My Marble Eyes are Still Working

/ NN

The Drowned and the Inevitable

- Automatic horror movie soliloquy


Casual newsbreaks. Entities in waiting. Legitimacy calls. Crackdown. As if.

Dreams are about something. Casualties add up to it. Schools of fish being herded by the stars. Wait for daybreak. Do not touch the stones. Do not add water. Remove the bad tissue and do not follow the sparkles scuttling along. You have no idea. Do you want to talk about it?

When I was a small baby last week, there was a bad neighbor with good shoes. We had no idea what to sing, and it attracted a colony of guillemots. Crabs were sticking to nightmares, fieldtrips gathered in other lunchbags, and none of us ever went to school again. That's how I remember it. It might be just a story to you.

The last time I saw that wooden statue, I couldn't refrain from yelling at it. And for all that time, not a single cloud darkened the sky. A goose with two heads. A fairytale with a long fermented tail. Agony will please us. Just get on with the chores. No one will see these droplets. We will all be able to sleep sweetly.

Being told that there is an answer to that pain. We didn't expect anyone to emerge from the woods so soon. There was a fine mist, that's all. Looking down from the treetops. Not knowing. It is a craven bridge and it is running high. A fit of cramps and it all crumbles. It is all just a particular kind of bird. I have no wish to remain alone here. We wouldn't be anything but similar ghosts in this shade. Matter has a fragrance of lemon and seafood. We are encircled by scrapings.

Crabs running down the trunks. Please open this particular door.

Biting splenic flexure

Some lockjawed angel who breathes through a tube
found a baby in a limekiln just a hand’s span from Sodom.

All the mums and dads and grans and uncles
clamoured to know how the trick was done.

Trip wires, rabbits or geomancy
or the insertion of eels into intimate combat,

little fangs biting the slackjawed angel
whose pelvis was crushed beneath the wheels of the sun.

John Andersson: There's a nightly rainbow

John Andersson:

There's a nightly rainbow

(from Lucifer, 2000)







I.


In her brown whale eye

I see the corners pack off

Through the whirling world

Through the articles





II.


There's a nightly rainbow

A few can see

And by it's end

lies a golden farm

In the farm there's a man

Trembling in a web

Hold up your lantern

He's completely dry

Lift up his hand

From the table dust

And read the words

Written on a case





III.


In the sky shines a moon

Radiating bloomy ways

I can see no bone to pick

Nothing in the wind






1980

The text above was lifted from the recently updated digital poetry archive of the surrealist group of Stockholm. The image at the top by J A is titled ”John Andersson ser på valar”.

Book launch, Saturday 12th June

BOOK LAUNCH & POETRY READING
Saturday 12th June
3pm
Izzy Young Folklore Centrum
Wollmar Yxkullsgatan 2
Stockholm

EMMA LUNDENMARK
Organica Fläktrum
published by Styx

MERL FLUIN
The Reality Binge Trick
published by Head Louse Press

HYDROLITH COLLECTIVE
Hydrolith: Surrealist Research & Investigations
published by Oyster Moon Press

Sparky

The sparky man! Yes, he's so sparky. He's positively crackling. You know what I heard? There was this one time when he was supposed to be telling the children all about inorganic chemistry. I don't know why, it was something to do with the weather or the alignment of limbs or the dog star or whatever. Anyway, apparently he went all the way to the captain's quarters to steal the charts, right, because he didn't really know anything about inorganic chemistry but he knew that the captain had hidden a crib sheet inside one of the sea charts. But he stole the wrong charts and when he opened them up all this sticky stuff started pouring out! Imagine! It was all on his clothes and everything, LOL! That's not the point, though, anyway, the point is that he didn't have the right charts, and all the children were waiting, and all the mums and dads were there, and some of the mums were pushing pushchairs, you know, with big heaps of shiny tin cans piled up in the pushchair seats, with all the labels taken off. So you had to open the can to find out what was in it. So he started waffling and making things up, talking about tripods and bunsen burners and how the earth was at the centre of the sun, just whatever, and while he was talking he was sort of shuffling over to the pushchairs, and then he started rummaging around amongst the cans, still talking about magma and the universe and the galactic ice storm that had conjured all the stars into the Milky Way like ice crystals conjured into trees, and he kept on rummaging until he pulled out this one tin can that was all kind of blown out at the sides. I mean whatever was in there, meat or fish or whatever, I don't know, but that can was so old or had got so overheated from the sun or whatnot that whatever was in there must have been RANK and all the gas was trying to get out from inside the can and it was all blown up like a pregnant sea horse. And he slipped that can into his jacket pocket, still talking about iron ore and Sumatra and the boiling sulphur springs on the moon, and slipped off his jacket as if he was suddenly too hot, sweaty, needed to cool off, and then suddenly, WHAM, spinning his jacket round above his head, with that tin can still in the pocket, and spun it round and round and let go so that it flew off up into the sky, and then it fell back down and hit the blackboard at the front of the room, and the tin can exploded and the jacket caught fire and thousands and thousands of scorpions poured out and started running around everywhere. That's what I heard, anyway, from Nicola's mum, and her boyfriend's dad was there and saw it with his own eyes. And that's why the call him the sparky man, because he loves lightning so much that he has a big burn mark right down one side of his chest.

