VI

The city chooses through whom it speaks. Hollow arteries, emotion suggestion, flaccid temper.

Once it’s chosen the atom-human-cyborg machine (call it Cybosaurus?) the city must drain-pipe,
throat-sliver him-her-it.

(what am I saying?

Speak without consequence.
Speak immediacy. Speak rhythm.
Speak in skulls. Speak dope. Speak easy.
Speak unruly. Speak in scales. Speak mutant disco.

Speak Chewbacca. Speak tornado. Speak conquistador.
Speak simulacra. Speak in fish dialect.
Speak Isadora, Q-lab, Dalston dirty condom-

                                                                 (-inium)

Speak

            rat-a-

                        tat-tat-tat…

Speak Angola. Speak fishnet stockings.
Speak zumba. Speak protons. Speak androids.
Speak cyber-graffiti.
Speak haemorrhoids.

Speak string theory. Speak antinomies. Speak Plato’s retreat.
Speak anglo-saxon, Michael Jackson, tooty-frooty.
                                                                        fornication.

Speak cellular Andromeda.
Speak black-hole flash fiction.

Speak auto-autopsy psychobabble-fish.

Speak in
neutrinos, in marmalade, in hot-flavour sado-masoch-
ism,

speak grizzlybear.
by Siddhartha Bose

This extract from ‘Cybosaurus’ is copyright © Siddhartha Bose, 2013. It is reprinted by permission of Penned in the Margins from Digital Monsoon (Penned in the Margins, 2013). 

Reading-based publisher Two Rivers Press is launching its new book The Arts of Peace next Monday 28 July from 6.30-8.30 in the Museum of English Rural Life garden in Reading. There will be a terrific range of readers, including Vahni Capildeo, Peter Carpenter, John Greening, A F Harrold, Gill Learner, Allison McVety, Peter Robinson, and Susan Utting. Tickets are £3, and there are more details on the MERL website.

Two Rivers will also be hosting an event about poetry and the First World War at Acton Court in Reading, ‘Blast from the Past’, on Friday 1 August at 7.30pm. Tickets are £12, and readers include Adrian Blamires, Claire Dyer, Ian House, and Peter Robinson. Booking details are on the Acton Court site, and you can find out more about the book The Arts of Peace on the Two Rivers website.

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

‘Cybosaurus’ is an apocalyptic trawl through a future London in the form of a poetry sequence in thirteen parts. The whole poem can be found in Siddhartha Bose’s second collection Digital Monsoon , published by Penned in the Margins. In this follow-up to the acclaimed debut Kalagora, Bose proposes the poet as a twenty-first century beatnik, a ravenous language machine eating up the margins of the city. You can watch Siddhartha Bose read extracts from the book on his website, Kalagora.

Penned in the Margins is an independent publisher and live literature producer specialising in poetry and based in East London. Founded in 2004, the company has produced numerous literature and performance events, toured several successful live literature shows, published over twenty-five books, and continues to run innovative poetry, arts and performance projects in the capital and beyond.

Their recent anthology, Adventures in Form, was awarded a Special Commendation by the Poetry Book Society and was chosen as one of 50 Best Summer Reads by The Independent. You can visit the Penned in the Margins website here to sign up to the mailing list, and follow the publisher on Facebook and Twitter. 

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.