is a lactose intolerant Milkman, Undertaker's Assistant, Yellow Van Man, Ditch Digger, Mosaicist, Fordham Park Festival Co-Founder, Deptford Kite Managing Editor, Irrigation Worker, Singer with One True Dog, Bookkeeper, Pre-Apples-&-Snakes Performance Poet and Meter Reader, who has performed in the hold of an old Fish Factory Ship in Amsterdam and into the ear of someone who looked like death on the evening of October 31st. He has recently brought out his second book of poems (this one includes a CD) The Tooth Agenda with Eatlatinandie. The book is wondrously illustrated by Dave Eyre of Books of Secrets using stills from his animations.
Zolan Quobble is a frequent performer at Hugh Metcalfe´s Klinker Club and Sibyl Madrigal´s Boat Ting see www.zolanquobble.co.uk , www.myspace.com/zolanquobble.co.uk and www.myspace.com/onetruedog .
Ear Unravelling
The conversation is lost in itself.
Lights dim.
Hearing settles in.
Cloth softly percusses on cloth.
There´s a deliberate lengthening of breath.
Dust readies itself to be stood up
in wave after invisible wave
especially in crevices.
Big ears unfurl into a shape
defined by a pluck
humming in a curvaceous,
resinous, hard body.
A note hangs like a lobe from the ceiling,
drops to thread through costume threads
and disappear into fat
undertones of belly and hip,
overtone inflections of bright surface.
The ear, a labyrinth, unravelling
from end to end.
Steel cat gut taut across a neck.
Wood moulded round the sound
of the string
excited by strokes and scratches,
warmed on a finger, thumb plectrum.
The whole instrument ringing
with autonomic nervousness
come into its inanimate frame
of felled trees and smelted rock.
The pick up, iron lips
vibrating in a magnetic field.
A body electric
strung between pylons,
strung between cooling towers and twisted
white blades turning in the mist,
strung between earth and potential.
ZQ 04-2010
A Night In Late Carbon
The sun goes down
like a red stop.
Light burns cold,
a cable length
from drum humming explosions
running along
wet streets, through signs,
under dark parks
into window glowing honeycombs.
Sky revolves
on treads of shadow
like a rubber tyre
glaucous with mud,
black and shiny
after a dim rainbow
left quivering
on a puddle.
A smokey moon
looms on the film,
then soaks away
between grains of tarmac.
Red eyed and streaming
in exhaust,
the sun comes up.
Zolan Quobble 2008