Editions MSS
Editions MSS
M. S. STRICKLAND
Street Acts


§ 1.

Plaça del Teatre

This approaches far too many for her silently to turn. To know how to write an elegiac life, we shall pivot the glowing face of her swiftly shattered pose. At first, I was a mere costume in her boots and she, fair-headed, was reduced to keeping me from trying them on outside. Thus angered, she married me hanging, but was lost without the broken ritual of the entertainment (its smokescreen was eternally corpulent), not to mention the partially tied purchases. You very well know that I have always tried to hunt during the chrystalline night, because Barcelona back then was just so much fun, moving from one flown club to another. Smiles came our way, smiles starving for fingernails to seize, and the heartbeat of the gambit briefly dragged us on to yet another. Strands of glass, now, have slipped from her clavicle, have let fall a spine that her childlike tendons could never stake. Her windpipe, for once, becomes nervously boyish. It was always the golden spiral: snares and folds. And always, I drove. That was what got us walking. I would march slightly, ecstatically staring at her young bronze biceps and breasts. We went out crawling, not in a bright circle, but in a plaça of rundown orange trees by the unchained link. To think that such a thing as farming could slip into our lives as mysterious as a goddess! The divine face that every face falls into when unbound, or when unsound magic gets up to a billion rituals, and falls into a wonderful barn unbroken... You can tell it boundless on the body; that, interwoven, life feeds on life. That teeming grip, that gaze she knew. Was that the rapturous problem she clenched her silver life with? Look no more at her naked blood; consider, or not, this hole, this grief, and her longing to be kissed by friends at dinner. For melancholia’s a simple procession of appearance. My silent lonely face dominated when I wet the pain, then set it down unencumbered before her eyes; dominated when I exhumed her skirt, her armband. Just as any dancer would who rises to come, invulnerable.
§ 2.

Basílica de la Mercè

Specifically, I stuck to it in order to come back to Barcelona as a sort of mirror for her make-up. I freed my costume of her boots, and got my own. Such was the hand with which I readily came back. I wanted to change the wet pacific pose in which she tried to move — the real wings of the catlike work! — so that she got hidden in it slowly, with tedium almost. A companionless home, as the Catalan saw puts it, will begin any relationship, for neither of us found sweat to be irrational. Such gifts tend to read and write in the gold of artistic coils, of sky, or, preferably, of every distant handout. Our fence wanted to aspire to a kind of travelling wheelbarrow of gore, a sort of creaking compound of horror in which her dog used to eat dinner with us. Look for the hand, I’d tell her. With both of us hungering after seascape, and a dog trying to catch at the church’s shadow and speak, as it were, I took over indiscriminately. I didn’t merely want to connect here and there — I wanted to kiss her livid hunger of freezing and rasping, of dying and returning from death, of undecorated and clear inspiration. She would give birth to the knee, not of a child, but a smooth black blade in such a way that you could perceive an axe in the aforementioned crumbled knee, or its stand-in. It would broadly obscure what the dog would be hunting for. Her pubis would beckon toward a burden of pommel, and you could connect the sweat-soaked saddle of the show with what I mean by pubis. She existed in the dark throat of it, and the dog would be whining in the background. How quickly smaller you can do it to something that appears to have no life left, for gradually, by means of a saw, one can deflate what looks like a throat, for example, or abridge an apparent arm. Much of the congregation would leave, appalled, but many would stay and observe the pounding sheets of a bed on which such an arm would be casually flopped over a penis. In the corner of the basilica’s doorway the starving dog found what it was sniffing for: another penis, and the vulva of a repulsive carcass. It was, in fact, a pig’s vulva, easily identified as such by the blood it spilt on the steps of the stairway where we captured it. The saddest blood, however, is that in the nose of a chicken. This scene of unholy farming would slowly approach the slats of her birth-swing. Her nose clicked so much with that stake in it, and her foot clattered randomly. And we mustn’t omit the pane on the attractive lattice window. By raising against it my muffled foot, I was able to make it rise as if imposed upon by mere will. Afterwards, sipping the earnings of our morning’s snares against what could very well be tomorrow’s dry morning of ashes, I pulled over to where our gear was. She wanted to get out and wander in the rubble.
§ 3.

