Kisses
Cause Cavities
Roaming East City Wall graffiti. Boutique ice cream at
Checkpoint Charlie. Imagine this deathstrip. Imagine this river crossing. Small
black triangle in ear from Krautsberg. The wasps fierce and relentless. Put the
orange from your Aperol on the other table. Anarchist squat flags and Turkish
meze. Humboldt Forum with happy DJs. Everyone out there in open air with polite
spaces between us. Waving our arms. Shaking our shoulders and hips. Wrestling
with thorny histories. Statues, streets, squares, who cares.
You left the burning house of childhood
crabbing forward into the cloaked future. Trees trembling with god wind.
In the crowded marketplace of identities, you slip out of one skin into
another. Kisses cause cavities.
Weeping willows bend down to touch you. Half moon fingernail snags the peaches.
Everything
is a Relic of Something
After a
day of drenching, we slide into the carriage to Wroclaw. The carriages are
filled with young people from the 1960s. Shaggy hair and baggy clothing. They
are traveling to the largest free festival in Poland called Woodstock. What does this age demand? How is it different than
the last one? Everything is a relic of something. You can count the tree rings on my forehead. Last
night my friend was small slice of brain sludging blood on ground with no mouth
to speak. You cannot lose too much lifeblood. I was trying to return him to his body. Your
brain is part of your body. Your heart sends messages. It is also the control
centre. In the east the seat of
consciousness is in the chest. The heart. But in the west it's the head. I’d like to be here, you say, tapping your chest. But I think I’m here,
you say, tapping your temples.
Hopscotch
I am always hoping to move ahead. I yell out my next
moves. Teeth, I yell, before brushing them. Rubbish, I yell, before running
with dripping sack towards bins. Everyone knows the big
bang. Now there is the big crunch, big freeze, big crumble, but my favourite is
the big bounce. I bounced into childhood with my stone washed jeans. Oh stud
muffins. Oh watery ketchup &
chalky curry powder. Berlin blinks
into the future. “How uninteresting interesting things can become”
said Robert Walser.
We are all dead already. No future. Reality
in a nutshell and fear in a handful of dust. All
dusty dream glitter.
The
Master
Threadbare was the name of my childhood. Someone else was always pulling the strings. I’ve caught the string puller, said father, but there
was always another string puller above them. Father pulled the strings to slip
out of the British army. We landed in Vegas. We pulled
the slots. Something came out of them. Then nothing. Here, said the missionary,
no strings attached. You can become the god of many children. You can hang the
chandeliers in your garden. You can live forever in the top level kingdom. We pulled some strings, but there was always more
string pullers above us. We stroked the white stripe on
our Starsky and Hutch car. Sold blah blah to our
neighbours. We moved two squares ahead and four squares to the right. We were
going somewhere. We kept pulling strings, but there was always more strings
ahead of us, behind us, above us. Oh great string puller. You are the master of
this universe.
Marcus Silcock (FKA Slease) is a surreal-absurd prose poet from Portadown, N. Ireland. He co-edits surreal-absurd for Mercurius magazine. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best of the Net, translated into Polish, Danish and Slovak, and has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including Bath Magg, Toad Suck Review, Right Hand Pointing, Juked, Ghost City Review, Bruiser, Monkeybicycle, Hobart, Fence, Poetry, Tin House, Blackbox Manifold, The Lincoln Review, and in the Best British Poetry series. His novel in prose poems, Never Mind the Beasts, is available from Dostoyevsky Wannabe and his book of surreal-absurd prose poems, The Green Monk, is available from Boiler House Press. He lives in the land of rabbits. Find out more at: Never Mind the Beasts