8182750The Reality Binge Trick

8/9/2019 8182750The Reality Binge Trick

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THE REALITY BINGE TRICK

Merl Fluin

Head Louse Press


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The Reality Binge Trick

by Merl Fluin

Merl Fluin 2010

ISBN 978-1-4452-6470-7

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-

Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.

To view a copy of this licence, visit

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite

300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Additional copies of this book can be ordered from Lulu

http://www.lulu.com/


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For Julian, talking Utopia


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THE REALITY BINGE TRICK


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Blackhat

Im the blackhat with teeth made of liquorice. Got slung by myown gun, got a malformed function. A happy trigger-slapperstoned on paradisiac potions, despoiling worldly earths acrossknown galaxies of dust. The Saturn returns of my complexiontease stormy cups in every port. Dont mess with me or Illtick-tock your pugsley, you little cockspittle. Do you want someyet?


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On Hypnogogic Love Considered from a PurelyScientific Standpoint

On mornings like this I ceaselessly re-imagine youminiaturised to the size of a Victorian china dolldressed in crinolines and dirty bloomersreclining under hot lights in a vivarium of gravel and cactiwith your back arched against the rocksand your knees raised and parted

and a silver skink creeping from between your lips.

It's going to be as lushly romantic as a calcified horse tail on agreen velvet cushion

but to make it all perfect I have to use those wine glasses withthe broken stems

and I'm afraid to go behind the supermarket to get thembecause Lord Byron is there and he's making passionate love to

Thomas Thorild on the broken-up cardboard boxes by thedumpster

they're making an incredible amount of noise and there's fruitpeel and bits of cardboard flying everywhere

Byron has a cloven hoof and a lovely voice and Thorild hasbeautiful hands

only I can't always tell for sure which is which.

These soft reptiles are draping themselves all round the side ofmy bath

I'm trying to wash my hair before you get here but the water'sclogged with enzymes

and the reptiles keep scratching my earlobes with their spinylittle claws.

I've been trying and trying to get you a doctor's appointment.Your fontanelle never closed, it just migrated to your heart.


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Bee Radiation

Birdsong and aspartame run like packs through arterialvineyards.

With their mynah birds strung out like torch lights thehenchmen are breaking every sumptuary law.

I could milk my fingers like udders. Ladybirds creep throughyour moustache.

Your gorgeous Y-incision would pucker beneath me.

We would succumb to bee radiation and fall thickly back intoashes.Our hearts would form an archipelago. This planet has two

suns.


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The Polymath of Perversity

Trickier than Odysseus with a greasy thumbNever leaves the house without: keys, mobile, mammal

capsule, broken hand, two spare glass eyes, glandular hinge,tinderbox

Tracked by tinnitus or hearing aidsGets down and dirty with the lord of the fliesNon-stop fingering of a gardening attitude

Doubled up and saturnine, face smeared with chlorophyll,every pore a war zone for trickster gods

At this latitude the morphologies slip their constellationsOnanists look like ships on fire, hermits look like ambulances,

duellists look like phosphenes, and superheroes look likeprehensile scientists

Occipital crick-crack, the mammalian gambleShouts gangway, gangway for the stump of your humanServes a term as supplicant to your armed proboscis

This declaration of love has been tampered with


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Dingo 73

dingo 73 is the eat-me centre of the corazn lineevery skinwalker bears its own chiliastic promise like a spider

in a pelicans mouthempties the pharmacy in a swoop of stockingskeeps its finger on the indexcoughs up a flurry of thumb-lovers

scars of grey felt glint over the snow-brinetheir equipment in mufti for a black cocoon sportsmoothed across a patina of minty chihuahua chops

the door contains the seeds of its own destruction


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Larval and Azure

larval and azure, the tracheal glisterconquers the breastbone in boreal daylightgrey as the cinnamon-traders horseswhose hooves spark milk from the flinty paths


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Doppelgnger

I awoke in the night beside your doppelgnger.His hands were a conspiracy of insects.His heart was a murmuring speculum.The bed was full of non-sequiturs.I kissed him as if you were me.His breath was wetter than muslin.In the morning my bath water was streaming with your angels.


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Handbag

Your swollen octopus is in my handbag.

Its too big to bite and its too wet to suck.

When I stroke its head it cries like a dog.

