NOMMO HEART

THE PHENOL KYLIX

Iron pyrites' monanthous lymph emulsion stashes the modular hippocampus and fickle pyramids germinate belligerent lorgnettes. Quinic acid sparks a phenol kylix whose masks coarctate obverse prefixes tempting lucent nostrums' osmosis. An umlaut neuritis slides ticklish walls within parrotfish fractions.

--From dictionary dowsing experiments

OUT OF THE WAY AVENUES

Some ways I've tried to engage the world lately involve moving found objects around the city during walks and bike rides, and exploring long overgrown alleyways in the north and northeast parts of Portland. The alleyways cut through backyards and there are various points of interest, whether it be overhanging tree limbs obscuring the path, a broken down car that may have been someone's bedroom, cats, rats, possums, racoons, interesting piles of rubble, someone's trash, graffiti, overgrown weeds and crumbling concrete mixed with hard dirt trails, and so on. Some spots offer a feeling of clandestine passage due to fences and walls being on either side, and the glare of streetlights does not always penetrate. Thus the impromptu life of the city is shown in some of its aspects when one strolls through the out of the way avenues.

--From the 'Update' on the C.S.E. page

THE MASK BENEATH THE MASK

As I look at Halloween photos I can't help but feel a certain sadness at the lack of creative and dynamic interpersonal transformation in our society. People are glad to get away from their usual habits by dressing up in colorful, macabre, sexy or humorous costumes. Halloween is the one chance that consciously conforming people have to escape their own particular set of personal and social limitations, because 'everyone does it' and there's no risk in being stared at, insulted or rejected by those who are 'serious adults' in this world of capitalism, dispossession, and imposed identity. But what of the mask beneath the mask? When we stare at ourselves in the mirror after the costumes have gone to the landfill and the beer companies are that much richer, what mysteries lie beneath the apparently calm surface? Where can we express the feeling of having multiple personalities within us when things have returned to 'normal?' 'Humanity' is more often than not another mystifying abstraction that demands our fealty. If I want to be part bat, snake or frog, or even an atmospheric phenomena, who is going to play along? We have little room to develop ourselves beyond sanctioned pathways, and the superego has us on a chain called 'propriety and property.' Where does this reactive loop of domestication get broken other than in the customary alcoholic inebriation or in private hedonism? Beyond the frozen caricatures of our personalities we are still very much unknown to ourselves, and even afraid to admit it. The next time you see someone standing on the street doing nothing, remember--they could be shapeshifting while you shop.

Reality Overload

QUASIRETINA!

The catnip foils the red birdhouse, whose chest is a flat book astride two skateboards. Cords bubble into arrows, leopard print drapery gloves into the hazelnut wind, blue pushpin plastic alfalfa, coat-of-arms sill, bean jar 2.4 rumples photos. Dice pasta thread busts red doll hair, the moon above them a hat without a crown. Ferrite grain sand sparkles blue. Diameter down the window, a tilted face, echo of the 11:07 stuck watch.

Desert sand purple milk wheel, eaten armchair handles stuffed thread, zombie thread ragdoll worn edge. Glass echo honeycomb window, cap contains silver smell, jar teakettle. Biting apple Louie Louie on the telephone instructions, blue sand. Dry paper door open paper bird, window lock safety pin chain. Black surf squash left shoulders the away, three-eyed plug. A lens is held by three hands, in a circle.

--Semi-automatic text created by imaginative reverie upon things seen in a given area, a method otherwise known as SURROUNDS. Originally printed in Stronger Wine, Madder Music #1.

DESCRIBE A ROOM

(This is a variation on the exquisite corpse and was
played by two people. The only requirement was to
'describe a room.')

The room was a curious mix of heaving bronze
airplanes, miniature statues and newspapers that bore
only one word: MINT.
The couch was flanked by two pigeons that looked more
like peacocks. It felt like liver.
The lamps were made from frozen juice, slowly dripping
as they melted onto the carpet which was wearing
something completely inappropriate and kept inching up
on the snail chair.
The chair kept moving around whenever new guests
arrived. They'd come through the front door, a wild
looking meat hook that swung on its hinges exotically
snatching cherry ribbons.
Next to the door was a coatrack that said 'ouch' or
'mmm' when people put their coats and hats on it.

Shibek & Nova

MECHANICAL FETUS ATOMS

The act of dissappearance could be a matter of image changing modern animal prosperity, often invisible. The rhetoric assumes that a complex dynamic is a false statement. Empty choices--'everybody does it.' Point blank strategies of rigid obscurity give meaning to the formulas. This is because decreased wages are the most widely exported racket. An extra myth had to put mechanical fetus atoms of a contradiction to work.

People will be specialized whirlpool zones, where the initial barriers fall back on the rotten expansion of affluent confusion. The pressure consists of untrusting invitation ready to unify the limits of ultra-exact false fronts, when revolutionaries can be everywhere moving through innovative obscurity.


--Composed by chance methods from an older issue of Against Sleep and Nightmare.

