Author's Note: Bozian refers to Dickens. I came into possession of my grandfather's collected Dickens and a smaller collection of other classics and, so, decided to use them for the purposes of poetry. I have structured the work into three distinct, but connected, parts, the Diary extracts [published in part below] being the first part, all from Dickens' books. The second part is a series of individual poems from seven classics by other authors. The third is a two-part long sequence, back to two remaining Dickens' books. In all cases, I've used the texts to create strict lexicons by applying parameters, in this case the last four words of each line of the first two chapters (or the whole books for the final sequence parts). The lexicons are then used as the basis for building the new texts using Constructionist techniques, relying heavily on the sub-conscious for selection and meaning.

a bozian journal
(extracts)

6 january

these pages
these hours
put to practice

sometimes beaten
as a question
of prediction

of legend kept
wild in death

in birth

evidences of what follows
seldom as proof

but prophetic still

as such bitter voices
saying the name
of desire turned about
to confound the silent eyes
of first light

second glance

without being early
without to stop

to move
to dwell upon
what was gone
and never repeated

as if resolved

dead to the world

14 january

in the light of day
words would have done
in poisoning
this pretence of affection

in pitching
the same old
half mad dreams
into a curious deceit

as though
an answer
read in the air
musty with time

an answer as if a sigh
a vestige of being
of what was found
in the kiss of morning come

7 february

if in all this time
had the pillow
of imagination
tired of tattooing
the folds
of bread brought
and flung ashore
then the dead
in the ground
would have been buried
for the shadows to see
as if having been
the perpetuation
of carefully scraped
scraps of letters found

but then
even more than when
that bread is brought
the dead are loved easier
than driving
the little things
that interest you now
than heaving
consoling lies
around in heaven
than getting
the remains
of night's dark shore
out without anything
more than words

9 february

dreamily spitting
into air that was faint

the blistering line

as it lay alike
over rough held stone

from a dusty hollow
towards the sun

showed the spot where
day and night

in a whisper

grew to become one

Copyright © John Mingay, 2016.