Poetry By Mark Young

In this age
 
of digital displays—clocks beside the bed, in cars, on microwaves, ovens, phones, et al.—I find such signs as 11:11 or 7:47 or 12:34 quite talismanic. Wake up or walk into the kitchen or whatever & come across such a display & I think it's a good thing. Not necessarily propitious, but at least offering something positive.
 
I have similar attitudes towards the chance sighting of particular birds, or the hearing of particular songs that have some sort of charge for me. I don't follow through on them, to check to see if they're prescient incidents, just note them in passing & move on. Enough that they've occured.
 
Of late, however, they've become something more. Not premonitions, more akin to knots in a rope that provide handholds. I see them, hang on to them, refuse to let go until another one comes along. & they're no longer chance: I seek them out. As I write this, I have a YouTube track of Miles Davis' So What playing in a minimized browser.
 
Nine more minutes of future I don't have to think about.
 
 


A variant on Ernesto Priego’s Hubiera
 
If
yesterday the
rain, even if
 
falling
ever so
lightly, & we
 
had
gone out
in it, bare-
 
foot
& naked,
& just in
 
case
it never
stopped raining we
 
running
so the
ice spilled from
 
the
glasses we
carried & melted
 
making
the run
a little lighter,
 
making
the rain
a little harder.


​
Mark Young's most recent book is les échiquiers effrontés, a collection of surrealist visual poems laid out on chessboard grids, just published by Luna Bisonte Prods. Due out later this year is The Word Factory: a miscellany, from gradient books of Finland, & an e-book, A Vicarious Life — the backing tracks, from otata.