Strange Days #1 - Strange Days are here... | Page 4
Andy Cook
where I was (my office) to go and laugh to myself in the toilet.
That happens a lot - having to leave my office to laugh at the
shit people come out with. I don’t know if it means I’m going
insane or if it’s stopping me. I’m going to
go and lie down in the rain for a bit now. if you actually read
this then I’m sorry. You should treat yourself with a cookie,
though i doubt it.
S
heffield-born, and a graduate from Birmingham, I
saw Andy perform in a bookshop in London almost
half a year ago and his work has really blown me away
since then. Taking cues from stand-up comedy and performance poetry, Andy’s work can be entertaining, poignant, personal and peculiar; usually all four at the same
time.
Forgoing regular form, but somehow always appropriate, Andy’s poems and prose fragments offer pretty
solid hope that the weird shall inherit the literary Earth
(so long as they’re not distracted by the joys of erudite
trolling and the mystery of why ‘gruntle’ is not a word).
As well as the pieces collected here, Andy keeps a
scrapbook tumblr where his various work, ravings, experimental projects and pro-level MS Paint work can be
found.
--[love poem hung over in sheffield station waiting for rachel]
And the miracle of you is that nothing sounds boring in your
presence. You magic up stadiums of invisible people who follow us into cafés and across bowling greens, who all laugh
insanely at all the right moments. I want to make you the fun
best friend of every action film hero. You turn the flowers into
miniature boom mics pointing at our faces. Bees are tiny Rushttp://canwebefriendsiloveyou.tumblr.com/
sel Brands to this inordinately well funded 24 hours reality
e are the inventors of cocktails. This one is called A TV show that we are the Stars of. And if pointing this out
Growing Sense of Self Doubt. It tastes like a food you breaks the fourth wall, we won’t loose a single sponsor.
used to like until you ate it too much.
We have another called Uncertainty At Your Future Living But if I do that in a poem, doesn’t that make it the fifth or
Arrangements, which smells like a bush in a parks where the sixth wall? Someone super clever is on their way to figstrangers go together. Our best seller of course, is the Dead ure this out, ladies and gentlemen. But it’s too late, we’ve alPhone On The Way To A Party On The Other Side Of Town ready started running around kicking over all the walls in
At 4am, which shines murkily, like an oil stain on the cheek of sight, shouting, ‘the world is a stage no more! yolo forever!’
a porcelain doll.
We are standing on a huge mound of broken bits of wall with
our arms in the air cheering because someone somewhere has
--scored a goal or finished a race or ate a whole pie or smiled
for the first time that day. Be my sticky love poem. Be my tree
[simply]
sap kiss.
smoke until it stops making you dizzy
weep yourself into a dried kitchen counter
And when I am old and spending my final days residing in the
text back back until you have no expectations
belly of a whale at the bottom of this world and my face looks
look at the sun until your eyes are no longer hurting
like a one of the barnacles I have feared, I’ll one day say, ‘I certainly was heady back then’. And when the whale groans for
--that day and me and my inevitable chess companion (oil-skin
coat, beard) barely flinches at the possibility of being ejected
We go the museum of Convictions Once Strongly Held Later depth-wards to join the Calpol bottles and Ikea furniture on
to be Learnt Were Totally Stupid. Everybody has their own the seabed, you better appear and slap me in the face with
individual section. Mostly they are full of recordings of peo- some flowers or something crazy just for the hell of it so I will
ple saying I love you, a few moulding slivers of communion finally have fun out of metaphors. Promise me. I’m getting in
bread. Not enough Mein Kampfs. One of them has a taxider- the police car. I’ll call you in the morning.
mied head of a tellitubby in it. I postulate that it may represent a psychological disease where the sufferer believes that
--everything is actually a taxidermied version of their originals.
We go over to your section and merrily bludgeon the framed It always makes me feel lame when I reply to messages that
photographs of our family members. It is our way of bond- only got sent just a few seconds ago but on the otherhand...
ing. Sadly my section only contains a miniature model of the Global Thermonuclear War,
museum, with tiny wax figures inside of us. You are sure than Robin Thicke,
one of them is going to move one day. I am not so sure.
the weird hole that’s opened up between two of my molars
W
that the dentists says is fine (how is flossing going to help, it
just makes it worse!),
my grandad,
my dad,
my paper basket full of business cards I don’t remember receiving,
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