An Ideal Dystopia

These days what’s the most we can realistically hope for but some form of ideal dystopia.
Perhaps an isolated bunker in a distant land deep beneath the surface fitted with all the conveniences that seem so essential, naturally.
We could sleep safe and soundly there and dream plastic dreams of our synthetic future as we transform into angelic androids, with our skins like vinyl that hisses and crackles when we touch, superficially smooth yet as we press harder we discover contours and grooves that activate sensations far forgotten within the soul.
We long for a fine and private place but there is none to speak of so we sneak into what passes for a sacred grove, dedicated to some degenerate local deity with one glass eye and undoubtedly an unappeasable taste for tidy hookers and neat gin.
In this dimly lit ersatz arbour made of rusting metal and fake bamboo hemmed in by tarnished mirrors we talk:
of replicants;
of organisms that ceaselessly duplicate;
of the next eagerly anticipated catastrophe;
of death and destruction as the ultimate spectator sport;
of the serenity to be found in surrendering to the spooked spiralling logic of paranoia;
of nightclubbing and nightcrawling;
of nocturnal emissions;
of the vicious inanity of Incubi and Succubi;
of the Latter Days of the Fourth Decadency;
of a corrosive inertia;
of ennui and entrophy;
of containment and contagion;
of chance encounters and happy accidents that lead to inevitable happy endings;
of the cellar door in The Very Heaven Heavenly Hotel;
of protean cult leaders;
of clairvoyant photographers;
of a vanishing star of stage and screen;
of wandering infra dig soldiers lost in the twilighting border zone;
of standing on the threshold of a room;
of skipping a vital slowed down sleazy beat;
of nonsensical impulses and randomly compelling whims;
of waylaid emotion and contaminated intimacy;
of perverse attractions;
of dream homes and heartache;
of love and sleep.

Take Me Tomorrow

Salvador Dali-a Miserable Flat (From the Marquis De Sade Suite-1969

Forever the sensualist, pursuing the pleasures
Of the flesh and the transitory moment,
Every passing chance and fleeting lust
With your oh-so debonair, cavalier
Devil-may-care-can-take-me tomorrow attitude,
Never paying heed, feckless and reckless
Following every bizarre whim and contrary impulse.
You never know why you are the way you are,
Though upon any given day you may blame
The father for passing on his rogue genes
Designed to self-destruct whenever
You gain an instant of clarity and collected calm,
Or the mother for expelling you from the Eden
Of the womb into this world of sorrow and woe.
But why stop there, surely the impersonal God
In the vast unreachable fortress of the Heavens
Deserves a share for even thinking and therefore
Emanating all the demiurges and demons
To fashion this perfectly flawed creation
With its built-in obsolescent as the unique selling point
Yes the guilt and the shame has to be theirs
For the urges that you always have to act on
Regardless of consequences and the possibility
Of a whole universe of hurt and pain
But can anyone take the weight of such responsibility?
At times like this, better to drink deeply
And gamble on the possibility of redemption,
Within her encircling arms lies salvation
The pressure of her hand on your thigh
Hints at an all-encompassing bliss
An unsurpassed re-capturing of the holy moment
If only she holds on tight and doesn’t hold back
You could die right now looking into her eyes
But one moment escapes into the next
And this night, like all nights, has to end:
The sun breaks the magic circle
Ending the eclipsing spell
Returning you to the sleazy here and now,
The dishevelled bed in this pallid light
In this foetid atmosphere heavy with sex
With the bitter taste of a fulfilled desire
Turning heavy and cold in your mouth.
The time is now, I think,
Tomorrow has come
Your party is over
That race has been run
You sinned in such haste
Time now to repent
At, of course, your leisure
For Hell is forever.

I Have So Often Dreamed Of You

Lee Miller-Man Ray 1929

Robert Desnos was in many ways the archetypal surrealist spirit. Involved in Paris Dada he was in the literary vanguard of Surrealism and possessed an extra-ordinary talent for automatic writing during the Trance Period, rivalled only by Rene Crevel. Desnos, like many others, fell out with Andre Breton and joined the group centred around Georges Bataille and his magazine Documents and he was one of the signers of the anti-Breton polemic Un Cadavre.

During WWII Desnos was an active member of the French Resistance and he was captured by the Gestapo in 1944. He was deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald and finally Theresienstadt where he would die a few weeks after the camp’s liberation from typhoid.

I have so often dreamed of you that you become unreal.
Is it still time enough to reach that living body and to kiss
on that mouth the birth of the voice so dear to me?
I have so often dreamed of you that my arms used as they are
to meet on my breast in embracing your shadow would
perhaps not fit the contour of your body.
And, before the real appearance of what has haunted and ruled
me for days and years, I might become only a shadow.
Oh the weighing of sentiment,
I have so often dreamed of you that there is probably no time
now to waken. I sleep standing, my body exposed to all the
appearances of life and love and you, who alone still
matter to me, I could less easily touch your forehead and
your lips than the first lips and the first forehead I
might meet by chance.
I have so often dreamed of you, walked, spoken, slept with your
phantom that perhaps I can be nothing any longer than a
phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow
than the shadow which walks and will walk joyously over
the sundial of your life.