THE PINPOINT OF SILENCE

Sight is the feeble moon eclipsed by encyclopedic clouds
The dictionary dominates the rate of pulsation
And sad worms ponder their spines in fright

This polarity sphere, a cognitive dome, is hunted by re-animated cloth
Worn by self important lips taller than the house of You

I'm sucked into the straw of raw globulin, a silver spark on my hand
Books make good ladders to reach the ears
Where the act of naming spells hypnotic futures
Unravelling ghost gutters with stellar marble skates

These iconic boards bend in magnetic heat
A trapped image shudders
A creeper rings the facial envelope
Drumming the horizon's square nettles
Into a splash of word circuits
Which form dense molecules stammering in restrictive cineplex mufflers
But no silence will dare sleep on the pinpoint
Which moments of censored glue fail to bind

Try as I may I cannot slide into this macabre footwear

BETWEEN HICCUPS AND OBLIVION

Attaining consequence is reduced to internal visions of a sonorous volcano which formed mucus glands. A final experiment can be entitled 'exploitation' as one of the forerunners of the deferred legendary formless. The attacks are attempting to follow a tendency to suffer from amnesia. Three days of this justification seemed like a lot of evidence. We feel a rejection reveals its true worth. If that were abandoned, an initial reading between hiccups and oblivion is therefore obliged to become more and more perilous.

An infatuation was raising a very high error, a description of the circumstances whose ruse is the very beginning. We have always been simply without mental reservations in this affair--a child under ten. I assure you, those in power because of elegant ulcers can be said to fit the criteria of didactic intention. This egocentrism is a vaunted dichotomy restrained and separated from the umbilical determinism.

Chance text collage

BLIND BREAKFAST DRAWING

While eating breakfast today I made two drawings with my other hand, without looking at the paper. Then I did a quick interpretation of each image. Here is the one I liked better:



Beehive hair and flying palm, she dances with a dense melange of an oil lamp, and crackling angles carry the charge of her internal wombat

SCHIZOTYPOGRAPHY

INTROVERTED ANHEDONIA

Galaxies' fingers suffocate my grizzled wasp, asp of a sudden lake spelling with a sedan the coiled letters of the sonic sun aimed at the heaving flame that drips across fasciculating mountains wrapped by snug time machine dust smashed into a net. Flinching elbows stain the ear plunged into a lime tree's how-to-do angina ripped wildly out of restless doors scored by mockery salt.

LABILITY OF AROUSAL

Smug advertisements for broken antennas cling to violent figs hurled into a treehouse where nosebleeds paint the lunar eclipse with bay leaves which are the clothes of a mandrake.

IDEAS OF REFERENCE

The static sea undulates with lyrical invocations to my infantile ribbons, olive eyes stung by robot news stuck in the exhaust.

CELIA GOURINSKY

I didn't know Celia Gourinsky, but I want to offer my condolences to the members of the Rio de la Plata group.

THE LIQUID MAGMA HEART

TELEPHONE TAG BLUES

Inspired by a video of George Melly making random calls from phone booths in England to recite poetic and humorous phrases, I decided to dial several completely random and probable 'wrong numbers' to ask if certain friends were at the place being called. I planned to improvise on the results, if there were any, but my first call went to an answering machine. As I was wanting to connect with a human being, I dialed another number which turned out to be the voice mail system for my entire high school. Thinking it amusing, I intended to leave poetic messages for an old teacher or two, but I was unable after several tries to enter a valid mailbox number. My third and final call was answered by a computer modem extending its screaming electronic palm towards my eardrum. I thought it oddly reflective of our times that I was unable to reach a single human being during this whimsical experiment in telephonic chance.

CHANCE DICTIONARY

A variation on Question and Answer or Definitions, but played using a single dictionary, or alternately, with one or more books.

Modern--of or like a lion

Shiite--an American shrub which bears small black or blue berries

Ratio--an organ of certain flowerless plants which bear reproductive cells

UNESCO--the state of being hypnotized

Prohibit--a cold blooded, aquatic vertebrate animal

Megalomaniac--insect, very destructive to wood

Lime--half light preceding sunrise

Legislate--a portion of a circle enclosed by two radii and the arc which they intercept

Warble--without form

Skeleton--a mercenary soldier who sells his services to any country

MAGNETIC SYRUP

If the heat lightning on your knuckles means cocoons will envelope your glass house, if rocks are laugh meters chummy with a tree vole, and if my hands are dynamos of strobe pools, giant trees carry magnetic syrup.

THE PRIME SLOUGH OF FROG DOUGH

As soon as my birch-leaf spine can finish with the muriatic cloud left boiling on a lash of wet silver coiled like a birth window over the prime slough of frog dough, half eaten by the outer eagle of toy beds, it will be one who walks with a secret ear to seek out and neutralize yellow wallpaper fads in glaciers where revelation animates the spider's green and white glove worn by the cloth panther.

THE SOMNAMBULIST FOOTPRINTS

The Somnambulist Footprints is the result of a collective project in which several contemporary surrealists and fellow travelers wrote short stories according to their own interests and imperatives, based on their common desire to subvert the very foundations of conventional reality, both on the written page and – more importantly – beyond it, in the open space of consciousness.

