A Fiery Flying Roll

In the richness of your secret folds

2012-02-05T16:10:00.001Z

It was a red herring

2012-01-06T19:12:00.000Z

for Simon Furey

The Samoan

2012-01-01T16:15:00.001Z

Two old scholars
Argue about the casual sex
They may or may not have shared
As adolescents.
Their frenzied disputes
Are hopeful fantasies
Of memory.
They apply, fail to apply, apply, fail to apply
The scientific method,
While their public defloration
Is stripped from the calendar.
In this land of no today
The Polynesian gifts exchanged
Are a wave of particles on the sand.
Flightless birds run into a yesterday that did not happen
And the bones of the elders
Will burn down a tomorrow
That will never come.

A festive apparition of Our Lady of Roswell (NW1)

2011-12-24T17:33:00.002Z

Oh please come at once to the nursery, sir

2011-11-27T18:27:00.001Z

The children are playing with something that looks like a dog and is not a dog

At the flesh kinematograph

2011-10-24T22:46:00.000+01:00

The Pest Anatomized

2011-10-14T18:49:00.001+01:00

Theresa May speaks

2011-10-10T14:22:00.003+01:00

"The illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because - I am not making this up - he had a pet cat."

Cameron speech: Let's show the world some fight

2011-10-05T18:44:00.006+01:00

Let's bring on the can-do optimism. Let's summon the energy and the appetite to fight for a better future. And you ... just keep your hands where we can see them until the revolutionary guards come to take you to your cell.

Watchet Starfish

2011-10-03T10:56:00.000+01:00

In the Pantheon

2011-09-23T09:51:00.002+01:00

The Merry Acropolitan Burns Athens

2011-09-14T18:59:00.000+01:00

Apollo's Lyre

2011-09-13T23:29:00.000+01:00

Then I saw the keyboard of an organ which filled one whole side of the walls. On the desk was a music-book covered with red notes. I asked leave to look at it and read, 'Don Juan Triumphant.'

The scrying pool

2011-09-08T11:11:00.001+01:00

You will be sentenced by a feeding frenzy of your peers

2011-09-01T17:35:00.000+01:00

Rotwang

2011-07-31T18:41:00.001+01:00

A found poem

2011-07-27T09:16:00.002+01:00

Valmeras loved Raymonde's melancholy charm
She put the gun to her shoulder, calmly took aim and fired
Two huge letters, each perhaps a foot long, appeared cut in relief in the granite of the floor
'We're going out now. What do you think of my cockle-shell, Beautrelet?'

Encased, the grim-faced guardian

2011-07-20T13:42:00.001+01:00

Switchback of love

2011-06-26T20:48:00.000+01:00

The first step to survival

2011-06-13T22:34:00.002+01:00

for my comrades of the Athens Surrealist Group

Solon, the owl

2011-06-10T22:41:00.001+01:00

Scinlace

2011-04-27T22:41:00.000+01:00

Shangri-La

2011-04-24T12:52:00.001+01:00

The unheimlich manoeuvre

2011-04-19T22:36:00.002+01:00

Every Man His Own Fantômas: or, Away With Nostalgia

2011-03-27T18:31:00.003+01:00

This piece was first published in Black Lightning #1. I reprint it here to mark ... not the centenary of Fantômas's birth, but a century of his rampages, in which we must join.

Do you know where the masked gaze of the Master of Terror first burned into you? I was in a second-hand bookshop in Balham. His cape swept over the city, and I felt those demonically empty eyes drawing me in. Edward Gorey compared the characters to Looney Tunes cartoons, and The Silent Executioner launched me on a night journey into sheer malicious wonder.

I was entranced.

These evil black pearls were magical and I wanted more. This was my discovery, nobody could ever have heard of Fantômas before, and I soaked up every empty coffin, every rubber-armed disguise, every deadly-perfumed flower. I was frenzied with the poison of these texts, and later with the deadly toxins of Feuillade’s films. I lived the swooning dread of the Unseizable One’s reign.

Along the way I came to realise that not only was I not, in fact, the first to succumb to his malevolent darts, but that many of the people I most admired had also written with similar frenzy of his iron grip. The early Surrealists, contemporaries of the novels and Feuillade’s films, were also swept along on their narcotic clouds. Apollinaire seems to have lifted the title The Poet Assassinated from a customarily vicious episode in a Fantômas novel. (Such a theft is itself worthy of the Genius of Crime).

