about
Category: NOMADIC SURREALIST PUNK
Travel writing while living in North Carolina, Utah, South Korea, Poland, Turkey, Italy, London, and Madrid.
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Long ago, in my crustacean period, I worked at Chevron. Gorging on beef jerky and graveyard radio. This was the mid 1990s. The world, of course, was very different. I rode the bus to work and read Greek philosophy. Also German was in my ear. I was hungry. Here is a reading about that time.…
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This week’s surreal-absurd at Mercurius is Chris Gutkind. Wild rides through layers of the surreal. There’s even Rilke! Here is one of the poems from the universe. Read more of Chris Gutkind’s poems over here at Mercurius
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A surreal-absurd prose poem from my manuscript Dream Dust. Written while visiting southern Utah. This is called “The Narrows.”
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Peculiarity has its own poetic; the everyday is full of the absurd. Ultimately, the act of ‘making strange’ is, I believe, a subversive one, challenging commonsensical conservative-reactionary values. Poets whose work I’m fond of include Giorgio Caproni, Paul Durcan and Selima Hill and I particularly like the work of Leonora Carrington. – Julian Stannard This…
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An ongoing nomadic surrealist journey. That’s what I’ll call it. Also funk. Nomadic surrealist funk. Here is a sample from the ongoing project: Tangling Llamas on the Tresses of the Sun.
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The tools we need for a reversal of fortunes are right in front of us, easily to hand. We must simply take up the weapons that harm us and REVERSE them.
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it was only here for a short time. The book Puppy. Hope the dog puppy is here longer. Puppy love is short. This is not puppy love. Here is a reading of the opening to Puppy. The book sinks into oblivion, like everything, on June 30th 2023 when the press closes its shop. If you…
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Here are “The Leftovers.” From my book The Green Monk. A poem about the wonder bread of Jesus. But really Jerry. His gold chain. His hardness.
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Are you the stinky thinker? It is hard to not become the stinky thinker. There are so many games and we forget to play them. Pull my finger. Pull my finger. Here is a low-key reading of the prose poem “Moon Pie.”
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Today’s prose poem is “Vanity, Wisconsin” by Maxine Chernoff. Published in 1979. How far we have traveled with our snapshots.
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Here are some sultry and less sultry wisdom nuggets for Wednesday. Courtesy of the poet James Richardson. In the year 2001. Oh the beginning of centuries.
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I’m not sure why I persist in associating absurdity with happiness when the concept is rooted in death and when a human induced sixth mass extinction has recently upped the absurdity stakes significantly. But here we are. ‘Now for lunch’ as Ron Padgett writes at the end of his poem ‘The Death Deal’.”
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Online reading and launch of Puppy (Marcus Slease), Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Vik Shirley), and Rhubarb (Tom Jenks) this coming Friday Nov 26th 2021. A Surreal-absurd feast! Grab you free tickets here
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Puppy is being launched and celebrated with two other terrific books and writers next Friday 26th November 8PM UK time. A Surreal-absurd evening with Marcus Slease, Tom Jenks, and Vik Shirley. Come join us!!! Free tickets for the online event here
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There was loneliness and isolation in a foreign country. We all wanted to go for a walk. Out there in nature where we all belong. Having a puppy is not easy. There is lots to learn about training a puppy. We are in a big net full of jewels and each jewel reflects the other…
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Here is a reading of four prose poems recently published in The Lincoln Review. From the streets of Barcelona (Gracia) and Castelldefels.
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Happy to have some new work in issue 2 of The Lincoln Review. A literary magazine produced by students at the University of Lincoln. Some prose poems from my manuscript in progress (currently entitled Hermit Kingdom). You can read the poems here.
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Hairy time at hospital for seven days. Emergency operation. Death’s door creaked open, then shut again. I am still here. Loving what I loved ever more! Here is a prose poem about the universe. From my book The Green Monk (Boiler House Press, 2018).
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Art and life are coming together. Puppy training is leaking into my micro stories. Here is one from today. It’s called Hand Signals:
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Finally finding my feet again after a long year teaching high school. Working on a book of micro fictions (tentatively called Hermit Kingdom). Here are three from the “Silesian Soul” section. Sailors, moon rabbits, a bardo pond.
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“Gallons of Gertrude Stein, smatterings of Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith. Mouthfuls of Michaux, currents of Kafka and Carrington, Donald Barthelme dropping around for tea.” Some terrific new poems by Adam J Maynard. Check em out in the surreal-absurd weekly sampler at Mercurius.
