Big thanks to Vaughan Rapatahana in NZ for this publication. He’s part of a project that (from the site) “offers an unprecedented opportunity for voices all over the world to share, in quality fiction and non-fiction, poetry and dialogue, art and music and more, the collective experiences of the international community during COVID.” https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com

My asemic poems are very recent, taken from my upcoming book The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler with Zimzalla Press. One is a crystal and one a landscape. https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com/2020/08/07/asemic-s-j-fowler/

Here is what I wrote for the site “i suppose, in a sense, a great deal of the experiences we have all gone through, if not the actual horrible sickness of covid itself, has been one of self-confrontation through lockdown’s pragmatic and practical limitations on our movements and space. in this sense then, i am interested in a poetry that acknowledges its inability to eloquently express inner dialogue, mood swings, clouded thought patterns, meaningless and often banal swings of feeling, and the expression of that. i think asemic, or semantically fraught poetry, gets to that. these poems are about synapses flashing and other things you can’t see but see anyway.”

Eating Bulgogi, memoriesare not the

porno a poem for Marcus Slease on the occasion of his 39th birthday

—and visual translation

- —-(man under a tree)

- – — – - by erkembode

david kelly

does that mean if you come here, you find?
I saw him see snow & ask ‘long, outside?’
does that mean if there’s snowfall snow hero fell fell?
do you know Daughn Gibson of the desert? u shud
write a song about an open road hobo
called the Mew Too & get sued by the Splendids
for foreign snow is a stage between glass & friends

remember the tree in the story, not the sitter
the throne is where it’s at, not the Kinga neighbouring love with wave its way jessMongol mermaid will not sight bloodbut that’ll not stop the threads clenchingthere are chicken cheekbones so delicatea man could not have told you, not possiblehere here _ _ _ in koe rea, who did I say, again?the performance of a thick, remonstration of regret

the worms of the Brain migrate to the pot
for the waste of human fruit (more fool them
it’s the coffee that’s the thing, the black choc)
it’s a long way down from the temple to the outre dark
but is it worth it for / depends on whome & with where
that which you’ll have clamped off will be so
let us them (mate) tell me about it