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Extracts from Simon Jenner's Waterloo Samplers No. 1


 

 
Akhenaten

Akhenaten, polishing his bronze
aged sun, knew it was so burning
simple, uncluttered with god's angles

yawning so greatly over milleniums -
they've rendered worshippers bored with
the cut direct to a turning god.

Pliaides people pray displacement -
their platinum's no alchemy from such gold;
they're electrplated softly from the stars

believe themselves so descended. Parallaxed
as if gas rarer than West Hampstead's
winded their words from husks, the drawn refracted

vowels of travelling empty. No matter.
The fiat of science is cosmos shaped
pawky with black and blue holes

the modern's mode of being simple-
minded strains for the oblique.
Akhenaten, too sophisticated

for the sophistry of worship
took on the sun's bare-faced lie -
for all times challenged a clean

scorch of self-deception. Left
blind watch-makers for
the time keeper that blinded them.


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Silent Elevenses

Slying eye to the camera for the eclipse
cornea to forbidden corona, the sudden cool
refracts burning inexperience
to reading our origins with eye pressure

and silence.  It's the glaucoma of gazing;
the headaches tell us how far we've come, from
spotting our young names for moon and sun
though the land darkens to innocence.


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Khemanandi

You were one syllable: Liz.
It was so simple,
stripped down into a single knot of attention:
the card-end's hieroglyph,
your ten-speed sudden arrival,
and the plain, hour-stacked silences.

Now you are four - and unfamiliar;
so that at last I can roll in my own mantra:
(Let it go; let it go; let it go; let it go)...



 

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