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“The world, of course, is absurd, even more so because it thinks it’s making perfect sense.” – Tom Jenks This week’s absurd-surreal sampler is from Tom Jenks. Humboldt squid, Subbuteo, ducks, druids, and the tragically overlooked 19th century Russian novelist. There are many delights for the fancies. Check out the poems over at this week’s…
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Bean Spasms, a collaborative book between Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, continues to tickle my fancies. I am writing the puppy section of my work in progress, and ran across “Dog.” Here is a recording.
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After an exhausting year of high school teaching, summer has arrived and I am finally writing. Tim Atkin’s new big Buddhist book of everything, NOTHING CONCLUSIVE HAS YET TAKEN PLACE IN THE WORLD THE ULTIMATE WORD OF THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD HAS NOT YET BEEN SPOKEN THE WORLD IS OPEN AND FREE EVERYTHING…
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“I like to surprise my reader and myself as I write. To do that, I have to set up a familiar situation on the page in which expectations are clear, then subvert those expectations. To zag instead of zig. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s weird and creepy and feels like a ghost is typing through…
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A nice simple surrealist poem by Pablo Neruda. Socks. & more.
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Just got 2 month year old puppy from the shelter. My life has become Pavlovian.
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My friend in London, Chris Gutkind, created an art project to cope with isolation and lockdown. Photos on a cheapo phone camera. Paying attention to small details around his house. Day to day hopes, despairs, and wonders. Hopefully it will displayed in a gallery sometime this year. It is available to view now at PERMEABLE…
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I’m coining my work nomadic surrealist punk. Punk aesthetics determine the type of art punks enjoy, which typically has underground, minimalist, and satirical sensibilities. Nomadic travels. Nomadic cuttings. Naive art. Surrealist/irrealist/absurdist / conceptual. We could keep tacking on the labels. There’s freedom there, in the hybrids. That’s why I travel, really. 20,000 words into my…
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I am working on a new book of lyrical essays, inspired by my creative non-fiction workshop, run by the terrific Amy (McDaniel) Robinson. Highly recommended. “My hair should have nothing to do with it, and yet it does, this thick coarse hair, often unruly, I prefer to tame it. My hippy phases were Jesus phases,…
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I am taking an online creative non-fiction workshop, with some terrific folks from Atlanta and the U.K. Taught by Amy (McDaniel) Robinson. It is part of The Art of Everyone and Studio Friend. Composing the Self and the World. I am remembering the importance of community. No one an island. Etc. Readings and prompts and…
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The novelist I pretend to be is a character invented, for the sole purpose of being obliterated, by the writer I am. The writer I am wants nothing to do with novelist. He suspects the novelist of wanting to restore to fiction the particular order of reality that suffocated him and drove him to write…
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“The Big Fire at the Architectural College” by Andrei Voznesensky (translated by Anselm Hollo) originally appeared in City Lights Pocket Poets Series No 16. Published in 1962, and entitled Red Cats, Hollo included translations of three Russian poets: Yevgeni Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, and Semyon Kirsanov. Here is a reading of “The Big Fire at the…
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A collaboration between the Polish artist and writer Grzegorz Wroblewski and the South African artist Doris Bloom, at the Warsaw Literary Museum, takes as it’s starting point The New Colony (2003), an experimental treatise/novel/play, in the tradition of Kafka and Beckett. Both Bloom and Wróblewski are immigrants to Denmark and their work probes “the endless…
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The Spirit of the Bathtub is a limited edition. You can grab a copy until 1st June 2019. Here is a description of the nomadic surrealist journey: Experience surreal tales from the bathtubs of South Korea, Utah, Turkey, Italy, Poland, and London. Vibration therapy with Spirit monkeys. Trying to define yourself is like trying to…
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A small sample from Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor. So much magic. It is easy to get lost in there. The best kind of traveling. (Painting: Miguel Hernadez. Music: Minor Victories. Reading: Marcus Slease)
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“The Subway Station” by Miroslav Holub, 1970. “Ornithology” by Bud Powell. Reading by Marcus Slease.
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by Miroslav Holub. 1970. Trans. Ian & Jaramila Miller
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by Leonor Fini. A sylphlike figure, a voyeuristic dialogue. Lurking behind the perfect figure, old hags contorting themselves into lascivious gestures.
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Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. June 20th 1931. A hut or a cave by the sea? How does our slavery weigh upon us? The monotony of everyday existence. Most of life is maintenance. The nothingness that is everything. How to be freedom?
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Fantastic Art has been with us since the beginning. The birth of consciousness. Again and again.
