Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette (trans. Beautiful Breath: Veil Water, 1921)
A semi-ready-made bottle of perfume with label showing title & head-shot photo of Rrose Sélavy (Duchamp in drag), with puns on Helen of Troy & eau de toilette, all making "fun of wealth, luxury and exclusivity, and the seductions of advertizing."
A distance from Rose to Rrose is infra thin, or have you been paying attention?
Funhouse to pun house Helen’s the ploy, veil’s in the voilette & we’s back splashing with mutts
Don’t hold your breath, or horses, Trojan This ad shows (on the nose) fragrant swirls gender choices disguised voices, altars for breezy Err’os(jus réduction de Mad Ave)
Flirty pictures& words, words, words – do not swill
They’s defo avant times deux du jour one pro’noun fluid is another’s inframince trans’lator
Plastic Arts simply sifter swifter on the ball better’nol’Slo’PoWorld
Five painted glass plates [spinning] on a metal axis [wired to a motor] creating the illusion of complete [target-like] concentric circles on a single plane when seen in motion from a distance of one meter.
Spinning eyes is spun I’s
Canny stump jump rotary targets, Doc’s Duch fix precision optics
Vision subs detach retina – aka queered rewired works of art –
Ol’ pal Guillaume warns he’s A+ energy anti-artist (think maybe Linus Pauling, Vit C)
First he stiffed his dentist then he thieved oculist eye charts
What a goy!Incite on route two nerve an’ a&satoriall-in-one
No collusion view, peripherals eyeshot
Anamorphosis(look’it up yourself, we did!)
Toss one to five glass plates in air, & wait . . .
Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 23 books and 6 chapbooks in print from Blazevox Books, Chax Press, Ekstasis Editions, Spuyten Duyvil, Thistledown Press, and several others. His work has also appeared as an e-book (Argotist, United Kingdom) and in well over 200 literary journals in Canada, the U.S., England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Croatia, Finland, and Turkey, as well as in eight anthologies, on radio, and on YouTube. His personal papers are archived for scholarly use at Simon Fraser University Library’s Contemporary Literature Collection. His website is stephenbett.com.