PARAMITSHA
A NEWSLETTER OF SURREALISM IN SOUTHAMPTON
Fernseed Gathered at Midnight
A scavenger and a thief and a wanderer by nature, I roam the streets asleep and awake - and I habitually go equipped. Here are paramitsha (a Romany word for "fairy tales"), stitched together from dreams, obsessions, encounters; fiery tales and a marvellous "fiction" to oppose the brutal "truth;"seeds of transformative power, found in the cracks of the corporate facade. Germination and imagination and a well-aimed crowbar will lever the walls apart!
FLETCHER HOUSE
Big black boot approaching
sings the lark
mercury sunrise intimidates
the song --Virginia
ORAM'S ARBOUR
inside each circle of turf made so
another smaller and so on and so on
and on
in the middle magnifying glass
applied
microscope electron laser deep down
investigator told you his beard look
his eyes his mouth choke on
chlorophyll--Steve
THE ROTUNDA
A theatre for the ritualised
presentation of orchidelerium.--Gypsy
THE FUZZIES
Eyes stitched closed
wafting blue haze settles
opium zephyr carries another shiny madness
to be misconstrued.--Virginia
POPLAR FOREST
must
everyne wants
to go
there admire
needle condom
burnt car
corpse god sculpture--Steve
THE FUZZIES
A goblin market of gift boxes from
the city of mischief.--Gypsy
ORAM'S ARBOUR
Body cast of thorns abandoned
cursed delicate veins
ecstatic left to their own devices
casting out life's blood
giving bone meal an ultimate
purpose
oh that wonderful sound of bones
grinding
heard fathoms deep in an indolent
sea
playing a barren song.--Virginia
MULBERRY ROW, MONTICELLO
fruit silk worms eaten
comes out squashed compressed
hitech treatment megastar
enough a more to move
across sunset-tinge dreamwater
mountain holed curved run off runnel
string
would play music if only bow big
enough
eat faster silkworms from droppings
next will make
needful to raise from water striding
rock instrument
tunes to raise leviathan ready steady
wrapped rising in silk scales you
make--Steve
FLETCHER HOUSE
Build from the raptures of Robin
Hood and the sweat brought back
from Australia.--Gypsy
WOLVESEY CASTLE
Auburn tresses rooted
ambiguous remains
swept into future destinations
stones now dancing with sterile
abandon
absence of cynical canines
Orion surveys den domain
longing for flaming colons
wolverine lust
dog breath coupling baying
ripping
subcutaneous penetration
NEVERMORE!--Virginia
ST. HELEN'S WELL
Where you may still hear the echo of
Grainne ni Mhaille sharpening her
sword.--Gypsy
THE ROTUNDA
the vast majority
at a guess must be
turning back to compost
earth a cycle round
upside down sunk
dome stops 'em
wriggling free below before
completely rotted down--Steve
QUEEN ELEANOR'S GARDEN
Sipping rosy hips urns wyver's eyes
green
her royal head transcendent
slight raw tendons devouring oysters
from a final broken strand
glow worms competing for black
opalescence
awaiting nymph's lanterns
lunar eclipse blooms bright above
mantis' motionless silhouette
she escapes rape just once
before the obese night flattens
her wish fulfillment.--Virginia
POPLAR FOREST
Where shivering tulip fire marks the
graves of those who once rode
beyond The Pale.--Gypsy
WOLVESEY CASTLE
deep night eye bright
howls fur walls heave
jaws up at moon
any morning now bound
one only be free
to be human again
uniform jobsworth keep out
enclosure keeps wild thoughts
in what battlements dungeons
made for faces licked
clean bright tidy schooled--Steve
ST. HELEN'S WELL
Luminous nocturnal seduction
residue of flames flutter
Alice is lost
cesspool stench of last year's uterus
leads the vile virginal way
to the mechanical cylinder
perfect in its paradise lost
legalized neutrality oils its beaters
their desires conform
fragile under the cross of
introspection.--Virginia
MULBERRY ROW, MONTICELLO
Leads reveries induced by the
perfumes of Brazil straight to the sea.--Gypsy
Artwork By:
The Questing Beast
The Questing Beast of Arthurian myth is a marvellous, convulsively beautiful hybrid. It resolves the non-diametrically opposed opposites of lion and leopard, snake and hare, in one body. Its appearance is heralded by the howling ("questing" in Old English) of twelve hounds in its belly, which emerge in a forest clearing to tear it apart.
A few years ago, at a jumble sale, I found a booklet by Alby Stone entitled The Questing Beast and Other Cosmic Dismemberments. This intriguing little work lay forgotten until this summer, when I finally got around to reading it beside the seaside in Croatia. Stone links the Questing Beast to other scenes of violent dismemberment in the Arthurian canon, which stick out like sore thumbs amid the christianised romances of the Middle Ages. These images, he asserts, come from the oral tradition, and are folk memories of ritual re-enactments of the creation of the cosmos itself. Their roots lie in Indo-European cosmogony, in which a primordial being is hacked to pieces, its body parts forming the physical universe. In Norse myth, for example, the world is formed from the body of Ymir, the frost-and-fire giant torn apart by Odin.
Surrealists dismember to create all the time. The Questing Beast is an ancient embodiment of Breton's spark, appearing when two separate realities are drawn into contact. They are dialectical beasts, and they exist to be pursued.
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