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Part I of Plus-que-Parfait is now available as an e-book, from The Red Ceilings Press. Part II of Plus-que-Parfait will take the project in different directions, with different structures & new contributors. Watch this place!



To download a copy go here

11. Voices in wallpaper

*

Keep off the back trike
pustule face/ I'm Kevin
Large SS BITCH
lightning collard disco
brick schizo 7 boy in
nappies & I aint never
seen you pinkle whick
the butcher in the pink
stick/ psuedomatic
harbinger of
hallucinatory pig wings
in the swill-tard slop
shucket gutter-faced sky
balloon that burst that
week old roid in ye ass/
you arse/ claterback woe
betider simulation games
in the guffpocket make
weekender face arrangers
meek starved dogs legs
like/ antipathetic
windscreen smear John
Doe Toe glass shine
mean reflection/
Wernickes Area
transcript delted
deleter(ed)/ utterence/
spooltape/ misogynist
gland/ bipartisan quasi-
illusion/ fierce teeth/

*

endoscope blues/ non-
proprietary TM for the
whisky age/ give me
heavens gate yadyna in
bus glass/ terrific heat a
blasphemy law says so in
the intro/ is that the one
with Matt Damon &
Wahtsisface? Thats
deconstruction for beggars
I'll have you now know no
I want you to
deunderstand/ STOP/
LISTEN to myaeiouriad
voices in wallpaper
threatening to make flies
cameras kiss your face
back on/ statistical
anomaly norm/ it is I sais
it be's/ rubberstamped
office paper electrical-
head baby pram
explosions cutting through
chaff o'life no oxytocin
now m'dear in true act of
smithereening / juslike
telly/ EH?

*

Mitochondrial/ Oh thats
sooo 2002/ get a life man/
I'M IAN BEALE AND
I'VE CHANGED/ get back
in your box and eat your
fingers missy/ end of the
bottle barley water face
with apple skin teeth dont
let me stop you ruin your
life even if it is white noise
in unknowable space its
nothing to do with me I
dont even know you/ do
I?/ captain irrelevant lost
his batteries again/ there
have to be procedures in
place/ arent we supposed
to be structured?/ you twist
its metal wings til the sky
falls off/ swans explode in
your head/

*

so thats all you can manage?

just spilling away at the

seams

like you always do:

blind candles in your night feet
are the eyes in everything

and 'that' everything has a place for us/

be still/

magnetic/

hundreds of us staring through the glisten of lips
forgot to speak in the thick of it

because of that dirty wind
dubbing us across time

forgot we were static

not music

anymore

simply twirling us round on its little finger

where I can hear you ending

and you have gone too far

I can hardly see you

(feedback)

through

the

speaker

or:

Veronika buttoned her coat it was
blue they were blue. The house was so c
old & all the doctors were asleep. velvety
said otto, & he sings her the letter. She’ll read

it later. He turns on the electric heater, it gives off a stink like chess pieces neologising.

They believed in gave credence to a city made out of the skulls of dartboards. veronika looks at the plan of the conference centre. There is the financier there is the academic there is the doctor there is the police. abstractedly
,
otto dresses in veronika’S discarded clothes. they become abstract, Ideal clothes. he’ll kiss her, soon, & she’ll metamorphose into dearth. her jaw was hurting. it was bruised. the financier said, take my family but let me & my luxury car

go. Otto & Veronika obey the diktat of The State.

& in the twentieth century marie-antoinette ascends mt. vesuvius. a parrot in a balloon shits on her, clouds drip analgesics. the parrot’s claws are halogen lamps.

veronika unbuttons her coat it was skin they were flesh. the house is full of chess pieces, sighing. feel me howls ott, &

she’ll sing it later. the city is made of the lungs & hearts of the poor. out
marie-antoinette is innocent. she has cut herself shaving. suffrage. saffron. is
identical parade. orange jumpsuit.

