Semtext (Plastic) 6

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should therefore never baulk at intoxication. Loss of memory & inconsequential heedlessness in action are for him the best means of remaining enthusiastic & focused upon the task.

Freezings & Thawings 4

But you look at us with the amusing & ferocious blows we distribute, have we the air of a yet another poor fellow who balances himself on one foot & then the other & makes several discrete trips to the edge of indifferent things waiting for the sunrise, have we the air of a fellow head hanging & defeated in advance by the unbelievable endurance of blue mountains & by the endurance still more unbelievable of the destrucPLASTIC 6 tion of a whole mountain? Oh, glance over here & there is an insect nourished by men at their own expense. they owe it nothing but they fear it. this insect, that loves not wine but prefers blood, would be see at once the shimmering of our silver costumes & capable by the exercise of occult powers, if its legitimate cravings were not satisfied, of swelling to the size of an elephant & crushing men like grain. it is how we empty out the world & how we brandish worth observing how they respect it, how they surround it with canine veneration, how they esteem it above all other animals in creation • lautréamont with agility on all sides at all times mirrors of our prodigious sleight of hand. & it is therefore a world in negative which folds back on itself, a world comically frozen which turns around us & passes kindly hold my D.J. Huppatz John Kinsella in a ring of fire beneath the applause of our regular little hand hold audience. my hand News From Anywhere: Notes on WritCow Wallpaper with smallish haloes... hold my Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as ing hand hold Translated from the French by Clare Wallace a commercial artist and I want to finish as a business my hand artist—Andy Warhol Bruno Solarik hold my & then went down to the street, that generic street named hand hold after anyone, to search for Vietnamese mint. Against a A Windgust or a Hat Sentient, different, over again, my hand flattened backdrop—replay, pause. Cue to an alleyway— staring at floors—polished wooden boards hold my cobbled bluestone, scattered glass & a noisy metal door. Terrified seamstresses warily hand hold & ceilings; eye-shake nibbling Now present tense: lives structured by syntax (if not peep out the window my hand They look like the three musketeers complete sentences), we are eating Happy Lam brand hold me like zeiss und cyberpunkt; that expressionist Shaven smooth, absent hats and shoes fishcakes, tofu & vegetables in a minty soup. There are D.J. Huppatz artist who says, out of the fat, bean shoots. Each word is a spoon, and our bodies also. out of greyish muck—hack, hack! Coitus leaned out the window and yelled at Death: Folded inside every one of our cells is a 180 centimetre study #4 Rudolf! Rudolf! Where’ve you been? Where do you long molecular sentence comprising 3.1 billion letters. Dogwood stark as winter think I should look for you? It’s been two weeks and The body provides no punctuation. Freeze at another generation for production. each one a father & a mother. not a word from you! becomes as warm as summer— moment: My spoon was a catapult flicking a mushroom heat radiation. he ate radiation. extract a buzz from Death started nervously, but at once pulled himit’s no more complex than that. sliver into the sink, yours part of the mechanism for bees. let me touch it please. a moving thing that is self together. He turned his head toward the Rudolfinum, creating a feedback loop. american. agent red agent yellow agent green agent from whose window Coitus was waving at him, and The yellow background—rare, orange. one or zero. one & two & three. fingerpainting doffed his hat. Rather than make a spectacle of himbut there, as if... behind the clouds. A poet, exiled from the court of Suryavaraman to the facepainting semiperfectworld. by the dawn’s early self before the people filling the street, he pretended Cold, insulated, the lift edge of the Malay penisular, never to see the reliefs of the that Milada was just an acquaintance. He would have light. envelope or encounter? Wat. Across the street, people are laughing hysterically, liked to continue on his way toward Mánes Bridge, going up and down in the new Emmanuelle Pireyre but suddenly caught sight of Sentimentality languidly you don’t know why you’re smiling. Writing is something New Yorker building, Vogue models approaching across it. Death quickly pulled his hat you have taken from them. They know but don’t mind. Freezings & Thawings & other