Soap In A Dish Below Rain In A Valley
Connor May
Published by Electric Frog Ltd 2023.
If you are unsatisfied, then welcome. — Peter Gizzi
O, O, O Bananas peaches a pomegranate ◊ in the training session Deanna has her
with difficulty
camera turned off and so does Owen I
find the
turn mine off so that I can make a
nightingale’s nest
cheese sandwich I’m still listening to the presenter though I can’t see the slideshow now this is the suicide awareness training I was talking about someone once thought that Deanna was my mum because of our accents
are
similar
after
this
presentation there is an emergency meeting it is 8pm already and I am thinking about watching an episode of Columbo I have recorded before I go to bed
the grass that has been cut and heaped
on some Japanese
into large mounds and has become a
islands the snails
hiding
place for insects young
have made one
children and playful mechanics has
problem even
started to rot and become slippy the
worse
colour of it is a very funny shade of green it makes you think of something your maths teacher said once you can’t remember what exactly but
the wizard’s
something about the way she moved
favourite dinner is
her mouth is reminiscent of the sickly
udon noodles with
green pallor of the grass a wizard
fried tofu and
emerges from an alleyway
orange nam jim
◊ I never would have guessed that one day I would be standing in my kitchen trying to get soap out of a dish bel ow rainfall in a valley
the wizard walked down a hall of
I am a fragment of a
pulped yams in his pocket was a brass
shadow
hyrax a clog of bone & the concept of milk ◊ a meeting room where several people are sitting on listerine blue chairs on a
everything changed
whiteboard in the centre of the room
when we caught
are the words ‘Hopes, Fears’ above a
fire
list of things in slightly smaller font the
categories
are
ambiguous
zeppelins is written just above goat dehorning a man sat in the corner climbs into a giant zip lock bag and seals himself in everyone else turns to watch him slowly suffocate they begin to slow clap
and therefore on the birch was written the first Ogham inscription ◊ Charles Olson didn’t like the concept of irony because he couldn’t see the iron in it the ◊
leathery
sea
squirt knobbly invader
excuse me! the bream is the lord of the
in Korea they are
river’s fish when I woke up in October
steamed
and saw the leaves coming off I knew
but here they are a
I would have to record it all the manta
menace
rays
the
sulpadeine
max
the
dysmorphia the sore stomachs the bruised nose (very sorry Samantha)
the idea is to get service users involved in the community in a meaningful way which means going to the chippy on a Friday night shall we go to watch the airplanes good man he doesn’t want to get out of the
astrophysicist shot
car have you tried showing him a
through wall
series
of
stickers
representing
activities in a sequence of time like walk juice car? we don’t know if he reads right to left or the other way or horizontally starting at the top the idea is that if you combine part of the community & meaningful activities & independent choice making then you have supported them to develop personhood we have replaced the triangle of impairment with another thing that doesn’t mean anything please bear it in mind always
the corporate language that these care
and the winner of
charities use is facile empty and
‘Bake off’ is
metaphysically wrong we make
nine dismembered
things
possible
corresponds
to
bodies
saying you can make something exist when there was nothing which is false and the acrostics they use are bad and not thought through properly so that they use a word like tenacious because they need a word for the ‘t’ in positive tenacious is a word whose connotations seem at odds with the idea of caring in a meeting a manager who was exactly my age said there is a big market for this which isn’t a comforting thought when you’re being put in harm’s way on very low pay power with not power over
all of us are Ahabs
it rained all morning but as I walked
the stage where a
to work I noticed a dish of soap
conflict might take
bubbling in a nearby creek what
place is now gone
caught my eye was not the soap itself
occluded by the
but rather the way that the rain was
receding state that
glistening on it
says there is no conflict though ◊
there is still the police logic of judges and law ‘we
the wizard had three lairs or hideouts
are the managers of
across a wide area the first is a house
the only thing
under a ridge the positioning of which
possible’ & the
was somehow worked out carefully so
only thing possible
that it sees only one hour of daylight
is more cuts the
the second is a listening house on the
destruction of yr
coast here he listens to whales
communities death
yawning a man masturbating on
just keeping
Rathlin Island the hardening of a gall
yourself alive is
stone inside Boris Johnson he records
radical now at the
all this every detail the third house
start of November I
was a cupboard inside a room in the
had three weeks off
probation board’s office
sick from work it was like restitution
is India planning to shrink its army? I am going to learn ◊
ancient ugaritic
reluctantly listening to a colleague who desperately wants to tell me about the history of the Godzilla films I like the one with Matthew Broderick apparently they are not all
lamb chops stuffed
about Hiroshima recent versions
in car exhaust in
speak to contemporary issues in
UK meat attack
Japanese politics and culture ◊
his death allowed for a panther to
one day amidst a fierce gale the sailors spotted
a
red-checkered
pigeon
fluttering wearily up in the sky
appear who could show them how to live without desire
how may one provide a relationship to
only October the
a person that would be advantageous
5th and already I
to their growth?
