I FEEL JEALOUS of the PEOPLE who laugh and do it together. Fixed time, fixed place, agenda fixated on laughter. I join the group and stand nervously in a circle of strangers. Deep breathing, stretching, chanting and clapping - gentle warm-up, only to deceive. In no time, injected with rich hormones of deliberate lies the mad medley of laughter turns into an unruly riot. ...READ MORE
thrusts a sheet of A4 paper into my hands, says,
‘here, have this.’
‘what do you mean?’ i said, ‘what is it?’
‘it’s a poem,’ the poem said. ‘a poem?’ i quizzed.
‘aye, a poem,’ the scottish poem replied.
i nodded my head in silent agreement
faith is only for the faithful / floating
most problems are self-created
happiness is not wanting to die it’s as simple as that
as a horn held to the table calling itself hoarse for nooses
In a high-pitch voice,
you called out my number.
Stayed in a long queue I await,
No chorus echoed in the crowded bank
Till a baby’s squall raid over the scene.
If those gigolos
were not long dead
they would remind me
of Anton Du Beke,
locusts in topcoats
feeding on puffed up
ladies who had eaten
half a grilled grapefruit
After I strangled him and kissed his forehead and tossed him in the trunk I drove to the hardware-drug store down the road to get a pair of scissors and a shovel and a bag of manure and some air freshener. I was in a hurry but the cashier was a fat old woman who breathed very loudly and had trouble ringing my things up.
Methodology – The first line and prompt of The Squawk Back has been subjected to Jean Lescure's Oulipian process of N+7. In the lines below, all nouns have been replaced by other nouns following x entries after the original in a dictionary. In line 1 x = 0, line 2 x = 1, line 3 x = 2 etc.
Trapping a pair of singers in a bank
Trapping a pal of single-deckers in a banker
Trapping a palace of singlets in a banking