When I push my fist into its mouth it chokes like a baby.


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Aurora Borealis Over London

Lets have a sance.The world authority on madness enjoys a well deserved rest in

his exquisite garden.Here indeed we see the fulfilment of philosophys design,just as though we had become aware of our sex,once it was wolves, now it is booty.

You helped him over the worst, Captain.The dreamer had been in a book-shop,a good that we do not even dare to desire,but he was struck by a poisoned dart and only managed to say

two words:Campo Tosto, cunning with the bow.

Once I had some mission to execute in the waste portions of theworld down beyond the Surrey Docks.

Careful! Weve arrived Always eager for some new infatuation,I had agreed to join a party for a sleigh-ride; but I had to wait a

long time before the news came that the sleigh was at thedoor.

Dont you think I can recognise love, that I see it when it is

there and realise when it isnt?

The fright never leaves me if the night is dark and the solitudedeep;

in general, in dreams occurring during the same night,those re-hashed Greek day-dreams about the rights of man,

which have become so ridiculous.There is a rainbow in my heart,I search my mind; I go back to an old notion on which I set my

heart far away in the nineties of the last century.


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And then a great bulk of notes and suggestions for The Hill ofDreams.

Look, you neednt be afraid.I do not expect to be believed simply by announcing so many

marvellous events and incomprehensible results:in spite of many thousands of years of effort,the poor devil had been dreaming his daydreams as he walked

on the snow with half-naked feet.


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How to Dispose of a Corpse

Stop kissing it.Shave its head. Soak the hair in vinegar and allow to stand

in the airing cupboard overnight. Plant the hair neatly using abulb planter in the early autumn. By spring you will have sixjolly fat mares growing out of your vegetable patch.

Remove the tongue and release it back into the sea to re-joinits wilder brothers.

Incinerate the head. The sound will be unpleasant but theears, lips and teeth will melt easily. The eyeballs however willshrink and crack like glass; you will need to retrieve them fromthe grate and get rid of them separately.

Separate the limbs from the torso using levers and strongrope.

If the corpse has breasts, dress them in a balm of butter,sugar and lavender flowers. If not, open the chest and pullapart the rib cage to release the loose-skinned brown lizardthat revolves inside. You will notice the smell as the bonescrack open. Note: you will need both hands for this.

The softness of the belly and the foulness of the contents willinvariably make you retch. Get this part over with as quicklyas possible, and don't bother trying to find any romance in it.

Lungs, kidneys, liver and spleen should be placed all

together inside the hollow tree trunk by the swings in the park.This can then be left to the elements, set light to, or buriedunder water at a later date.

The navel should be allowed to continue to guard itsmysteries.

Rub down the thigh bones with glass paper and molasses.The patellae can be removed in the same way as contact lenses.Detach the fleshy parts of the calves which are good wheneaten.

When removing the hands, take care not to ruin the orb ofthe wrist bone, but let it keep its blind milky eye intact. Cut inthis fashion, the hands of the dead have many properties. Acorpse's fingers will do quite as well in a woman's hair asbetween her thighs, and if placed in her mouth will bring herboth migraines and longevity.


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Prepare the back by inserting red-headed map pins alongthe ridge of the spine. Do not substitute the map pins with

cufflinks. The spine itself is both indestructible and self-fastening, and you will have to carry it on your own back fromnow on. It will chafe your skin and the sores will run withoutrespite, as a constant reminder of your bestial intelligence.

Doubtless you will have been entertaining high hopes for theheart as the climax of this night's work. What have you beenimagining you will find there in that raw hole? A prairie fire, ascalding geyser, a meteorite, a leaping trout, a tiger lily, amermaid, a cloven hoof, an electric eel, the nub of a pearl, adirty razor blade, a catherine wheel, a tinder box, a cute littlepuppy, your mother, a branding iron, a glass slipper, a fightingrooster, a poker game, Perseus's sword, a bloody pillowcase, thebaby Jesus, a white-hot syringe, a seething vivarium, apiranha, a lioness, iron ore, a cathedral of granite, a flaminglibrary, a spider in a pint glass, a dripping rainforest, an

extraterrestrial landscape, an enchanted mirror, an expresstrain, a sticky honey bee, a golden viper, a centipede, a meltingglacier, a devouring mouth, the head of Orpheus, a goshawk, aphoenix, a goat's eye, a lightning conductor still wet from thestorm? Dry your eyes, it's only a wet piece of offal.

