By Mark Twain.
But that’s always the way; it don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person’s insides, and yet ain’t no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer he says the same.
Or, On What There Is.
By J H Prynne.
[...] No dream
all hunger in the mouth get the fuck out of joy and beauty come on
be direct for a change truth to tell not even war but abject misery
the nothing to not have not eat, feel your mouth lost for words
and minimum fluid intake. Dry is not a sound dwindling beyond
utterance because in the very internal being of the nothing that
is not there, empty. What language is this unable to be spoken
tongue cracked I saw no need nor use for the dialect beyond all
that so is self-being implicit as a luxury good, fancy handbag
for what you’ll never put in it or snap its glitzy closure void
at heart and brain where mouth unoccupied not even known, even
or not, masticate on words of the species unquoted on the ex-
change so far below par. Keep very calm since excess along the
indigent/indignant border is the radiant bonus paid out against
Rule One. The calmness is a special kind of final joy even at
deep unkindness, because it is the truth of things and this
truth shall not make you free, to sit still or not it is for
sure necessitous but man-made and not by necessity this limpet
contradiction faces the void and is the truth of captivity, to
know this is the joy of ruin and needfulness feel these words
in the feral mouth of separation this too no lick no spittle,
freedom too costly even at the top end or especially there (Rule
Four) our bonds are our sure bondage already in manifest plain
view I saw this too. [...]
By Gillian Rose.
Subsequently, I found myself in a routinely tedious faculty meeting, in which, as usual, I carried no presence whatsoever. As drivers insist that the blaring radio aids their concentration on the road, so I always found that a volume open on my lap enabled me to pay the small amount of attention needed to navigate these shallows. When asked with withering detection by the impassive secretary whether the book I was blatantly perusing was good, I nonchalantly replied, “I only read good books.” I responded similarly to her policing my failure to send a note of apology for a meeting that I actually managed to miss, “But I’m not sorry.” On this particular occasion, I was aware of an intense aura emanating from someone whom I had never seen before, an intense, sexual aura, aimed precisely and accurately at my vacant being. “A man,” I wondered, “could there be a man in this meeting?” He looked weather-beaten, his flat, lined faced suffused with a self-consciously alert intelligence and a knowledge of sensual power. I had no idea who he was, and did not pursue the matter.
From Minimum Security Prison Dentistry, by Stephen Fowler.
as rare as
rocking horse
shit
my love for tacky
Eastern European sluts
with cheap handbags,
stressed denim
& frizzed out hair
you can save up
for an expensive
handbag your whole life
& still
they will only want
what you give
hate these suicidal poets
who are pushing the mid-30s
& dress like tampons
just so they can maybe
sneak up a drunk student’s
gash
rich girls are so pampered
& self indulgent
they either dress like brats
OR a minister’s daughter
they are clean though
& this is what it
is really about.
a haircut
on the trolley
a washing line like flags
is meant to remind you
of Apartheid
From Mercier and Camier by Samuel Beckett:
The century was two months old.
Look at it now.
A silence ensued which Camier was the first to violate.
Well, he said, do we put it up now or wait for the weather to worsen?
Mercier scrutinised the inscrutable sky.
Go take a look, he said, and see what you think.
Camier again gained the corner of the street. On his return he said:
There is perhaps a little light below the verge. Would you have me go up on the roof?
Mercier concentrated. Finally he exclaimed, impulsively:
Let us put it up and pray for the best.
But Camier could not put it up.
Give it here to me, said Mercier.
But Mercier had no better success. He brandished it above his head, but controlled himself in time.
What have we done to God? he said.
Denied him, said Camier.
Don’t tell me he is all that rancorous, said Mercier.
Camier took the umbrella and vanished up the stairs.
From In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust:
And, seeing upon the water, where it reflected the wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: “Damn, damn, damn, damn!”
By Edward St Aubyn.
‘They fuck you up. They don’t mean to but they do,’ she sighed. ‘Who says they don’t mean to?’ growled Patrick.
By Thomas Ligotti.
He pressed the doorbell, which he said was a ‘buzzer-type bell,’ as opposed to the type that chimed or tolled its signal. However, in addition to the buzzing noise that was made when he pressed the button for the doorbell, he claimed that there was also a ‘jingle-jangle sound’ similar to that of sleigh bells.
Bad Press (so liberated from the imperatives of purposive activity it’s unreal)
IS PLEASED TO ANNOUCE
* * n e w ! * *
CARIBOU, by AMY DE’ATH
A cerebrally serpentine collection of love poems re-working the lyric into a silken girder that will dizzy you with echoes of itself ALL AFTERNOON: in short, YES.
Caribou whizzes its readers from the ‘Fast Eddy’ of East London to the ‘Vertigo Valley’ of West Canada. “Now I am conducive to everything” writes Amy De’Ath and she means it, through her wonderfully sassy lyric ‘I’ that negotiates the rapids and gulps at the cliff edge with never a flicker of introspective self-importance. These poems are fleet-footed and fancy-free. They love to dance but they know the depths they skip across, the brow that beetles, the heart that almost disintegrates. So they are an example to us. — John Wilkinson
Accelerates from fast break scatter into pocketa pocketa: a love careen. “This thing-ting, thinking! … this out-of-sync wonkybeat,” this poetry knows its game too well not to bash the balls off the table. Go on, De’Ath, “boom brighter than the moon.” – Cathy Wagner
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From Veer, Critical Documents, Anything Anymore Anywhere. Starry Snood Model’s Own