Camp de la Bota

The shovel of her now late hands lifted for some time, I must admit. Earlier, she’d held those clear hands over her head and begged. Continuous piles, piles that could be snared without let up during our rehearsals. A light dustpan, all day, where I kissed her wrist from the southeast. An hour, however, was usually all it took to perform. Like any tool or particle of common cold dust lighting the darkness. A winter wind, also, could have been born during the hours of that autumn failure. It flew past, plundering the wet wheelbarrow. She submitted in the big morning. Afterwards, pounding the morning’s hard ashes, she fought by boiling the courtyard sieve. By the bones of our tumbledown they were as big everything. With a few of the steadier bones, I drove stakes inside the piles. And would go back and forth with a sieve for too long, possibly, choosing the smaller bones. Quickly marking out the everything per què apuntar this descampat which the long concrete would soon efface. Her tongue also was long and rolling on the pile, the limestone siftings and shapes, the sieve and the pile of juniper-charred polla de granja we’d baked for a long time in that redrock courtyard of windswept bones — old bones and her young tongue. Pining, we left there in time for dinner once or twice. It was only a pile of bones doomed to drown beneath lush asphalt anyway. Usually, I knew them by their shape. We separated, for instance, a windblown fragment of fingers: phalanges shattered by phalangist clubs. It pains now the night to look away. Among the piles of dry readymades, I starved myself. We howled together, and she kissed the ash that I let slip. Did I come back to myself after? Wind shears all morning, lifts into ashes, and excludes what had been our first morning. My bones responded anyway, like a second tongue that taps almost imperceptibly. We continually changed the wheelbarrow and every day learned new things about ourselves in the opposite courtyard, even trying to forgive the ashes. We simply talked and walked, pushing the wheelbarrow across the soft rubble. But for the clay shovels of our hands and the piles we made, I don’t think the audience would have got it. But after an hour, usually, their hands exploded into applause. Sometimes they changed hastily, condemning to sand that wasted morning of our life. But a few mornings, our shows easily went on to till dusk, and then and there we’d solder shut a full detachment of illusions, the open or closed shutters that patiently judged us to the bones as if we had let break a dose of excess wind. Gone painfully to the fallow debate, no coven would choose salt of the sea against walls of the luxury houses I was to drive to. Eventually, the bystanders went away to hunt for some consistency. So I sputter you to strap on the soybean coherence for me to flicker outside the logic of it.
§ 4.

Platja de la Nova Icària

The cotton position barely murmurs Zuleika. Learning to hunt beckons my recurrent murmur, which was really an apostrophe to the whole world. Didn’t Beerbohm know better? Perhaps we never knew and never will know that even the flickers of the young elms lining the straight way to the scuttled barges were barely murmuring. They had seen us coming. We approached the snares of the bathers who were murmuring stereotypically. The shutters were soldered shut, very corroded I supposed, for the ocean’s musth did not veil what she was now trying to do. At once I called. Not limestone or sandstone tufts, I stood with a few offerings that the eyesting at once shaved dead. The bloodsting too. I was born in such a way that my tufts were staring at grass and she was running me out into the surf. Not bloated, but nodes with an empty sort of antisand standing in a wave. To sway the dunes with it, to turn and pivot and lift the plastic casually. The beach left us in the oranges. It broached pining and the sand-syllables sheared too much into murmurs and eyes. Onto the syringe, just as she cut its wet tongue into her vein, she looked frightfully, as milky as the ruby consistency of what was inside it. Her coherence was as one-galloned as any logic could be. Too much this murmur to choose another murmur. I am dry and beautiful to rub, to murmur in the first life of concealed murmur of a murmur, or the murmur of shutters that regard the beautiful walls of a house. There was a murmur from the audience of Ambdós — ambdues. The desert-like coherence of her increased logic delightedly started to love us in its lonely mapping. I did come back to shore eventually. Of our leaves precisely late in tongue, the feverish stake of the afternoon unserried their tongue to let its own warm and wet tongue duck the logic of what was wet. I was the first to slip nightly, to emerge out of the position, to try, in my illusions, to go up a ways. I could walk all by myself, not quite even trying to march the storefront illusion of me crawling first. I didn’t write for love of the clichés that her lips, in banalities, had run to slip into the storefront sea. But any whispers of their leaves were lost in the bare murmur of the crowd. It transgressed very far beyond the drooping shore and us. My words starved her tongue into rain. As I began the second stanza, predicting that when my lady died too the angels of heaven would bear her straight to me, the audience would have heard a loud murmur, or subdued roar, outside the hulls. The tongue felt the rain, the tongue for murmur in order to get them up miraculously because, murmur for murmur, the murmur of scars falls to leaves. The murmur and murmur at shutters to farming bent walls. As we piled up the invective, we noticed an ominous restiveness in the congregation — murmurs, clenching of hands, dark looks. Through it all, stray houses were pining, soon to crocus into illusions for the rainy bloodsting of eyesting. Whereas the English tourists merely murmured Poor girl or What a shame, the French shouted Popotin giroflé! or Quel acharnement! And my offerings to love’s leaves and the shore’s colder inconstancy to not dip into the wet aspect of our act... And faith, though a history of wet pogroms and committing no bones to heaven, tells of a sloshing evil. It obliges us to be slapped, to grip the martyrdom of technique and not clench or wince. It boils newly each time. For dinner, however, we grew, covered, out of a history. There was a murmur of Sí, sí, senyoras.
§ 5.

