1664 c/o Sam Riviere
CRONENBOURG
Claude nearly drowns when the river floods.
The water came in faster than he could run.
He's saved by the man who practically invented beer.
I am huge, obviously. I bathe the scene.
There's a smell of river muck. In the opposite house,
a poet's being born. The last part is his fist.
Water laps under the door with a noise
like an enormous black tongue lapping. Its stagnant smell
announces the poet. It sticks to him his whole life
and intensifies during the creative act.
He curses it aloud many times, shame
driving him from the library and his private studies.
If I seem conspicuous or bigger here, it's because
there aren't enough things to compare me to.
I am more like fizz inside his mind. His tiny fingers
are failing to define it. The smell reaches optimum strength
during his long incarceration, where contrary
to popular legend, he does not produce his best work.
Often, when he looks up from his writing, I appear
and disappear in the window. My reflection is a slice
of myself, sliced off. I am not a constant, clearly.
Soon we enter the age in which the state applauds the satirists.
Claude coughs up some river muck. I touch his face. I want
to be like something to drink. Inside his fermenting, fist-sized brain
I am studied, conceptualised, photographed, redesigned,
filtered, compressed, stored at supercool temperatures.
I am refined and then refined again. He perfects this version
and I see my face floating like white plastic on the waters
of the floods. It's like… I can't, for example, from here,
on May 4th, look much like a beercan, viewed from above.
I don't think I am mysterious enough.
1663 c/o C. P. Harrison
Cotton Mather
Let's get Puritan baby,
ya make me wanna burn witches
and drown these bitches
til our colony twitches
Let's get Puritan girl,
I'll give it all I got,
rock out yo chamber pot
til we get Salem (Salem) hot
[Chorus]
I am the Puritan , you can be sure of then
AY (oh yes) YAE(oh yes, oh yes)
I am the Puritan , you can be sure of then
AY (oh yes) YAE(oh yes, oh yes)
This the jam, yep, yep, yep, yep,
Put your hands up (wave)
Put your hands up (wave)
AY (oh yes) YAE (oh yes)
Let's get Puritan baby
til we see weird ass visions
make some bad decisions
start locking kids in prisons
(Sly Deceiver)- I'm coming to git ya, coming to git ya, I'm coming, coming, coming, coming, coming to git ya!
[Chorus X 3]
Let's get Puritan , boo
you goodie little fox
I'll rock yo scarlet box
til you scream "FUCK SMALLPOX!"
1662 c/o Harry Burke
1662, Taiwan
I couldn’t answer if you asked me too.
We were all arranged by height order outside the training ground gates. I recall a sort of hazy atmosphere, pick-pocketed with stars. Night was the only definite line. I think we were ready to go.
‘There’s something here for all of you, to be returned to me by midnight.’
A grey moustache signalled authority, a sort of strangled integrity balancing on high-waisted trousers. I tried to decide between five-a-side football and poetry, a wind grazed a number of houses. My heart beat, had I had a heart.
‘I’ll see you back here in a number of hours.’
What he really said seemed irrelevant. I’d never experienced real flying, really falling between castles, floating islands and nodes of superreality. This was so much more than rush hour. I once sicked strawberry milkshake through my nose, only now were my arms, legs made of sugar and dissolving beneath me. School trips are all tableaus and tannoys and too sweet ham sandwiches. This was thicker than reality.
Red ! stage; Green ! stage; Blue ! stage; gliding.
God we were up there for days. Light was the only definite line; peach cheeked and breathless eating only oxygen, I was nothing but the residue and mini milks, flying round sand castles arms wide, action man nylon trunks mum reading John le Carré and work on Monday, the tide going down and little limpets god hanging on like they could never ever change, I swear we’ll go back there one day.
Imagine little limpets hanging on to sand castles, concocting this notion of ‘siege’.
I think we were up there for days.
1661 c/o Dave Shaw
Oliver Cromwell's Head
He can see Parc Jean-Drapeau in the distance and is reminded of the music festival he and Elizabeth had attended there in the summer of 1658.
Do you think Pavement will ever get back together?
The spike penetrating the top of Oliver Cromwell's Head is jagged and inconvenient, but he has learned to live with it.
No use in complaining, Elizabeth always reminded him.
These things just happen to some people.
The phone rings and Oliver Cromwell's Head allows it to ring three times before he answers it.
I'm not coming over; It's late, I have work in the morning.
Well, whatever.
'Night.
Oliver Cromwell's Head instantly feels guilty for the small sting of satisfaction he feels in cancelling plans. Elizabeth deserves better than that.
But what could she expect?
Oliver Cromwell's Head leans over the edge of the window to get a view of the street below.
Drunk people getting in and out of taxis. The dregs of the night.
Oliver Cromwell's Head is sick of waiting. Fuck this.
1660 c/o Lily Dawn
Oliver Cromwell's Head
He stares back at us,
rotting up there
on his twenty foot pole.
The children laugh,
making fun of him
by throwing pebbles,
betting on who will be the first to
land one in his hanging jaw.
He is defenseless,
unlike when he killed King Charles
and crowned himself "Lord Protector."
You will rest up on that pole,
Mr. Cromwell,
for another twenty five years,
(save for the momentary removal for a quick roof repair)
until a strong-winded storm comes
to set you free.
For two hundred and seventy five years,
you will come to know the British museum circuit well,
until finally, some day,
you will be dropped back into the dirt,
three hundred years after you were lifted out of it.
1659 c/o Nicholas Liu
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Pausing Between Bites of Umbilical Cord, Addresses His First Aphorism to His Father
Nine months to birth; thirteen years to the sword? Would that you’d jizzed in the eye of my lord’s enemy instead!