Translation Mary Ann Caws

Ill Defined Locations

Jonathan Andrew-Bunker

 

I.

I am bored with symmetry, logic, systems, and rationales
Please don’t bother yourself to explain the why where or how,
Whatever happened to losing ourselves in some threatening city?
The thrill of taking a wrong turning and sensing the shadows shift-
Shape into lives that only in this moment have any relation to our own:
Becoming unmoored from our painstakingly constructed personas,
Thinking acting dying in the vertigo inducing deep instance.

II.

Please don’t tell me where I am going or where you have been,
The only maps I read fringe the expanse of blank space with monsters:
I have always searched for a location with ill defined co-ordinates,
A place where the boundaries are frangible or porous,
Here I can stage the break out, the break in, the break through,
A clue to the exit, entrance, waiting room or maybe terminus,
It’s been said before but I will say it again: existence is elsewhere;
In the recessed wardrobe in some forgotten attic spare room;
Down a rabbit hole in a field or through a silvered looking glass;
At the opening of the hidden eye or the tingle at the base of the spine;
A broken lift stuck between floors high up in some sink estate;
In the pressure on the solar plexus, in the hollow nexus of flesh;
Or a graffitied toilet cubicle in some abstract hotel of the future;
The cellar of a church scrawled with incantations, exorcisms and veves;
In an abandoned concrete bunker on a desolate stretch of shoreline;
Beneath an island of black sand and volcanic glass in a complex of caves;
Or the receding house in the borderlands shifting in the distance;
Somewhere or there if you say the right words at the appointed time
You could find yourself in some subterranean underworld or Wonderland,
To re-encounter all the savageries of childhood games and innocence,
Meet the chthonic deities, secret rulers, invisible masters, sovereigns
Of all they survey in these latter days of the Fourth Decadency.

III.

I have heard a rumour that they are hiring, press-ganging, shanghaiing,
Suitable personages, help is always wanted, space can sure be found
For lieutenants and officers of a studious and introspective disposition;
Rehabbing Ingénues resting in between a succession of difficult roles;
Be-bop gynaecologists smoking before inserting a fist into localized wombs;
Free-styling surgeons coming hard and fast as they make the cut into flesh,
But remember that incision is always first, anaesthesia only ever after:
For Sisters of the Immaculate Silk Stocking and Perpetual Pain
Raptly murmuring well sorry but you to me are just a pigeon;
Purveyors of all kinds of reprocessed filth and high spin deviation;
Hard noise volatilized followers of sinister charismatic cult leaders;
Aberrationist lexicographers in league with heretical cartographers;
Natty dogs with polka dot ties telepathically communicating weather reports;
Architects and designers specializing in the style of the Neo-New Brutalism
Or are actively working towards the Retro-Chaldean-Rococo-Monstrosity;
Procurers of contraband urine analysis and recondite pharmacopeia;
Contortionist courtesans of a pan-dimensional renown and fame;
Deep cover agents that have forgotten that they are in fact agents
Subverting the suburban norms that they ostensibly embody.

IV.

In the presence of the sublime and the grotesque our eyes will dilate
As we experience the miserable miracle beyond all artificial paradises;
But it is the only destination worth setting out for so let’s carry on
Without lodestones or compass, no navigation aid beyond still beating hearts.

You Promised Me Paris

Brassai

Do you remember?
Probably not,
Not rightly anyway.
I’ve listened to you reminisce,
Oh I don’t know
How many thousand times
And it only tangentially
Touches upon the truth:
Bears little to no resemblance
To any reality we ever lived.
You re-cast yourself as the hero,
The catalyst and centre-point
Of every scenario and situation.
You re-write the script,
The story changes in the telling
Every single time.
But do you remember?
Don’t you remember that

You promised me Paris
As a pendant,
Hanging from my necklace
Fashioned from falling stars.
You promised me the world
As a good luck charm,
Swinging from my bracelet
Wrought from light beams.
You promised me Paris,
You promised me Paris.

I wish I could forget
The years of careless neglect,
The constant evasions,
The way I avert my downcast eyes
As you smile once again
At some passing sweet young thing.
Look what you have made of me,
You could never help yourself.
You are always searching,
For someone to save you
From your own wretched self.
But you know it’s later than you think
Though sometimes I can almost believe
That you once believed
In you and me as a destiny,
In the words you spoke,
That I wish I could forget,
But I can never forget that

You promised me Paris
As a pendant,
Hanging from my necklace
Fashioned from falling stars.
You promised me the world
As a good luck charm,
Swinging from my bracelet
Wrought from light beams.
You promised me Paris,
You promised me Paris.