les échiquiers effrontés

"Duchamp's Nude came eddying down the staircase carrying a chessboard & some sort of dictionary. 'Your move,' she said. I started with 'angular.' She won in less than ten moves. Kept on winning. Even when I painted the board red she beat me. It wasn't until I started opening with Smurfs or the sigils of YouTube & Facebook, things she'd never seen before, that I began to be competitive. I finally won when I brought Nelson Mandela forward. That's when Daddy stepped in. I never won again. 'A readymade Mark,' he called me," Mark Young - Conceptual and surrealist visual poetry constructed on chessboard grids by the Australia-based poet and editor of the international journal, Otoliths.