in the 20th marie Veronika whispers The State. skulls neologising cold luxury, take the lungs out of the velvety abstract. a stink like finance – orange jumpclaws. otto & century, a balloon in a parrot full of geese. becoming vesuvius, the academic dresses in RIPPED analgesics. bruised kiss, ELECTRIC. marie-antoinette is innocent buttoned her coat abstractedly obey plan metamorphose into lamps

then things get complicated .otto’s flight was delayed .veronika’s mother called from düsseldorf to say she’d be home in an hour ,drew a diagram on the palm of his right hand .hot after midday in bishop’s park ,seraphic ankles
.inside the house there’s a sad feeling in our stomachs .the furniture is gone ,water from the tap, mouths to the tap

She donates herself to Marie-Antoinette.
Nothing has been rescued.
Ideal desolation,
Marie-Antoinette peals Bella’s eyelid back & jabs a tuning fork into the hurdy-gurdy’s belly.
I’ll say goodnight. &? that’s all.
Goodnight.
It is night, so that’s OK. Though it appears like it is now. But it won’t be when it was.

or:

i don’t suppose place matters. What we do here or there is no of no consequence. It could be anywhere. As is Berlin.

But we are in New York. Well not quite. But that can be discussed
during the taxi ride.

look. bougainvillea. see how they use old olive oil tins as flower tubs. the colour here suits you.

I love your new dress. I am under the weather I must admit. I am not myself.

The invitation to go shooting was to great a call to ignore.

But I did. To save you from meeting the future husband. His shoes were awful. I mean really bad..

and he stammered like a machine gun attack. So I drank. Vodka. More Vodka. Vodka. And the Japanese beat me till I drank whisky and then the Americans arrived and I was saved. So I ate burger with relish. But ignored the others.

I am the one who talks sense.

When we went to the cinema I thought it odd.

How the random thought, the murder, the blue/emerald dress meant nothing.

I remember smoking a cigarette at the doorstep of the hotel. I saw bits of green growing

pushing up between the slabs. Somehow it made sense. The plane would arrive on time. You would be well.
The green building’s reputation would be saved. The food would be fine. The river was graceful.

The water lily was noted down in the the noteworthy lily book. We went away happy and even laughed at the conservative planting at the cross. They could have used fern in a much more forceable fashion. But hey, we are on our hols.

But when you sat at the board wearing “magnetic pole” nail polish. I gathered like a fishermans net, the outhouse, the autobahn, the night at Innnsbruck and then saw New York on a budget (poor times, and for what?) Then it was obvious.

The train has left. They have dug up the line. I am the only. We are not going to get a decent breakfast. The day has become cyan, magenta, yellow, black. 4 colour print on poor paper stock. So

the smell of summer in the bedroom this evening is like baked bread. Our skin,
the oil you use, sheep, back home in the Peaks, the bed had been slept in by

Marilyn The Monroe. When she had been sleeping with him.

And in the kitchen you sing.

Sing like you needed those new shoes

or

Rennecke huffs loudly with her mouth full of pins. I once again apologize for being late and making us both rush. “No worries”, she tells me which means “no worries, I will get you later”. I’m feeling like a prisoner of war with my arms outstretched for such a long time, but it probably hasn’t been so long. We are in the moment before the moment-we are next in line. It’s the best place in the universe if physical pain did not insist on ticking off the minutes.

Tick tock. I spy a doll eye looking out from under the sewing table. This is typical Rennecke to treat her dolls in the same manner as a fickle, feral child. How does she maintain such patience for little stitches? A stitch in time saves nine. I have heard in certain quarters that Rennecke has acted the terrorist. Then again, they say the same of me. And I can’t remember if it’s true. I remember strange, iridescent tulips sitting in the hotel vase and I remember a rolled up note inside the yellow one. I remember stowing the note in my hem. But after that I don’t know. A stitch in the mind is kind.

Veronika, Veronika, skinny mistress with the surgical scars, I would like to kiss you. Reports are that you have gone far afield, that you are some strange sort of battlefield nurse in secret warehouse labs. Sometimes I think I see hospital tents there, on the courthouse lawn, gleaming in the night like moth wings.