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From 8 year novel in progress, Never Mind the Beasts (formally The Autobiography of Don Whiskers). This part takes place after Don Whiskers has immigrated from N. Ireland to Las Vegas. It is the late 80’s. He feels the pull, temporally, towards the Cold War on his Commodore 64.
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Subtlety, 1928
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by Jayne Cortez
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Terrific article about the erotic art of Leonor Fini. A sexually charged lifelong revolution
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(From Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere, High Risk Books, 1996
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Leonora Carrington, 1951.
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The first woman of African descent to take part in Surrealism, Simone Yoyotte was born in Martinique.
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From my book The Green Monk (Boiler House Press 2018).
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A collage novel by Max Ernst. Fantastic!
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Directed by Jean Cocteau
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(1947)
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One of my favs. Spectacular surrealist. “And So On and So Forth
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I love. Jacques-Bernard Brunius.
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Terrific review of my book Play Yr Kardz Right. Thank you so much Beach Sloth!! “Over the course of the work, the use of a childlike wonder allows the poetry to expose deeper held truths within the world. Lust, love, hope, fear, these roll on through in ways that feel beyond the usual. Highly honest,…
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There are so many of them. Don’t you get tired. Reading all those words. Dry lifeless fossilised language. Every technology leaves something behind. There is a cost, always, with traveling from one technology to another. For example from oral literature to written, and now, maybe the omega point, the internet. Words, there are too many…
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“Slease refuses the comforts of rootedness, stability, permanence. In doing so, he represents what the philosopher Rose Braidotti identifies as the model of nomadic subjectivity “in flux, never opposed to a dominant hierarchy yet intrinsically other, always in the process of becoming, and perpetually engaged in dynamic power relations both creative and restrictive.” For many…
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The Grand Tour, back in the day, we based on John Dewey and experiential education, at least partially. It was also based on ideas of high culture, and the lack of it in England. Also class and privilege, since mostly it was some aristocratic females and of course upper class males. Get out of the…
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When Ewa and I first arrived in Madrid, Christian Pérez, his wife Megan, and their son Oscar welcomed us. Showed us around their neighbourhood of La Latina, lollies and neighbourhood festivals with sweet meats, up on their rooftop terrace, an introduction to mighty fine Spanish olives, wine, and cheese. And much much much more. They…
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I have never been comfortable with money. The chasing it, living my life for numbers. In America, as an immigrant, I was saturated with the lack of it. Lower middle class, chasing the American dream, the endless informercials and my family trying so many pyramid schemes, doing the grunt work to make someone else wealthy,…
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Why do we travel? The weekend getaway. The summer and winter breaks. The islands and exotic locations. What are we looking for? The travel industry is one of the biggest on our planet. According to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), the travel industry generated 7.6 trillion U.S. dollars in 2016. We are looking…
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Panmelys wrote a nice review of my nomadic poetry. She writes: “seeking otherness Of a soul, hungering after ‘Hiraeth’. Which means ‘A longing for something This World can never give’, Celtic source, with an Emphasis on ‘This’ as opposed to ‘Other ‘world” I like this very much. I think it gets at the seemingly contradictory…
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I just reached over half million visits on my blogger website Never Mind the Beasts. A mile stone maybe. Thank you so much for stopping by!! The blogger Never Mind the Beasts blog has now gone dark to avoid duplicate content. Never Mind the Beasts now has its own domain and a new site. This…
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TERRIFIC POEMS BY DREW GARDNER OVER AT EMPTY MIRROR: http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/poems/poems-by-drew-gardner.html
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My Shamanistic mix track from conversations with soothsayer birds and others . .
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Currently finishing up my manuscript Never Mind the Beasts. Never Mind the Beasts is a book of saints with many settings, including: Lisbon, London, Milton Keynes, Hurricane, Portadown, Katowice, Faro, and Texas. It is a great mashup bursting with flavours, including: instructional essays, alien immigrant memoirs, erotic stories, vignettes, political fables, monologues, and travelogues. Never…
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https://player.vimeo.com/video/195170235google translate from JJMars on Vimeo.
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HOW IS YOUR ZIPPER? https://player.vimeo.com/video/192234342zippers from JJMars on Vimeo.
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https://vimeo.com/186089921 The true story of a search for home and the attempt to alleviate or ameliorate a mostly musty existence with showers of flowers and living kind of close to nature but not with swans. https://player.vimeo.com/video/186089921Tiny House from JJMars on Vimeo.
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POSTMAN PAT from my new book in progress: Alien Memory Machine (transmissions from Iberia) https://player.vimeo.com/video/185125441POSTMAN PAT from JJMars on Vimeo.