Carrer del Call

So it goes in art. To the heart of chill upheaval I saw her singing for darker hands. And in her eyes... It howled, her dog, like it was eating dinner with heaven. I flicked it. I was coming, you see, into the hard evil time that hangs about in the hard tedium of it. Yes, it could resemble that red pistol she sticks out at them as she hunts for their rifle, for their whip, for their pike. Without history, at least, it wasn’t going to grow, to be repeated in detail. So we dissolved desperately in praise for the pogrom. If there’s anyone to blame for it, you must blame the farmer, for farming time’s the slayer, the alternative to souls and bones and omit a last heaven. Evil comes back to them. Beware the snares of bones. And, after, comes back to them that they will gently splay along with wisdom’s faith. She scans them, and they douche to hell. The history we were playing, you see, was a pogrom de dutxa. I flew to like it like that. The cows starved in comparison, while we were doing some pumping of water together there in heaven, clicking gracefully, too hidden in evil for the hope of any ungracefully scrubbed wormhole of despair to efface our dignity. Who, after all, shall begin the ancient dry burden? Know that its light could have been born on such an aspiration as the prickly heaven, and say last year’s hope to walk the last dignity in the ladder of your mesquite-grilled hope. I will write a knotted oven out of the dignity, while clinched in the block of the silent news through her invoice. She could catch to leave the new beauty of her illusion. Of course, she was pining. Not to speak of the intrusion, about that strip of doubt, but she connected writing with a wet poise about the silence and slowly plucked bodies from the lumen of beauty and illusion. We died closed. The sight flashed plum in their eyes and stop trying to end delusion into our dreadful sound, will you? The ear’s noise is beginning forever, is filled by its strong silence and art. We love because they must, inextricably, admit the well-exercised recent murderer’s music is the blondest we’ve begged so far in this choice. And beauty, because they let life’s illusion, as well as death’s, give birth eternally in their communion. Quickly, her voice lifted above the silence during the autumn. We shared that beauty, left the blackjack pining to do the illusion again, which foregrounds our worshipful gazing into each other’s misery.
§ 6.

Parc de la Ciutadella (I)

Around her dignity she piles another dignity of worshipful abasement, and she douches gravitationally to have stretched only a suffering and a sharpened stake of a beaten-down fear of hope. The beaten-down seeds walk dignity. For dinner, out of the open misery in the treeless burst-open thread of white hope, in suffering of the knife, there was only absence. Dried construction omits more in the blood — gravel, absence, strong wire — than in the hooks and shovels, or maw. After all, masculine is to macho as woman of silence is to religion. The male, rough and ugly, intriguing to dry life’s injunction, is illusion to light power of less than light. The blue words of tenacity and grammar appear to him as a continual hunt after sweat-soaked root and rhythm. That mire surrounded hell and impotence, but the futility of love is wisdom in unbuttoned concepts of infinity; is to shrivel striving in the extended sabbat which the knees clatter against rather than trying. The humility of urine farming, I nodded in rage, when fever of degradation acceded to master it, approaches slight and gently in the blood. It clicked across its own history, clattered a pogrom or stave. To focus like I’m doing all afternoon, to get wet pathetically, while trying to back up into the heaven of it, then for an evil politician be burnt like a fried poet, lies all crisp and topical in a death I walk toward anguished. It is a lure for an empty life’s repulsiveness. My straight politician’s hands and his poet’s aren’t snares or miracles, nor artificial infants recalled dimly among the patriots of us, but clean necks detribalized — the poet’s, on how to write a dry burnt-out axe; the politician’s, on prisons and poets. The rusty guillotine she found gave out a new rhyme, a harsh rhyme between justice and vengeance, but (with the equality of rasping cruelty where, unseen, the politician simply starved the poet) the locked costume she gave me to bliss drank me quickly into the part, such as pornographer and prophet. For it is not by mask alone that we know the parasite of what a priest has said, but out of the most extreme slave-owner, the intertwined business to a poet shall be revealed.
§ 7.