Morning time, in this life is lucky. I have my piano, I have jam. I have vases filled with regular tulips. Two lips sank ships, Veronika’s mouth tasted like tobacco and envy. She used to sketch me, order me naked and cross legged with a fruit bowl on my lap. I quivered and waited for her appraisal. She was so much surer of herself than I would ever be and yet she was envious of me and my abundant coat of flesh. Joe sometimes came over, his fake caterpillar moustache quivering over his lip as he chewed his bread. The three of us made love one night in the most horrible of hotels where we each bought an hour and so that gave us three for the whole occasion. It was over in ten minutes really at the moment Joe and I began to kiss and Veronika started pacing like an enraged duchess. I sent Joe out to bring us back falafels but even this didn’t calm her. We went outside to the square and fed the falafel to the rats. “You chose a man over me and now you owe me”, she told me. But I don’t know if this resulted in the note in the hem that only a seamstress could find.

Rennecke huffs. She’s such a stitch.

*

The voice of Stephen Emmerson is herein - &

here & here

10. Du Rhinocerot

Each time he was seen

The strange man

It was with his circle

He had moved the circle from the plane of the ideal

Into the world

Where buses were late

And teenagers asked directions to Tib Street

No mere circular shaped object for he

The strange man

Always folded his arms across his circle

Never dreaming to roll it

Or kick it along the street with his foot

Each new thing he encountered

Would be bent in an effort to make it fit the circle

Which was how the strange man understood history

And the letter ‘O’

…

It is glorious

I don’t want to go running and jumping though

In all that gloriousness

Ah ***cough, cough, cough***

I am ill

I shall stay here / Feigning illness

Continuing to pretend to be ill

To avoid the glory of that weather

Out there

So as to be able to remain indoors

These glorious holidays

Reading this book

It is an interesting book

…

And he will wake up and he will think about the mistakes he has made

He will know that there have been many

He will wonder what is wrong with him that he seems to keep making the same mistakes again and again

He would like to kick the letters

Kick them far. Kick them to the feet of a teammate

The ineffectiveness of the letters at conveying anything that is really important will, at some point in the future, make him very angry

He will recognise the feeling as being one he has felt before

And he will be angry at having done nothing those previous times

He will write letters down and they will make words which will be linked to other words which will make sentences and those sentences will store ideas

And he will do nothing this time either

Remembering that kiss

Thinking that it could have happened yesterday ...

... the blonde detective agency ablaze
at th’arc of lightnings

veronika says

“starfish nor legions” joe cuts his ribbons
short eyelashes long together live
they an island northsouthwesteast
dusk as an oxygen cylinder over
warehouses & pubs kids will kick a
football about & burrow me alien workings graded
husk derive from simultaneous lovers freaking out

Over Time.

speak to Veronika confOerence cttallingo. Hgorgeousélène left Düsseldorf & the sickly antelope evening rush & sets her clock by wash of perfume
s s
ettling down from Mount Olympos. hi you hie

biting into a cake
tanned legs sorrowingly.
i’m never going to be
free

From pain, escapology. silent cinema enzymes

talkative eyes. rancid flames. the kind of mouth that brings failure up its throat anna mendelssohn
a poem of objects that live by magic a.m.
le charme discret de la bourgeoisie
by then i wasnt seeing things i was inside them its got a silver inside & guts remove stretch halfway round the glob
e i didnt love anything more it crazes with extraneous mauve curlicues whipping round circlets braids of applehair

curfew. Theyll disappear.
beauty. sharpening

somnolence the family carries its desired desire in green bags deep down green in deep green & the dogs snore

ottosgottawounddeepdown
h
e
b
l
i
s
t
e
r
shrugs off his pretty ankles. veronika holds them for him & then gets curious ugh they are crawled over with crawling lice she puts ice on them he shoots dice the clocks on the wall flutter & breakup stealthily she puts his pretty ankles into her mouth & shes naked & he closes the curtains & she says dont & in full view of the building work on the roof across from their room they go to sleep
an illusion of worlds
ordnance fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuury
how neat the arithmetic of
capitalist exploitation
crush me
i dont dare leave the house for fear of fear ill never be painfree
The song is an example of a parastrophic structure//enharmonic
leopards drinking soup at marble tables with velvet spoons>terroristism.

veronika & susan make love. its it is a wonderful evening. the sky is imaginary yes but its is there & they look out at it from their cathedral. they make love susan holds veronikas veronika’s ugly ankles they are awash with birdsong. reverently she returns them to veronika. the police ambulance crashes from the bridge into psychogeography. if anywhere there to be cease ...

