Category: books

books and comics

Suppose, said the Universe

Suppose, said the Universe,
that I don’t care about being understood.
Suppose that I care more about being?

You are wrong again, then, said the Philosopher.
For being that is not conscious being
can scarcely be called being at all.

Can’t we just lie down in the shade
the rest of the afternoon
and watch the wheels go round?
I made nearly everything spherical
in the beginning so it would roll
when I kicked it. 

You are absurd! cried the Philosopher.
Uh-huh, said the Universe.

I’d like to see a whole thousand of giraffes
walking along in a row,
with their heads in the air,
thinking, thinking, thinking …
with tail coats and horn-rimmed goggles.

From Noah An’ Jonah An’ Cap’n John Smith, Don Marquis, 1921.

The old calendar must be the right one

For the animals still use it. The stork
flies away according to it, the bear
comes out of his hole on the Candlemas day
of the old calendar and not of the Pope’s 

and the cattle stand up in their stalls
to honor the birth of the Lord
on the Christmas night of the old
and not of the new calendar. 

The Pope has made his new calendar
that Christ will get confused and not know when
to come for the last judgment, and the Pope
will continue his knavery still longer.

An Italian walnut tree that had
reliably put forth leaves, nuts, and blossoms
on the night before Saint John’s day under
the old regime performed its feat 

on the correct day in fifteen eighty-three.
I have today sent a branch, broken off,
to Herr von Dietrichstein,
who no doubt will show it to the Kaiser.

From The Reform of the Julian Calendar, Roscoe Lamont, 1920.

Théodore Monod’s flan

Place some pastry in the flan-tray
in irregular masses, these
are the Precambrian mountain chains.

One fine day, while iguanodons
are blundering around in Picardy
and swarms of ammonites
are scudding around in the Parisian sea
a second tap is turned on again
and adds another layer,
this time of cream.
The sea re-invades a good part of the Sahara
and deposits the usual sediments —
Cretaceous and Eocene.

Gradually, the country comes to be
like it is today;
sprinkle with granular sugar
(fresh-water Quaternary deposits)
and icing sugar dunes.
Serve hot or chilled.

(From French naturalist Théodore Monod’s Méharées: Explorations au vrai Sahara, 1937)

Filey

Almost mid-way betwixt
Scarborough and Bridlington,
Filey Brigg,
being a nose of cliff thrust out into the sea
to form a horn of Filey Bay.

Here, there, are sands
i n o n e v a s t g l o r i o u s e x p a n s e,
from the Brigg to the Bempton Cliffs –
six miles of them all round the bay,
so spacious that there could never be
any overcrowding.
The beach
shelves
gently.

(From Every Woman’s Enquire Within: A Complete Library and Household Knowledge for all Home-Loving Women, 1939. Submitted by H L Foster)

A Hiding Darkness

The monsters
in our cupboards
and our minds
are always there
in the darkness
like mold
beneath the floorboards
and behind the wallpaper
and there is so much darkness
an inexhaustible supply
of darkness.

The universe is
amply supplied
with night.

(From Neil Gaiman’s Trigger Warning. Submitted by Anabella Maria Galang)

Profits

in the
real sense
of the word,
pro that
wonderful,
fun, and
deliciously creative
force that
bathes the body
in delight and pleasure,

and what you are actually against is porn sex?

a kind of sex that is debased dehumanized formulaic and generic a kind of sex based not on individual fantasy play or imagination but one that is the result of an industrial product created by those who get excited not by bodily contact but by market penetration and –

profits.

(From ‘Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality’ by Gail Dines. Submitted by Rosa Walling-Wefelmeyer)

Some Sort of Shining

I can still see the bright-crimson glow.
This wasn’t any ordinary fire,
It was some sort of shining.
I’d never seen anything like it in the movies.
That evening everyone spilled out
onto their balconies
and those who didn’t have them
went to friends’ houses.
We were on the ninth floor,
we had a great view.
People brought their kids out,
picked them up, said, “Look! Remember!”
They stood in the black dust,
talking, breathing, wondering at it.
People came from all around in their cars
and their bikes to have a look.
We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful.

(From Voices from Chernobyl. Submitted by Howie Good)

Soil, sand, dust

If anyone sees that sand or dust is falling on him,
then he will become very rich
and own a lot of property.

If he sees that he is walking in dust and sand
or he sees that he is loaded with the soil,
then he will have to toil much to get wealth
and he will get plenty of it.

If anyone sees that dust is suspended in the sky,
then it is a sign that his affairs
will become complicated.

If a person sees that he is digging the earth
and eating its oil
then he will be devouring wealth
with deceit and falsehood,
because “earth” means
a false religion.

A wilderness of horror
has the same interpretation.

(From Interpretation of Dreams, 1979). Submitted by Dale Wisely)

Fossil

In this quiet inlet,
some eddy has collected
and drowned at the bottom
of the mire, now turned into marl,
enormous heaps of shells
of every shape and size.
It is a molluscs’ burying ground
with hills for tumuli.

I dig up oysters a cubit long
and weighing five or six pounds a piece.
One could shovel up in the immense pile,
Scallops, Cones, Cylheridae,
Mactridae, Murices,
Turretellidae, Mitridae
and others too numerous,
too innumerable to mention

You stand stupefied before the vital ardour
of the days of old, which was able
to supply such a pile of relics
in a mere nook of earth.

(Jean-Henri Fabre on fossils in The Faber Book of Science. Submitted by Taidgh Lynch)