I say ‘biscuit’ 900 times an hour

The hippies of
outrageous fortune
weigh heavy on
the minds of dogs

Taken from an account of life with Tourette’s in the Guardian, 10th February 2012. Submitted by Marika Rose.

La vie aux bouts des doigts

Solo and ropeless
Edlinger climbs out
underneath an overhang,

hangs effortlessly off one arm
several hundred feet
off the ground while

dipping the other
into a bag of chalk,
utterly indifferent

to the danger,
before swinging his foot
into a crack above his head

and pulling himself up.

From the obituary of Patrick Edlinger, 15 June 1960 – 16 November 2012, in the Daily Telegraph. Submitted by Angi Holden.

Houndstooth

Things started to go downhill
while I was trying to
administer novocaine to a dog.
I’m still not entirely sure what happened.
I was trying to inject his gums with anesthesia
when a message popped up,
telling me I had failed.

Game over.

Taken from a review of an ipad app called ‘Dental Surgery’, 4th December 2012. Submitted by Mat Riches.

Kugel decided then and there

that he would die a happy man,
that he would consider his meager life
a success, if
in years to come,
somewhere,
someday,
someone
kicked in Jonah’s door
and Jonah was surprised.
Shocked.
Amazed.

Let him be utterly
bewildered, dear God.

Let him wonder,
raised-eyebrowed and slack-jawed,

They kick doors in now?
Since when?
Hang on, hang on—
they’re putting people in ovens?
You can’t be serious.
Since when
do people
put other people
in ovens?

From Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander (2012). Submitted by Ailsa Holland.

Snakes

I don’t mind snakes
but sometimes
they’ve been quite

you know: snakes
going up legs
and snakes everywhere
warm on your skin

lots of snakes
like giant white albino pythons
I don’t mind them
so it’s all right

I don’t mind them
I quite like them
but yeah
if you didn’t I mean

Taken from an interview with Kate Moss in The Times, 26th January 2012. The interviewer’s questions and some punctuation removed. Submitted by Thom.

A relationship with the vernacular

Let us also recognize
our own native
detachable snake-hips,
our rangy legs,

our educated feet.
Our arms and fingers
wave and snap
in a special way.
Our shoulders hang
as no other people’s
shoulders hang.

Taken from ‘Musical Myths of the American West’, by Stephen Brown, a review of two books in the Times Literary Supplement, 9 November 2012. The poem is a quotation from the writings of Lincoln Kirstein. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

Game over

Even our ideas
Rick
are most certainly not our own

We have read everything
somewhere
or have heard it
somewhere

We’ve got nothing
really
except each other

And we hate each other

From a discussion of the political divide on Salon.com. Submitted by Wesley Brown.

Ontology

And
painters don’t
know they are.

Not
Ed Ruscha.
Not Robert Indiana.

They
just don’t
know. But they

are.
It’s good
they don’t know.

They’d
be impoverished
by their art

if
they knew.

Taken from a blogpost on the blog dbqp, 12th November 2012. “They’d” has been contracted from “They would”. Submitted by Andrew Bailey.

Guitar practice

Wait until the moon is out
then go outside
eat a multi-grained bread
and play your guitar to a bush.
If the bush doesn’t shake
eat another piece of bread.

From Captain Beefheart’s 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing. Submitted by Grace Andreacchi.

On Feet

Slippers are designed
to be slipped into
without help from the hand.
They are monuments to
the hatred of bending down.

A quotation from Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life, first published in 1951. Submitted by Marika Rose.