Contributing authors: Mariela Arzadun, J. Karl Bogartte, Daniel Boyer, Eric W. Bragg, Mattias Forshage, Parry Harnden, Dale Michael Houstman, Philip Kane, Merl, Ribitch, Matthew Rounsville, Shibek, Andrew Torch, and Xtian. With illustrations in black and white. Edited and introduced by Eric W. Bragg.

This is the very first publication by Oyster Moon Press -- a non-profit, surrealist publishing co-op initiated in Berkeley, California.

AN AWESOME LOVE SCAM

If that running Jesus could try rat bambi's taxi theories on the bed, technically pig digits can't turn into a window. Wish I'd thought lazy dream ball instruments, 10,237 high noises on my first try, and the best course of action, my clones...it's your head out a window! So everything like this has been released on an unlucky day. Meanwhile, I feel that sort of thing to be a surprise. An awesome love scam had never come to detention.

(semi-automatic word collage on the comics page)

PHILIP LAMANTIA

I want to take a moment to remember Philip Lamantia, who died three years ago on March 7th, 2005 in San Francisco. Lamantia's orientation, which included surrealism, poetic revolution, jazz, mystical/mythical heresy, and much more, continues to be inspiring.

SURREALIST EGREGORE

This blog strives to be a forum and archive for articles, events and creative material related to Portland, and for things of interest to me, with a nod towards surrealist experience and urban anthropology. It is open to other like minded contributors.

CAT IN A CAVE

PUPPET TEARS BOTHER THE CLEAN HOUSE

During screechy, unique, broken exploits, the cornstarch passion for bigger post-dance ferment is returning. Infamous arrows expand the tempestuous electric bedouin crocs. I lean ghost roses out of the shadow beating. They didn't know a generic rogue would love a priceless treacle wave.

The puppet tears bother the clean house. A few evenings later, gruesome uptight dummies closed the twenty-second floor lanes. Come make impossible sun characters--their secret desires inevitably pretended it was a death.

Fewer uphill hurricanes included the Negev desert into their injury lyric on her doorstep. The brief festival ends badly, highlighted by your deeply felt parade of fool's gold: brilliant logistics in predictable murders.

(Chance text dowsing on an entertainment weekly)

IN THE CASTLE OF CLAY CUPS

The Great Lakes are ambushed by an earthquake
A trembling visceral heatwave
In the castle of clay cups

Swallows wrap ribbons around the mountains
Their spider hands collapse mirrored dice

Ice appears on the old streets
The wild plants' invasion

Crazed ramblers of nepotism
Like falling glass


M.K. Shibek and Tim Iserman

SURROUNDS

The door of the left arm's eyelash nose and shoulder wisp the sigh of the right leg

Wrinkled loonies edge up from the crater 'neath a silver fish whose coal purple edge sets navel and breast 'gainst widge pugs


(text created through an imaginative reverie associating objects in the room with internal body states and subjective impressions)

PORTLAND SURREALIST GROUP DISSOLVES

The Portland Surrealist Group, founded in August 2001, dissolved on January 14th, 2008. Due to various internal situations we were unable to maintain a level of collective activity that was consistent over time, and this led to Brandon Freels resigning on January 13th. After further discussion FN Brill and I decided to disband the group. Much of the material that has been published at the Flying Stone blog and elsewhere will be printed and made available later this year.

I want to thank those who came to our meetings or pursued projects or friendships with us during these years (although such a list could never be complete): Victoria Garcia, Kaylene Chassie, Trillium, Rain, Ron, Dave, Chris Beavers, Paul Portugee, Sarah Frances, Andrew Daily, Christopher Gray, Trevor Blake, Anthony Leskov, Dave Negation, the Portland IWW, the Red and Black Cafe, the 411 Collective, the Portland Vadding Collective, Fifth Estate Magazine, Eberhardt Press, Doug Lain, Karl Lind, Apio Ludicrous, Ron Sakolsky, James Koehnline, Laura Corsiglia, Eric Bragg, Dale Houstman, Parry Harnden, Kevin Sampsell, Barrett John Erickson, Johannes and Anna Bergmark, Thom Burns, Nova Dawn, Tim Iserman, various cafe dwellers, passers-by, and other groups and individuals who wrote letters, sent books or showed support from the international surrealist community, especially the groups in Chicago, Stockholm, Leeds, London, and Rio de la Plata. Thanks to Zazie for hosting our first website.

The members of this nucleus will carry on surrealist pursuits in their own way. I may sponsor open meetings based on collective creation, reading circles, and experiments in the street in hopes of sparking a new group activity. Also, sound experiments with Qkcofse are providing an element of improvisation and collaboration that's in the spirit of surrealism, so those will continue.

M.K. Shibek

STRING GLASS ECHO

Without a shrug of bushes intent on rousing the string
You'll be a whisper in an engine room's glass echo

Without a parcel of ice-faced bunnies
Taken from the shelled ribbon plant
You'll be a frozen rose in the noon's telescope