Beatbox (after Aase Berg)
by John Wilkinson

Place your scrap into the
         singing black box,
paper slips shall billow
profligately,
world-building blaze & blare –
scraps,
         every scrimp
get deep in hock
to the black box  –

The singing black box
         forgives,
a million limb-pyramids
         twitch but not in time,
time won’t make tracks
here,
to the funkiest black box,
none have a scrap
         left to throw,
what is the toll
taken on the scrapyard,
the shipping crate?
                   Nil.
         Let me hear.
Not a scrap, a fortune cookie
slip won’t mend.
Nil, I say, nil.
We dance against pyramids,
whiter than white.
         Nothing sticks.
The voice mausoleum
hunches.

∆

Had a skinful, true.
A husband heart, dumb cluck
         automaton,
bootstrapped
gorged annulment, rapped
in a stiff glove, a cape,
most he off wave & flukes
         to boot, to bone
gags

Imperial
         Elmo
Chemical,
the chock-full beauty sea
giddying on a gasped beach,

volcanoes of withheld speech,
growths of shut-up
flap the esplanade,
a torque spanner, calm
         perusal
settles waves, catches
on Zone 2,
         painless interfacing,
should I address its punctum,
fissure glass.

Death watch bells, imperished

Eyes from under

Borromean knots knot.

∆

Walk about the black box,
drag slow,
         drag your heels
in the shade of high
rates of recall.
Resolve, rotate
about your sepulchre
         to be a palmer, seek
directions to the out-
landish 
place to be continued,
strung out without limit.

Part buried, part
indivisible skin, he in part
/talk of violence/
         lined their own
fingers, tamperproof, pulled
the undertow across floors,
flooding caskets.
His hands sewn like gloves,
fingers scuttle
itching out epitaphs,
         sowing strings
purplish mussels populate,
soft-shell crabs
bunched & beating
blood-jelly rockpool-grips.

Shingled the shut music.
Box leaves fell.
Plumps on sewage.
         Fistular pluralities.

Also by John Wilkinson in ActionYes #5:
An essay on Spirit