And of course this was only to be expected. I was responding to the same febrile marvels as the earlier Surrealists had.

But I began to notice another trend, too, as I became more involved with contemporary Surrealism. Liking Fantômas had been sanctioned by our forebears. It was acceptable and appropriate to admit liking Fantômas. How many people borrowed my Feuillade DVDs because they felt they ought to, and then had nothing to say about them afterwards? How many people were prepared to drop the name of Fantômas whilst clearly having no interest in his crimes? Fantômas had simply become canonical.

The canon has a dead hand, but I didn’t love Fantômas because Desnos had written a poem about him, because it was permitted. I loved Desnos’s poem for the same reason I loved Fantômas: I wanted to sweep everyone and everything away in an amoral cataclysm that was not permitted, I wanted to send an actor to the gallows in my stead so that I might achieve my terrible plans. In a world which treats us with callous contempt, Fantômas’ coldly rational and unexplained fury is the doorway to our release.

We will always make lists of things we love. We will always look behind us at doors that have already opened, but their value lies in what is still found behind them, not in who told us they were open, nor in when they were unlocked. This is no nostalgic wallow. Yes Fantômas lives, but so do such convulsive descendants as T-Bag in Prison Break, the Joker, or President Lex Luthor. Only by sending the piteous Gurn summarily to his doom will we also be able to find these new Fantômases here and now, will we be able to open new doors. To break the skeletal grip of the canon we must not admire Fantômas. We must be him.

To the sewers!

The dancing master walks on crutches

2011-03-16T23:08:00.000Z

Muammar Gaddafi: 'All my people love me'

2011-03-02T00:18:00.002Z

Falcon dances with vulture

2011-02-09T19:04:00.000Z

E12 hieroglyphs

Desiccated dancing in a castle of the skins of my former lives

2011-01-28T19:48:00.003Z

The embolism

2011-01-27T11:14:00.001Z

Spontaneous confirmation of the possibility of changing life and transforming the world

2011-01-12T11:40:00.000Z

Slippery Ghosts

2011-01-10T19:00:00.002Z

At other times footsteps have been heard and horrible sliding, serpentine rustles, as of gigantic snakes slipping about on the brick steps. Water fills the tunnel to within a few steps of the top. It is extremely probable that the river has broken in at some time and flooded the passage. This has given rise to stories that the tunnel is inhabited by great eels ...

A glimpse of the future

2010-12-31T14:33:00.000Z

Sheela na Gig

2010-12-06T14:32:00.001Z

At the court of the Crimson King

2010-11-26T13:14:00.000Z

The Projectionist

2010-11-20T17:13:00.001Z

La bourgeoise s'épate

2010-11-15T17:39:00.001Z

'I am scandalised at these salacious details,' she said. Her eyes twinkled with the prurient lusts of the desiccated and empty.

'But they are entirely your own invention,' I objected. She could not hear me above the sounds of her hands rustling in her underwear.

'Oh how astonishing to find myself - me, just an unassuming housewife - part of this bohemian world'.

Like all the other products of her imagination, she made it sound like a shopping centre.

In the age of the romantic gesture

2010-11-06T16:39:00.002Z

George Osborne says we must all tighten our belts (2)

2010-10-26T12:51:00.001+01:00

We must share the sacrifice and spend the same

George Osborne says we must all tighten our belts

2010-10-21T16:19:00.001+01:00

The Transmogrifiers

2010-10-08T15:09:00.003+01:00

The teenage alchemists of E6 scatter pages from their records across the streets.

Pottery Should Be Made By Al

2010-10-07T13:05:00.000+01:00

The Lusty Hero

2010-09-30T19:20:00.001+01:00

His vigour was impressive

Stalked by a phoenix of retribution

2010-09-18T13:37:00.001+01:00

The Midnight Show at the Folies Papales

2010-09-12T16:35:00.004+01:00

Dancing for a special audience of hormonal pubescents who are thinking of joining the Hitler Youth

Birger Jarl's Golden Erection

2010-08-29T20:28:00.000+01:00

Arcanum IX

2010-08-21T14:22:00.001+01:00

The Big Society

2010-08-20T11:37:00.002+01:00

Angry villagers seek out evidence of scientific progress

Primitive Survival

2010-07-30T15:18:00.002+01:00

I dug an animal trap beneath my eye.
I grew a stain of leaf-mould to cover it
And hide the work of necrotising insects.
At the corners of the horizon
Oil-winged predators slip from my view
Leaving the smell of burnt fish-skins
And the taste of charcoal.
The soft rotting pops in my ears

