Surreal-Absurd Sampler Tom Jenks

Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation”– Octavia Paz

“The world, of course, is absurd, even more so because it thinks it’s making perfect sense. For me, surrealism, as Paz suggests, is permission not to worry about that, in fact to see supposed nonsense as a deeper, truer reality. My work is less like the Comte de Lautréamont’s “chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”, more the chance meeting of Louis IV and a talking squirrel on a garage forecourt in Milton Keynes, but you get the idea.”- Tom Jenks

Humboldt

The Humboldt squid lives predominately upstairs,

coming down for meals, parcel deliveries

or to demonstrate his particular skills.

‘Look’, says the Humboldt squid; 

‘I am cracking this troublesome coconut with my beak’.

‘Look’, says the Humboldt squid.

‘With this tentacle, I am stirring porridge.

 With this tentacle, I am poaching an egg using the whirlpool method.

 With this tentacle, I am learning ju-jitsu online.

 With this tentacle, I am casting runes.

 With this tentacle, I am writing a screenplay

 in which a large squid designed to live

 in the deep waters of the Humboldt current, 

 which flows northwest from Tierra del Fuego to the northern coast of Peru

 is instead living in a three bedroom suburban semi-detached

 which has a problem with fruit flies in summer

 and a Wi-Fi connection that is affected by the weather’.

We are all of us balanced on this seesaw, I say.

We dip our hands into the jar, but the jar is made of opaque glass

and there is no way to know exactly what is in the jar.

‘I worry’, says the Humboldt squid

‘that you will die and I won’t feel anything,

 also how, in that eventuality, I will push down the plunger of the cafetiere

 without spilling coffee over the work surface’.

Meals are mainly prawns and spaghetti eaten with the lights off and the TV on.

There is an ornate butter knife on the table between us,

its handle encrusted with polished shells.

One of us will reach for it.

bushes

There is no consolation in cauliflower cheese or visiting the forest to find it empty.

We spent the summer at the chateau near the ice rink, opening and closing the tumble drier,

playing Subbuteo in the long room where you wrote The Top 9 Rules That Successful People Live By.

Little wasps with shells of earthenware.

You break open the shell of earthenware, and there is another shell of earthenware.

All the different pasta, the absurdity of it.

We burnt our mouths on pumpkin gnocchi 

and cried for six weeks straight on the ramparts.

This is a feast day, circled on the planner,

when we can eat as much frozen spinach as we please,

when a window opens to his lordship’s larder

and we may touch the caramels, for miracles.

Some things are pointless, like meringues are pointless, or golf balls, or history,

or telling a joke to dolphins that does not specifically reference dolphins is pointless.

People change, but a lemon remains a lemon.

That is an interesting philosophical position, said the gnome,

absent-mindedly folding a crepe suzette.

Let’s go outside and wave at the space station.

Most days, I think I am finished, said the gnome,

distractedly toying with a balloon whisk.

Sometimes I get a really good idea, but my pen is on the other side of the kingdom.

We are inert, the gnome and I, like the noble gases and multigrain boulders.

We have slept too long in the yellow moonlight, desolate in a world of fondant.

We are stone cold, mostly, or else burnt out.

Often, we get lost in the bushes.

not so fast, Fyodor

The tragically overlooked nineteenth century Russian novelist

places a One Cup drawstring teabag in a dishwasher-safe cup

and fills the cup with hot water

from the wall-mounted Zip HydroBoil instant hot water boiler.

The tragically overlooked nineteenth century Russian novelist

is melancholy, as always, ruminatively eating a muesli bar,

gazing out over the rooftops of the supermarket

and the smaller surrounding shops.

One shop sells paperbacks, but nothing worth having.

Another sells miniature jars of artisan jam.

The tragically overlooked nineteenth century Russian novelist’s

behaviour in meetings has been remarked upon, unfavourably.

He has been accused of sighing, fidgeting, putting his head in his hands

and being generally distracted.

He has been accused of extracting a pale blue bird’s egg

from within his knotted, straw-coloured beard

and cracking it into his mouth during the virtual wellness huddle,

an accusation that is largely unsubstantiated.

The really tragic thing is that no-one is aware

that the tragically overlooked nineteenth century Russian novelist

is a tragically overlooked nineteenth century Russian novelist.

This fact, it seems, has been inadequately documented.

grapefruit

To dream of rats means many small worries, grass on the turrets, that particular lichen.

I followed them up the spiral stairs, into the room of jigsaw puzzles.

Stand down pilgrim, for your miracle seeds have split and there is watercress.

I place a mirror on the stair, the better to meet myself in the morning:

Lord Pamplemousse, your brand ambassador, out of office till the ravens come.

pops

Why don’t we get a camper van, said Pops, and take our wisdom to the mountain folk?

That’s a great idea Pops, but we’re not going to do it.

Camper vans don’t grow on trees and wisdom turns to folly north of the snowline.

We decant the linctus into silver vials and hide them down the cul-de-sac.

Your trouble is you know nothing of love, playing slide trombone in your loft conversion.

All true poets are sad on the inside, like giant pandas or Olympic athletes.

The mountain folk are something else. They shear their llamas and sing ballads about whales.

They shoot an arrow into the forest and wherever it lands they build a monument.

This one shows where the king lost his waffles.

ducks

The druids are back, splitting their shopping into separate transactions, 

explaining everything they’re doing while they’re doing it. 

Observe, Margaret says the one in the snood 

how I trim the ancient holly with scissors, 

which both improves its silhouette and encourages fruition. 

These are curious times. 

The ducks have left town. 

Stars overlap above the business park, 

where latterly there have been unexplained bin fires.

Tom Jenks’ most recent book is A Long and Hard Night Troubled by Visions (if p then q, 2018) and his next will be Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs, a collaborative pangrammatic novel, with Catherine Vidler, forthcoming from Penteract Press. He administers the avant objects imprint zimZalla.