Three-Eyed Frankenstein (Rewilding)
This morning my old pal Maz.
Our sun had ejaculated on the road.
I walk there in dreams yellow bukkake,
that sparse, spread-out London or Anchorage.
Wherever, on a hill. And down the incline I
went and looked across the way. And there
was Maz walking up the incline
with the big painting.
And I shouted out, “Maz, Maz!”
And he crossed to my side,
lugging the gold-framed artwork
he had bought at a charity shop of a
three-eyed Frankenstein monster.
And I admired it.
And he had something else,
a smaller photograph with jail bars,
enclosing shiny happy people.
Something to do with music.
And maybe my dad in there, too.
I don’t know. Maybe not.
I watched the painting for Maz;
he had to go do something.
So I watched it for him for a while. I
don’t remember how we said goodbye,
but we did. I think he later
continued walking up the hill with a
big charity-shop painting of a
three-eyed Frankenstein. If you knew
James Patrick Blackden Marriott, you would
know that buying a charity-shop painting of a
three-eyed Frankenstein painting and
listening to experimental music is exactly
what he’d be doing in the afterlife.
These three-eyed ravens from
shows like Game of Thrones O Mary
Shelley with your psychic New Age third eye,
did you foresee my pair of ceramic
salt and pepper shakers, the happy couple
the Bride of Frankenstein and
her groom I have a white streak in my dark
hair since the pandemic and never had one
grey hair before; it wears on you
it does. And then I decided to do the painting
very quickly this morning so it now
exists in real life too.
Three months into the pandemic I
dreamed of a goat with tea in its udders
Alaskan-born Kathleen Bryson received her Ph.D. in Evolutionary Anthropology from University College London,. She studies prejudice/empathy in humans and other great apes and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of Oxford. She also is a published author of over 100 fiction pieces, including 3 novels of literary fiction. The most recent novel is the experimental The Stagtress, published by Fugue State Press (2019), and her non-fiction book Why We Struggle With Ambiguity: The Quiddity Question will be published by Ethics Press International in 2023. Her poems have been published in Magma, Eunoia Review and the Bombay Literary Magazine, amongst many others. An artist-writer-filmmaker for many years, she has had 10 solo art exhibitions, amongst them Once Upon a Spacetime at the Royal Institution (2019). She has just completed her second directed feature film Baked Alaska, for which she wrote the screenplay and performs. Read about her at www.kathleenbryson.com