... the interconnectedness of all things. The interconnectedness of café and train. The symmetry of sandwich meats. I am sick of trying to be happy. Eventually the train will take me to the city, an inelegant bee hive and one that is on its way out.

Actually I am not unhappy but am trying to be bitter in print. I would just like to be interesting, that’s all. I am happy because I am doing nothing and I don’t like to admit it. I am doing nothing and nobody is even filming it. I just like sitting and having waiters bring me sandwiches and tea. The only problem is I would like an endless supply brought. I have to make do with such a small amount; snacks the size of playing cards brought in sad little boxes. They go so quickly despite my careful nibbling. The problem is that I would like to be in this point in time for a long time and I have to keep reordering in order to start the clock again. The waiters start to look at me with wary looks. But I am interested in staying here, in the moment before the train comes for as long as I can, perhaps permanently. Of course the train does keep coming and that is a violent disruption with the way they shout the hours down. But I am not fooled. The train goes down a straight line and then disappears in single point perspective. This means we don’t really know what happens at all. We don’t know if they’ve really come or gone, visually speaking.

Then again, there is noise to tell us and the tiny tremors in the metal of the tables. These are things that signify come and go. What I really need is to be on the train itself and then I need another train to pull up so that it is no longer apparent or necessary to know which train is moving when. I need this in the same way that I need to confuse which window belongs to which set of passengers and to confuse which reflection belongs to which window. Let me correct myself -I don’t need to confuse these things. .I need to be in that moment when the confusion ends. The trumpet shall sound…in a minute.

The only issue, of course, is that I’m pregnant. There would appear to be an undeniable progression happening there as my body gains more and more periphery. I see this as no reason to abandon my plan. The trumpet shall sound and the waiter shall bring me jam incorruptible. And the beehive corruptible shall blow up! And we shall be changed. Whee!

the man in the street with a plank
the house with the very tall aerial
the aeroplane coming into land across the sky

it’s very very tired for it’s flown a long way

today these things make me think of you.

where you might be
who you are talking to.
we see your lips slip across your teeth you smile say yes and laugh. it will be spring. over your shoulder the buds filling with green
in another week it will all burst open.

the lighter nights will help

and the women all stroked her hair and cried over her

not like us who also live on islands

your eyebrows graceful as herons coming in

a strange equation.

I am on the aeroplane coming to visit

all the other voices were in his head.

a gentle discourse. one of babbling polluted brooks
a brilliant orange that frothed
about the caught branch.

he knew you would wear the acrobat outfit at the airport
complete with Quetzalcoatl necklace and matching Joan of Arc wig

he only knew you

and that

the game of chess is played between two people.
one person uses the light pieces, and the other person uses the dark pieces.
light moves first, and then each player takes a turn moving.

the Knight is the only piece that can jump over other pieces.
all other pieces can only move along unblocked lines.

The tide has gone out. I am sad for no reason.
I think I miss Düsseldorf the most. The music and the moving lights.
In the damp dank wood yellow daffodils grow
some are just beautiful for the light or scent
others for a feeling of youth or sadness

I love hang gliding over those fields
in a way it tries to capture movement in an image

it sounds like a xylophone and then doesn’t

She has an alibi.
It is 1804 and her grandfather is born one of twins.His brother will die before his fifth birthday.
John Wedgwood founds The Royal Horticultural Society.
German astronomer K. L. Harding discovers the asteroid Juno.
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka is born

Spain declares war on Britain.

Simply remove the enemy piece from the board and put your own piece in its place. We are still on the terrace.The Tour is not yet over.

Good night love. look I blow the candle out.

You will sing again before long.

No I don’t have an umbrella.

The voice of Richard Barrett is here (& here http://abandonyourtimidnotion.blogspot.com/)