Tony Baker
Three Part Invention
Into the folder marked “thrashings” I twig
rarely if at all how future settings will flag
my messages’ priorities, jag back to foreground
the inevitable hungers that rig their little tents
against a niggard rain so these men
can get on with their work
digging up the threshold to this place – La Place
indeed: church, baker, coiffeur & mairie --
prefiguring the common market stall
we might exchange our mutual, eventual
nagging doubts upon. The tongue’s
a rag shredded by the democratic jets
that split sky-slabs above, a rag-
bag I suppose I mean the breath
of children, friends, dead-ringers for the only
snag of being
is in fact just that
abrupt
shudder of wrecked sense that drags itself
against the tide of constant racket bedding in-
to corporate speech-forms looking for a sponsor.
They light their fags,
share coffee, bulldoze a wall, cough
frostily over trenches already dug and string
alignments from someone else’s plans, don’t ask me, I just
hug
promotions offered in the loop where ‘public’ lapses on
a luminary hope your word against mine
will fit snugly, nothing more. Like so. To get laid
beneath their trowels & be cemented there, counter-
subject to a fugue of yelps & clicks, sea-whistles, huge
dugouts paddled out of history bearing grave goods to a car
boot sale of desire that lugs nicked stuff to your door for free
if you invest entire resource, let’s say, in dried figs.
It matters not a scrap to anyone to know the sack
of clag and drizzle emptied chilly on this European single
winter weekday when the dustmen come,
who missed the bus or what
the 36
male names of sons of sons of men
whose names are on the sides of vans, the names
of artisans dying at Sedan Sarajevo
in the marshes south of Tehran,
whose names are cut in stone
by the point de recyclage where someone’s
dumped the innards of a vacuum cleaner. I tap
upon the pipes of virtual tones& think
message-systems into being binary
constructs that really lag behind the flow
of conversation, but
pax, “let’s communicate” as Maurice says, log on
to the noise of motors and hydraulic scooper-things
that jog the carrelage on this kitchen floor, the bordel
of shoutings come in from the cold, the whole
complex low of it
blowing in from the west
& ‘losing its identity
in Biscay’,
Gucci
& Armani Easy
Jet, Corus,
Nike
“look
it’s like in
Jurassic Park, it’s
got its teeth
right in the window”. Listen
to the karaoke ring of hammers tugging
at the heart-fog round the vinestakes of these solid
commune slopes, and try to tell me then it isn’t this
their voices vainly scramble up to tag .
last updated November 5, 2003