Scott MacLeod


AUDITION



We're breaking different worlds.

There is no fire, but electricity was beautiful.
⠀
I want to write our lives.

 I'll try.
⠀
Who is this for? 

Not for those who live in a private night.

This story is not for you. 

But take a 30-40 minute smoke break. 

If you wait, you can live and work as a ruffling beast.

So the cost can be calculated yourself.

I was free when I was running.
⠀
Everywhere is a myth. 

On the road standing like an infused one. 

But it's ok.

Mirrors, perhaps.

The first couple of days are wildly uncomfortable, then you get used to it. 

At night, everything is visible perfectly.
⠀
It's very difficult to get drunk like at home.
⠀
To be honest, you resemble childhood.

Efficiency, economy and something.

If only the field was worth the horizon.

The slip towards the horizon.
⠀
Melts in front of the eyes.
⠀
The conclusion is definitely part of our future. 

What will happen in 5-8 years? 

And in winter? 

There are many questions to choose from.

I’m glad.


11/10/21

[Excavated from an AUDI advertisement.]



PUB CRAWL

Improvised Extractions from Jim Leftwich’s Southeast Roanoke Is In Southwest Virginia 
In The Mid-Atlantic Region Of The United States (July 2021)


1. Frankie and Johnny at the Cabaret Voltaire

long shift at the mill blows the day open
lifetimes blowing down the road, pirate radio
opens Pandorum’s jar, thoughts like thistles
chair noble tumbleweeds rolling spliffs

Pat Buchanan leaning over the front seats
trying to reach the highball on the bar

the frontage road don’t bring much traffic
anymore, the highway flows through Guilt’s 
Mill, on the other side of Queen Anne’s 
cemetery, on the ulterior side of town

there’s dust between the neon pronouns
and the snow coming down hard tonight

long walk from the factory to the off-ramp
past all the canine risk-suppression systems
caged in chain-link, barreling around to nowhere
erasing their own paw-prints in the feral snow

never mind the strident cities, their ovals, their
circuses, overpasses and local water districts

never mind the diminished notational reflection
my keening voice rises like a flock of tongues
up the crater of my absent spine, falling onto night
like stilts breaking under vellum halo streetlights 


2. THE FROG & WATERFALL

so much depends on the diminished, so much
on looking away, lowering the gaze, forgetting

the water’s up to our navels, birds miscarrying
during earthquakes, the stars overhead fading
over the graveyard, dust covers the landscape
like dying bioluminescence, diminishing sight

lost helix of desires, material, mental, menial
we are gestures, puzzled by lost technique

synonymous bodies in parallel supine solitude
sequenced industrial process superseding
other codes, blurring the neon sign overhead
and the percussive, parasitic, voracious overload

Eliza slides lunch in front of Pat, he always calls it
clarity fuel, but it’s just stew, or a gesture towards 

Pat mumbles grace to himself, makes the sign
of the cross, gestures over the bowl of onions
carrots, potatoes, sycamore, ersatz fungibles
it’s traditional, metallic, edible with a pickaxe

its only value is telltale, subjective, but it renews
him, his eye, his eye becomes the eye bursting fire


3. THE CARRION & CROW

Eliza, in the kitchen, exhausted, leans against 
the freezer door, her larynx unraveling, her eye
disembarking simultaneously, to a barnyard
in France, where she joins a traveling circus

but the traveling circus is the eye, her eye
taklng in the clowns around her, carving onions
potatoes, sycamore, carrots, carrion for stew
industrial process stew for workers, charity fuel

devoid of taste, avoiding sensation, a void of
essence, everyone sentenced to avoidance

Eliza amends the menu on the chalkboard
draws a line through what we’ve run out of
liver and onions, semen and reminiscence

lyrics to a song we’ve forgotten we’ve forgotten

the eye is scratching lyrics on a chalkboard
seeking to be read, in real time, ai-ai-ai

layers of players speaking plethoras
voices like insects distorted microtones
graphic scores played like avant texture
mystic subjectivity in brick rat factories

