Poetry: Mark Young

Mark Young

The Tingle Tango
(A Tom Beckett Title)
 
Written for beginner string groups
in a classy yet sassy style, it provides

 
the perfect heat for all your dishes &
can also be used as a tanning accele-
 
rator. From start to finish it provides
unbiased political news &, for a few
 
dollars more, informed racing inform-
ation so that you can take advantage
 
of Jonbon being all class & certain to
retain the annual Tingle Tango title.

***

 

A line from Ferdinand de Lesseps

I couldn't center the camera properly;
had to change it to combat settings
in the game options. Such a pity that
Google doesn't actually read your mind
 
instead of just appearing to. That way
there wouldn't be a need to enunciate a
question which was already in my mind
& so could be answered immediately

 
rather than having to trawl through gar-
dens of legal jargon or plough through
layers of opacity in order to access the
root of it & capture proof.txt from /root.

***

 

Not noted whether

she took the advice 
of her careers advisor
& spent the following 
day learning from 
Fluxus how to turn 
paintballs into dust 
storms—& vice versa—
using only increased 
plasma viscosity &
environmental politics.

***

 

Virtual Memories
(A Tom Beckett Title)
 
Motorcycle wokeness did not
manifest itself until after
Mother had died. At least that's
how I remember it. I woke up,
was told Mother had passed,
went out & bought myself a

two wheel beast. Not a Harley —
Mother would never forgive me
for doing that — but rather one
of those 750cc Japanese models
that you ride sedately on only
if that's what you want to do.

Will overtake most anything that
you'll find on the highway apart
from the odd kangaroo. Which
is what happened to me; & now
I'm in a coma, have no conscious
memories, am virtually a corpse.

***

 

 

lemon centered

To aid in constructing a short
historical overview of community
membership & its desire for a
legacy — no matter how far-
reaching the impact — proper
hazard recognition, even when
released in mystery blind boxes,
is fundamental. Entropy always

increases when anti-leptons are
annihilated; &, in this epoch of
recombination, the possibility
of a closed universe, oscillating
forever, means that gravity may
eventually block any expansion.

***

Bio: Mark Young was born in Aotearoa / New Zealand but now lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. He has been publishing poetry for over sixty-five years, & is the author of around seventy-five books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, non-fiction, & art history. Books due out later this year include Balance, from Neo-Mimeo Editions, Nualláin House, Monte Rio, California & From the Cave’s jukebox, from Sandy Press, Santa Barbara, California.

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Setu, November 2025