processes wondering why Times Square has devolved. down over his brow, made a detour toward the emThey let you take it. Yours was the pineal ear, hearing to applied to circumstances bankment, and furtively entered the Rudolfinum excess. A furious distillation that ... They’re chipping away There’s no verse left in this: through the rear entrance, possessing a key of course. over there without you as you drift across the strait, mind It is always advisable, during nights of insomnia, to the hook, the look, the butcher’s: unfreeze something or someone. The sound of dropincised, crosshatched with memory lines extending over He consults the map in a frenzy: Yes, muttering to all those elegies and Shelley too. lets falling on the kitchen floor calms the spirit as the the Timor Sea. These words you carry with you will himself under his beard, Letohrad . . . Jirásek’s Trail stirring murmur of conversations, freed of ice, are never be yours. . . . that one interests me . . . OK, the miller says, this Scope, affiliate, fall into accepting recaptured in the darkness after hours of waiting path I’ll buy myself. that divinity brings quality, smoking cigarettes before the open deep freeze. How to use prosthetic organs: tongue lolls in moisture, She observes it all through a hole in a knot of & verbose flights of oratory. Freezing & unfreezing are similarly distressing; the scoops in pools & waits for sensation from outside. wood and can’t keep from laughing. The miller could former however may be repeated indefinitely whereas Fingermuscles work plastic keys, arms & shoulders care less: after five half-liters of rum one doesn’t hear Ethan A. Paquin the latter may only take place once, an unfortunate his own words. tense. Words gather around an idea, break it into disequilibrium which transforms a very amusing game But the laughter rocks the cottage more and more Claustrophobian managable chunks for storage & distribution. The sticky into an alarming conundrum. forcefully. Look: one after another the thatches slide substance on dark sheets is all that remains of our along the roof’s slanted surface. Bretislav comes transubstansiation. The C16th physician Paracelsus: Given six persimmons, one must shelve alone with Freezings & Thawings 2 slowly cantering up on horseback. Now by the cot“What is not a poison? All things are poisons and nothing five asleep, content in redness, weighing sickness in tage’s wall, the breath of his mare glistens on the & yet having climbed up to a vantage point one is without toxicity. Only the dose permits anything not to dark. doorhandle. scrutinises, hand shading the eyes, the laborious be poisonous.” You’ve brought some tools—a chisel, She pulls a measuring stick from her pocket and, mise en scène of circumstances, glimpsing that the brushes & spraycan—now build yourself a wall to write There are lesson plans for air and not air; namely, that link by link, slowly swallows it down. eternal circulation of electricity in a freezer of even the on. rather than succour with dampness, dimness alights highest quality will probably not be sufficient to render Thistles in its fleece, a ram slowly devours candles our frozen product as immutable as an entity floating me and captures, snares the many causes of infirmity. arranged in the grass at the last tram stop. She obLouis Armand through the cosmos on a trajectory of beauty & simPerhaps I shall burn - avatar of kindle - when day’s serves the motley kneesocks. It’s difficult to guess plicity with the bearing of an angel or a mathematical their number as they flash between the trees. The To Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace figure. In consequence, crushed by the triumph of girls hurry from their evening lessons in the distant whittled to bedded soundlessness, when red’s an an intelligence which, at a given instant, would know all the inevitable & by the enduring question of condentown like shears cutting a long fat-lined groove along assertion of grateful non-rest. the forces by which nature is animated, & the respective sation, I threw myself again on the nearest sofa, my the axis of a turkey belly. With a rumble coming from situations of all the elements of which it is composed decomposing beetroot on my knees. So it is that one who knows where the belly closes up again so that can no longer see what must be done to save such the shears have to instantly repeat their jaunt until the 1. a door opening & closing & a light going on & a dear object in such a bad condition. Sinking into the hand that has invested them with life is completely Nicole Tomlinson off—their function is not the panacea it spacious & clear scenery, in