Mad Hatters' Review - Issue 3 - Poetry Collaborations by Francis Raven and Jeff Bacon - 'Attempts at a Sentence', 'Covered in Plastic Syrup', 'Gratitude', 'Expunged Ending'

'Friends You Know' by Graf-hick

Poetry Collaborations by

Francis Raven & Jeff Bacon

Music by Christopher Aitken

Attempts at a Sentence

(pick 1)

1) The artist demonstrates truth by giving all his ideas again and again.

2) The faith of the artist consists in using up all his ideas.

3) The one who gives his ideas and visions with the faith that he will later have more to give, is the artist.

4) The faith of the artist:
to use all of his ideas,
not an expectation of a response,
literal or spiritual, but the
faith that he will not cease to be an artist
because he has made art.

Covered in Plastic Syrup

You look into the little houses…
the women's faces are framed with metal
[rectangles]
you look for the details,
they are all there…
but everything drips with a messy lacquer:
semen of the voyeur's eye.

Gratitude

Thank you for inviting me to the feast.

Our sweet family of remarks, our islands of ideals.

My head is aching cuz my heart's gone spinning.

I have lost what a poem is: Please teach me.

Expunged Ending

rhyming gestures of erasure
from wounds and folds;
blood ruins the creases.

The bottles crush the plums,
Bottled water bubbles through;
The vertical diagram of statues.

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