Eliza, existed, converged and defined
in pastures of atmospheric melancholy 


4. CARNE DIEM

not quite mindless octaural crosstown traffic
melodies stuck between chutes and tubes
anarcho-collective lighting slips us the bird 
the demon interviews the spit-fingered pitcher

Sadly Koufacts, deluded, touches his eye
multiple catchers intervene on the mound

Venus sits untamed along the freeway exit
mumbling in the weeds, mumbling in the weeks
the virus carrions our community’s future 
on its back, there is no off-ramp, honey

no safe markers, no dry erase, it’s permanent
it’s nematodes in orbit, it’s broken blackboards

in the future young people will drive furniture
in orbits fraught with complex bodies snaking
in endless patterns and hybridized tempos
discontent spreading recklessly out of control

literature wakes up dry-mouthed in a heatwave
loving morning like a rooster loves a rattlesnake


5. CRAP DIEM

the future out-of-control, recklessly spread 

our discontent kept here, in a closet without windows
a clothesline asphyxiation taken to the next level

systemic demonic instrumentality as deep as
the buddha’s handshake, as curved as carbon
offset, as rubbery as this pickled Narration

teeth after a month of salt, of silence, of trickery
the fine print of experience, the useless warranty
we never read because we know it’s pastiche
due, full of barbarous shapes racing to and fro

toe dipped into history of these covert covid reds
flags urge the dominant to dominate, intimate
intubate, deliver their lists via radio, attention
paid, panic delivered, affordable society illusion
coprophagic picnic, table set, covered, tsunamic

tsunamis cover tables set with society’s shit illusions
affordable, delivered, paid, right up to your door
your whine cellars, kitschens, badrooms, on sweet
sour candy pucker, morsels, parcels, Purell hand outs
hide outs, hunt outs, hunt in camophage clothing 

let’s try to dream or breath here or at least dream
of breathing, queasy unsettled, selves sour, legs
for days, standing there pumping gas, hand pump
summer stretching out, steamy, cat food simmering

radio blatant, dripping light bulb, steaming bulge
dreaming messy steamy fast-food telenovelas 
cerebral toothy dreamy gas station attendees 

dressed like condiments, fragrances, shiny chains
celebrating their swooning morals, their teeming

toothless mouths agape in a teething economy


6. THE POEM & PINT

at the corner of Missouri and Tenth, a venue distinct
by virtue, its nonclassist architecture evading monotony
toothless poets serialized in pondcasts and proprietary zines
chew on onion toast in the corner, their performative lunch
never distinct from the kitchen in which it is cooked
or the biased eye under which it is consumed, cameras
view our dented years, their humming library continues 
its research years after years after years of our years
our years swimming in mirrors, inside mirrors, glazed
by glare and variant, Omega glariant, staring at and
stared at, toothless, dented, panting and pantless
in the library, tormented by words and letters 
piled on pires, on fyre, holding cheese over coals
butterfly messages collapsing like Arecibo into flames


7. GILT MILF LILT

if this night pole atmosphere holds up
like mother lifts guilt, to the lips, unwavering
we’ll sit just as steady ahead of two pints
and rind, damaged peaches, and honey

maybe eels later, and Oregon grapes
if the billfold unfolds without folding
finances airtight in the firelight, boots
against the brazier, slow smoke exhale

from one end of the ideological night
to the historical traces of the other end
bought roan, bent teeth and long boots
gradual implications begin to mark the present

that sits at the bottom of the objective pool
politics already covering its sides like barnacles
devils’ bacteria fills in the trail, fills everywhere 
at maximum capacity around the unplayer piano


8.THE LAWN & LEAF

after your customary six minutes sleep 
you open the windows or doors onto 
deformed suburban lawn chair geometry

you are experiencing a voluntary crisis
but you are optimistic, follow the gradual
footsteps all the way dawn to the bottom

of the almond grove where the HOA in rapture
repetitive rapture, footsteps on the bottom of
the swimming pool, the rotary club vice president

is allergic to maple syrup, or the pancakes’ bacteria
growing slowly and implausibly yet predictably
along the leaf, up the 13 gal. kitchen trash can liner

fingers of lightning along the margins of the kitchen
elevate the television glow into the star-shaped public
while ‘trane in the corner with a spoon, adapting

and you finger-count your beans, the take, the cut
erase the notes, so your theft disappears, ledger
demain, light as Sal(ieri)’s astonishing piano technique


