“The enuig,enueg or enuech (Old Occitan: “complaint, vexation”) is a genre of lyric poetry practised by the troubadours. Somewhat similar to the sirventes, the enuig was generally a litany of complaints, few of them connect topically to the others.” (from Wikipedia)
1.
In the quad
where the robed & hooded
figures weave their
algorithms – coming
going wiping down spoilage
Death by misadventure
assurance-lack
will you complete the triad?
He could not equal Dante
nor challenge Michelangelo’s
apex – vast stretch of time
like a hernia of gargantuan
proportion: lanced, palpitating
Disjecta cloying the durable
oeuvre-abscess or tumescence
Duomo invites the last temptation
Malacoda stares from the
campanile: albino peeping-tom
Rockaby Billie Whitelaw’s visage
let me hear your footfalls
in the turn of the stairwell
fumbling for a greasier key:
mystery tramp in green velvet jacket
hardly inscrutable Buster Keaton
Giotto &/or Duccio? Fresco
after medieval-cached fresco
burning – sack of Paris final hide-
out – your teeth carious outposts
unredeemable the beau jours
the hallelujah recitals
In the quad
intellect-dance defaults
into le sacre du printemps
syncopate strident vortices
fin de partie
Crypto-designed
for those born to
an intricate illogical
station the fail-mercy
milieu lock-stepped gnomes
coming & going
wiping down discharge
In the quaquaqua . . .
ah, god-blast
the quadrivium!
2.
No cure for that:
reprobate time gyres
through spatial inferno
So you clutch your sack
crawl through the mud
check for cans & opener
Assume the inscrutable
victim-torturer profile
Wrapped in hessian
sacramental cloak
for your transactions
in this fin de partie
You come & go
talking of Sordello
Belacqua’s heavy shade
splices through your guts:
subcutaneous & spectral
A ventriloquist who
masters immobility
No cure for that
Charismatic anonymity
wowing with opacity
Invisible poet withdraws
from all that’s quotidian
paring yellow fingernails
over stillborn creation
You’re last man standing
who were ‘last year’s man’
Old Scarlett in maculate
trousers digging immaculate
graves for the departed
Company is solitude
meeting-house become
the world’s end hermitage
lost in the oily corner
of a tempera-spread board
Italian master squeezing
out haemorrhoids banished
from the guilds: Unnamable
Yet no cure for the fact
you’re an inhabitant
on Planet Earth
3.
Nothing to be done
You must be going
I’ll be leaving you then
Why are you so immobile?
Splayed across the chaise-
longue bought at auction
stained mildew-urinous
Trying to wake up from
whiff of nightmare centuries
Must have passed on
whilst rocking into night
A state of transition
mesmerised by chiasmus
variations on the motif
All these compositions
attain to the state of music
embody the diminuendo
No-how dispatched to
the dustbin of senility
along with post-war Pound
Why are you so immobile?
We will wait again
tomorrow same time same place
Let’s exchange hats
& maybe neckerchiefs
Make it a celestial skit
ham up the tragi-comedy
Won’t you embrace me
one last fraternal time
before you deliberate
which branch will best
take your weight & measure
4.
Complaint is plaintive confiture:
jarred, distilled, posterity-sealed.
Have exhumed a stinking horde.
Tres riche heures spent in cemeteries
mousing around weathered memorials.
A flâneur, an out-of-hire elegist
fishing for sound, a compositor-mooch.
Ennui has to be sifted for.
Each nuance has the exactitude
of a well-performed autopsy.
Hand me your neckerchief to wipe
down blood-sweat accruing on
both our high foreheads, for you’ve
brought out the best in me. And
on what must be a beau jour, let me
sniff the myrrh of our tart love.
Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), The Angel of History (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two, as well as a tragi-comedy, Arden. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review, Rasputin and Le Zaporogue.