Poem: "Slits In Aerosol Green"

SLITS IN AEROSOL GREEN /

‘DES INTERNATIONALE

POETIQUE AT STRASBOURG’

There’s a skill to

making a clean incision

symmetrically around the scalp,

then inserting thumbnails

beneath the layers of skin

and folding it carefully back

from the exposed porous flesh.

Shaping the scalp from

a convex to a concave,

until the contours of the

dome of head correspond exactly

with the contours of the

inverted scalp poised above it.

The effect thus produced

is aesthetically pleasing,

the intersection of

mathematically precise curves

and segments of damply gleaming

hemispheres…

the hollow formed

by the inverse scalp is

also convenient for the

storage of half-written poems,

cigarette ends, biscuits,

and pieces of string…

Published in:
‘SEPIA no.1’ (UK – July 1977)
‘EMPIRE no.15’ (USA – May 1979)
also in collection:
‘SUBVERSIVE ART AT POPULAR PRICES’
(Purple Heather Publications) (UK – January 1988)
on cassette:
‘DREAMS OF REALITY: BROKEN SKULL TAPES’
(UK – C60 – September 1981)

The recent discorporation of Ari Up of wonderful Punky-Reggae iconoclasts The Slits (Ariane Daniele Forster 17 January 1962 – 20 October 2010), suggests maybe I should divulge the secret history of this poem’s title, which was attacked by a certain Feminist critic as gratuitously violent. The story goes thus. Driving the trans-Pennine M62, at the highest point of Britain’s highest motorway there’s the breathtaking arc of a bridge like a knife-cut across the sky, and there, on the visible underside of this soaring structure, someone had managed to graffiti the name of Ari Up’s band, there it was ‘Slits’ in green aerosol. I felt such heroic fan-dedication deserved some small tribute. Later, when this poem formed the title of a DIY-Indie C30 cassette collection, it was reviewed in ‘New Musical Express (NME)’ as ‘poems from a twisted mind’. Recommendation seldom came better…!