9. THE CHARM & CHALICE

just six minutes of inverted suburban distance 
and there you are, asleep in the snug, erased

between the ends of a chair hewed in Oregon
your bent teeth, your boots, drinks are on you

tonight, your lawn chalice aura charming us all
right out of our easy politics, let’s knee the jerk

right out of the pub, initiate some snowed-in 
snowed-under crisis under his ass, better him

than us in the slush, the melt, the approaching
dawn and footsteps and long message of boots

coming for us (better you than me) once and for all


10. LAST NIGHT AT THE GILT MILF

the present approaches ideological rapture in Salisbury
excited but apprehensive about the plausible implications 

of disinformation, repetitive fascist politics, soured wine, 
inciteful stories and possible allergic digestive reactions 

to ecological bacteria and microbiota slowly growing on
leaky storage vats and cans in the pub’s elevated kitchen

not simply elevated but star-shaped, lightning, zero-fill
with all the clarity that star-shaped demands, the present

knows that the story depends on wet thimbleberry-thin 
boundaries, on light weaving its deposits in your ocean

of unread teaching moments, your suburban microcosm
your astonishing piano rendition of Beir’s Lawn Chalice

your teeth bent around the grape, your resilient unspoken 
ragtime know-how coaxing the toxic tonic sonic rapture 

out of those thick clumsy broadbats at the ends 
of your optimistic wavering outstretched arms

roaming over the keys, following traces of other hands
shadows near footsteps as Joe, empty, approaches


12. THE KING'S KNOT

you are asleep, erased, sitting in a chair near or against
the door or a door, it’s January so the door is barricaded

January barricade the goats

against the goatherds as much as the goats themselves
but you are inverted, distant, asleep, perhaps even

you are meteorship aura syst

optimistic about the caste system ending of pie steaming
forth from the kitchen here in the knot, your tongue unties

you are methodolo of the cosm

the Geordie knot tied by by your nose, dismantles long
histories, textile industries woven through with pies

you are opening geometry tissue 

from increasingly unpredictable kitchens, plug-ins
pop-ups and popovers, leaking 4/20 blackbirds 24/7

ideological stories subject to allergic redaction

free markets are siblings that make repetitive objects
adaptable to suburban libel democracy-shaped demands
goverrepolittinentatixtentation w/o reprobation

star-shaped pianos threaten agribusiness boundaries
never slowly growing, not a story, simply exit



13. THE KING'S KNOB

finger under your lap towel, you can hear it winking
growling on bohemian pages, the bell the belt the bone 
of easy advantage ringing your receptive barmaid ocean
tall drinks of water teeter totters on tattered titters, teats
for tots, on the horizon the lake sinks leaving bacteria
trails that collapse in oceans, you eat the malt cake
drink from the chalice while on the lawn the piano
astounds, erasing distance, making the walls and doors
that separate us disappear, makes all repressive geometry 
illegible

norms
unspoken

sovereignty
collapsed

no more bowing down to the prefect sunning themselves
on a bridge, standing in the sun, unforgettable, stunning
themselves with heat and architecture along the wide river
where the sun is sinking over antelopes loping southwest
toward the shadows of the blinking mountains, quelled
and awed by the new political structure building in the mist
the perfecct perrfect stumbling of solvent turbulence


14. BUBBA’S GRILL

you are just sitting in your usual booth minding your own
when the pandemic children appear and approach
inform you that facts are snacks, stranded on a ridge

your left hand drops from your chin slowly into the bowl
on the table, into the unforgettable thaw of the artichoke dip
your elbow encroaches on the sliced eggs and biscuits

this is worse than Vikings doing poppers, your guide says
bowing the new will, bowing low below the belt, soluble
toweling out the grovel, worse than liver tastes, he says

you don’t really believe your guide or the pandemic
children: facts are precarious, political, interpolated
can hear the larks, feathers blinking in fountains’ mist

out the window the sun is in a rainbow, the light is a bell
all hydrogen ringing the lake and mountains like a bell
a bell a bell a bell is like a bell you declare in your snug

and the children start, then stare then scatter like quasidots
like automatic writing, like building with water, they bloom
in the polar light like footsteps across a frozen lake


