Brink#2

Artificial Books Presents...

BRINK #2

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
















































































































































SNAPSHOTS

By Dee Marshall



At the cliff edge

Japanese man steps back

to take picture of friends -

He falls:

finger on auto-wind,

his fall exposed 34 times.

Click

Fall

Click

Falling through light

Eyes open.


In Accident & Emergency

Spirit rises

In a continuous glare of white light

he moves towards the open shutter -

In that strange dilation of Time

between moments:

Falling in slow motion,

thud - nausea.

Inbetween Here & Somewhere

Man views his image dipped & pegged -

He appears on magik paper;

a ghostly image

staccato breath noise rushing out

Each frame

each still

echoing a whole.



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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. More of her work in
Brink #1.
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STATUE

By Helen Foster

We must all need a statue smooth marble fingertips when mothers are gone Revise love with engines of destruction revert but She in your infernal temple is light and darkness is everything is emptiness Sway words can sway Then you do not know in the mutiny what belongs Shifting not fixed Cracked by heat arced shut out



Helen
Foster works for local television in the South West of England. She has an e-collection due out soon from Artificial Books. More of her work can be found in Brink#1.
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THE FALL

By Kenny Knight


Like matchboxes piled on top of each other
The skyscrapers, some lit, windows sing songs
Radios and parrots, others empty
Like shells at the bottom of paradise's cage

Carrying vacuum cleaners
We climb through the numbers
Slow for fear of oxygen malnutrition
To a floor where grass language
Street kingdom of speech
Has evolved into a divine dialect
To a cliff top throne of glass
Where the sea is a whisper
Where the rain's black fingers
Are preparing for the fall

A bilingual lark
Whose ancestors once nested
In the lower altitudes
Translates soil into sky

Gazing out of God's bedroom window
At a box of flowering stars
We trace our fingers over furniture
Smothered in angel dust
The lark tells God we've come on
A long journey to clean his apartment
God shows us into the kitchen
Where we drink jasmine tea
In cups cracked by lightning
The resident fridge, a baby iceberg
In one corner, we discover is full
Of angel eggs incubating


After giving his apartment
A thorough salvation clean
We store the vacuum cleaners
Minus the bags
In a utility cupboard
And prepare ourselves for the fall
God returns with a fist full of angelnotes
We bow and drive off
Respectively in our imaginations
In matching coloured cadillacs
Then begin the long walk down
Passing walls sprayed
With religious graffiti
Heavier by ounces
Bags of God dust
On our shoulders



Kenny Knight likes to write long poems and has written many long poems. Hailed by the Plymouth Press as "Plymouth's Own", and hailed by Phil Bowen as his South West 'Tip for the Top' (whatever that means), KK is a man with long hair and lives by the Marina and Arts Centre.

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Alexis Kirke's Bookmarks

e-zines & netlit

The Seven By Nine Squares
Rec.Arts.Poems: The Main Poetry Newsgroup
The Urdu Poetry Newsgroup
The Lesbian Feminist Poetry Newsgroup
The Christnet.Poetry Newsgroup
The Scruz.Poetry Newsgroup
The tw.bbs.Literal.Poem Newsgroup
huddleston
The Dorsai Embassy Home Page
monketry
The National Library of Poetry
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
Untitled
Electronic Poetry Center
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
The Daily Dump
Corduroy's Coffeehouse
Honeywell Allied Data Comm. - Home Page
Nightmare LPMud HTTP Server
Rei's Home Page
Welcome to the White House
Brink#1
HomePage Publisher
Live and exclusive, from the COMMA vision lab..
The search for some hypertext fiction
Masthead
InterText: The Online Fiction Magazine
HyperPoetry
The Shiki Internet Haiku Salon
publishing.html
DeathNet
ABU - Project Gutenberg

Release 1.0
The search for some hypertext fiction

SHAMAN

By Viv Grant



Dreams of desire
about people we see
we want
But cannot have.
The radio interrupts
even when delivering good music
Always interrupts and back into dreams.
I am permanently awake
dreaming with open eyes
stirring tea in my winter sleep
with people around me
making cosy
from the blister of wind
between two worlds
Dancing with the healer.
His cave is beauty
composed of lines
Joyous in the light of his flame.
If I was free to love him as light
To hold him in sleep
to protect him from myself
I would enter his realm.



Viv Grant is from the South West of England. She is a lecturer in art and photography. She is also a Terrible Worker. Her husband has his latest album out on the Web.