Before disposing of the rest, try to wait for the shudders tostop.


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Vanilla Baby

Pardon me for bothering you but I think I left my vanilla babyin your house.Have you seen her.Can you please go and look.I think I put her down on your sofa.She might have crawled into the cushions.

She might have slipped out of the back door while you weregardening.Your pets might have eaten her.Your family might have trodden on her.It was when I was in your living room and you had goneupstairs.You were gone for half an hour.I could hear you moving about and I could hear your voice but I

don't know what you were saying.While you were gone I started looking through your shelves. Iopened your cupboards. I found a drawer full of glue pots andpieces of felt, and another full of boys' underwear all differentsizes, and one full of dice, and one full of feathers and milletseeds, and another full of tiny little dead mice.I looked at all the papers on the table and then underneath the

papers I found a stick of charcoal covered in chewing gum. Ipulled off the chewing gum and gave it to my vanilla baby toplay with. I snapped the charcoal in two and put one piece inmy mouth and sucked and licked it until dark brown drool randown my chin. I put the other piece inside the nappy of myvanilla baby.Then you came downstairs wearing a different set of clothesand with a strange bruise on your face and asked me in a funny

way whether I had brought any food with me and could I smellanything.I ran out of the house all the way to the railway station butwhen I got there I realised I had left my vanilla baby behind.Maybe you don't remember.Maybe I left her somewhere else.


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Maybe she went into the kitchen or maybe after I had gone youcarried her upstairs and locked the door and said some of those

things to her.I don't know what those things are because you never say themto me but perhaps at night-time if you had her you wouldwhisper them to my vanilla baby.


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London Monster

I am as sleek as a suburban tempest. Exposed to oxygen, Iflare with desire on contact. The stars stagger and collide astheir control panels catch fire. I wheel in the space betweenthem and my fur flies. In this constellation my tongue swellsand glints with goose-fat; in the next my tail-brush dripsmagnesium pollen onto the surface of the Thames; in anothermy penis suckles my belly like a lamprey. Like a clockwork

inferno, having risen, I fall through the layers of corrugatedcardboard night and land all four paws on the white lines of anempty car park. Live prey and dead metaphors sprawl on theverges. With my usual nonchalance I take my pick and dragmy trophy into the rhododendrons. I glide like hot milk acrossthe pavements.

A rat-run opens like a laddered stocking. Greasy papers andapple cores roll between the alley walls. My little feet go pit-a-pat through the smears of custard and honey as my path leadsaway from the shut-down market stalls and between thefacades of the supermarket to my right and the chip shop to myleft. A dip, a jump, a rush from a drainpipe, and I enter thepubic hair of London.

Every stone, fibre, rusting clamp and crumbling concreteslab is gold in my sweet yellow tooth. There is nothing in this

vinegary landscape that wouldn't swoon and yield to my wetmouth. Every cleft in the mud opens and closes behind my tail.I burrow down to the hot sticky centre of the Earth, my passingheralded by a thousand ring tones. Human hairs wrapthemselves between my toes. Tropical bacteria line the city'sinvisible corridors like the velvet interior of a lubricatedanimal-engine. Rus in urbe. The breath of every virus heavesand presses against my sweating flanks as I run, ecstatic,through tubes of rippling spores, eyes closed, mouth open,guided by scar tissue and clitoral scent trails.

Then while you're asleep I lie on the end of your bed anddreams crawl across my skin like lice. With every whimper I'mcalling on Apollo to raise armies of stink; with every twitch I'mleading a horde of desiccated offal across slick plains of meat;with every fart I'm unfurling long banners of silky obedience.


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In the morning you'll let me lick your face and I'll releasegrains of alien invasion into your open eyes. I am the ultimate

double agent in the service of many wills, organic and mineral,mammal and machine, penetration and juxtaposition. Mydigestive tract is the launch pad and final destination of amaster plan to destroy the human race; my seasonal cuntopens onto scenes of barbarism; my anus is a puncture woundin your domestic interior.