The Eye is the Devil's Doorway

2010-07-15T23:19:00.002+01:00

The Choir

2010-06-20T18:13:00.001+01:00

Earless forger and gifted academic

The King and Queen of the Violently Dead

2010-06-13T21:17:00.001+01:00

April on Eyjafjallajökull

2010-05-30T22:01:00.001+01:00

From the Bloomsbury Zoological Garden

2010-05-19T16:48:00.001+01:00

Pope Benny the Nazi Writes to the Irish

2010-03-24T21:27:00.002Z

Hello sonny. You've probably been wondering about all these changes that have taken place recently, haven't you? Why you haven't seen Father Michael quite as often as you used to? Or quite so close up? Well, I'd like to set your mind at - gosh, you're big for your age, aren't you? I tell you what, why don't you hop up here on my knee while I tell you all about it. It's ok, nobody needs to know. After all, what happens in Maynooth stays in Maynooth.

For His Holiness Spartacus Mills, the Loose Canon

Sylvia's Hello pt 3

2010-03-19T11:16:00.000Z

melt action pusher next!
under sheaf sheaf steer.
self fagot monkey some!
dormer steer dormer way!
choker livid throve throve.
shelve guslar.
detank dove.
arena billet layer rung?
bigamy next.
self dot cyder scar?
movie melt.
goof movie relic.
endue nobble way reddle!

da dextram misero et tecum me tolle per undas

2010-02-19T15:56:00.001Z

The Companions of the Rosy Hours of Mazenderan

2010-01-17T17:12:00.000Z

The stalker of my dreams pursued me into the morning

2009-12-31T18:24:00.002Z

for AM

2009-12-24T16:51:00.002Z

In your dark mouth

I have seen the thousand mountain words.

Shoals of silver leaves

Swim beneath the city's domes,

Among the fountain crowns.

Breath murmurs

Within the bullet-soled slippers

As you dance

In black-whiskered air bubbles.

The shattering air glitters,

Dust clouds the sights,

And your raven's wings

Dissolve softly on the horizon.

The Lecanomant's Response

2009-12-15T11:07:00.002Z

Sylvia's Hello (part 2)

2009-11-28T01:44:00.002Z

gantry guslar phlegm keen?

scar ensure sward.

camp guslar enrol kotow.

check way labile layer!

otto sheaf enrol shelve!

repay dot detank relic!

kotow sheaf preen parky!

gantry outsit scar coiner.

billet squeal kotow throve!

media relic check scar!

check labile phlegm.

small doubt dove lake.

arena livid crow sircar?

bemuse detank melt next?

jura some otto sircar!

wizard precis denim.

gun scar.

more urban legends

2009-11-20T13:37:00.001Z

'... but they didn't want to break their holiday, so they wrapped her up and left her in the car ...'

Madame Celeste

2009-11-19T10:43:00.000Z

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

2009-11-12T21:10:00.002Z

One Message

2009-10-26T19:29:00.000Z

Revolutionary Uterus-Tilting

2009-10-16T12:06:00.002+01:00

"The angle at which the womb is suspended in the pelvis frequently settles the whole question of sanity or insanity. Tilt the organ a little forward - introvert it, and immediately the patient forsakes her home, embraces some strong ultraism - Mormonism, Mesmerism, Fourierism, Socialism"

Jewelled spiders amongst the dead

2009-10-14T12:38:00.001+01:00

Sylvia's Hello (part 1)

2009-10-02T17:18:00.000+01:00

egret throve halm taster

squeal limey livid.

guslar keen crow rung!

preen parky torque action?

camp bagged ulna repay.

phlegm doubt throve

spawn kotow spun.

dormer choker unbare repay!

otto halm unbare bigamy?

pithy cyder reddle.

buff dormer melt phlegm!

phlegm stem.

enrol melt.

cyder spun bagged steer.

detank otto dree ensure!

rung leaden

relic pusher.

The ringing of poetry

2009-09-25T18:54:00.000+01:00

Demons in the struggle against ...

2009-09-14T13:04:00.000+01:00

Cry havoc and let slip the prawns of dawn

2009-09-03T19:56:00.000+01:00

Meanwhile, on board the Enterprise ...

2009-08-25T10:29:00.002+01:00

... Chief Engineer Geordi Lafargue is demanding the right to be lazy.

for Erik

The trail of terror led Juve to Stockholm

2009-08-24T18:46:00.001+01:00

The public executioner initiates his deformed son into his trade

2009-08-15T17:28:00.000+01:00

The Long View

2009-07-13T23:39:00.004+01:00

He studies history

As social networking and

Shops, surrounded

By years.

