Five Minute Readings
Raoul Hausmann, Dada collage 1918
[Poem I wrote about five years ago after a feeling of dissatisfaction with five minute poetry readings.]
Five Minute Readings
it assumes the sound bite
it assumes the well-taught urn
it assumes the tight arsed
little sonnet to his mistress
it assumes less is more
(often perhaps mostly right)
it assumes the seminar
day coach to well-lit halls of cerebral trade
it assumes a savage democracy of equal breath
it kills King Billy Blake, Walter B. Whitman
& The Song Of Songs
it kills the all-night shaman’s rave
Allen Howl-Me-Master Ginsberg
Charlie Cliff-Face Bukowski Esenin Mayakovsky
Yevtushenko Lorca Neruda Rumi Hafiz Virgil Dante
Homer Moses Marx & all the joyous angels
of Dada & ecstatic doom
it kills the big breath yawp & roll
of vowels & consonants & sudden breaks
sweeping in from the body’s uncharterable sea
yes, but it also pricks
swollen ego balloons (almost)
fake shaman self-therapists
& the vain circuitous search
for absent mirrors acting out the early loss
it liberates through limits
& the subtlest inferences of chameleon tone
it eternalises nanosecond gesture, facial shift
moments of truth in a nervous grin
embeds the single voice clearly in the group
that carries it, focuses the large heart’s heat
through small prisms of polished words
till the page turns emerald in the mind
it assumes
for five minutes
we are
finished