Now in the daylight you duck and curse when you see mecoming, but I could fly right through your heart and youwouldn't even catch a glimpse. You'd just feel the tug of mywings through your body, a fluttering between your breasts, asmear-test scrape at the bottom of your throat. It would beover before you knew it, and while you were still coughing I'dalready be plunging into the heart of the one behind you.


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Walpurgis

Where were you while I was tonguing the aphidsdown by the place of fear where agate sparked on the slipwayand cannibals asked for parley from between my syncopated

thighs.

In the house of wax I grooved on rill-bones,gorged on crow-meat and blindsided the houyhnhnms.

Hounded by airborne alphabets I steered for the land of thedead.

Sleep tight, necromancer, in this eyeless orbit.Your rose-petalled lungs make colophonic war games.Snuggled down in larval splendour, your synapse bone will tell

you your desires.


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Southend

Imaginary lizards sunned themselves between Boboliphantoms. Octopuses pulsed on the counter of everynewsagent; one flew through the air on makeshift wings. Atrail of wax and coal marked its route along the shoreline.

Meanwhile in the crooked house, ectoplasm frothed from thelavatory bowl and dead sea animals decayed in the shower

basin.

Pods burst and stuttered in traction. Umbilical cords grewteeth; fishermen used them as bait for mermaids.


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Decoder

polypentacular starflies are pupating between the exhibitsfireworking the orderlies with a golden chrysalis digging stickrhythmic wasps taste the dark moon under glass on a map of

the coastlinethe opening is a ripped tin cobraits hot syrupy dripsare still undreamt


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The Reality Binge Trick

The reality binge trick:In the red Madam attic, the belted child looks like

contamination.A labyrinthodon stalks the male wetside.Now repeat your lesson:

snybbkst, a word for a new type of hooligan.


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Equant

Slithering comets leave their stains on the kitchen floornightly.

The ladybirds crow like cockerels on an axis of 23 degrees.My belly is an astrolabe taking readings from the rotations of

insects.Sun spins beneath the darkness. The pupae are in eclipse.


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Gumshoe

The gumshoe is thickest here.Riding along the gamble-cable,Golden, bee-pelted, lapping iron,Loping through breakfast like a Sun King,Folding antonyms around arachnophobic breastsWith hips swinging avuncular-style.The masks sting like eucalyptus.

Only the mathematicians are unbearded.


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The Coral Ape

now heres the coral apebreaking her demotic waterssee her little tippy-toessee her golden sweetie-pieshes nipple-sucking tufted mangoeskeeps Byzantium stashed on a lilac shelfcarpeted with crackling ampoules

with her belly-rents gauzier than butterfly dampers


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Daydream Addict

Whats it for, all this machinery?The candied glass ridges blistered my tonguewhile I chartered my last unbroken finger.

To perform keyhole surgery at that hour of the morningI would have needed a popsicle, or one of your earrings.

Batcave or funhouse? Your breath clouds the engine.Thoughts of you in an iron lung turn me wet and bristly,like snowdrifts on the balcony, or nitrogen burns on the floor.


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Spiral City

Picture the city as it spirals upwards from the planet's surface,as cold as a woodlouse and silent as a beak. Picture thecrunching humans below, their faces shiny with amniotic fluidas they do their christmas shopping, clutching their purses tobarnacled breasts. Somewhere leeward of analgesic tradewinds a giant is walking across an icy plateau, pushing his feetthrough the clattering snow. His hair is plastered against his

forehead, his wings are retracted into his body, his beard's allretinal against his carapace, and somewhere inside a deeptrouser pocket his hip-flask is undergoing acceleratedevolution. Fungal spores are released from his eyelids as herubs at his face with a stolen handkerchief. High above him atthe city's winking tip he thinks he can make out the shape ofan empress poised like a figurehead above orbital waves; andout even further, far far beyond her, nothing but gall,pubescence, and the twinkling of a thousand tiny abattoirs.


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Neoteny

It has recently come to my attention that, under certainconditions during the normal sleep cycle, my bodymetamorphoses into yours.

My jawbone becomes your sutra, your throat buzzes withelectronic voice phenomena, a damselfly appears between mythighs, and I become your paedomorph.

By this unusual methodology you are able to play in my housein the dark.

Some nights you slither around the bed legs and grapple myclothes with your phantom limb.

Some nights you creep downstairs and masturbate on the sofa.

Usually I only know what has happened because of the messyou have left behind: the half-open drawer, the smear markson the window, the smell of your pelt on the furniture.

