Monday 27 October 2014

Look Away Now

You trip over Bolaño in the bathtub. Vonnegut hits you right between the eyes and the Eliots are many. Up the walls; a heap of Hugoes crushes you. Orwell bops off your forehead. Down the hallway's an obstacle gauntlet comprising MDF Yeatses floating up out of the loam, Bulgakovs on the machine-made mist, and a Borges tripping at your heel-cuffs.

A Dickens stampede takes you down and, as your breathing fails, a crane-necked Plath mouths the count over your deaf head. Laozi's on the wallpaper. Through the window, Bukowski sleeps on the lawn, awed by the Austen statue there. Tumbling, rumbling distantly, rockfalls of boulder-sized Dostoyevskies threaten rain.

The coaster on the table sits actually on a sea of Woolves and Flauberts and Soupaults. Now, the rug's centripetal Zhuangzi may have its electric buzz but it's Sunday's post-roast Sontag, dancing in TV ruzz, that's retina-burnt in permanent fuzz. Mayakovsky in the chime of the clock is a blue whistle hanging on the light but nothing evermore matters when Tolstoy releases his fatal kite.

A Singer sunrise wakes you, burning your face. You have to shoo a Kafka off the window sill and while the way to breakfast is strewn with Hemingways and Hugheses, the sink's filled to the brim with a mixture of briny Wilde and wily Thomas. In the painting behind the kitchen door, a naked Tennyson and Browning are knee to knee in a tin bathtub that's cresting a waterfall.

Faulkner's in the bushes, Peake is in the sky, but Hardy's there to bind us, eye to eye to eye.

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