Surreal-Absurd and the Art of the Prose-Poem
Sour Lollipop by John Dummet
Since its launch in 2020, Mercurius has published over 90 contemporary surrealist poets, showcasing some very fine talent.
We invented the term “surreal-absurd” to distinguish 21st century surrealists from their 20th century counterparts, though there is much overlapping and continuity.
One notable characteristic of the surreal-absurd is a taste for minimalism and prose-poetry, for spinning weird yet resonant yarns in a paragraph or so of poetic prose.
The archives brim with exciting examples of this emerging form that combines elements of prose, poetry, minimalism, absurdism, surrealism, and micro-fiction.
Below is a selection of these prose poems. Click on the author’s name to read more of their works…
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
I’m afraid of getting my soul sucked. I’ve had my soul sucked. Have you had your soul sucked? Where did you get your soul sucked? Who sucked your soul and why did they suck your soul? Soul sucking is voluntary. And sometimes involuntary. How many souls have you sucked? How many people have sucked your soul? When will you stop sucking souls? Do you want to stop sucking souls? When did you first start sucking souls? Do you prefer sucking souls or having your soul sucked? If soul sucking stopped tomorrow what would you suck? Would you stop sucking? What was your favourite soul suck? What is your average soul suck? How many soul sucks do you prefer per day? How many souls can you suck at one time? When you suck a soul how do you feel before and after? When you have your soul sucked do you think of sucking someone else’s soul? What do you think about when sucking a soul or having your soul sucked?
HOW DRONES ARE BORN
A porcelain doll abandons her carriage and crouches like an insect in the corn. The girl, from her bedroom window, reaches for the doll, but slumps in a white ruffled collar. A wafer of arsenic crosses the sky. Green powder blooms from her mother’s dress. A black milk seeps from the child. Her father, in his rocking chair on the lawn, bites his fat tongue in the dark. All night, the doll waltzes through the corn until dawn erases her face. Blades sprout from her neck and she ascends into the cracked clouds.
BBC
A young man lifts his hands to the sun and the sun becomes honey. He opens his mouth to the moon and the moon becomes breath mints. The young man listens to the sea and the sea becomes Ss and Os. There are more things that become things than time to describe. The young man quietly dies and the news becomes lamplight.
Spectre
The ghost had never been a person, had never been lashed with superlunary bonds to a site of earthly anguish, had never been held aloft in the arrow-cloud of time, rising, rising, then falling over the atemporal badlands towards which all becoming was directed. The ghost had never been embodied in a pyxis of matter, had never seen their skin glisten in the rain or pushed their fingers into the earth or listened to the heartbeat of someone they held close or tasted their mother’s cooking while a storm knelled outside the window and lightning genuflected upon the horizon. The ghost had never known immensity or insignificance, had never experienced singularities or multitudes. The ghost was compelled to haunt, to linger without purpose or intent. They were oblivious to motion or stillness. If the world was straight lines, either parallel or intersecting, the ghost was curvature. The ghost was a debt that had to be paid. The ghost was formless ambiguity. Their experience could be described as a lack of experience. They had no self or name and no way of knowing this. The ghost was a colourless stone plummeting through a liminal ocean. The ghost was slippage, the absence of spectacle, a punctured eye in a textile rend. The ghost negated codification. The ghost was text in white space. The ghost lapsed through the page.
SPEED OF SOUND
I am a superhero. The invincible guy. I can stop a bullet with my chest. I can bend a samurai sword with a flick of my finger. However, I don’t have a chance to show my power here. In this seaside resort, no one carries a gun or a sword under the bathing suit.
My present enemies are battalions of sea cucumbers. The hotel guests detest treading on the slimy bodies while playing around on the beach. Every morning my manager orders me to get rid of the creatures from the sand. I pick them up and throw them away faster than the speed of sound.
I know the world is waiting for my help, but I can't leave here. I had my flying cape stolen by a group of bird-brained college students last year. My manager is stern and relentless. My enemies on the beach are innumerable. I must throw them away faster than the speed of sound every morning.
THE REQUIRED ASSEMBLY
I have eight lovers, one for each day of the week, plus a spare. I keep them in cardboard boxes, holes cut out for windows, feed them a diet high in saturated fat. They’re never hungry for much. They’ve learned to speak in each others’ voices, like a swarm of pollen-soaked bees. I tell them all they’re my favorite, let each one talk uninterrupted when we’re in bed. They say things like, if sorrows were crocuses we could pull them up by the roots, and if wishes were trees we’d all be wandering naked in the forest. I just listen. What do I know, I’m only one ninth of a whole, one crack crisscrossing the white plaster of the ceiling. If we lived at the bottom of the ocean, the water’s surface would be the sky.
THE DIGGER
Five men are digging a hole but only two of them are human. Assembled quickly and cheaply in a nearby factory, the other three are made from grease and sugar cubes. They grin and talk just like other men, but are sweeter and tend to be less concerned about themselves. The trucks that deliver them take the older ones away, free of charge. And with so many holes to dig, they are always in plentiful demand.
AVALANCHE
For some unknown reason the moon invites me to a dinner party. When I arrive, I find all the other guests sleeping. Repeatedly, I try to wake them, but all are unresponsive. Later, a woman - who might be the moon - plunges a fork into my cold back. Although I have no sensation of pain I still want to cry out. At that very moment I realize that I am frozen. Under the ice that covers my entire body, I feel horror welling up, until it becomes an avalanche.