But last night I woke up for the first time with your body stillplunging through mine.

For the first time I saw your skin scale and flare.

I heard your breath rise and fall like pinking shears or a battleor the spores of some fanatical coral.

I watched your teething ring enter the eustachian tube and

pass through the dappled glade into the fiacre.

And then I fell back to sleep.


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The Magic Bullets

Since the moment I first saw them Ive been hopelesslyobsessed with the scars from those magic bullets. Ports ofsimultaneous exit and entry, theyve kept me awake and hadme dreaming ... Chlorophyll seeps from them as they liepassively in the dark. When I slip the jack under the skin Ihear the sigh as their lips gently close around the conductor.Oily metal jacks make a sharp sliding motion, whereas more

organic probing devices work differently. A tooth, say, will pullthe scar right open, wide and shallow; hands and feet will boreslow hard spirals, while a head will bring about totalmetamorphosis by forced entry. Exotic varieties of keyholesurgery can be performed with the introduction of hot cuttingwires into each scars central aperture, or endoscopes insertedfor the inspection, tender and aggressive by turns, ofcomplexity in action.

But different elementals are in play when the scars becomeactive and extrude feathery tendrils to catch and ingest passingorganisms such as oral bacteria, epithelial cells or homunculi,or when they squirt torrents of self-fertilising eggs while youretaking a shower. At other times and quite without warningthey can suddenly shoot forth knives or root-stems orcompound eyes or exploding endoskeletons, or yes if we get

lucky one day maybe even those actual magic bullets.As they open and close, push and pull, ingest and excrete in

irregular rhythms, I can take each scar in turn entirely into mymouth, and my tongue is coated with a million tiny hairs whichtrample the surface to pick up the vibrations of distantbiochemical suns. Nodes become nipples which sprout teethand bite the soft palate between gulps of amniotic fluid. Magicbullets erupt from the skin and slither away from you acrossthe papers on your desk towards me. We can take it in turns tocry helplessly. Youre sleeping now, but Im wide awake, andIm counting over those magic bullets like a miser.


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Lightning Oaths

now coming rainlike under the seanow arcing skywards, whetted with firefire on a thread to measure gravitys zeromy teeth in your holsteryour skinned holsterand all those lightning oaths turned into ravens


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Campanile

he drops his thyroid into her lapunder the seeding campanilewet larks' feet pearled in the space hoppersky belling and drop-weatheredpasted breasts curled inside the foreskin

her bristly cormorant lets slip the keyring

open-hearted galapagos on the fin-glideeach needlepoint on the melon rindhis lips as mercurial as summersoft carbons grazed on a prosthetic tongue

falling along the icarus boneshe slowly feathers the razorfishdrenches his magnetism across the cicatricehe runs her hair like a vendettahis coral is her fleecy sun


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Sextant

sugarlumped at the bikini linemy blonde's gone blunt

left to myself too inconstant to steer byarrhythmic amid the archipelagotaking a shoreleave odyssey picking a way through broken

guillemots

this midget crucifixioncamping al fresco beneath his unspent convictions


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Stockholm Syndrome

No touch can ever be light enough for a man so infested.Frozen lice shoot from his reticulated prostate, his testicles arepebbledashed with chips of his own teeth; to give him an enemaof mercury amphetamine and cauterise his anus might providesome short-term relief but it's no way to make him fall in love;it will only leave his vampiric hymen intact. By night hisorifice completes its circuit and comes to rest on the roof of his

mouth. His heart is born repeatedly by parthenogenesisbetween sticky palms, and his temper is smelted in sanguinaryrituals. He may love you as reptiles do, according totemperature; but as his feet clatter across the living room flooryou'll feel his proboscis withdraw from your gastropod, backinto its cubby-hole of elliptic fevers, and then you'll understandthe sentience of his gift.