Forensic taxonomy

Crops shattering
as if downright nevertheless, in a tumbleweed scenario forgetting whom to benefit, and as if it was in those pages in those sullen despair of dictation fortnights subtle countermeasures not in such an open scenery - look don't look there might not be someone there to reproach you, and you might simmer starlings for the weight of your inanimate bloodshed, and intimidating maggots, though not of madness shed and not of simplemindedness ordered around to the tablecloth and its ultimate corner in the serrated latitudes,
none there to supervise, mortuary gamewise sampled, teaspoon of solicitude, dropped into this marble as if by coarse-ground sector schematics, I had never alotted fairways this scrambled crayfish and laughter housewise, forcefully reproaching the guidelines and crumbling the sacks of necessities hidden in a candlestick,
not knowing how thereby the life of scallops and their shallow tendrils approach the intimacy of gathered nestlings,
not at all, not a single bloodshed to this fortunate essay of lost moments and cough syrup,
had we only been fastened by this atrocity or another and seen or not seen voracity take another direction in history-


(in the comprehensive program of automatism exercises, somebody had suggested writing an automatic text drunk.)


(Byssus threads which might illustrate the "tendrils of scallops")

Cutlery ethnology

Dream suggestion: Some groups of people have developed the skills of eating using four or five chopsticks in their left hand, which resembles a bird's nest or more specifically imitates "Aristotle's lantern" (the chewing apparatus of sea urchins). They themselves prefer to liken it to the beak of a squid, which it does not resemble. It is however remarkably apt for both crushing and peeling shrimp.

Tree geometry

As if non-seeing promises would have benefitted from such doubts and dashes and the skies were nothing but illustrious, clear and wasted, and there would have been nothing to carry on, except in modern snowflakes, or the carcasses of beloved machines, and no seven wholehearted ash-carriers climbing the strange ladders; it might all have been a pathway to hinterlands of sycomore barriers as well; water could not be carried there, stones would assume other meanings, neighbors offered their necks and turtles went mad; as did we all but fell asleep and spilled our effort in the grand bathtub of inertia.

(english-language automatic text saturday morning; such exercises are not often seen here but now part of a collective project; what if we were to continuously post such inconclusive outbursts and really populate the desert in a dalinian sense, o noise and vanity)

Polytheism of the Imagination

Some Local Deities

Some local Deities, painting by Niklas Nenzén

So she walked on the burning before she took her shoulder's narrow road, a lone chameleon and what she wore on her head. A basket of sticks bent by the wind. And eternity was just one of those ordinary thin cloud streaks.

No one saw who attacked whom either. With only a bark of surprise and a rotten smell, like the return of discarded fruit. For they had succeeded.

It was not even a real party, just a frequent meeting which everyone, for once, could attend. And they had just begun to move slowly, towards the evening. Even though those in the city thought otherwise, they would meet them at night.

/ Emma Lundenmark

The First Sighting of the Lone Chameleon

Polytheists of the imagination are known for trying to support and give in to the temptation to perform heathen rituals in honor of gods of which we know nothing more than we can imagine.