Mark Young

Contexts Collapse

Your audiences have merged into one.
The borders have collapsed of their
own volition. Homogeneity prevails.

Isn't how it was meant to be. A filing
cabinet without any dividers? A Venn
diagram that resembles a labyrinth?

Facebook by any name won't smell
as sweet once current employer dis-
covers past opinions & indiscretions

or family unearth those snaps of you
in a Gay Pride march. No more diff-
erent strokes for different folks. Will

take much more than digital surgery
to fix. Où sont les cartographes d'antan?

 

 The Legend of the Dayluge

Criticisms of American democratic 
liberalism as it is both 
preached & practiced are
entirely due to the unbalancing 

of my own interior forces. I tend 
to think of them as periods of 
darkness, a sausage encasing machine
derived from birch bark canoes.

geographies: Oxford

The colophon on the chapbook’s
back notes that this collection
of sestinas from a pride of uni-
cellular organisms was made

possible through the genero-
sity of an anonymous slime
mold aggregation currently en-
sconced in the Bodleian Library.

 

The Handsome Pork-Butcher

For the past ten hours or so
the talking box of Francis Picabia
has been broadcasting Homer
in the classical Greek. I couldn’t
follow it at first, only picked
up on it from the summations
of ‘the story thus far’ that
follow the station identification
which comes in after every six
stanzas. It looks like Troy won’t 
be able to hold out much longer.
I wonder what happens then. 

 

Mark Young's most recent books are One Hundred Titles From Tom Beckett, with paintings by Thomas Fink, published by Otoliths in June, 2024; Alkaline Pageantry, published by Serious Publications in September, 2024; & The Magritte Poems which came out from Sandy Press in October.