If sexual transmission, then, is an unreliable prospect, youcan make him infect you by sharing his dirty dreamworks.With the first hit you suddenly have hooves where your feetused to be, your nostrils flare and he's skimmity-riding youdown to the seafront in the dust-clogged small hours, his spursshred your ribs and his pale hands pull the wings from yourwithers as you race the glass bullet that he spat from betweenhis buttocks as he crouched, arse-upwards, over your head

when he held you down in the doorway. You know withabsolute certainty that you must overtake the bullet because ifit reaches the sea before you do it will pierce the water andenter the heart of your mother's corpse which has lain thereundisturbed since your twenty-sixth birthday. He's urging youon, his hands wrist-deep in the wounds on your shoulders, hisheels in your belly, his teeth in your mane. The bullet swoopsand shimmers ahead of you, and as you leap the sea wall andrise over the shingle you glance down at the driftwood, the tornbits of plastic sheeting, the aluminium cans and old rubber flip-flops and condoms and dogshit and golden ammonites scatteredbeneath you, and you open your mouth and gasp as you catchthe bullet at last at the back of your throat, and you fallbackwards onto the beach, knocked in an arc with the bulletscorching your tongue, with him rolling and flailing and


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cursing under your weight, your hooves trampling the air, thesea retreating into flaccid black mud, your frightened screams

choked on his hair which is still, even now, the most beautifulyou have ever seen.


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The Teething Coral

Ribbonned babies keelhauled under the fleets of Actiumfrom copper to scree over a molten breastboneover frozen winehelpless as milk.Sugared almonds dissolve just like mummys warhorseblades are untongued, and everyones last breath is stolen.


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Amaretto Drops

Amaretto drops into a bowl of sugar-ice from the pearl handleof a silver revolver. The guru of all my affection leans into myear and whispers instructions. In the railway sidings at nighta fox screams and scrabbles with frozen claws, staggering andreeling like Edward G. Robinson: Little Caesar who emptiesmy dreams into a slop bucket and pours them out into theMilky Way. Is this the end of Rico? His imperial wings unfold

over the opera house and trail through the sky above theThames which falls back, stunned by beauty, into the lap of along-dead mudlark. My thighs scavenge there for what theycan find that's pearly and slick and open to persuasion. Pressyour pearl handle into my palm, push your silver snoutbetween my fingers ...


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Rough Night

In angel weed, my distant golembreaks his fingers on the key to the city,comes in his palms all crazy-paved and dune-slapped.Dark red and calorific, he cries like a diver.

Meanwhile in the dream hotel the children were swollen,stamen and pistil left taped to the message board.


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Laryngitis

Last night I was handed an oiled and luminous childwhich was clearly intended for you.

So this is what its likewhen the handlebars open like dowsing rodsand the pedals become crutches.

Your gums were sprouting featherswhile I lay awake under the wolfmans table.

Take the child please.


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Notes from a Lecture Overheard in Another Room

The fundamental typology of the hydratic equation at roomtemperature can be understood as a series of epithelialconcavities encased in a large salt crystal. Within this broadphenotypical arrangement however a number of divisions areseen to occur. At the level of hydra pupation the righteousanglophiles are often striated across the slats of cartilagewhich cross the shoreline, sucked from their shells through

milk teeth, lovingly exomorphed into your lap. Alternatinggenerations remain sedentary but nubile, passively waitinglike mediumistic opals winking in an iron-ore piss stream at ahigher temperature than the surrounding sea water, often atsurprising depths impenetrable to calcination. The calcination,indeed, of this flickering lap, on which four burning hands areevolving horizontally into some form of breathable fossil to beset free by the hammer blow of a pauperised Circe, thistrilobite of the many wiles strapped to the huge glass spinalcolumn which rises wetly from the boiling sand. With eachgenetic mutation my imaginary friend becomes more real, orpossibly vice versa, this stubborn coral which refuses to becomea gorgon despite the many advantages which would accrueboth ontogenetically and otherwise to the emergence of thewinged lungfish from its sanguineous fibroids. Draw a

diagram of it if you can. The lapped bestiary is free-swimmingand differentiated, but the division of labour is shifting anduncertain, flickering between lover and loved, tonalincongruities irradiating minor obsessions to the point ofbestialisation, woken wet and breathless, limbs inarticulable, asaline deposit marking the point of glaciation where seabirdsregurgitate their own young.