Parc de la Ciutadella (II)

The naked tiny savior was to get out measure so that she could protest. He believed all that she could derive, for the machined robes dried the torturer’s and the teacher’s gown, and this poet’s politician was wobbling in the aching sweet country, in the sort of virgin pogrom that’s only possible in a little poll. It’s as if style was the staked straws she cried on in the dry life as it transgressed before — it thwacked too dry to proffer kisses taut into the meat. We easily suppressed them; sharp starved ideas beckoned occasionally as she sat out the brittle number to heen them in. And then they speak, these heads she sought to connect: “So you determined to try [vulgui intentar] process, found your cautiously begged-for dinner, politician [politicastre], on the poet,” or some such tricks we sensed, and others: “You could take to reach for alchemy to learn that a friend’s there to cook a just and methodically crumbling cause about that martyr’s.” So the bullet doesn’t know, it never knew that it could write with the shorn blood at least as slowly, even though out in the raw sunlight’s gold you’d never know it as such. “You never flicker to approach leaves [fulles] like these,” she says, approaching the sidewalk, flaccid like that of a village square. Who said life was dry until, in the luminous morning, he screamed at the policemen because of the bench and the bead, because of the southfacing ruby? For a mouth, instead of laughing off the fifth-floor eyes to set snares, they soldered it, so that it shut momentarily for our face to compare where the ears to offer do the voice and will go out hunting. Said hands on the billy wanted the innards of her geode, or to speak connecting shards of her dazzled singing. A lot alone, body, then striving out with a smell at the same dignity to claim a shame on “alone.” Memory had seen me lifted to her and to the room which was left floating about, alone, tonguing such fear of them floating more suburban than her squawk ever was. A houselight bead perceived warmth in the warm ruby, obscuring the diesel-fuel sunlight which was lost there when the leaves were wet and alone. If we evoked to lift it to the fountain, we were shears that this village square gave birth to off the water, so that even we were degraded, digging for eyes, and that we were ravishing to end our face without even trying. Beginning it for them was an air-conditioned murmur about the airport; ears in the clear voice. What would farming explain without singing? How many scars might teeth look like through bars? About blue guards, why break the helot and dry his body’s duplicate of our spring shame? And about morning memory — as an Appalachian room, why did they laud us, walking her tongue on our sunlight? — and which leaves?
§ 8.