am doing the five pound a day thing ◊
which is something like a Tesco meal
I am the rogue affect in your corporate
deal and then a
structure of feeling
bowl of cornflakes later some toast
◊
maybe some tinned tomatoes and fish
the skull of a first-born dog is used to
on toast the wage
heal rashes caused by stepping into a
gap
dangerous space ◊ the Aveeno cream you apply twice a day after his flannel wash or evening bath to any scratches or irruptions the salbutamol inhaler he takes before bed using the rubber fitting that helps him breathe it in
the humiliation of one’s own void is
the
wizard’s
the only authentically lived emotion
favourite dinner is udon noodles with
◊
fried
tofu
orange nam jim I like my mechanical pencil cheers Connor ◊ tango with a I’ll get inside your bones and bleed you to the floor ◊ a person’s happiness is better when faced with the morning happiness of another
Norwegian fox
and
inside each pitcher was strung out on a tension wire screwed at either end
I could eat these
to the walls the room I was in was 6ft
chandeliers like a
x 10ft the pitchers were arranged like
souvenir chocobo
this in terms of colour: yellow blue burgundy purple gold inside each pitcher was red wine that was so dark as to almost to be black under each pitcher lay a man five in total they all were shirtless and breathing heavily their stomachs going up and down like the surface of the ocean a
Kurt Cobain was
mechanism
lactose
something
like
a
miniature crane had been placed at one end of the tension wire and every few seconds it would move the wire so that some of the contents of each pitcher would tip out into the mouths of the men I noticed that whether from sadness or joy the men were crying
intolerant
conspiracy theory
apparently walking is good for the mind and the body on one of these walks Charlemagne and Kafka fight
the somewhat
about the credence of Julian Jayne’s
unpredictable
novel The Origin of Consciousness In the
nature of the
Breakdown
Rumspringans will
of
the
Bicameral
Mind
Charlemagne throws a handful of
always be of
wood lice in Kafka’s direction that
concern
night I sit up drinking with Kafka until three something he is so drunk that when he gets up to go to the toilet he realises he can’t make it so he pisses on my leg and we both laugh ◊ my neighbour is training a Bedlington
YouTube search for
Terrier called Haneke to sniff out
Hannah Weiner
invasive Argentine ants
leads me to a video titled “Hannah Montana’s Giant Weiner”
dream in which I am cleaning a garden
jet engine
shed out for someone but they’re
manufacturers used
ungrateful for it I have nearly finished
to test for
my task the floor is swept the
birdstrikes by
gardening implements are stowed
launching dead
away I notice two small rabbit
birds into the
hutches stacked on top of each other
engines
in the corner one is empty but the other one contains a dozen tiny people in kneeling postures as if praying in one hand they all are
Tetanus, erysipelas
holding a lit torch I tip the hutch
and anthrax are the
upside-down
price most
to
evacuate
these
people but it is now apparently full of
frequently paid for
Dijon mustard the mustard oozes out
these particular
all over the shed floor and onto a
caresses
toolbox in the garden I notice a dead lizard that wasn’t there before it gets suddenly very dark and then I wake
this will destroy
up
bourgeois subjectivity
he cooks me a meal in a rusty pan
in fractal blissfully
funnily enough I can’t taste the rust
angry woodspurge
but instead the grated cheese that has
in the pebble slit
clearly gone off
the autograph dizzy panic heron ◊
gobs pollination pad lineated grouse
Why did anyone administer LSD to an
ripened sink
elephant?