15. THE PELICAN & LEG

December will appear where to spit is irresistible
the polar light fishing for easy advantage over us
over how we feel about the hard bone of choice
up our ass, mumbling, finding the knack
for disemboweling, melting us like soluble candy
in the sun, as we helplessly hope for darkness
to slink in like a slide guitar, but the only slinking
is by the sleek slack waitress hoisting precarious
…pints, and asking for our orders, come on gents
cbroirr wefvifov cvmxoi npoirjg ioajrg oirng moianrge
iuryhbjr oiaerhgn mroi iuryhbjr ijaeruig er - sorry luv
we dinna speak Welsh, but oh god she’s breathtaking
groomed, with blinking silken gorges, spectacular icebergs
automatic hubcaps, so run down to the corner, lad
and alert all the tribes, the Pierogi, the Quonset
and the Coelacanths, let them know there’s a party
here, it begins at 2:30 p.m. stark, it’ll be off the page
with skyrockets, red shoes, carrot cake and radios
curried cheeseburgers, milk teaspoons and air socks
oh yeah and it’ll be managerial weather by sunset
so bring your coat, your mask, you know why


16. THE KNOT & SCISSORS

there’s a rotten dive like this behind every stadium
the public frowns on the hundreds of rotten shoes
the numbers increaping definitively, in raw percent
whole mammal shoals, flotillas wash forth to bend
the prayer-full public frown, wash the weak herd
across the river, the narrow moss, the drool
of ghosts, the thirsty werewolves shoveling
froth off the shoals, clearing the way for ghosts
disembarking, looking for lodging above the vats
of foam and lager, shit-faced laborers drooling
on the oak plank tables, pissing into their shoes
shitting into their hats, squeezing rotten limes
into dubious well drinks, onto raw oysters, crude
crudités, banging their forks like hammers, banging
barmaids like mimes, silent, trapped in invisible boxes
built by visible varmints, weak yet deadly varmints
wearing wealth or its lack like garments or the lack of
anything like public prayer, just forks hammering 
on tables, fists pounding on wood till something bleeds
and maybe that’s just all what prayer is anyway


17. THE MOON AND SUBURBS

used to be called the Frown & Thistle or was it Whistle
I could never jar my thoughts into sharp focus in July

too confused by my urge to lower my mouth to a goat’s eye
like a moth to burning plastic, like a raccoon to yoghurt

tub in the bin, cabin ajar, you’d need a steel yurt 
and burning borderlands to refuse plastic to a raccoon

their wonderful keening refusal and its implications
for memorial footage has led corpses to evolutionary

use of biomineralized influlosseenza and illallation
for sequencing the plasticity of glial neural events

ay least that’s what the sign on the door said this morning
when I passed by on my way to the market for some feta

some goat milk feta to be precise, I wanted some for my tea
and needed to replace what the raccoons got last night


18. THE HARLEQUIN & NEWT

this place really splurged on its mascot, the purple impala
there’s a taxidermied one impaled on the wall, printed on
handmade mudflaps and woven coasters, there’s better
impala swag that there was for their old seahorse mascot 
or the one before that, the symbiotic algae, that one was
a tough sell, kept the marketing laboratory busy to no avail
trying to monetize half muddied structures of bacteria and
algae, cutting and devising, capturing back-to-back woven
magnetic ruptures, forming foaming machine-proof religious
symbionts that look good on beer cozies and coffee cups
and can play a passable rendition of the “Einkorn” symphony
the audio hymn gently flowing through lamptooth speakers

anyway that’s the gift shop, a three-part three-story world 
of warm crayons, shifting mothbonkers, Horn of Einstein CDs
content strewn knick-knacks to help our clothe our feral uncles 
in collective energies, so they don’t cook the seams, picnic
on raw worms, kill the photographer before we arrive, ie
so we don’t have to suffer through any more go their lurid
“progress” offered as inaudible paper narratives, definitions
that by definitions glue seemingly fugitive associations together
in order to enclose what otherwise would be broad accessible
beach frontage, where we can stare into pandemic mirrors
butter peicans, burn pianos and send them to sea on fire


19. MIRACLE OF THE NORTH

the eye beckons and the leg 
breaks, what’s the use of knowing 
that, you might ask, they are merely
objects in a rear view mirror 
at midnight on our
slowly disappearing 
summer holiday

I guess knowing means you have some choice
what to believe, which to prefer, the short term
or the long line, which inclusive objects to include
and which analyses unofficially threaten themselves
should have their deviations punished, or is that just
another word for imagination?