Marsyas @ Twenty Five

By Kerry Sowerby




I am a self-marked Cain & I say I am no longer a man of anybody's dreams. * She strung him between two tall stories & flayed him as tenderly as is possible. She rubbed salt & amphetamine into his skin-suit & sat perched on a rock, patiently awaiting her answer. That skin thing. If "release" then some vague mnemonic agile as Homeric simile; "This is no spot to dread growing old." "Who the fuck wants to be a river god?" * Resonant wind of her singing minces my words -- Fingered. Memos of the good, the done, the whole- some rotted on the spike. "I am a man & I want what I am capable of respect" "You are a man years past your satirical peak. What is more you have no skin." * piped less beautifully. motions less fluently. postures more decadent. rage of the futile. * Keep Burglar Bill from the door lest he get in & strip the place bare, force the folk to consider them naked, keep him out it is hardly a scandal. A pulse, then a spurt, wearing his heart in his chest, animals flock from the eloquent wound, glisly end translated by Minerva, Minerva being cunning & music & death. Why has this crisis come early? Why are you taking me from me? Why are you making me sell myself? * haunch, jowl, the snick snick of the knife, the class "A" word, flensing. "They were so hard they kicked in each other's fantasies, * playing a pipe is not worth this."



Kerry Sowerby is from Leeds. He edits the literary journal 'Ramraid Extraordinaire' and has collections due out from Odyssey and Headlock.
 

PLYMOTHIAN TANTRIC

By Norman Jope



1

The air is full of pictures:
Clouds festooned in shapes of goddesses,
Of feathers, serpents, ferns and chalices,
And every weather front brings miracles.
He watches the clouds move over, mirrored
on the brows of the shoppers, all their power within,
those humming atoms in their bags.


2

He's blinded by those liveries:
The cream and cobalt of the Western Nationals,
The infernal sunrise scarlet of the City Buses.
Over a Fifties reconstructed skyline
Dartmoor curves, is veiled and sober.


3

Sudden glances blast him sideways;
Young women tear him open, eyes like tigers
Clawing at his flesh picked clean from bone;
The body parts spread out across the suburbs,
Buried under sandstone knolls, in the limestone quarries.
Then, at dawn, the workers pick them up;
Packed neatly in their pockets, he returns to town.


4

Sometimes, rain sets in for weeks
And the pubs are full of wearied faces
With the flapping gobs of hake or sea-bass.
He swirls the Plymouth Gin around his mouth,
Imagines all the other sacred foods;
The fish and wine are there. The meat and grain in Tescos;
He can score the bhang in one of several clubs.


5

On a summer Sunday, buses run
To Princetown, with its TV mast and prison.
He traipses over granite plateaux,
Counting kills, the lambflesh scrapyards
As the buzzards mewl. At dusk,
He clambers from the depot to his flat
And the tramps avoid him, of the Butcher Caste,
Who has moved through death towards a Light
As brilliant as the barrel of a gun...
But the next day, he is in the office
With his cream cake spurting over pens and staplers.


6

At Argyle, he is oddly distant.
Stared into his paper cup as cross winds foil
The passing moves of either side.
He thinks how green the grass,
How green the home team's kit,
How long the first half-kalpa.
A goal's a dunghill cock's idea of sex
He sniffs at scornfully. But still, he watches.


7

She leaves him faltering for speech,
Not at all his usual eloquent self
Because she enters him, his air and water shakti,
Ten years between them, just two masks, two skins.
He does not understand her hold,
It stuns him for an hour, but then rain falls
And he lets its fingers twist his matted hair
Until he sees an old man in the window of a shop
That's closed, and ten years feel like forty.


8

He lights a legal cannabis jossstick,
Sips ground coffee, struggles for
An image of his anima. Alone, in time,
External models vanish.
Gets nowhere; out the door; and goes
Towards the Hoe, to trace her in the waters
On a moonlit summer's evening.
There is something in his eye, his gait
That repels all muggers; truth, or foolishness.


9

He treads the graveyard path
Past Bull Point, Swilly, Pembroke Street;
The smoulder from a fuel-tank
Is a pyre to Kali that reminds his nostrils
Of the distant ghat-slopes, elements divested,
Births to come in ceaseless Lila. Nonetheless,
He sees some strutting lads
And moves off rapidly.


10

Tracing heron tracks
From shore to watershed,
From tower blocks north, towards the tors,
He seeks his moorings.
The space is that between two scales
As Shakti rides on Shiva like a moor on his horizon.


11

He sails the Tamar, slowing down
As the oxbow river bends near Calstock.
No life is long enough to name this magic
He intones, breathing, losing count of breath.
A mini-tannoy booms "The bar is open".


12

At home projects a stranger's mask.
Takes days off work to walk the streets
And look, and learn, and total what he sees.
The life teems from Prakriti;
Waving gunas tangled like his world-lines,
Smiling on his lips as he returns past stucco,
Dreaming in his place as seagulls test their language


13

Then his lover visits;
Holding her body in the dark,
He moves across her with his fingers
As his legs have moved across the city.
Where does dwelling end, and love begin


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Norman Jope is from Swindon/Brighton/Plymouth. He edited the highly acclaimed small press magazine Memes. He has collections due out from Phlebas and Stride.
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