The Project Gutenberg eBook, Deadly Pollen, by Stephen Oliver

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Title: Deadly Pollen

Author: Stephen Oliver

Release Date: March 9, 2004 [eBook #11522] [Most recently updated August 2, 2004]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEADLY POLLEN***

Copyright (C) 2003 by Stephen Oliver.

DEADLY POLLEN

Stephen Oliver

WORD RIOT PRESS

(c) Stephen Oliver, 2003

Books by Stephen Oliver

Henwise (1975)
& Interviews (1978)
Autumn Songs (1978)
Letter To James K. Baxter (1980)
Earthbound Mirrors (1984)
Guardians, Not Angels (1993)
Islands of Wilderness - A Romance (1996)
Unmanned (1999)
Election Year Blues (1999)
Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978 - 2000 (2001)
Deadly Pollen (2003)
Ballads, Satire & Salt (2003)

Recordings

Earthbound Mirrors, a selection, Stephen Oliver,
Ode Records Label, Auckland, (cassette) 1984

For more information on Stephen Oliver visit: http://people.smartchat.net.au/~sao/

Cover design: Pina Ricciu. Cover image: The Lithuanian Bison, engraving from J. von Brincken, 1828.

Acknowledgements: Antipodes (USA), Biff's Quarterly (USA), Brief (NZ),
Catalyzer Journal (USA), Comet Magazine (San Francisco), JAAM (NZ),
Poetry NZ/26 featured poet, San Francisco Salvo, Spreadhead (USA),
Thylazine (Aust).

An Actual Encounter With the Sun On / My Balcony At France Street: a parody on Frank O'Hara's 'A True Account Of Talking / To The Sun At Fire Island' who in turn based his account on Mayakovsky's more robust poem, 'A Most Extraordinary Adventure'. POETS' PALACE: a name given by the author to an old Kauri, weatherboard guest house in France Street (the upper story of which he occupied in the early '80s) near the prostitute's strip off K'rd, Auckland. Various 'emerging' poets & artists lived downstairs at intervals during this period. As the last of its kind in Newton Gully this 100 year old wooden building was finally demolished at the close of the decade.

Deadly Pollen is published by

Word Riot Press
PO Box 414
Middletown, NJ 07748
USA
http://www.wordriot.org/press

ISBN 0-9728200-2-7

Typeset by Word Riot Press in Bembo

Contents

Deadly Pollen

1. 'ZIONISM:'

2. 'You return to the stupa, yearly,'

3. 'The stones collected. Ground'

4. ' "With digital, there is no past," '

5. 'How is it the floating island'

6. 'Mediocre raiders lie in wait.'

7. 'Time passes - that pressure in'

8. 'Hugely, our indifference squats -'

9. 'Circuit; right hand wise,'

10. 'If streets had cobblestones'

11. 'A Public Works draughtsman'

12. 'Pyrrha, your dewy hair,'

13. 'The flames above the wall,'

14. 'Once cradle of civilization -'

15. 'Forty thousand tons. Space'

16. 'A giallo antico moon framed'

17. ''The Breaking of Nations' '

18. ''A line is taking a full-stop'

19. 'Buildings off the crustal shelf,'

20. 'Generalization of Old World'

21. 'CEOs in castles cascade'

22. 'Footprints for satellites?'

23. 'Is recollection seeing anew,'

24. 'So. Earth's most dramatic'

25. 'I wanted to reach my hand into'

26. ' 'Your breasts in the mirror,' '

27. 'Alcatraz not Minoan ruins.'

28. 'Do words bring to mind flat'

29. 'Serpent-backed bridge profiled:'

30. 'One quadrant of sky turns,'

31. 'Barrel of the sun, gun-wad,'

32. 'Rubbed off sky exposes an'

33. 'The day combustible as a'

34. 'Compression of bees,'

35. 'Scent makes the air visible,'

An Actual Encounter With The Sun On
                    My Balcony At France Street

Deadly Pollen

ZIONISM: to carry forward the cultural gene - O bright-lit destiny of the chosen! The child's bouncing ball lands in mud on the other side of the wire; footsteps are paradoxical in a minefield. His heart ticks fast as a metal detector, slowly, the yellow ball rolls to a stop. Proposition: to advance onto ancestral territory, or return into gentle, familial lands, a footfall journey backward. His eye shrinks the land to desert.

*

You return to the stupa, yearly, to seek your return. You wish to come back as forest deer but that deer is extinct. The stupa is a rock upon which your dreams founder, yearly, - you return that which you do not have. Meanwhile, in the West, under ragged skies and beneath a hundred spires no longer dreamt of - attendance comes tumbling down; each stone, unturned, in an emptied space within a space caved under.

*

The stones collected. Ground levelled and swept. The first cubicle erected with four windowed-walls, an open doorway. One man on a step looking out to sea. Civilization open for business. Soon, marble was made smooth and square. The Idea locked into permanence. Curiosity stimulated commerce; others came and conquered then went away. That first step never forgotten became a throne - history's seat.

*

"With digital, there is no past," says Jean-Luc Godard. Either way, the button is redundant. Voice-command is thought - the fear deep and futureless as history, desire to appease which remains featureless, not the disorganized weather it truly is, as much a part of the breathing stars as constancy of rock. The 'Mr Whippy Man' weaves Greensleeves in and out of suburbia; a caravan in search of a trade-route - via the village that never existed.

8

*

How is it the floating island detaches itself from horizon in dream - its first appearance, otherworldly, but of this world, a wheel loosened from the world's ratchet, out of time, riding above it and inhabited by folk fixated upon a particular theorem-thought; elevated imponderables, whereby you access this island by door set underneath as you sail under? Islands, a dream of round towers! the sudden rush of water under hulls.