Spitting Mound of Venus
by Margot Mardaux
Space
The centre is the centre is the centre of the invisible ‘I’. The looker and the unlooked looking at generalities of looking at the solipsistic centre where a glowing eye beams radial lines out past retinas, past nostrils, past grass, moles, ants and trees, past birds, beanstalks, pylon conductors, nuclear reactors, uranium bunkers, the worlds tallest buildings and seven out of ten wonders of the world, past cycloning interstellar debris, orbiting satellites and cycloning Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars and uniquely benefic Jupiter, past the malefic maleific Saturn, past anti-bargaining Uranus, past shape-shifting Neptune, past the cyclonic spin of Pluto, all the way past the Milky Way and Pleiades, cornering infinity, intersecting with some end, the avoidance of Death is the in-perpetuity circle circling cycling cycloning inside an inverted vortex that mistakes spin for motion and motion for advancement and advancements as a flat concentric thing, the art of looking is the warding off the inevitable eating of the centre, the snuffing of the centre, the centre, the centre of looking out.
Little dot A looking out calculating backwards the location of the centre, who, what, why, I, I, I, I, I, looking out from a comfortably saddled swamp worm, uncoiled, the penis E in the vulva and vice versa, D, a circle on an intersecting stick, the impregnated circle-dot becoming EYE. I begets ‘I’ in four gaits; the open, the closed, the preparing to open, the preparing to close. The W.A.F.E.s in their four; Water, Air, Fire, Earth, a single snaffle bit between their four heads, bridled by a child crying out ‘HYAAA!’ The eye eye eye in the head, heart and navel, lower your eyes when you think of babies, think bottom up, three eyes are better than two half-truth makers conflating singularity where singularity does not exist.
Aristotle’s irreducible elements concur, Water, Air, Fire, Water; coconuts in action splitting hairs, drawing milk, fatting nations, stabilising explosives. Aristotle’s reason in the sidereal lakes, blanketing tiny white light volcanoes, brain; planted cabbage on a long stalk jammed in spinal-juice, sucking electricity from pink digit whorls, in every finger face is a map of the stars and all their relations and inter-relations. From the tapestry of the palms, the head and heart lines, the fraying fate line spit and sprayed by a spitting Mound of Venus severing the Triangle of Mars, finger-limbs one, two, three, four, five, one a head, two a torso, three a heart, four a set of hands and feet, five a conscience to compare. In palms and feet all that is round is straight, igloos laid horizontal to reflect the Moon. Shake hands, clap thunder, grind brimstone, whet the areola. Flaked skin falls scattering ancestors’ tracks traced by star scouts wearing finely strung chicken feathers.
What is conscience? What is fact? The fingers, the toes, the eye in the forehead, the eye looking, the looking eye seeing past the future, the seeing and seen treading the same thought-rippled desert path.
Listen. Listen. Listen. Sanity is regulated velocity. Happiness is regulated sanity. Velocity is turning of Yeats’s gyre. Happiness stops starts stops. Spins.
About the Author
Born in central Scotland, Margot Margaux is a self-confessed nomad who only feels settled in a home that moves. She has lived in over fifty places with jobs and careers to match. She has taken many writing sabbaticals in America, India and briefly in Tibet in 2001 that intersects all of her writing. Margot is also an accomplished humanist astrologer in the UK and America and is the creator of a new form of poetry, 'The Chart Poem'. Margot lives with partner, photographer James Merrell and her daughter Zara on a houseboat on the Basingstoke Canal. As Margot Wilson she is also an expert in meditation, lucid and vivid dreaming and is creator of the Breath-Induced Vivid Dreaming technique.
She read philosophy as an undergraduate at Birkbeck, University of London and received an MPhil (Research) in philosophy from the University of Glasgow in 2016. Margot was awarded an MA English & Creative Writing with distinction from The University of Sheffield in 2017.
Margot's poems are published by BARE FICTION MAGAZINE (NOV 2017), ROUTE 57 (MARCH 2017), THE MECHANIC'S INSTITUTE REVIEW (NOV 2016).
She has recently completed her novel titled 'Loving Susan Sontag'. Her writing is considered experimental, frenetic, bathos and lyrical.
Margot has completed 5 collections of poetry, Larky v America, Primo Atlantis, Smoke My Feather, CC Pilgrim Trails and Chart Poems. Her short story titled ‘Horse Tails’ was published in the US online publication, First Writer, in 2014. Her one-act play titled ‘The Bag’ performed at Theatre in the Pound at The Cockpit Theatre in London and 'The Dream Doctor' performed at Sheffield's Drama Studio in June 2017.