Mark Howe
FAUSTIAN PACT
The three-score-ten-and when? shall not be mine,
The secondhand minutiae of death
Today and today and today, value
For nothing in the scale man equals man:
My studies shall conjure let-there-be-life:
In the beginning I'll ready the word.
I whisper the palimpsestuous word
And good devils/bad angels become mine,
Conspirators' breath, conjurors of life
Hourglass-weighing infinite sands of death
Where, found wanting the limeburnt heart of man,
The unpardonable sin loses value.
My soul exchanged acquires true use value,
The two-two sullied equals flesh made word:
Mephisto-incarnate soft-machine man,
Old mole. Inflamed meninges undermine,
Nightmare in my brain - sting, where is thy death?
A free visitation, upon my life.
The double helix, the secret of life,
Beyond land of Cockayne's surplus value,
Brief history of tempus fugit, death
A fork-tongued riddle dissolved by the word,
Paradise of snakes, silver of the mine:
All this infinity I, more than man.
Harmony of fears, the music of Mann,
The languages of sin: this is the life.
The marrage of heaven and hell is mine.
Under western eyes blinded to value
All the world's a theatre of the abword,
Sans sentence, sans repentance and sans death.
A little blood clears me of this deed, death
Warrant habeas-corpsed, homo-fled man;
No parole beside my countersigned word,
A new covenant, raised again to life.
A pound of flesh, an ounce of blood: value.
Satan lied for somebody's sins, not mine.
From the bitterness of death springs forth life:
I am bargained man and nothing value.
I bought the word - Hisperic power is mine.
CYGNE ASCENDANT
Surréalisme, amanuensis
Asleep in the intray of consciousness
While clearing the desk to take dictation
In the shorthand of thought (tel quelque chose) -
Chance combinations in the waking life,
Pictures at a listened exhibition -
Places itself automatonally
At the service of the unknown dreamer,
A hard askmaster. At an immense cost
Phrases and phases of phrases, fragmeants,
Frackings of monologue or dialogue,
Are mined from sleep and, depreciating
In value but not lost in translation,
So cut and polished into reckoning -
A réveillé they sound and manufacture
With the seemlessness of unearned offerings -
And become hoarded as precious touchstones,
Carbon copies of the Sibylline leaves,
What will or will not be. (Ceci n'est pas
An egg in a desert too hot to fry,
A watch stopped twice, once waking, once timeless,
The watchtower Eiffel melted in the sun,
Eyelids propped open upon matchstick ids,
The world a retourglass turned upside down:
Swans buried up to their necks in the sand
Nine-tenths balletic above the surface.
Ostriches turn a blind eye to vultures,
Who slake their appetites on sandwiches.
An hourglass figure. The phoenix picnics
On Prometheus' liver and onions.
In the yellowbrick maze of the desert
The urinal of a ruined temple,
An oasis to think from as you please.
Blown far off course an Aleppo merchant
Astride a horse of different colour,
Common-or-garden cameleopardus,
The harlequin Arabian, for sale
Documents at secondsight, signed and sealed,
The desert's ship, palindromedary,
Forwards, backwards, the forktongue not spaken,
Indecipherable Cairoglyphics,
When shall we three unrendezvous again?
Unconverts on the road to Damascus
Fullfathoming the riddle of the Sphinx,
The lion body decapitated.
From the ashes soar birds ever singing.
The statue of Nonmem ventriloquised
In stone accents, the music of the fears,
A petrified airscape with no escape,
Obsidian terraforming round earth:
Machine molle, stilt skin, gravity's painbow,
Lava lamps' rotal eclipse of the sun.
Sand and shore exchange unsure vows and weep
The unaltered length of the horizon,
A lonely rubber band stretched far away.
The high wire grows tired just halfway between
The Eifell Tower and the Umpire State,
A balancing act of never the twain:
The apes of God dine on scrape and girders
And slip up the planes with banana skins;
Fear of falling much exaggerated -
Close your eyes, make a wish and don't look down.
In a lost-and-drowned dépte of the Métro
Atlantis thinks what pain there is in drought,
The city's lifeblood leeched on the beaches,
Potemkin villages, burst barrage balloons.
Icebergs and arks are towed into dry dock
And catapelt titanic burgesses
With empty jeroboams of champagne.
The dignitaries stand with one hand tied
Awaiting the swing of the pendulum
Under the sway of the magnétiseur
Whose turn will come leaving zero to chance
Invisible between the red and black.
All the world's a promenade at D'eauville.
The talented Mr RIP fakes
Secondhand signatures of long-lost friends
On traveller's cheques in an antique land
And leaves behind his baggage in two trunks
For a round world cruise to furthest corners.
The four winds whisper navigation news;
The cyclops keeps an eye on the cyclones
As ships in sheep's clothing pass in the night,
The auto-pilot asleep at the wheel.
An albatross sinks without trace beneath
The surface prismed by a white swan's flight:
A rainbow dissected and etherised.
La lune et le citron touts Citröenés
Unblinking sentinel amid darkness,
A lake whose lady withered at the edge...)
Men with stopwatches walk through factories,
The conveyor belt of reality,
Caterpillar tracks, broken butterflies,
Night and day on the treadmill. I prefer
To toil by twilight, sommeil réveillé,
Alone, my back to the son et lumière,
Secondhand mirage of humanity,
Undimensional man in summersaults.
A blindfolded statue of Fourier
Extends one hand to the huddled masses
And forgives the assassin of Kirov.
The three-score-ten-and when? shall not be mine,
The secondhand minutiae of death
Today and today and today, value
For nothing in the scale man equals man:
My studies shall conjure let-there-be-life:
In the beginning I'll ready the word.
