Chris Goode. No Son House
1-903488-39-7. 2004. 24 pp. £4.00 / $6.00
Chris Goode is a writer, performance maker and musician. In 1999 he set up the theatre company Signal to Noise. Since 2001 he has been Artistic Director of camden people’s theatre, and also Associate Director with Unlimited Theatre, which was awarded a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2001, for the show Neutrino. In 2002 he won a second Fringe First for his one-person show Kiss of Life, which previewed at cpt before its run at Pleasance Dome. And in 2003 he took his production of Napoleon in Exile (initially developed at cpt for the 2002 Sprint Festival) to an acclaimed run at the Traverse, and subsequently to a London outing at The Drill Hall. He has been described by The Guardian as "one of the most exciting talents working in Britain today". In addition, he has worked widely as a musician and sound artist (including the duo COAT with Jeremy Hardingham, and collaboration with the installation artist Emily Orley).
Chris is also the author of Boomer Console and Go Portland, OR.
Cot death link to womb dream
: I am so scared
of the work ahead the hands turn into silt
& steal away recall abyssal reach recovery plan
goes Challenger Deep & nearly vertical
how I will hold up here until the rain bumps
speed lights skidding abed a lying night
a supine brain stem sand map manganese
fields the echo life map of the breath routine
susceptible gait in a blue technology
swirl spot kin speak utterly hopelessly
loveliness spiral brotherly I came down
an infant pigtail macaque compares
two mother surrogates: one is covered
in cloth, the other is a bare wire cage
soundless wreckage the living cut gay
twins conjoined at the atlas prejudicial
seamounts mouthed in retrospect news of
beagle failure cats on the artificial
prowl the bow wave what do they mean by
window of communication? millions of
dinoflagellates mechanically excited by the
sailors i’m speaking of before they tidied up
shortwave possibly shadow of the weathercock
what turns round in the mind’s eye
even her names for me now are spurious
leading to functional abnormality
mummy’s brave soldier as the day is long
to go without milk as a token of love
a dream of a dream of neural fire the
monstrous seahorse cut alive cut away
cut with remorse or baby formula
glucose oxyluciferin mute
the alarm a plan for homeland security
eaten by facial bacteria you
unsinkable then extinct it turns
the organ inward or it shrouds in black
the lanterneye seems to blink befell
my image recognition wetware &
I came down into the morning
roll up the sleeve of his long-sleeve t-shirt
several new cuts this is how we fucking
talk to each other when the music’s too loud
interrupted cadence trauma intercept
cloak of night ransacked parietal
bone for liquor Olympiad recess
storage facility down to the wire I
sleepstalk loss Jeff Buckley dead at
30 spurious lossless format
vivisect crowd scene seed in the palm of the
fist little distorted Churchill
gremlin crept in colonise the foetal
breathing pathways roadmap kept
with the water locked in the glovebox sleepyhead
two more surrogates: cardboard & fabric:
two fake mothers on fluoxetine payroll
one is swinging & the other is still
regular disruption to the landscape here’s a
message from the Taikong Corporation
bloodshot and snot-streaked city lights sideways
bled Jeff Buckley dead at 24
Hollywood dream of night pearl life cut
Philip Morris NPD gets firebombed
no sex check on the signal components
beagles on ice after lights-out eerie
calm on the milk-white sea
Jeff Buckley dead at 22 which
bewept to the grave did not go
a bonnet macaque slips out to the cinema
adverts for zoomzoom & auto-fellatio
lights up in the toilets where the usherettes aren’t
rain band vivisect fortune brought
an electric son to pick up & hug
& tight hold dear Trieste submersible
miracle pre-emptive forgiveness deep
encoded sleepstalk courtship failure
flash-train distant we are experiencing
problems with sound somebody spells out
M-U-M with carnations vivisect
lossless sucking on cloth for nutrients
‘Dracula in Memphis’ wound is bleeding
day & night no commercial use
silent drizzle on the incubator plane I’m
breeding a sheer pre-Christian syndrome
wake up at midnight desperate for water
less like the womb a nation of cold-seep
tubeworms we watched Tremors II: Aftershocks
(S.S. Wilson, 1995)
Big worm horror starring Michael Gross
city never sleeps its aposematic
son et lumière we don’t even know we’re
born Jeff Buckley dead at 15
gang-raped by soldiers vivisect the anomal-
opidae is that Intel inside?
remedial intervention an exploratory
surgical procedure wasted on you
say how will you then Mark Laudenslader
know when your children struggle and tear?
the duck stops dancing when the candle goes out
the real-mother apparatus rendered in foxfire
a spurious kiss dead air down the spurious
waveband shredded on spurious methyl-
amphetamine babysit detriment blast
one’s name is the least of it one in a thousand
succumbs it says here suddenly withdrawn
into soundless nightlessness great unlearning
vivisect the splitfin flashlight fish
determine its smokeless fuel no word
from the beagle rewired cat on the sleepstalk
scared child moonless asleep at the wheel