a distended instant, I exhausted — like in the gruesome fairy tale of the crept into the fields of mossy blue & grey fur where I seems to be—strange interblacksmith who locks Death in the wardrobe and Untitled [Gielard] roamed until the last fresh red drops permeating the ludes, other doors not made to be opened, an then swallows the key. The kneesocks come to a moss had dried, the last sign of the living centre of isolated, un-shaded electric bulb Gielard from Cardiff thinks God stop over a spring. A canary-yellow pair of finely this small & highly burlesque garden star. & so whose filament is about to expire at is left handed textured stockings in black-polished shoes with worndiscouragement impresses itself & one no longer any (given) moment—or a doorstop seems probable, yes for Gielard, out soles glitters under its surface. In the fleshy siknows what to make of the situation. singing piously his 38th psalm fixed to a door, to let it lence a rosy black engulfs the thighs; a rosy black “thy right hand shall save me,” open no more than 45 degrees (what does that that brings to mind the facial hue of textile workers Freezings & Thawings 3 knows that his God knocks him mean?) sleeping in a paludal fever during lunch in the comleftways munal canteen; a fever that pushes its way through From a certain point of view freezing is a wager every time. the forest among the chiggers and chimneys, until a 2. a calendar reminds him that it’s late already, or already lost to present forces & the odour of spoon breaks with a clatter on a plate. he’s alone, standing before a gauntlet immensities. But this never prevents us from a freAnd Gielard is singing, The kneesocks deliberately crush beetles and of unrelenting symbols, one after annetic rhythm of freezing because freezing soon inI’m a goat on a tether, millipedes underfoot. They themselves suggest a habits every gesture of its actor, a refusal to embody other—there’s no more room—falling upwards to travelling the blank Millipede fisher for their crunching grate of gravel, circumference resignation. One soon acquires the habit for example thought & keeping the outside twigs, and leaves. They’re coming to a brickyard, of my stake when one takes a staggering walk outside freezing close at hand (the scene itself is which from a distance clearly looks to be on the completely askew everything found on the way back. constantly repeated, each time arousing an verge of collapsing into the grass without a stone left And Gielard is singing, The unkempt & sleep-swollen appearance of the obexpectation of more than it contains); that there standing. Black smoke billows from the brickyard my soul ject one captures in the middle of the night or early are figures or were leaves nothing to be like from a car. We perceive its surprising density as is like a little fish morning is similar to the frozen one & however so shown, in the too-deliberate afterword: a material entity rather than as a phantom. Only now it moves behind glass, different that one cannot stop oneself from bursting out shitting do some of the kneesocks detach themselves from laughing right in the middle of the footpath, between in the water the procession’s core and run off toward the village to what follows is as unrelated as what went the shops’ empty illuminated windows. But one often it breathes. get help, while the others (admittedly, there are only before—a window facing out over a forgets that a frozen thing is a supplementary modaltwo), insolently remain in front of the gates, scratchnarrow passageway, with stairs & broken ity of an unfrozen thing. Oh, my poor friends, how And Gielard is singing, ing one another’s deep-green woolen surface with fire-alarm—the rooks raise an ominous sign: “no disappointingly contrary is freezing to its opposite, as the orbit is internal and the tips of their shoes. The smoke rolls over the extraneous details” (it’s not the uncertain game if every advance of hope is the promise of a cruel golden like the sun. village, looking in confusion at the lowering sky, despair. & all that one risks obtaining in the end is a it at first appeared), even if the objective is whose shower would enable it to descend again on stinking world of tissue bruised by the vigour of the concealed, secretly watched-over And Gielard is singing, the landscape and suffocate it in the coal embrace of cold. As if things were not going badly enough alhold my hand, hold by some accessory before the fact: right down to its vitality, wreaking a devastation more impressive. ready. Contrary to what one might believe, the freezer my hand the last laugh


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