“deviation,” I mean, just to be clear

I don’t know, I’m just sitting here in this pub
in the upper latitudes, at the bar with a pint
staring down on a severely limited vocabulary
trying to make some sense by making some
connections between words that don’t really
belong together, they’ve just accumulated here
on the wooden bar, next to a small puddle
of spilled beer, waiting to be mopped up
into some bucket that might hold them
for a few seconds anyway this afternoon


20. THE WRACK & RUIN

every idea is obstacles

analysis itself
and their factions

coercive civilizational erasure
unleashing orchestrated logic
thought traffic under worlds

deviations will slice across accumulation
the emerged journey expresses the possible

refers to specific accidentality
the debacle gliding on its face
its intuitive conformity is missing

its disappearance precedes patterns of culture
inverted memories made by rain a wooden hat

we are lowly, never eat, reflect 
facile banality defined by repetition
according to the sassy barmaid

each one of you falls on a certain kind 
of writing with the futility of aspiration

that’s what she said


21. THE WOODEN HAT

as we push ourselves towards the production 
of anemic writing, we contact others who ooze
obsessions (both forms) and aural emissions

fever haunts us, frustrated, hissing, oozing
history everywhere, all the time, almost as long 
as I have been sitting in this pub writing about this

constantly thwarted by our inability to attain
the anemic, we have been using ghost regalia
and visual engagement with others who might

or might not be able to offer us the numinous
epiphanic, schizophasic fracture we are after
the barmaid, for instance, and Time, that thief

and Jazz and Moloch and Colin Farrell and all
the nightmare characters and phenomena that 
have haunted this place since 1968, this place

on the border, on Bat House River, this half haven
on the delta where content perspires, where the
border, public-shaped and twenty feet wider 

than the sea, exists anew, found in their eons of 
resonant, subjective, intimate, and specific urgency
buried under charred rocks, pumice, carpenter bees

furious sediment and architectures of interpretation 
thus ever hosting loss is the name of the love song
no cast iron and no zippers is the name of the love song


22. THE MAGIC THROTTLED ONION

scissors / prose cannot resist a remake
scribbled mementos on futuristic protein
knotsemantic corridors & not notactions
pair of dime antics upstairs wile we shit
here in our booth both chewing cheese
and plums and severed leg of cardigan
damsel adjunkt prof up in the adjoining
attic, herein arbuth playing poker, we’ll
sprout our nonced program map uptick
and such three fried eggs for vitamins
sweat mountains of sausage round the
table, our memories will include (a) milk
(b) mammaries (c) slender grazed elk
from a hundred temperate forests, our
ilk displaces via poaching everything
we are a structural monsoon, salmon
crumbling, carbon offsettling, upsetting
aluminum aluminum lapsed narratives
lapse Lapps crumbling ruinous wonder
cheese on our wooden plates, butter
radishes and underwhelming batches 
of grasshoppers and crickets, the new
protein we’ve collapsed ourselves into 
but we’re chewing them anyway, chew
chew chew gesundheist ruined world
we your ruinous ruineers swallow the
evidence before court can be called
into session, today in the parking lot 
because the courthouse is off limits
justice is out of bounds, out of reach
to most of us, too moist of us, Juris’
prudent dry humor, our flaring nostrils
and gasping lungs 