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My new phone is coming today. A motorola. Not elegant. Simple. But should get the job done. I mean, I should be able to use Tuenti app and make calls and texts (if needed). I hardly ever text or call, only Ewa, and Chris G in the past. Part hermit. I am not sure when…
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Final day in London. Last minute charity shop runs and bag weight reshufflings. Then chill in North London with Chris Gutkind. North London is where London began for me over 7 years ago. By noon tomorrow we will be residents of Madrid. Airb&b for a while while hunting for flat to rent. Have to start…
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My short reading at Rich Mix, East London last night. Part of the Nightime Economy exhibition: https://soundcloud.com/jjmars/the-night-time-economy-exhibition-marcus-slease-1 A collaborative exhibition of photography and poetry exploring the often fractious energy and environment of Newport, Wales’ nightclubs and pubs. Conceived and created in close collaboration between photographer Kate Mercer and poet & artist SJ Fowler, this exhibition…
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I read at Xing the Line last night. My last reading before leaving to live in Madrid. On the eve of the big vote. Maybe I will not be gone long. Who knows. I hope I am still an EU citizen after today. Then again I have been meaning to change my passport for an…
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“At the lunch table there is a new man. He has been to Dubai and it is very hot. But worse than that is Vegas he says. He gets very excited about Vegas. You have to step into the casinos to cool off he says. I don’t know how to gamble he says. Did you…
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DO YOU PREFER SUCKING A SOUL OR HAVING YOUR SOUL SUCKED . . . . https://player.vimeo.com/video/169079845GREAT EXPECTATIONS from JJMars on Vimeo.
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Saints/Mimih/Migration Compendium.Featuring art, poetry and prose by Marcus Slease, @TjaKm, Pascal O’Loughlin, Lucy Jane Hilton, Stuart Westerby, Irish Poetry Shop, Erkembode, Catherine Carncross, Geoffrey Buoys & Sian Williams.Edited by David Kelly-Mancaux.Translucent.Initial limited run of #22.Expected arrival. June 2016.ISBN: 978-0957349636 £7 INCLUDING POSTAGE http://erkembode.weebly.com/shop.html
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https://soundcloud.com/jjmars/the-force FROM ANOTHER KIND OF MISSION. THIS ONE IS ABOUT BENDY BANANA KICKS.AND STARS WARS. IT TAKES PLACE IN COFFEE HALL. A GOVERNMENT HOUSING ESTATE IN MILTON KEYNES, ENGLAND. IN THE 80’S.
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Happy to have some new work from my poetry memoir Play Yr Kardz Right in the new Past Simple. Terrific issue with Native American poetry and innovative poetry from Arizona and the UK!!! http://www.pastsimple.org/
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Recorded a wee poem . . back in another lifetime in my hick days in Hurricane Utah . . first loves and sherbets and walt whitman and deserts and rabbits and cricks and first kiss no tongue .. . HERE IS THE RECORDING: https://soundcloud.com/jjmars/somewhere-in-time
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Did a reading and short talk at Austrian Cultural Forum in London yesterday. The spirit of the Vienna Secessionists through Max Kurzweil’s paintings Woman in a Yellow Dress and Despair. Imagination and freedom!! The only war is the war against imagination. Also allowing for vulnerability in art. No real connection (in art or life) without…
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Flashback Friday to 2013 performance at Hardy Tree Gallery in London with sound artist Ben Morris. Great two weeks of performances and exhibitions, including the artist known as Erkembode. Mixing the arts is very good. Specialisation is boring. Visual art, sound art, language art. “Ben Morris & Marcus Slease realised the aberrant underbelly of the…
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I am performing with Tim Atkins this Saturday. Tim Atkins is innovative British poetry at its very best. Scrap that. He is more than British innovative poetry. Buddhist dharma poetry. Camarade 61 – January Saturday 16th – 7pm – Free Entry – Apiary Studios: 460 Hackney Rd, E2 9EG http://www.theenemiesproject.com/camarade http://www.apiarystudios.org/2015/12/the-enemies-project-presents-camarade-61/ with: Lavinia Singer &…
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The British have voted for more bombing. Minimalist drone shows, stick figures, military stations, hoof prints on the coffee table, skeleton trees, a manual for legs, and a warning note near the great mustard wheel pulled by a large horse. Elation is elevation via the visual cortex. Another flash fiction/wee story from book in progress.…
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My new vixen short short. It takes place in the heart room at a party and on the porch. Blood is a warning sign. The heart of a dummy cannot be destroyed.https://soundcloud.com/marcus-slease/let-the-right-one-in
Never Mind the Beasts 