Templo de la Sagrada Familia

Even the kitschy sidewalk’s big bead, such as the ruby mouth, the block, is grinning farming’s turquoise on this grout. We must admit the cold bench, and last night’s village square, with her face in the cool voice of spring’s murmur, but also upstairs with her hot lips, her first teeth willing to beg gingerly about the tongue, as of a gat. That singing pellet’s hot singing came back up to the pale room and let its tongue, by pulling desperately their calm, slip brittle up by the goddamned fools begging that sow to show her heart. On-time children’s pets, undeniable wisdom, the ultimate, suspended, understood. Or its barely bitter youth trying to pluck open a heavy trinxeraire still sleeping in the sunlight. Its leaves were for a sidewalk, a line to consider it best. An emotional ruby, she belches, half-closed, in the eastern bead; she walks in the physical mouth, marches the last shards of its face at the stake against the boot sole of a sudden voice. Crawling or running though that joyous kicking, I slip so lonely, singing, “It was wet that fall, and we got up quietly to fall.” Sitting on a cell at the electric toilet, within the resonant clothes, the shit cannot light, and darkness caught more seemingly than it told. The tenuous cows starved, stayed. She peed in polished a room, her tongue advised sunlight for the brass leaves of unspoken sidewalk. To listen to what she wailed, joyous, in the attached village square at the hunt, was like gripping a black trip across the prison with my own feet, clenching the bead and the boils and then manipulating them in ruby. She wheeled the mouth infinite, unlike her half-silvered overcast eyes that went walking when didn’t, deep and turned in her face when not on her this ears, lunging to aspire a circular full harsh voice and singing. And always you could see continually whether our place was set for dinner or whether they would keep on speaking against her screams. It must have been then that I began to connect luminous and reverent the night, the seemingly distant pallet, and how it howled within its cell which shall begin, not flicked with any of the snares of the distant guards holding their billy clubs, but as if in communion you were standing ruling and burning sparks. Why write in the insistent room? Her uncle, an accomplished jester, was the muddy beloved of my Kali, the nearer nightmare of his bride, who was lost, unable to struggle as a sweet jester in a slow box in an elegant bouquet barely above or unable to tell me about how hidden she was, yes hidden, in her second life and so I stuck her with it as she flew. I depopulate to gratify myself with it.
§ 9.

Sacrat Corazón

To accost her third life with arms, with blooms for marigold and primrose, was as though, through the slow melting naked and burning iris of the gaggle, the hot witches were trying to convey by farming in my memory, to try painfully the dark and poisoned fallen spleen in the dry flaking stew of the ingrown shock (loss of rage, bride, corymbs, hags, and so on). Was it hard to face who should try not to form the foretold trying of a sister’s happy lace within a fat nearness of monsters? To tell how we managed to write the night’s articulation of mimicry — tell flesh they shocked? I abandoned the mother. I was tapped, I was trapped, and could dream only, threatened with time, the lifeless bride. Around about the unwilted hour in this bar — to use what we obey — she adhered to conceive the bad. Now, that’s debauchery of the varicose sweet kind, with tobacco on top. Gracelessly, we roamed about committing love so much in the bespoken carriage that, connected, we becowed the home body with our weight. The salty air around my sleep, the occasionally swept-over eyes of her big darkness so dirty, spit fright and also to that of her big red brother. Our naked tobacco and clumsy snares come back from all of our places. But the built-up mouth never comes back. That the bride had left us was an open salvation in the bouquet of spear. They were pining in anger of the arms to execute the legs, so that if memory saw in the trying quivers, then in the sharp blue stone arrows, all the dry love in sight — it comes back by the sore penis; it never comes back in the dry man. Instead, they beckoned the shassed die exactly like the hose. We tried peeling the spray. Still, she knew how to pearl the waving, run displays, and brandish up before dinner howled, “Speak!” throughout all that terrace cafe goddess hilarity. Whose tax wants its toilet to sore the nicotine night’s door? Who called the dry cracked tomb, staked the snickers? Splash that she drenched to click the exit from, and clattered into the black piss. The hidden beacons were giggling. If you were having to see distantly you wouldn’t have had to hunt dimly and closer; otherwise the bank, the stream, the receptive camping was sinking into you. Worry and run to hew the wet swollen time, O sensitive bride. Help choose. Don’t know, never knew that we never will fly by the driveling, nor tread the greedy hidden imitation because of it. It saw her voice to the fifth of measure, and never starved for her delicate dark nose to praise. For those in the tunnel of canvas, they stuck to flickers from the withered proud sensations.
§ 10.

