The Hidden Structure
‘Do you think I’m stupid? I’m much smarter than you Mister.’
Judge Judy.
(i) GRY
There are three words
in the English language
ending in GRY.
One is angry.
The second is hungry.
Everyone knows what the third
word is.
Everyone uses them every day.
If you listen carefully, I have
given you the third word.
(ii) Unemployed People Who Pose as Aliens
Arun, Misbah & Baldwin watch
illicit TV when Helen goes on lunch.
Jerry Springers the neo-Socrates, now;
‘No one’s treating each other right’,
as the cinnabar of his tongue turns
the “undercover lovers” from red hot
to a glossy mercury imitation of alchemy.
Their love a Golem; a ratings construct.
Judge Judy’s no better, no worse (?)
a neo-Thetis,
the scales of justice
tipped in America’s favour, now;
the Goddesses’ blindfold reserved
for inmates in Guantanamo Bay.
Springer’s final shackles of thought
leaked inside Wal-Mart, the neo-Parthenon;
‘This poison’s not working anymore!’
(iii) Job Position: 1200 AD, Mongolia
- Buz Kashi players: wanted to join in group activity. Must have own horse & current “H” class license. Duties consist of carrying 50-pound headless calf around boundary flags & scoring a home goal if possible (an early ancestor of Quidditch). Essential: must have sense of foul play & good horsemanship/melee skills.
- NB. Nomad-Mongol background desirable.
- NB. His Royal Highness, Charles, the Prince of Wales need not apply.
- NB. Kerry Packer may apply.
(iv) Job Position: 800 AD, Japan
- Living Cultural Monument:
aka Getsu, sword-maker. Must have ability
to fold steel like speech, thirty thousand times.
Good morning
Work Corrections Australia
This is Genghis Khan
How can I help you?
The Music of the Spheres
‘Arithmetic, like language, begins in legend’.
- Bronowski
(i) Perspectives
It’s a;
Beck – ‘Odeley’, ‘Mutations’
Mercury Rev – ‘Deserter Songs’, ‘All is Dream’
Radiohead – ‘The Bends’
kind of day
(pure lyrical alchemy
on five disc shuffle).
but Arun, Redhoune & Misbah,
the three wise men from the East
keep their heads stuck to the telephone numbers.
The Adoration of the Unemployed Magi
unfolds on Dürer’s 20th century
South Brisbane job renaissance
masterpiece.
A perspective/conclusion,
he didn’t draw.
(ii) SPG’S (Samos Party Girls)
Pythagoras hid in the mouth of numbers.
Harboured the language of nature, plucked order
out of chaos; cleared stones off a dirt floor.
The music of the spheres; the Heavens
whined like a crystal goblet, stroked
with a wet tyrannical finger.
A hundred oxen later,
the Muses pushed aside their plates
(having satisfied their desire for food & drink)
patted Pythagoras on the back
& hit the road Jack.
Samos, being just another scene, after all,
the Girls well & truly over it.
(iii) Mutations
‘Put a song in your throat
let the dead beats play on’. Beck
Zero
Cipher
Algebra
Almanac
Zenith.
These Arabic words;
a fine white powder
on the sealed envelope
of English. A cloister
of languages,
of numbers, of symbols.
The Muses reclining now
in the East, inside
Sala de las Camas
(the harem’s secret heart).
The Sultan sending down
his big apple – one branch
of forbidden knowledge
at a time. Egyptian,
Babylonian, Indian,
Chinese, Hittite, Greek,
Persian. A sweet succession
in the body of science.
‘You can’t touch this!”
The face of Rome pushed
further into the mud.
The Moorish artists cum
mathematicians fused the core
of the Euclidean plane,
mapped the Alhambra’s walls
in pure Escher symmetry.
The Girls starting to go
cross-eyed with the strain
of that ‘Magic Eye’ effect.
Headaches all round.
(iv) Toledo, 1086 AD, Spain.
Toledo, the boom city,
of 1086 AD. Moorish Spain
hustling in the great
music of the Renaissance
to its cultural backwater:
Western Europe.
A veritable beehive
of intellectual activity.
Made good swords too!
The finest silver-steel
in all the world!
Lots of full-time employment
for scholars, translators,
artists, clerks, copy-editors,
black-smiths, armourers, lawyers.
The Peninsula cut in half.
The omphalos of culture
balancing on a sword-blade.
(v) Misbah II
At Work Corrections
Misbah, the Agronomist
from Bangladesh tunes
for work in a Brisbane
car stereo factory.
Can’t use his Masters Degree
in Soil Science, not the ‘right’
kind of dirt under those blue
production-line fingernails.
His eyes; a brimful of floodwater
dumps silt on a tropical soul.
But Baldwin only nudges him
in the ribs, winks & says,
‘You need fluoro at your back
not the sun, a concrete floor
to stand on, not the delta
sands, Mate. Besides, you can
cry about it until the cows
come home, but Bangladesh will
never beat Australia in cricket?’
The Paris to Dhaka
is a human race (?)
Good morning
Work Corrections Australia
This is Misbah
How can I help you?
(vi) Expanding Our Awareness
For three hours they play
psychological games with the JNM
to identify the extent
of their ‘conditioning’.
- Draw four straight lines
through all nine squares without
lifting your pen or pencil from
the paper, or retracting.
- ● ●
- ● ●
- ● ●
- Using one line only
make the following configuration
into a “6”.
I X
- Read this message once.
FEAR OF CHANGE IS A FOOLISH THING
FOR TO RESIST CHANGE IS TO RESIST LIFE:
IN OUR RESISTANCE OF CHANGE WE FORCE
CHANGE ONLY OF ANOTHER KIND
How many letter F’s are there?
(vii) FCUK
How many F’s are there in fucking waste of time?
‘The Hidden Structure’ and ‘The Music of the Spheres’ were first published in Retort magazine.
Bitter as the cud 