Mike Ferguson Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My fullest reading of an absurdist style would be by Richard Brautigan, and my one satirical novel about teaching Writing with Hammers was influenced by this: the title a clue, but also epistolary chapters like those about hiding for weeks above a false classroom ceiling, the caretaker who sucked up year 7 students in his industrial Billy Goat vacuum cleaner, and the two headmasters I disappeared. A significant period mainly writing found prose poems brought me closest to a sustained absurdist style – the random connections of found content – but being arbitrary and staccato, they lacked the more usual storytelling. Two contemporary writers of a narrative style I admire are Ian Seed and Tom Jenks – the former’s disturbing surreal prose poems about uncertainty, loss, disconnection, false memory and other, and the latter’s absurd, richly imaginative vignettes where the namings within are always delightful surprises.”—Mike Ferguson
Snow Stopping Before
Waking, she thought it was snowing outside, but it was her
dead skin cells floating around in the bedroom. When I later
looked out the window, snow was falling in flurries and it
seemed to me that I should run out there and collect all I could
before her complete dissolution, just in case she had made a
mistake and confused things. I cannot explain my prevarication
as, watching still, it did come and go, at times falling straight
down in large heavy flakes, yet just as quickly lost in the grey
of the sky behind and into running water along the ground.
I continued to watch, unsure. By the time I reconsidered, it was
definitely raining. If I was a surgeon, or a soldier, or even the
driver of a bus on a dangerous curve, I would need to be more
decisive. The fact we all think we can predict the weather does
not make me feel any better about my lack of professionalism.
The Philosophy of Being Delayed on a Train
A tannoy does not express a doctrine. Delays are explained – in documentation – through the calm rhetoric of platitude and irony. That Dialectical Theory of Staggered Time is considered a load of bollocks by passengers. The train got delayed presupposes a self-sense of desire and/or expectation. An epistemic utility of knowing the amount of time in its procrastination rather than a happening itself. How Bertrand Russell got delayed before getting on his at the Gare du Nord. Simultaneity of timetable / leaving / track / leaves. For me, our tolerance for or sensitivity to delay exists as variables in an expression that looks impenetrably like mathematics. Dickens’ mimetic capture was of the unstoppable forward thrust into death.
My Next Poems
I promised myself that the next set/collection of poems would not be ‘found’ ones; they would be entirely from my own, internal composition – the muse – even if that meant they erred towards the more conventional. So, I was shocked and surprised when the following arrived at home by post inside a plain off-white envelope. With a neat, American-cursive handwriting, the single side of A5 paper read: Take these words, all one hundred and forty, and from them craft a Shakespearean sonnet. Rhymes and rhythms should be exacting. Think of heritage and lineage and what Robert Frost declared. I remember your ‘sonnets’ chapbook – all those ‘fourteen line’ poems, most of which never rhymed, or managed to only in the token last couplet. Scatological too. Addiction is meaningless if it isn’t filial. There was a separate sheet of the typed 140 words.
The Edwin Morgan Blues Band
When they played our wedding reception, the music was as unique as we’d hoped, for example the blues dirge arrangement of Orgy which was rap-like and hypnotic – including suggestive beyond the original detail. The band even stepped outside their namesake’s canon, delivering a beautiful ballad version of Emmett Williams’ Sweethearts without toning down its saucy storyline. Late into the set, I was by then a little drunk as well as aroused and joined them on their marquee platform to jam along with my make-believe harmonica.
Gardening
In an act of manic altruism, I had dug five vegetable patches for different people that secretive day, small but nonetheless established plots which would benefit from this surprise Spring-season turnover. It was only later when regaling a friend with my joy at digging for Tom that I was shocked to recall he could no longer be alive, an elderly man when I knew him first as a teenager. Worse, the pub garden I tackled as a bonus gesture in ‘his’ village therefore had no connection to me whatsoever and would likely be considered random vandalism when discovered. It was as if being woke in care and kindness would now be my social downfall.
Whipped Body Butter
Opening the small flip-top bin, I am surprised to see a discarded tub of Crème Fouetté Corps – Fresh Raspberry, vegan – having never used, and then I remember she had occupied the bedroom for a few days. There is a crescent remnant of its butter inside the lid and I rub a fingertip-sized dollop into a mole on my upper left arm. At the Astroturf behind the house, hockey players are staging a protest, sitting down en masse in its centre. They could simply be knackered, but they’re waving banners and I cannot spot any references to fatigue. Another jet plane flies in low over the house, wheels down and readied to land beyond the hill where that sports pitch lies – I always wonder what the pilot thinks when finding the airport no longer there.
Mike Ferguson is an American permanently resident in the UK. His poetry publications include the sonnets chapbook Precarious Real (Maquette Press, 2016), a found prose poems collection The Lonesomest Sound (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2019), the truth-elusive vignettes And I Used to Sail Barges (Red Ceilings Press, 2020), and poems about teaching and education Drawing on Previous Learning (Wrecking Ball Press, 2021). An English teacher for 30 years, he retired early but continues an interest in education, co-authoring the teaching text Writing Workshops (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
