Tag Archives: Jake St. John

Michael Mann has just produced a couple of colourful issues of unarmed, his modestly produced little treasures of magazines and chaps. unarmed #62 features a collage by Steve Dalachinsky on the cover:

Included in this issue are one of mine, “The Sword’s Brayer” (a homolinguistic satire on The Lord’s Prayer), as well as poems by Simon Cutts, Joel Dailey, Sheila E. Murphy, Michael Basinski, Vernon Frazer, Nicholas Ravinkar, Tom Weigel, Michael the Mann himself, and many others. Here are a couple of samples from the issue:

39.
by Tom Weigel

The lark sings a shut case
but to be quick there’s nothing I want
only bird friends chatter & congregations
functional stuff without guile
ripe grapes of an old German novella
read at night against a cold snap in Spring
it’s back there with film & the art of letters
picking up the odd piece of scrap iron
the words SILVER FLOSS on a can of sauerkraut
I think of LOVE on a slow walk
among drowsy lilacs away from noise
when the ice cream truck sounds its chimes
down the streets of hopscotch & whiffle ball
past the car mechanic describing a special wrench

* * * * *

“nothing can be more contemptible
than to suppose public records to be true” wm blake (1757-1827)
by Michael Mann

my pockets carry the odor of sharpened coins
and flower-like meanings from the extremities of success
from which the upticked “twist-points” anchor the unknown

a just-never that unfolds in a spectacle of confusions
cat’s eye-bright in its scattering of the warners from the commons
the few communist-saints remain only to wait on our mudflap lady

still my luck holds its tongue in a rhapsody of reticence
a silence more reliable than passion, of lyrics made from time’s
contention that it was once forbidden to forbid

i tarry too with rules of cruelty
my polished shoes the progressive experience
of evolutionary hardware on the rivers of the medes

fearless oil-whatever-the-politics dilutes the absolute
in words perfect for both halting and advancing
the proof of which irrealists must watch through their fingers

an inly response to the unavailing spinozistic distaste for courage
my heroes, our carcerals, and the habits of flesh
“together in one bed (the dears)”

* * * * *

And the chap that came with #62,  Change of Address by Jake St. John, features on the back and front covers water colours by Kimball Lockhart:

An excerpt by Jake St. John:

Yesterday

seems far removed
from today
but the leaves
are now falling
from the recently
potted plants
and the photographs
have worn
at the corners
and faded slightly
over the young faces
that have now seen
many years
since the
meticulous crawl
of westward expansion

Sonnets

Codes of Public Sleep