Thursday 14 February 2008

He made couches out of commas

The boy in the book
fucked his fist out,
took to making letter lists
sleep slicked himself with digits
and cubed bits and centimetres and pixels
and the scrits of kerf that lolled off the cover lip.

He knee waded deep to the pylon spine
and grout gripped as the arms all Ceilidh made moving,
the fist that fucked him, a footnote.
The scapula smuck of edit
got him at the edge of that Blackpool Penelope,
always he’d seen a signpost to the common,
but actually turned out it was a death wedge
of more story coming.

4 comments:

Emma Hammond said...

i really like this- but don't fully understand it. can you elaborate? thanks

hannah walker said...

The loungey lazy boy living in a book gone got cut out the book is all and he tries to stay in but the lines keep getting flung about and he gets caught at the corner of an exclamation mark and deaded.

Sounds pretty strange now I try to explain it but it made perfect sense last night when I was overtired.

Hope I have provided some illumination for you.

Good day

Ross Sutherland said...

wicked- lost in grammatics. i kept thinking on that phrase that lawyers say: "we'll bury him in paper"

i always like abstractions that verge on maths.
lines such as "the scrits of kerf that lolled off the cover lip." have that powerful angular quality that leaves you with a strong sense without ever knowing quite what's happening.

looking through your terrifyingly large collection of poems on ABC tales I see you've referred to an exclamation mark as a "blackpool penelope" before. where does that come from?

hannah walker said...

Sorry yes,
was lying down when I wrote the last comment and I have realised sounded sarcastic. Thats what happens when I lie down.

Thank you Emma, thank you Ross.
Erm, blackpool Penelope.

I have indeed used it before.
It comes from thinking of exlamation marks as 'common' punctuation. So thought of a place which people think of as common - (generically Blackpool) which makes me think of tall things like helter skelters and roller coasters which make me think of Olive from Popeye and when I think of them both I always think of a combination of the two names which to me is Penelope.

But obviously I dont expect anyone else to get that.
So a more simple explanation would be tall black dot topped things, like pepper mills and Blackpool and apostrophes.

Make any more sense?
Reckon I should cut it?