Beachcombing
It almost takes an hour to claw through the thick memories of beach huts and souvenir ashtrays, but when we finally reach the sea it’s the same as it always was. Back then, though – and I’m talking about a time of peace and prosperity, when old men smoked pipes and sailed around the world in homemade boats, and everybody’s grandmother wore hairnets – there had been mines beneath the sand, primed and eager to steal the dreams of small boys and donkeys. The sea, though, was the sea, its moods as neat as a schoolroom wallchart, its colours as uncomplicated as powder paints in bright boxes. And although it stretched beyond the blur of white-sailed boats, licking at the edges of America, Australia, Japan, and countries whose names have changed over time, the sea showed us where we were, its limits underlined by striped ribbons the colour of mint rock. The ribbons, like all ribbons, are now wound in grandmothers’ boxes, and the old men never came home. Memories surge like the threat of a fret and I stoop to scoop up dogwhelks, cowries, wentletraps, and limpets.
Object no. 14
In the gathering dusk the neighbourhood looked unfamiliar, but I knew the car was around here somewhere. All I had to do was walk up and down the rows of parked cars until I spotted its familiar shape. The streets were virtually deserted, but anyway what would I have said had anyone passed me? I could hardly ask if they had seen a silver Passat. Then turning a corner I ran into what I took to be a small dog, a toy poodle to be precise, though its hair was bright pink. ‘Can I help you?’ it asked in a husky American accent. ‘A robot,’ I thought. ‘That’s right,’ it said, wagging its tail. It eyed me quizzically, its head cocked on one side. Clearly I was going to have to be careful here. I tried to empty my mind of thoughts, and set off down the street, the robot dog following. ‘Hey sarge, I don’t think you told me your name,’ it said. ‘Looking for your car, by any chance?’ I pressed on along the street, trying to shake it off. ‘Some sort of neighbourhood watch scheme,’ I thought. ‘Not even warm,’ the robot poodle said.
In the Empty House
We found what looked like a piece of light, unmoving, frozen in the shape of a human being. We were afraid to touch it – it looked cold enough to burn us. What would happen if we could unfreeze it? Would it melt and vanish, or would it keep its shape and come alive? Could we take it away with us? Would it make any difference to how we lived, or loved, one way or another?
THE DEVIL SUGGESTS
The devil is wearing a scarf and we do not know why. The final island is not the final island. The shoeboxes are full of old dolls. I have kept this rug in my car for years. I named her after kerosine drying on a wall. I'm writing a final thesis on puzzle pieces. The sea urchins earning room in my foot. Hollow trees, we apologize for our pouring of sand. The end of the world is a camera capturing the silence. Every time my knee clicks, I know I'll live forever.
NO INCOMMENSURABLE SIGN
for M.B.
Body-swap movie in which absolutely everyone swaps bodies.
Oh, you’re a flautist? Well now you’re a pilot land land land land
land land the fucking plane. You were applying raspberry coulis to
the edges of a big square white plate, now you’re trying to take
out somebody’s appendix; you were riding a horse now you are
undergoing an appendectomy performed by a sous chef; you had
acute appendicitis now you are being thrown from a horse because
horses always know; you were married to me well now you are
married to yourself. But the film isn’t really about heavy-handed
reversals of fortune and spends most of its 106 minutes on people
swapping from one fairly similar situation to another (you were
hungover, now you’re hungover and your leg is shaking) initially
seized by a desire to go find the self they just swapped out of but
then gradually coming to the realisation that it’s probably a bad
idea. Best to leave them. Yours were the only eyes I could look into
very long – look away now. You were trying to keep your balance
on a crowded train now you are trying to sell the option on your
body-swap screenplay.
Parade
I walked out to the barn. It was a day like any other, probably a Wednesday. I checked in on the animals because I'm a responsible person. The chickens were fine. The horses seemed in good spirits, especially Ambulance Driver. I was almost through my daily round when it occurred to me: the asses were gone. No trace. I called their names, "Grumpy? Murky? Needy?" Nothing. The fence wasn't open. There were no tire tracks or hoof prints. Did I even have any asses to begin with? I looked around, but the answer wasn't up the oak or peeking from the birdbath. Lapsed, I went back inside and flipped on the news. There was some capsizing at the boat parade. I poured the largest glass of lemonade in my life, but couldn’t finish.
The Matriarch
Harald and Klara tried to eat quietly, on the table, without the distractions of tv, radio, or birdsong. They would chew old newspapers into sloppy papier mâché and stop up the gaps in the door and window frames to aid the sound proofing, an old trick Harald brought via a great great uncle from Łódź, deep in the snows of central Poland. On a Wednesday evening in April, four years after their children had gone to live in the city, Klara broke down. Harald knelt beside her, offering a glass of water. ‘It’s her fault,’ Klara said, pointing to Harald’s mother, sitting on the floor in the corner, her ropes fraying with age, a bowl of corn on her lap. Harald felt helpless, but smiled. Klara breathed in heavily, thanked Harald for the water, and they returned to their meal. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Harald. ‘She can’t live forever. One day, we shall be free.’
Metastatic
I walked on shadows. Shadows like any other: heartless spaces, invisible buttons, deadly traps. Inside I felt the shadow’s heart. In the shadow’s heart, a hank of hair, a sleeping spool. I grabbed the hair. It dangled from my fingers. The light licked the hair. The hair squirmed. I dropped it and ran. The hair coiled. It was mine, and I lost it. I rushed back. No hair. No trace. No irradiated blood to light my way. Hardly recognizable, the shadow stared up about to speak.
Episode 2: Human Grows Transparent
Burning Dorothy confronts her amputated ex-husband. When Dorothy’s mouth seals, the tadpole’s wedding to Stanley is over. Their married daughter traps her whole body in jelly. The younger woman gets gasoline into her skull and Kate must guess who’s who. His head walks out on his marriage.