23. THE KING’S WIGEON

this pub might as well be called The Suburbs
as far as we had to stagger to get here from the last
call, port of call, asking everyone along the way, once
we realized Charley Hawthorne’s map was shite, shite
covered in snow like our boots and shoulders tonight
now we’ve taken to calling it The Hawthorne Effect
that’s covered in snow, real life covered in Real Snow
kind of a code, a special algebra, a fragment of the
larger map we are piecing together to present the world
to ourselves, a world stretched out like yurts shuttered 
against the sun in the Valley of the Mountains of Vishnu
like piles of copper pennies on a plaster bulldog, paws
up, basking, standing like a new Director of Marketing 
looking out the window before their first bored meeting

yes, this pub is urban sacrilege, a supine botulism
a fungal flugelhorn blowing stifled Heads of Biotech
no logic to the bustling teeming noises, entangling
memories together with new patterns, illicit facades
and shoes paths few have taken, footprints invading
the whole brain pan, unlocking vandalism & summer
an electric alchemy of feral stories paving the skeleton
the much shrinking public toolbox, bacteria scurrying
from how we feel to what we will do, crawling about
waiting for you to wait for me to tell you what to wait for


24. NOVEMBER’S KNEE

the butter ceased to clean, the kelp to seduce
so we all knew this tavern was in deep trouble
but we didn’t have any idea what to do about it

it seems that the customers, some of them anyway
had issues with eating feathers, wanted chinook
and coho instead of pigeons, even though they knew
the water level was down under 770 for the first time
in thousands of years, it’s like they only have faith
in mirrors, like their protein membranes shed thought
like tissues in a lightning storm, like silly fistfights
at a regional basketball weekend, like historical
photographs in the Soviet Union, like warm beer

we who have stakes in the grammar of community
can’t let this architecture slip away from us, need
to choose now between chaos and false footwork 

all that is new is fabric stretched over a wide river
as long as we strengthen underneath the critical 
nature of the parsed self, all will be ghood, gyood

at least that’s what they have been telling us all along
these young men standing alone in the snow looking up 
at our window, posing as a subversive pedestrian and
limping Johnson Appleseeds, marking time, in silence


25. DIOGENES’ CISTERN

this is the original land, the original pub
in this land, the original saloon they say
here, that’s how they call it, their words
arrive here between wolves & Wyoming 

beer, birds, and insects, the place is booming
brimming with immunotheraputic anecdotes
and neural maxims, sense-deviations, voices
sneezing past laboratory tundra to serve shots

to sour prodigies flexing their studies, high
as rooftops but yoked to original word models
scats as innovatif as permafrost, while we sit
here in the corner booth all the way in back

by the rest room, resting, drinking, humming
our soul études, our potent poetry, our altered
violins, we arrive as another young reality
sea-selves on fire in the snowy woods, our

particles and maxims wiping the pavement 
clean of the clumped heroics and dendritic
architecture, healing the flooded forest with
macrobiotic explanations at the pace of thrills


26. THE GORSE & GROUSE

we are an odd number, the receiving
the servo glitch editors weighing change
and losing at pub trivia challenge night 

our masks are also our socks

if there are any stepladders to help
us navigate this mirrored sensorium
I haven’t seen them, have you mate?

our unbenting helix of logic circles
like a railroad owl in helium airways

sit and celebrate imaginary languages
with us, accidental paranoiacs lacking
any idea of what comes next, irritated

our public practice culminates 
and ebbs, the semibinge 
initiated by our failures
goes without saying

anthracite decades
not even a festival

pituitary rivers 
dime voices
unborn friction

we are happier 
than we think

renting stories 
that don’t end


27. THE BOOT & SPUR

sour dreams remind us of
the failure to consider our 
invented catastrophes’
rogue shadows in all this 
shadows of swords and
socks & shoes & hats &
socks, invented & stolen
convenient carbon, fossils
flooding grey matter, space
reduced to grids, solutions
we borrow for their clues
their incoming associations
with miracles celebrated 
over centuries, delighting
everyone		everyone
else is you, honest, dreaming
your unique ceremonies
your hoist a glass, your cheer
your shout, your Hey Ho Lads
Hey Ho

#

Scott MacLeod’s slender handsome form can normally be glimpsed wielding his prized metal detector as he searches for Roman artifacts in the moors behind his 1688 stone cottage outside Kilter-Middling, near Penrith in the Lake District, UK. He is content to publish only occasionally, for which the literary world is grateful.

 
 

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