Rambla del Raval

Hidden it approaches dimly to approach the pressure, as it were. Warmth flicked, pain lit, her nose burning, and even the canvas should have troubled the giggles tucked, by pain, by warmth, into the awaiting back. Soldered, it survives the hidden girl to seize her bare foot. Girl, even the girl, and the girl who darkly eroticized the limply bloodstained penis of the giggles, and who immediately increased but starved fear of what that memory severed and saw howling. The brother of her timelessly frostbitten gangrenous love for the passion turned the bed with his sacred syphilitic stain in which spinal and fallen cycles on life were loathing. That pivot could have been born tense. Meanwhile, poetry was striving out of it or her and doesn’t it fit in with the tears? Yet she is so green and wet with the slow cause, that she was as crisp as the black home of a weakness before it left its keep, during which time travel lunged us in a shame-faced vigil, naked and bleeding within, while we hunched and lifted the streaky yellow wetness. I looked, without, as if to die the steady drip-drop approach into drooling love and embrace what she’d done to win so near, and tag her need to any among the audience who was still aspiring to perceive or obscure the out that persisted simply. Hot to retreat with frozen loam of shame on a flaw in which I was there to consider so festering a jester for the performance. I wince. With clinches to the wilt of the stem of our act, which saw from luminous fruit to unreasonable curtain-crash a body. In general, however, I lifted my grip smooth, so that your mind would clench within the exertion of what was boiling. That is what we called farming — a dalliance of the scene, trying or otherwise to bark from a single unifying action the threads of the forgotten clockwork of what our drool-mouthed fight or spastic playtoy of intercourse — to which touch was actually a curse — were but the ill-remembered snares of withered waste, of vessels and tropics. But warmth was blither — was not warmth blither? — wilted into the friendship, committed in the hobbled pride, and shears of her strength of land backing down for the hunt. But have I really forgotten at last the frantic boat she took with her vase? Did I forget already that memory? She turned the anticipation. There, on a dark love beside it, she was waiting to give birth to grandeur, but was, instead, a twice-hourly consciousness of a woman’s light kiss blossoming. Also, she was neither hidden lips nor absolution, and, save for a few precious tears, she was occasionally terrifying through the sacred passion behind them, so as to blaze up the picnic. I enforced returns with her life-sprung hand, and identified what may have been still alive to my writing by hand on the infinite bliss. A world reached, in other words, by any co-author whose gravitational points must admit, or which she begged as a useless abortion, and is able to tell therefore easily the sweet-smelling come-back. Could I catch or end it? A stake for beginning it all: a desperate or despairing everything of defiled relationship saw tightly. Let a month slip by that bitter conception. If pregnancy can know that any dead nature dims either discreetly or dumbly violent to the try of its option’s spirit, then also it should arrive or have already arrived at what soul was taught begging. I tap her. The virgin wisdom steps the terms, but I, floating in innumerable spirit, and thinner than yellow mind’s — which I just now wanted, and waited to climb — breathe it with her in veneer, as if we had rehearsed only to detest the meat we ate at dinner with this soul. I follow, crablike, the everything of her dripping-beauty consciousness and, sham, I bait my snares however. I inoculate silver and most dim her childish each orchid of abuse, trying once or twice to light her martyred hard sex, which was there gurgling to resolve a love in dry waves for stiff rock and earth-gash up until ocean or island —
§ 11.

Carrer del Telègraf

She operates that steam make claim to talk up sundering by derive her found surface to them and by trying to employed black depth with her and by themselves. I masticate an old diamond in ash that she suck not swallow me starve and poorly for me, she cannot light tightly indistinct. How darkens you gold at once pluck the star’s of your inferno by a snare so forgotten, and walk your forgotten mind into that sea which the stone of minerals march on the forgotten, the forgotten life of black worlds. There crawls a jester even steady the box, for the fourth life run not slip full until intense dream after the parts of the waking. Truly before dinner hearty usual nightmare fall pale with flat memory, of which each get up a blossom, as a blood or pain of the scar, and to fall the love beauty for a fraction of the embarrassing self. Speak small wet sudden indulgence from good pebble in the visiting bed. She speaks. Connect my whirlpools, and I left hers up and pining it, to have kissed her, if I could, that I walk that she march steady. But I crawl not run black about it for all the sphere. Full wildfires slip quickly spring me it fall great by farming, to get up sobbing whelks upon the blains fall. When I come back thus electric in the situation, then she never comes back, without a pebble’s paperweight, to drive a stake through me and pluck off my cauldron, or thrust a witch’s elsewhat that may have rivaled my escape to murder. She envelopes me. Nor tattered it so silently swiftly, that far from rebuffed her room for another buzz mirrors on snapshots of dense certain notebooks, the phonetic poems of that thick journal escapes beckons to light the letters, that for those glistening gifts she darkens all the early dry and tell on books, for clothes so green storm and thighs as the bloody hunt of a pebble. The desk put back, I am now not well enough to know how to write her. I unmanned the lie down to a pebble of panicles that I said, not how to die.
[ A not-for-profit instantiation of human imagination and human labor ]
Copyright © 1997 M. S. Strickland