Come on, Snowy

Emblematize.

That was no boating accident.

My initial

New beginning to things

Clouded the excitement.

Neverending cycle of goodness

Causes birth defects. However, studies in animals have shown surplus

Tablet of happiness is here.

Refurbishment and unauthorised entry

2009-07-06T12:36:00.001+01:00

On the Tight Rope

2009-07-02T13:47:00.001+01:00

The Warmth of My Heart

2009-06-29T19:33:00.000+01:00

A Message

2009-06-19T19:49:00.004+01:00

Down on the broad Underground platform, the party was in full swing. There was a hubbub of chatter, the clink of glasses. I stood close to the wall, holding a glass of wine, when a tall figure in white came and stood in front of me. He wore long white robes, which were bound round the lower half of his face. On his head he wore a tight-woven cap of white ribbons. A good head taller than me, he looked down with his piercing dark eyes. Raising the forefingers of his right hand up to the level of my eyes, he said solemnly 'Don't forget. It's in the Second Manifesto'.

As his hand dropped again to his side, he began to fade, becoming transparent. From the midriff he slowly disappeared, and I could see the platform and the party through his form until there was nothing left there at all.

Thoth reads the Second Spell on the Alp

2009-06-14T20:07:00.000+01:00

Het Duivelspaard

2009-06-05T23:55:00.002+01:00

So the Devil leapt on to the woman he had turned into a black horse, and rode her right to the doors of Hell. He shouted 'Open these doors! I am here with a woman!'

The Portrait

2009-05-28T14:36:00.000+01:00

The Siren

2009-05-21T13:22:00.001+01:00

Tauromachy (E12)

2009-05-11T11:58:00.000+01:00

The sampling wasn't terribly scientific

2009-05-06T23:39:00.002+01:00

Jana Philosophe carried a knife

in her potato-form bodice

A lightning bolt through her ear.

Fat speckled snakes ran through bamboo flowers

Down her arms

While lights danced in her blind cat's eyes

On the blank starred walls.

Legs Lloyd Overton ate his fists

as letters tumbled to the floor,

Shaky with caffeine poisoning.

His hat trembled

As his unmanaged reputation disintegrated.

A world of obstacles and conditions

2009-05-05T12:23:00.000+01:00

Danse macabre

2009-04-30T16:17:00.001+01:00

A Certain Degree of Obnubilation

2009-04-29T00:50:00.000+01:00

to be continued

2009-04-17T11:50:00.005+01:00

Like many others, I got to surrealism thanks to the work of Franklin Rosemont. I first read André Breton in Franklin's invaluable anthology, What is Surrealism? His introduction to Breton burned with the vividness of surrealism as a living movement. I didn't always agree with Franklin, but that's a mark of a living movement. That so many of us are part of that movement, arguing and collaborating and disputing and creating, is a testimony to his contribution over the years.

'... surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine, nor a philosophical system, nor a mere literary or artistic school. It is an unrelenting revolt against a civilisation that reduces all human aspirations to market values, religious impostures, universal boredom and misery'.

Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009)

At the fun-fair, one ride in particular caught my attention

2009-04-07T11:52:00.000+01:00

A birthday greeting from London

2009-04-05T00:41:00.003+01:00

Do not be alarmed. I will instruct half a dozen servants to keep the venerated remains of your body and to protect them from the ravenous hunger of the dogs. No doubt the body has remained stuck to the wall like a ripe pear and has not fallen to the earth; but a dog can jump extremely high, if one is not careful ...

Evolutionary Anthropology Discovers the Missing Link Between Humanity and Extinction

2009-03-31T16:19:00.001+01:00

The Fool

2009-03-25T21:40:00.001Z

The red light continues about me, and I find myself surrounded by extraordinary flowers

2009-03-22T20:49:00.003Z

A dream in which I sliced coffin lids like chilis

2009-03-14T17:36:00.000Z

Dagon

2009-03-13T18:37:00.001Z

Then suddenly I saw it ...

The Hand of Conventi

2009-03-02T15:50:00.001Z

All parts of the city find themselves in the grip of the Napoleon of Necromancy

The Octopus Scarab

2009-02-26T23:22:00.000Z

Do not be afraid to extirbate

2009-02-23T14:32:00.000Z