I whisper the palimpsestuous word
And good devils/bad angels become mine,
Conspirators' breath, conjurors of life
Hourglass-weighing infinite sands of death
Where, found wanting the limeburnt heart of man,
The unpardonable sin loses value.
My soul exchanged acquires true use value,
The two-two sullied equals flesh made word:
Mephisto-incarnate soft-machine man,
Old mole. Inflamed meninges undermine,
Nightmare in my brain - sting, where is thy death?
A free visitation, upon my life.
The double helix, the secret of life,
Beyond land of Cockayne's surplus value,
Brief history of tempus fugit, death
A fork-tongued riddle dissolved by the word,
Paradise of snakes, silver of the mine:
All this infinity I, more than man.
Harmony of fears, the music of Mann,
The languages of sin: this is the life.
The marrage of heaven and hell is mine.
Under western eyes blinded to value
All the world's a theatre of the abword,
Sans sentence, sans repentance and sans death.
A little blood clears me of this deed, death
Warrant habeas-corpsed, homo-fled man;
No parole beside my countersigned word,
A new covenant, raised again to life.
A pound of flesh, an ounce of blood: value.
Satan lied for somebody's sins, not mine.
From the bitterness of death springs forth life:
I am bargained man and nothing value.
I bought the word - Hisperic power is mine.
CYGNE ASCENDANT
Surréalisme, amanuensis
Asleep in the intray of consciousness
While clearing the desk to take dictation
In the shorthand of thought (tel quelque chose) -
Chance combinations in the waking life,
Pictures at a listened exhibition -
Places itself automatonally
At the service of the unknown dreamer,
A hard askmaster. At an immense cost
Phrases and phases of phrases, fragmeants,
Frackings of monologue or dialogue,
Are mined from sleep and, depreciating
In value but not lost in translation,
So cut and polished into reckoning -
A réveillé they sound and manufacture
With the seemlessness of unearned offerings -
And become hoarded as precious touchstones,
Carbon copies of the Sibylline leaves,
What will or will not be. (Ceci n'est pas
An egg in a desert too hot to fry,
A watch stopped twice, once waking, once timeless,
The watchtower Eiffel melted in the sun,
Eyelids propped open upon matchstick ids,
The world a retourglass turned upside down:
Swans buried up to their necks in the sand
Nine-tenths balletic above the surface.
Ostriches turn a blind eye to vultures,
Who slake their appetites on sandwiches.
An hourglass figure. The phoenix picnics
On Prometheus' liver and onions.
In the yellowbrick maze of the desert
The urinal of a ruined temple,
An oasis to think from as you please.
Blown far off course an Aleppo merchant
Astride a horse of different colour,
Common-or-garden cameleopardus,
The harlequin Arabian, for sale
Documents at secondsight, signed and sealed,
The desert's ship, palindromedary,
Forwards, backwards, the forktongue not spaken,
Indecipherable Cairoglyphics,
When shall we three unrendezvous again?
Unconverts on the road to Damascus
Fullfathoming the riddle of the Sphinx,
The lion body decapitated.
From the ashes soar birds ever singing.
The statue of Nonmem ventriloquised
In stone accents, the music of the fears,
A petrified airscape with no escape,
Obsidian terraforming round earth:
Machine molle, stilt skin, gravity's painbow,
Lava lamps' rotal eclipse of the sun.
Sand and shore exchange unsure vows and weep
The unaltered length of the horizon,
A lonely rubber band stretched far away.
The high wire grows tired just halfway between
The Eifell Tower and the Umpire State,
A balancing act of never the twain:
The apes of God dine on scrape and girders
And slip up the planes with banana skins;
Fear of falling much exaggerated -
Close your eyes, make a wish and don't look down.
In a lost-and-drowned dépte of the Métro
Atlantis thinks what pain there is in drought,
The city's lifeblood leeched on the beaches,
Potemkin villages, burst barrage balloons.
Icebergs and arks are towed into dry dock
And catapelt titanic burgesses
With empty jeroboams of champagne.
The dignitaries stand with one hand tied
Awaiting the swing of the pendulum
Under the sway of the magnétiseur
Whose turn will come leaving zero to chance
Invisible between the red and black.
All the world's a promenade at D'eauville.
The talented Mr RIP fakes
Secondhand signatures of long-lost friends
On traveller's cheques in an antique land
And leaves behind his baggage in two trunks
For a round world cruise to furthest corners.
The four winds whisper navigation news;
The cyclops keeps an eye on the cyclones
As ships in sheep's clothing pass in the night,
The auto-pilot asleep at the wheel.
An albatross sinks without trace beneath
The surface prismed by a white swan's flight:
A rainbow dissected and etherised.
La lune et le citron touts Citröenés
Unblinking sentinel amid darkness,
A lake whose lady withered at the edge...)
Men with stopwatches walk through factories,
The conveyor belt of reality,
Caterpillar tracks, broken butterflies,
Night and day on the treadmill. I prefer
To toil by twilight, sommeil réveillé,
Alone, my back to the son et lumière,
Secondhand mirage of humanity,
Undimensional man in summersaults.
A blindfolded statue of Fourier
Extends one hand to the huddled masses
And forgives the assassin of Kirov.
© Copyright Mark Howe 2020
Mark Howe has been published in 2PLUS2, Poetry World, Anglo-Welsh Review and Acumen, among others. He has worked as a senior production journalist at The Independent and Morning Star, and has edited an anthology of journalism from the Daily Worker/Morning Star. He lives near Cambridge.