terracotta brown painter’s stone ◊
posser gushed acrid marsh cuckoo
I have heard it claimed that if a
radio road
human's metabolic rate was somehow
introductory
increased
chumbawumba
to
match
that
of
a
hummingbird the human would burst
gratiné
into flames is this true and if so how
pip crazed gutter
was it calculated and for that matter
chakra wet billiard
what prevents hummingbirds from
candle-smoke went
spontaneously combusting if their
igneous bitter
metabolism is as high as this claim
evacuations
implies
retracted hazel wambly leaking
the snail’s mouth is an opening on the
two days now I will
underside of the animal’s body this
have to spend only
opening presses firmly against the
£3.60 or something
tomato skin each time the mouth
like
opens a rough tonguelike strap rakes
divided by 18 is
across the tomato the strap sweeps
£4.444444444444
shreds of tomato flesh into the snail’s
444
mouth the snail keeps this up all night not far away other snails are rapidly consuming
broccoli
melons
and
cucumbers as they glide along eating they leave a trail of damaged rinds chewed-up stalks and slimy leaves ◊ the experience was all the more poignant owing to the distinct cheese smell on the periphery of sensation
that
£80
when he moved in the house had fairy
I’m in Girls Aloud
stickers on the wall mottoes from neverland we both spent an hour scraping the stickers off the kitchen tiles some of the bigger ones in other
observes as a tubby
rooms are only half peeled off the one
tardigrade crawled
in the box room now reads: “if you
across the sun’s
in yourself
surface
thing
is possible” in
his bedroom one of the stickers on the wall says ‘SPARKLE’ ‘how can you cut yourself when you’re looking at a wall with SPARKLE written on it?’ I asked
spooky action in a
we laughed but it’s a very serious
piglet
thing ◊ it all seems a bit white cis male at the top of the RMT
while out in the field on November 7th an eagle-eyed officer spotted a German
ammunition
train
and
wanted to send word of this to HQ aware of his sterling reputation he chose the Poilu for the task as the bird flew back to Cuisy he was hit by shrapnel multiple times but kept
Jair Bolsonaro is
flying with flesh and feathers on his
sick and can’t wear
head and neck hanging in ribbons and
pants
reeling like a drunken man the Poilu landed in his loft with the message intact ◊ scientists
made
coming in from the rain after buying a
snails
remember
sandwich I feel like taking my shirt off
something
I think about the gaze of the other as I
never happened to
am doing this
them
that
the city of Haarlem fell to the
the last act of Sir
Spaniards in 1573 because they
John Tiptof
learned of a relief attempt from an
humanist book
intercepted pigeon
collector and impaler of men was to ask the
◊
executioner to chop off his head
the foot is the body part that you can
with three blows
see most easily at the foot’s front end
for the sake of the
is the snail’s head with a mouth and
Trinity
two pairs of feelers the feelers are used for touching smelling and seeing ◊
I watch Haneke’s film of Kafka’s The
a wooden leg and a real foot a man
Castle
with a glass eye with a hole drilled
cornflakes I think I
through it so he can see
must be depressed
the
and
light
orange
eat
glew
a giant African snail searches for its
regrets
next meal the sun is setting and the
interwrought with
large snails are beginning to move
small wins
about the garden one snail glides forward over the smooth surface of a tomato as the snail moves it eats nonstop a sign or a string of signs
I don’t spend time
signifying the same things at all times
in
and in all places
because the plants
the
garden
just seem wrong ◊ Elvis was so pathologically attached to his mother that he could not have sex with a woman who gave birth ◊
quantum entangled my lasagne al forno
visions of a crab in the fabric of the settee this can’t go on it goes on
giant African snails have entered the
I am entering the war on drugs on the
United States many
side of drugs
times
Mark E. Smith sang into the bass
landscape of thorns
drum with his arse facing the
forbidding
audience
spike field spikes bursting ◊
I lie to my managers a lot and they lie to me ◊
solitary cardamom pod sits on the arm of my sofa
grid
blocks through
despite everything we can still produce songs that are beyond our condition