Throwing The Bridesmaid‘s Flowers (Music & Spoken Word Version):
Click Soundcloud (red) link below to listen:
Poem, Image & Recitation: Robert Frede Kenter
Music composed & performed by Vikki C.
Audio production: Vikki C.
Throwing the Bridesmaid’s Flower (Made from a Post-Positive Futures Investment/ Only Possible At This Time and In this Place)
The abscessed absence is a noted
disposition, a rupture in the world,
a deposition with indecision – blood – a
brooding web, all spider in concave position.
Drinking. All the sweetness of the trees.
Sure, as if all of this place once mattered to someone,
like frosting on a sugar cake. Cagey, the infinite
is a riptide, a whirlpool splatter of storm up the coast
with nothing to grab onto; in the late afternoon as it brings
you down in gasping realization, that
the pain you thought you avoided is,
in point of present fact, the sink hole in the news,
of your life, there you are
in front of the ocean, right below are
last year’s webbed-petroleum-marathon-victory shoes.
There goes Dracula shadow dancing at your window.
A silhouette of something launched in the name of solitude.
The viceroys, their flattened wings fattening by
flattering the slatternly officers of nightmares
into a covert recognition that this is their
night , after all, becomes a thesis with no vision,
as presence is a cascade of spoken word,
an incantation, and theocratic by means of
an insomniac lurch. Trip wire demoiselles of disorder
leaning on a typewritten gauge, as staccato as nails on
a melodic escalator, as star struck as a heel
stuck in the mob mall, remain unnoticed, like
a demarcated OUT OF SERVICE sign, there but
somehow at a remove.
Your assistants are behind you gathering broken
branches from the stems of an alphabetic
torture, all tourniquet of bitten wounds
and broken metatarsal of excess, all alienated
in a hubris of influences as notable as a savoy
of government corsages in the buttonhole of bulbous
statues. We revel in how the status of stylus and position
are within the stars’ configuration, their own hidden
ancient ligaments in alignment, speaking out of turn
from the galleys of astronomy click decks, the buttons
where oars of dread now row us closer together
and then further way from understanding, are stationed.
From this ethos comes the aftermath of forethought
and the confessional structure of construction, say
of a CEO, notable and known, all breath and witness,
whose harp can surely be implicated in everything,
even the sinking ships in flames which Achilles’
mother holds in her palms closed tight beside Oedipus
The gouged-out eyes. Conclude after all that, the winter sales
force is forced once again to donate plasma to eat, and
accept that a dozen widgets of suffering through which to see and hear
become the acceptable tabula rasa of cafeteria mac and cheese.
A cultured Dracula is holding up a rose.
The recognizable face is in the fate, the arc of dancing.
Outside a casino, men in jackets , dreaming
ceremonials of a line of men and coffins, a
procession of pallbearers in long coats, feels
clearly that the future lies in 1000 chemical burns
spilled over the heartbeat of the remapped planet.
Shouldering a great weight and yes they say, weeping,
Trouble is often geared more to the scale of a woman’s
touch, a notion advertised in the forum of yellow
racing pages as tightly taut as the forearms of the Fallen
Widows, dressed in black, out on a speedway,
gloved hands, stitched Bouquets for the new
age, veined roses, their fumigated wings a fulmination
of new windows for pinned trophies, mirror balls for
a memorial ballroom. Here is to the arrival and departure
with passports from another war, residents from
a city ground to dust.
Ah, and their fallen solemn children running from
the radioactive tsunami, mis-presented and unaccounted for
inside the gates to New Perfumed Garden, their tattooed
nodules, a centre for recircling traffic, circulating
as in a taxonomy of ripe, yet secretive proportions,
promotions to the composer of salami recipes,
recomposing in the circulatory travails
all evident in a wasteland, in the
waltz to no dawn, that Accordion Veins,
A Polka To New Planetary Atrial Fibrillation,
is on the jukebox, and on repeat play. Someone
must adore that dancing Dracula in holding up
a face that resembles a recognizable spectre, the elegant
funeral Director, replete with slashed messenger and
a ruby corsage.
Images #1, #2, #3 or Haptic Roses – An image collaboration by Snowstorm/Monsoon Productions (c) 2024
Throwing the Bridesmaid’s Flower PDF version (c) 2024 Robert Frede Kenter/ Ice Floe Press.
Robert Frede Kenter is a multiple Pushcart-nominated poet, a BOTN nominee, lives with ME/CFS & is a writer of experimental prose, a performer, editor, visual artist, multiple grant recipient, book designer & EIC/Publisher of Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net). Books include FATHER TECTONIC (forthcoming, Ethel Zine Press, 2025), & hybrid collections, EDEN (2021), Audacity of Form (Ice Floe Press, 2019). Robert’s work is in anthologies incl. The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press, 2022), Seeing in Tongues (Steel Incisors, 2023), Reformatting the Pain Scale (Olney Books). Recent journals in/forthcoming: Cable Street, Harpy Hybrid, Storms Journal, The Winged Moon, Dark Winter Literary Review, Cutbow Q, Street Cake, Feral, Erato, Setu, WatchYourHead, Fevers Of, Black Bough, talking strawberries all the time, Cough, Twist in Time, Anthropocene, Burning House, & many others. Robert contributed as a poet to the recent 40th anniversary exhibition for Bronski Beat (UK). Twitter: @frede_kenter; IG: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle, icefloe22.
Vikki C. is a British-born award-nominated writer & musician. She is the author of two collections: ‘The Art of Glass Houses’ (The Alien Buddha) & ‘Where Sands Run Finest’ (DarkWinter Press).
Vikki’s poetry and prose appear or are forthcoming in international venues across UK, US, Canada & Europe. These include: Psaltery & Lyre, The Inflectionist Review, Stone Circle Review, EcoTheo Review, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, Ice Floe Press, New Verse Review, Sweet Literary, Harpy Hybrid, Cable Street, Emerge Literary Journal, Grain Magazine, Sublunary Review, Suburban Witchcraft Magazine, The Winged Moon, The Hyacinth Review, Dust Poetry, Black Bough Poetry, The Broken Spine, The Belfast Review, Origami Poems, Boats Against The Current, Jerry Jazz Musician, Across The Margin, Lazuli Literary Group, Salò Press, The Write-In (National Flash Fiction Day), Literary Revelations & Loft Books, among others.
Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize & the Orison Best Spiritual Literature.
Vikki is an improvisational pianist & composer whose cinematic soundscapes fuse classical and experimental techniques in spaces where universal rhythms meet the metaphysical. In vein with her writing, Vikki’s music embraces eco-conscious, cultural and post-world motifs that collectively explore the deep truths and complexities of our zeitgeist. Her musical creations have been set to spoken-word poetry & short experimental films. Vikki’s voice and written works have also been featured widely in audio collaborations and podcasts.
Find her published writing at linktr.ee/vikki_c._author
& her music & spoken poetry at Vikki C. Music: https://on.soundcloud.com/TsXUk
X: @VWC_Writes
SNOWSTORM/ MONSOON PRODUCTIONS (c) 2024
IceFloe Press 