But I digress.The structure of this typology is not well understood. Its

deceptive transparency masks an opaque colloquium ofmedusae in colonial statehood. Added to this instability ofintention is the werestate of the australopithecus infant withits often cited tendency to bawl, puke and invent theseimaginary friends whose sacra are northern and vulnerable,perhaps more so indeed than their real or imaginary hearts


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which feel the pull of magnetic seas like the pull of a child onone's hand, who smear some kind of epithelial love on whatever

they touch, usually their own laps which are thereby renderedbreathless and imaginary, just a few moments before waking,when all the continents of the world are still fused into a singleland mass, when the flickering is rapid enough for the flesh toappear stable, when for that fleeting instant no-one can tell forsure whether this fossilised body before us is a disease-shrunken hominid or a whole new species.


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Physical Culture

I was listening to a disquisition on the physical culture of beeswhen I looked up and saw crawling towards me across thecarpet a pink fat baby with a lions head.

Its mane was all sticky and it had something around its mouththat could have been marmite and it looked very purposeful.

And I said, Oh shit, Id forgotten about you.

Stinky-fingered boy with a nappy full of rose petals andwhipped cream in your navel, when I left you with yourhypnotist foster-father I thought that that was that.

After carrying you for nine months through the streets of

Laredo on a dog sled, I rode you into choky on a soft leathersaddle.

In those days it was carpe diem all across the bedspread whileyour father was away having his double hand transplant, andit took two bottles of Cif to get the membrane off the bath.

I remember you had had a drip bag for a placenta,

oh it was awful, I literally cried my eyes out

peppermint swamp thing in the slipstream of an ice swarm,you were all the world in an orphanage to me.

We were not separable and your hand was my hand in

somebodys ants nest, red ants and the tongue right up to thestump.


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Now youre shot full of arrows and bedraggled as scampi, withthe hospital tag still round your wrist and your teething ring

falling open.

You used to be a chine.

You Caligula, oh my little boot.


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The Fossil Beach

Look, every night you've had me galloping icewards until thecompass needle spins east and pricks my eyeball. Fur-skinned,the cold black water, decked out like an oil rig when theprophets come to town, I mean, does that seem fair to you?Waking up in a tube train with leaky windows and nothingvisible outside but a fossil beach? Fair enough, you've got theequipment, the oily shapeshifter and the fingers and all that,

but I'm starting to suspect that most of that's just phosphenesanyway, and you only ever used the unearthed self-starterright at the beginning, before the cling-belt was shot ... I mean,are you taking the piss or what?


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Vindice

A virgin honour is a crystal tower: disbetrothed and unbroken,bloody passage sealed with grave wax; looking like balefulgrapestems, or else scalped by parch-fenders; arch-traitor ofangels, pondweed smeared like a wig around the torso Capitulate, capitulate, you my spyvies, each tumbledown maskreeks of pallid ozone, and trenchered thighs fall open at thebreath of blade-kind. Here under a canvassing moon, the

Leyden jars lie smashed and emptied; pinprickers andsarabandes go mad on booze and the afterlife; lovers breaktheir waters for the heart of an ant, and wreck their shoesagainst broken faces.

Such dreaming boys should be jerking out mothers milk, notplunging hot fingers into spackled gorse.


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45

Torso

Fireblast and skyparts across the torso.

The limbless child who slips through the skylight, out underthe door and back through the window, round and round thebed all night long.

The ringing of red mercury bells drowns out the sound of

screaming hares.

Sitting before the keyboard in the mornings, waiting for thecentipedes to come slithering out of the ends of my fingers.

I smashed the vivaria so that I could pare my heart-rind withthe broken glass.


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46

Stilted Conversation

Over-run by osmosis in a bucket of starlightStabbed twice through the heart with a vaselined coat-hangerCopiously emptiedOpium-pricked masterplanDefibrillated by a car-jacker on a tribe of pack-ice


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Heart (Heart) Polar

Each bird is a tiny alchemical vessel.All through the winter, through suds of air, they metabolise

cloudberries into plutoniumand chase the pink horseman over artificial hills where the

skyline drops like snow.Hes distinguished from other mammals by the sweetness of his

cranium,

his spider fangs and his cosmically aligned fontanelle.Cormorants are exaggerated all the same.

Evolution is a matter for cremation dancers.The ghost of Olof Palme appeared in a joke-shop mask and told

them they had to rinse the curve,but when they tried to draw the water they found the bucket

was full of long red hair,and all the roses had turned into cycle paths,and they said, The iceman is taking a turn for the better.

Meanwhile, late night in the museum, Vincent Price waswriting up his psychological reports on all the schoolkids.

