Poem by John Havelda

 drunk on white noise and red pessimism

Switch off the seminar music

Do not let children play with American superstitions

Sing for a dog in a mirror of eyes poor school

Stock houses and empire deserts with all you can eat piano bars

Lunge langue urge to understandable marionettes as unpretentious as glanced meteorites

Put it in a vat of home wired misanthropy

Do not overlook the grumpiness of broken blues chords receiving life affirming graver evils

Predict specific subhuman sub-genres of acoustic instruments

Simplify the bleak and bereft sheer frost of this putative taste boundary

Peel a slew of heretofores of births and rebirths fatally unreadable and terminally unpublishable

Emulate immaculate bulk and mountainous undergrounds

Snip the ego off the syncopated kick drum

Rather than merely hear a tear drop, stake a patch of parched land available for download

Trouble aesthetics with flight and pursuit

Avoid blurring fusing flecks and flickering particles

Stir dots with curls and calligraphic gestures rather than yearning arpeggios

Walk just one street away from the obstreperous clusters verging on psychedelia old and new

Engage in slow slurry conversations on an ankle or the like

Grope at a man made mandarin movie, static nudge and more

Broadcast limited tender buttons, rising stains and Romanian dervishes

Except in close-minded silence and stoic crafts, pluck plot turns from the famous using small sombre sounds

Poignantly drizzle the unacceptable once upon a time share

Package gold and green boredoms

After a string of buoyant disquieting settings cash in two black gloves for arcane chansons

Let’s just not say that relentless vocalising underneath muted brass protocols caused brooding sentient beings

Provided that quirks as true opera exacerbate the queasily reminiscent guess which woven aftermath skewed echoed space

Now see it now don’t

After three days of diffusion, reverb, distortion and delay float “Float My Childhood on Rural Norfolk”

Whenever a slab of early vintage glass drawn by a Palestinian pianist persuades a wave of buoying congas breathe less freely

Never impose chimes on nocturnal creatures

Mangle the plain truth

Scatter squeaks of alluring numerals

Gaze straight into the sheaves of concrete poetry falling back on weak cucumber humour

Whether or not the Quack Quack Gallery exhibits its boisterous ebb and flow its haphazard plonking unsettle digital debris

Sample road drills coffee grinders and acoustic computer with pinprick focus on a brass outburst

Under another name hack or saw at rickshaw spokes

Work in gargantuan yard sounds

Beware of mumbled utterances that rhyme with “it’s a rich metaphor for the inner landscape”

Wander on a docked ship or an elongated drum sculpture

Unless a plum job comes up perch between smeared frenzies and unrest

Stock up on delicate dialectics or twist and shout

Watch out for saxophonists with hair on the wrong objects

Settle for vulgar sensationalism or the rough and righteous but pay no more than ten richly lacquered pieces

Only flinch if perfect and polite

Wink at the soulless meld of the bleakest moments when the dark thoughts descend

When twice the age of a mental fiddler spare the scratchings and rattle the box

Gurgle on the doom laden

With race now based in Southern Italy bolt on Chinese boxes

After a boppish turn of phrase jab the repeat button

Sitting at a forlorn piano burble away and call it impressionistic audio collage taken to transcendental aesthetic edginess

If the dialogue becomes exquisitely subdued call out “Adieu les jours”

As soon as the bucolic chirrups glimpse through the heaving and excitable crowd don’t hear the notes

Strum erratic junk culture

Reflect that Australian flavour and pack up your samples in your old kit bag

Careening around a small stage display shamanic multiphonics

Capsize the sound of big ugly orthodoxies under the sweaty arches of a railway bridge

Hotly debate a drizzly grey day of composers drunk on white noise and red pessimism

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Visual poetry by John Havelda will appear in AlteredScale.com 2.