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