Flying Stone

The Portland Surrealist Group, founded in August 2001, dissolved on January 14th, 2008. Due to various internal situations we were unable to maintain a level of collective activity that was consistent over time, and this led to Brandon Freels resigning on January 13th. After further discussion FN Brill and I decided to disband the group. Much of the material that has been published at the Flying Stone blog and elsewhere will be printed and made available later this year.

I want to thank those who came to our meetings or pursued projects or friendships with us during these years (although such a list could never be complete): Victoria Garcia, Kaylene Chassie, Trillium, Rain, Ron, Dave, Chris Beavers, Paul Portugee, Sarah Frances, Andrew Daily, Christopher Gray, Trevor Blake, Anthony Leskov, Dave Negation, the Portland IWW, the Red and Black Cafe, the 411 Collective, the Portland Vadding Collective, Fifth Estate Magazine, Eberhardt Press, Doug Lain, Karl Lind, Apio Ludicrous, Ron Sakolsky, James Koehnline, Laura Corsiglia, Eric Bragg, Dale Houstman, Parry Harnden, Kevin Sampsell, Barrett John Erickson, Johannes and Anna Bergmark, Thom Burns, Nova Dawn, Tim Iserman, various cafe dwellers, passers-by, and other groups and individuals who wrote letters, sent books or showed support from the international surrealist community, especially the groups in Chicago, Stockholm, Leeds, London, and Rio de la Plata. Thanks to Zazie for hosting our first website.

The members of this nucleus will carry on surrealist pursuits in their own way. I may sponsor open meetings based on collective creation, reading circles, and experiments in the street in hopes of sparking a new group activity. Also, sound experiments with Qkcofse are providing an element of improvisation and collaboration that's in the spirit of surrealism, so those will continue.

M.K. Shibek

Water colored turtles bask in useless abandon

Luminous chocolate spirited away
The purple Shetlander adrift in ennui

Hers was a tragic compulsion to laugh whilst shopping

Something extraordinary is stalking me
And you sit there listening to Burmese operas you
don’t quite like

A little star dust paints my way into your pink
yearnings
Seven over twelve curved nimbles

Shimmery sand hill cranes dance for mates beneath the
gibbous moon
Nothing eyes, everything sunglasses

Beatific turquoise tears glisten in that termite
colony

The sudden appearance of her infrared appendage caused
a change in the flight migrations of spotted hippos
across North America

This place smells of Eustacian tubes

FN Brill, MK Shibek, Nova Dawn

On July eleventh I dreamed I was in a scene featuring a frozen woman and a telepathic fox. The woman was laying on the ground in a thick layer of opaque ice, while the fox seemed to be narrating comic-book panels with its mind. In these panels which I was reading or hearing, the fox suggested someone drill a small hole towards the woman's breathing area so he could lick or bite the rest of the ice away and possibly revive her. As this was going on, I realized I didn't know where I was. I looked in the sky only to see many boulders and flat rocks slowly floating by high above. Other planets were visible on the immediate horizon.

Later at work, while thinking about the dream, I looked at a local entertainment weekly to see an article about a man who'd killed his lover and for some time kept his body covered with ice and frozen food packages in the bathtub. Eventually the killer went to the police, said he was off his medications, had been using alcohol and meth, and "wanted to do the right thing." The frozen body was discovered and the man was arrested.

MK Shibek

1.

I was in one of those forests in another body under the earth and on the sun planted in the masculine word facing the sea!

I was heaving the oracle stained with garden gates running through the world’s pierced coons I’m wild I’m new surrounded by flies!

Water whispers into the barricade ready for blooming flesh birds of night bathers dancers rivers steam!

I was standing shaking every mountain red a shoulder masked with scarabs desire knows labyrinth hands!

I was in one of those forests in the oil of my head in another gash in a pocket picked where a lonely gun knows no one is visible!

You passed through the sweet ache with leaves individual as my life made from delinquents!

We control the wheels!


2.

At the X an unmarked space enters your white body like a solitary woman!

I saw your armor through Oaxaca the night eating a siren in a path your tears climbing and descending!

Stop the earth stiff jaw face to face two bodies are at night oceans with wheels in each drink without moving sing without shoulders without a man once a child!

One by one leaves crows rock your stone language passion viewed against the living night belches devoutly!

Contemplate my burial my rough flesh color my iron mittens my long airy veins!

At the X a mouth in spite of your hand your chest a yellow sky a black earth an X made by two legs walking a lane made by dreams eaten!

Let the flies swarm! Let the dust fly!


3.

I am not the one looking for the one cyclone time raised out of anyone who says cries wild!

I am not the one who says has given up crying through the blizzard the half-eaten out utterly boring small of anywhere gone down flapping lightly against her sea shoulders!

I am not the one who never met her pulled the knife from the Cyprus other oceans other seditious moth eating masks other bigger and bigger clothes can love like this!

Heraclitus here I was from the top of here I have just seen all the nights like animals in me before a large cliff held up by my five fire arms!

Before I die I want to remember the bruises for a millions years the black gold yellow dancing that I hated I hated everyone that I told the truth!


4.

Lightening coming home all night day I cut my boredom in an experiment I am the driver the open door the gate the umbilicus where the belly the ocean gets lost under the dirt!

Rooted in plates draped in sheets stacked in drawers hidden in revolvers in their big eyes there is enough hate no love no love each color is an imaginary letter a numbered kiss creation of consciousness!

Further away you are we are they are further than I can tell let me open my mouth I can’t touch I can’t touch without your cut your keyboard your clock!

On the mountain I hear a heat wave decades later facades of buildings tomorrow I can almost touch the ticking yesterday even if the hounds come back from death I want to go backwards busted busted clock!

Just say my name spell it write it send it smash it this will be enough hardly gunshots hardly childhood hardly life hardly!

This will be enough!


Brandon Freels