bracken & sea-shrapnel

‘Nothing I’d read prepared me for a body this unfair’

-John Newlove

‘Til we be roten, kan we not be rypen’

-Geoffrey Chaucer

Those who are allergic to the sea.

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Those who have resisted depravity.

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Men who shave off beards in stages, pausing to take photographs.

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American rock stars who wear Toronto Maple Leaf hockey sweaters.

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Those who (while visiting a foreign country) have lost the end of a Q tip in their ear and have been unable to explain their problem.

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Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked woman’s stomach after lunch and later, after slowing down the sound considerably, have sold these noises in the open market as whale songs.

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All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform

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Men who fear to use an electric lawn-mower feeling they could drowse off and be dragged by it into a swimming pool.

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Any dinner guest who has consumed the host’s missing contact lens along with the dessert.

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Any person who has had the following dream. You are in a subway station of a major city. At the far end you see a coffee machine. You put in two coins. The Holy Grail drops down. Then blood pours into the chalice.

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Any person who has lost a urine sample in the mail.

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All those belle-lettrists who feel that should have been ‘an urine sample’. 

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Anyone who has had to step into an elevator with all of the Irish Rovers.

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Those who have filled in a bilingual and confidential pig survey from Statistics Canada. (Une enquete sur les porcs, strictement confidentielle)

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Those who have written to the age old brotherhood of Rosicrucians for a free copy of their book ‘The Mastery of Life’ in order to release the inner consciousness and to experience (in the privacy of the home) momentary flights of the soul.

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Those who have accidently stapled themselves.

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Anyone who has been penetrated by a mountie.

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Any university professor who has danced with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Jean Genet.

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Those who have unintentionally locked themselves within a sleeping bag at a camping goods store.

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Any woman whose i.u.d. has set off an alarm system at the airport.

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Those who, after a swim, find the sensation of water dribbling out of their ears erotic.

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Men who have never touched a whippet.

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Women who gave up the accordion because of pinched breasts.

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Those who have pissed out of the back of moving trucks.

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Those who have woken to find the wet footprints of a peacock across their kitchen floor.

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Anyone whose knees have been ruined as a result of performing sexual acts in elevators.

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Those who have so much as contemplated the possibility of creeping up to one’s enemy with two Bic lights, pressing simultaneously the butane switches - one into each nostril - and so gassing him to death.

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Literary critics who have swum the Hellespoint.

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Anyone who has hired as a ‘professional beater’ and frightened grouse in the direction of the Queen Mother.

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Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine’s Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis.

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Those who have come across their own telephone numbers underneath terse insults or compliments in the washroom of the Bay Street Bus Terminal.

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Those who have used the following techniques of seduction

- small talk at a falconry convention

- entering a spa town disguised as Ford Madox Ford

- making erotic rotations of the pelvis, backstage, during the storm scene in King Lear

- underlining suggestive phrases in the prefaces of Joseph Conrad

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Anyone who has testified as a character witness for a dog in a court of law.

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Any writer who has been photographed for the jacket of a book in one of the following poses: sitting in the back of a 1956 Dodge with two roosters; in a tuxedo with the Sydney Opera House in the distance; study the vanishing point on a jar of Dutch Cleanser; against a gravestone with dramatic back lighting with a false nose on; in the vicinity of Machu Pichu; or sitting in a study and looking intensely at one’s own book.

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The person who borrowed my Martin Beck thriller, read it in a sauna which melted the glue off the spine so the pages drifted to the floor, stapled them together and returned the book, thinking I wouldn’t notice.

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Anyone who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board.

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Anyone with pain.

Elimination (an intermission) - Michael Ondaatje