David Russell writes

This Could Be Happening

A chopped up and-centre-rag-plate and five pointers, sucked to a twined lost bath core – drill a well for the want of a coned river – a rasping, grating curl of smoke, the only hint of a cylinder being the river of fallen ashes in the rim, sweet bones with the cracking resonance of plastic beakers – ’tis all the flint-ship – what then? Go to it with the spidered sunbeam, the sick hole, a tectonic plate turned to air, assuring visibility, as saw-slashed cogs engineering on the crust – so he spread out his swimming eyes, gas-dynamo to inflate his balloon-idol, loss of repulsion and therefore gain of underheat, dynamic as a bent starfish inverted totally for the drying mop.

Absent-minded, he was always dropping and dispersing his precious artefacts. He hoped that an adequate consumption of glass – qua water-glass would make sharpened, looped veins and arteries out of his enlarged pores – a corn, or petals, as the case may be, in the middle – be discriminating, pile them into large bundles for the perspective of efficient loading, to the crash-smash splaying and flattening of overloaded, unsupported bounce – unlooped by tactile contact. Only gas could be tied to them, for the tying could not stem from the flow of the root-blood, but only from the restraining of that flow – poor, poor artefacts!  

He constructed a glass-fronted slot machine which depicted two men competing to climb up greasy poles.  Or would it be a gallows or a crucifix – or two gallows melting into one crucifix, flat out with their backs in the air, sustaining their footholds which, of course, were inflexible – so that, on the attainment of any goal, each one would be sliced to concussion, as entire bodies shrunk to mere arms, enlarged feet as connections to a massive vacuum of nailed, hammered overlap – this could be the best bed if the foot were the best rest – no question of submitting oneself to the same horizontal suspense of those sprung, soft mattresses. But first make a ninety-degree lunge, head first, by repulsion muscle-power of course, cutting through the weaving which made up the blankets above, wiping clean the torn, drenched reams of sleep’s soggy membranes, to be the jagged quality, the inconsistency within the tearing itself, so it was all supremely curled, as if by some awkward, irate fisherman trying to shake out the muddy waste water from his small, wooden-framed net, with fish for the balls.