Stephen C. Middleton

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Mechanisms (Plumbing)

Can remember… in beleaguered whispers / easy tears / or stoppered ducts. Broken. Epic fail. The nerve will not release. The faulty cascade mechanism, he spoke of, in his delirium (contested). (Stress position). So, do my own plumbing, to little avail. Reductive these beliefs. This just in. Or this… stale,

Aftermath (Legitimacy)

The riffs
Lift up –
Stop on a dime
& interpolate (what)
In real time
Swift & swoop
Loop & break

Do the dance
To – or do – the architecture
At pace

You wouldn’t
You couldn’t

Except in action
in the throes

How (we) validate creation

Gone cold so quickly
(Sweat dries / throat sore)
Then the trickster lick – legitimacy.

All

Or not. It is all dialogue. It is not all craft, said the figurative painter, rather against her expectation. ‘It is all blur’. ‘Kinda Silver’, he called it, in split homage. Mostly, there is no momentum. It all moves around in the mix / forestalls presumption / recognition. Licks (familiar)). ‘Glass Enclosure’ – the prison described panoptic. Architecture sketched no solo it is all structure and enclitic thereafter. All shadows. No development. Elsewhere – freer, organic. Cadence and rhythm – no words. Contoured. Hiatus – a quick step off the pace / syllabic placement. Or memories erased by panic. Traces … is all.

Stephen C. Middleton is a writer working in London, England. He has had five books published, including A Brave Light (Stride) and Worlds of Pain / Shades of Grace (Poetry Salzburg). He has been in several anthologies, including Paging Doctor Jazz (Shoestring), From Hepworth’s Garden Out (Shearsman, 2010), & Yesterday’s Music Today (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2015). For several years he was editor of Ostinato, a magazine of jazz and jazz related poetry, and The Tenormen Press. He has been in many magazines worldwide. He is currently working on projects (prose and poetry) relating to jazz, blues, politics, outsider (folk) art, mountain environments, and long-term illness.

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