Hes the one who tops up the exhibits with arsenic every nightwith ungloved hands

and then goes upstairs to masturbate over images of an elderlyBuzz Aldrin in a baseball shirt spraying his tag across theobservatory windows.

There are some concluding remarks about craneflies andgavels,

and whether Trotsky could whistle,and whether stupidity is a superpower,to which we shall return on another occasion.


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Tarzan

I think I left something behind:

a skein of silverfish, a living key to the ignition

of a scarlet-thighed wasp that smells of petrol in the hall.

Sirius flew down nightly to lick marzipan from our fingers

and for several hours afterwards we could understand thelanguage of corvids,

while the Evening Star exerted its superpowers

and exploded into a fall of morning snow.


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49

One Minute to Midnight

ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT yeah that's right you're allgoing to get the true cross coming at you through the archingsky zipping like a gun shot straight out of the eye of theEgyptian dog that's running loose through the parks andheaths of London, yeah ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT andhere it comes now, it's a dash heading straight for yourforehead and I've got nothing to prove to you now you bunch of

cunts yeah that's right now we'll see

and here's my lover now ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT sobeautiful like a searing scar in a headwind of scholasticentreaties like an anteater or a rich vanilla pod-strewn acorn-crested hogmanay night yeah that's it he's fine now he's JEANHARLOW WITH A DICK and he's going to spread his whitesatin gown all across the bedspread now with a glint of honey-fire and a squeamish architect begging for mercy while weslowly unpeel every shred of varnish from his glowingfingernails

ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT NOW and it's too late for youto try to explain what you were telling me about the tenthousand ways I'm wrong because for every one of those ten

thousand ways now there's a small little insect that's going toinflate across the horizon of the plain and set fire to the ruinedcity while the screaming multitudes pour out of its smokingmandibles and run across the landscape straight into your arse

yelling it into your face now you jolly little twat and here itcomes it's ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT and you can onlygape in amazement as the top-rigging flames with pistachiofire and your neighbour's hennaed beard turns into a bearskinand claws his face off right there in the street standing in thequeue for the cashpoint but there is no queue and there is nocashpoint and there is no street there's just a revolving streamof mercury arcing across the sky like the arched back of JeanHarlow as she whacks out the greatest solo you ever heard onthe guitar which grows straight out of her belly and arcs across


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her face like a hennaed beard between the thighs of a tightlywadded pack of wolves who are prowling the parks of London

in search of the bonny bonny bows of a fiddle-playing swanwashed up on the shore of the Isle of Dogs in the dead of nightwhen the bankers have all gone home to wank into their creditcard holders

because you know what it's ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHTand I'm trying to get my fingers round your neck but it's takingtoo long because your neck is made of the stuff in the christmasbox in the loft and the lights are all flashing and melting likecormorant eggs smashed against the side of a glass of snowballon the sideboard

ONE MIDNIGHT TO THE MINUTE yeah and you're lyingthere asking me to show you what truth I've gotbut I'm not showing it

yeah


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Merl Fluin is a member of the

Surrealist London Action Group(SLAG), and sometimes also of theStockholm Surrealist Group.

SLAG online:http://robberbridegroom.blogspot.com/

Stockholm Surrealist Group online:http://www.surrealistgruppen.org/

How to Dispose of a Corpsepreviously appeared inArcturus

issue 1 (London Surrealist Group, 2005), and in a Greektranslation by Nikos Stabakis in Klidonasissue 1 (AthensSurrealist Group, 2006).

Bee Radiation, Doppelgnger, Larval and Azure, The TeethingCoraland Walpurgishave all previously appeared in Swedishtranslation by Mattias Forshage on the Stockholm SurrealistGroup blog Biografier t okrossbara hlleflundror(http://okrossbara.blogspot.com). Most other texts havepreviously appeared in English on either the StockholmSurrealist Group blog The Terrestrial Cephalopod(http://terrestrialcephalopod.blogspot.com) or the SLAG blog LaBelle Tnbreuse(http://labelletenebreuse.blogspot.com).

Thanks to many Surrealist friends for their support, and most

special thanks of all to Paul Cowdell, Paul Cross, MattiasForshage and Emma Lundenmark, for blowing the bloodydoors off.

Documents

8182750The Reality Binge Trick