I feel a great love for grass

I feel a great love for grass, thorns in the palm
of the hand, ears red against the sun,
and the little feathers of bottles.
Not only does all this delight me,
but also the grapevines and the donkeys
that crowd the sky.

In the sky
are donkeys with parrot heads, grass and sand
from the beach, all about to explode, all clean,
incredibly objective, and the scene
is awash in an indescribable blue,
the green, the red and yellow of a parrot,
an edible white, the metallic white
of a stray breast. How beautiful!

Helle,
dear sir! Yessirree, you must be rich.
If I were you I would be your whore
to cajole you and steal peseta notes
to dip in donkey piss…

Just think
with a little money, with five hundred
pesetas, we could bring out an issue
of the ANTI-ARTISTIC magazine
and shit on everyone and everything
from the Orfeo Catalan to Juan Ramon.

(From Salvador Dali’s letter to Federico Garcia Lorca, December 1927)

Few people would mourn a snail

He was a daily constant, a familiar
friend. The last known snail of his kind,
the final Achatinella apexfulva.

It is said that everyone dies alone,
but that was doubly true for George, alone
at the end both in his cage and in the world.

(From The Last of Its Kind)

Feed the brute

Advice on Marriage to Young Ladies:
do not marry at all but if you must
avoid the Beauty Men, Flirts and Bounders,
Tailors Dummies and Football Enthusiasts.

Look for a Strong, Tame Man, a Fire-lighter,
Coal-getter, Window Cleaner and Yard Swiller.
Don’t expect too much, most men are lazy,
selfish, thoughtless, lying, drunken, clumsy,

heavy-footed, rough, unmanly brutes,
and need taming. All Bachelors are
and many are worse still. If you want him
to be happy, Feed the Brute. The same

remark applies to dogs. You will be wiser
not to chance it, it isn’t worth the risk.

(Suffragette marriage advice from Pontypridd Museum, via History Hit)

Dead brown mice

At sundown the western sky turned a deep
and almost brilliant red, changing
and softening in colour in its upward
spread until the verge from south to north
was like an immense but yellowing rainbow.
Then frost came lightly; there was the merest
sound of a crinkle in walking over the grass
away from the oak wood. This morning the air
was softer. On the broad marl and flint track
there were dead brown mice; they had crept
from among the withered leaves under
the bramble bushes; it is one of the signs
that winter is sharpening.

(From 100 years ago: Rooks set about the acorns in an orderly way)

10 more years

Ten years of being loved up
fucked up
fucked off
loved up
very loved up
totally fucked off
so fucking loved up
I love you so fucking much
fuck you and the fucking horse
you rode in on.
Yeah?
Well, fuck you, too.
And utterly
utterly
loved the fuck up.
Another ten, then?
Yeah, go on
you sexy mother fucker.

(A friend’s Facebook status celebrating 10 years of a relationship)

Going on

The dog on a train station on my bed
and Netflix
and I’m working fine now
and I’m not working on a new phone
and then I’m driving to this room with me
and I don’t know if I’ll get it back
or I get it now
I got a problem
that I’m just going on with my life

(Generated by hitting the suggested text button in iPhone Notes repeatedly)

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)

Almost never losing

My whole life is about winning.
I don’t lose often.

I have a great relationship with the Mexican people.

All of the women on The Apprentice
flirted with me – consciously
or unconsciously.
That’s to be expected.

I have a great relationship with the blacks.

I better use some Tic Tacs
in case I start kissing her.
You know I’m automatically attracted
to beautiful women,
I just start kissing them,
it’s like a magnet.
You know when you’re a star they let you do it.
You can do anything.
Grab them by the pussy.
You can do anything.

I have tremendous respect for the Japanese people.

You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write
as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.
But she’s got to be young and beautiful.

Part of the beauty of me
is that I am very rich.
A person who is very flat-chested
is very hard to be a 10.

Black entertainers love Donald Trump.

Well, someone’s doing the raping, Don!
I mean, somebody’s doing it.
Who’s doing the raping?

With the proper woman you don’t need Viagra.

I almost never lose.

Who’s doing the raping?

(Quotes from The Collected Donald Trump and 32 quotes that sum up Donald Trump’s election campaign)

Specific comments about certain aspects of the meals service

In reply to a comment about the
fish batter not being sufficiently
crisp, Mr Howe explained that one of the fish
friers was not working properly, but
that he hoped that this would be put right
in the near future.

Mr Howe also
mentioned that recently it appeared
that a small number of undergraduates
in lunch and informal hall were taking
two portions of sweet or cheese and biscuits.
The committee agreed with him that people
should not take an additional helping
which they had not paid for.

Mr Howe said
that there was a tendency for the pencils
to disappear from the ticket machines
outside hall; the committee felt that
for the benefit of others, people
should not remove the pencils from the ticket
machines.

Mr Howe was worried about
standards of hygiene in the ‘servery’
and thought that undergraduates could
play a part in preserving standards by
refraining from peering into the food trays.

(Kitchen Committee minutes from Fitzwilliam College Magazine, 1971)

Sweet poison

When I first started selling wild honey
the price was extremely high. Then someone
in Korea ate too much and died.

This year’s harvest: quarter of a teaspoon.
You have a few minutes before
you are overcome with an urgent need
to defecate, urinate and vomit.

After the purge, you alternate between
light and dark. You can see and then
you can’t see. A sound, jam jam jam pulses,
like the drone of a bee hive, in your head.
Then you lose all motor function.
The paralysis lasts for a day or so.

Normally we have to see a doctor
to get bad things taken out of our bodies,
but the honey does this for us.

(From a National Geographic photo of wild honey caption)