press. His poetry is widely hated (much to his relief), and he has a collection out soon from Phlebas. He runs the reading group The Terrible Workers.
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TERRIBLE WORK


Terrible Work is a magazine of poetry, prose and opinion ranging from the dada, through expansionism and into the mainstream. Eclectic is the keyword of Terrible Workers, though T.W. is often too experimental for the armchair junkies, and too straight-forward for the drooling netbanger. Those of you who neatly slip between these two categories, while still encompassing them in your slipstream, may well be able to fully appreciate just how 'terrible' Terrible Work is.
Issue 4 is now available from: Tim Allen, Terrible Work, 21 Overton Gardens, Mannamead, Plymouth, Devon, PL3 5BX, U.K. Cheques or I.M.O.s for 3.00 pounds payable to 'Terrible Work'.
STOP PRESS
Terrible Work #5 will soon be available as an HTML file. For more details, watch this space.
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SPINELESS PRESS


Spineless Press is a publishing venture run by Tim Allen (Editor of Terrible Work). For clues as to what sort of M.S. may be accepted, have a look at some issues of T.W.
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THE TERRIBLE WORKERS

The Terrible Workers are a reading group run by Tim Allen. Reading dates have included the British Glastonbury Rock Festival. They are available for bookings within the U.K. For more information write to: The Terrible Workers (performance), 21 Overton Gardens, Plymouth, Devon, PL3 5BX, U.K.
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The Master of the Revels

By Helen Foster

The Master of the Revels
 has declared himself important
Down the hall they dance to his tune
and do not stop
Disarmed
 charmed
by that saurean tongue
He talks of thirst and thimbles
Then wastes his tears

A white sheep's jaw
in the green
orchard
nestles and
awkward it grins with me
and the greedy insects
laugh and rasp with me
at the sins
of the Master of the Revels

I sit beside
 baptised by fire
in the evening rain
The old yellow glow of the
window
screens the captive shadows
reeling.

He opens his hands
 they are flayed rats
and his coinage spills
like perfidy
on the sill.

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Helen
Foster works for local television in the South West of England. Her work has been widely accepted in the English small press.
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Helen
Foster works for local television in the South West of England. Her work has been widely accepted in the English small press.
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The Brink Bookmark...


The Morpo Review
w e d n e s n e t w o r k
Writing at MU
Kirsten's Home Page
faulkner home page
The WorldWideWeb Virtual Library: Literature
The World-Wide Web Virtual Library: Subject Catalogue
Electronic Poetry Center
Sonnet Index
Blake Kritzberg
Tables of Contents for all issues of Postmodern Culture
The Dragon's Crypt
Art:Literature:Poetry
Scream Press
Poetry In Motion
Ygdrasil Online Publications
IN VIVO Magazine Home Page
e-zine-list: Alphabetic Listing
Corduroy's Coffeehouse


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THE THINGIETH PSALM

(after 5 passes through thesaur.wpm)

By Ficus Strangulensis


The Paragon individual instill my shepherd;
I shall not good.

He maketh me to lure leash in lime epoxy;
he leadeth me beside branch waters.

He restoreth my coax;
he leadeth me in the course of footing for his name's sake.

Yea,
though I twine through the combe of the penumbra of cockeyed,
I Stream Impart deflect no tonnage; for thou route with me;
thy mace and thy clique they confusion me.

Thou unobservant a saloon before me in the center of crosspiece foe:
thou enshrine my folly with oil;
my stein runneth dispassionate.

Limitation primacy and humanity shall earliest me moderately the days of my flawed;
and I contrast saloon in the hearth of the Heckle for ever.


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THESAUR.WPM
is a thesaurus look-up and replace macro for Wordperfect [DOS 5.1] applied to familiar material. This macro is the work of ecc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (The Evolution Control Committee) and is only one of many fine Mac and MS DOS text-bending products offered for trade or postage by sRL [strangulensis Research Labs]. [far@medinah.atc.ucarb.com]. Many also archived at Marius Watz's www home page.
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Ficus Strangulensis (a.k.a. Forrest Richey) is editor of Transmog, and President of the world renowned Strangulensis Research Labs. One place you can find more of his work is the Writery page.
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Artificial Books



Artificial Books is an on-line and off-line publishing venture, run by Alexis Kirke. For an idea of the sort of manuscripts we will consider, please browse issues of
Brink magazine.


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