THOUGHTS TO SET THE IMAGINATION ADRIFT
i
To wax philosophical and produce a Camus for Madame Toussauds.
ii
He lost his balance and slid into insanity.
iii
"This
is a double-barrelled repeater," he said, "which I have tactfully
named 'The Parrot'."
iv
In one of my dreams I was a sleepwalker.
v
When we northerners set sail, we set sail to the south.
vi
A swarm of people around an empty
beehive.
vii
Drunkenness abated, he staggered to his senses.
viii
The
"Tap-Dancers' Concerto" was recently played, in the key of blunt
imagination, to a full house of chimps on Mars.
All box-office records were broken and duly scattered throughout the
Solar System.
ix
To be
buoyed-up, like a cork, on a current of enlightenment, and safely borne across
a sea of tempestuous creativity - such is the raft every artist craves.
x
The
seahorse, or hippocampus, is a kind of small fish that lives on plankton. The horse, a solid-hoofed quadruped, is a
large mammal that lives on oats.
xi
The sea lion lives on the land, but the lion does not live in the
water.
xii
An artist with the genius to execute a painting entitled
"Capital Punishment".
xiii
A train of thought speeding through
a small tunnel in the mind.
xiv
The monk's habits habitually came to grief in the presence of his
habit.
xv
We call it
a rainbow because the sun's rays have fashioned from the rain an arch of
prismatic colours which miraculously resembles an arrowless bow.
xvi
Her body was the magnet of my desire.
xvii
Nebular
clusters on the sun-bleached sands of
xviii
We pitched our tents towards the enemy's camp.
xix
As an
unmarried mother who disapproved of abortion, she anathematized her lover's
pudenda and subsequently gave birth to a eunuch.
xx
They pay
homage to the ruins of a former civilization, like mourners around a grave.
xxi
During the
night the lovers, lying side-by-side, dreamed that they were making love. In the morning, the man informed the woman
that he had 'taken her' in his sleep.
xxii
"Oh that," he
said, referring to the overly hyperbolical assertion of a nearby cinema
advertisement, "that is merely
the stigma of inimical criteria!"
xxiii
The composer was obliged to atone for his atonal music.
xxiv
She became an iconoclast after breaking my heart.
xxv
Political asylums for demented
politicians.
xxvi
Had his
madness not been so useful to society, he would most certainly have been
classified insane!
xxvii
The living
dead bear flowers to their former lives in graves beneath a sombre sky. The flowers die, the dead live on.
xxviii
In order to get aboard the bus, we had to jump the queue.
xxix
"Less of your cheek and more of your lips!" he retorted
to his new girlfriend.
xxx
We lost track of love way back in the labyrinth of our pride.
xxxi
After the
clouds have stopped crying, I shall be obliged to wipe their tears from my
spectacle lenses.
xxxii
We sent
each other large letters through the post, and subsequently discovered that the
total number received duly added-up to each-other's names.
xxxiii
The fish was cured, but the cat was doctored.
xxxiv
He is a man sadly addicted to temperance.
xxxv
Her iris is like a small, calm sea which surrounds the
xxxvi
We wade through a stream of traffic.
xxxvii
In his
spare time the circus employee, whose task it was to tame wild cats, amused
himself by making tame cats wild.
xxxviii
He dreamed
that the local fire station had burnt down while the local police station was
being burgled.
xxxix
Smote by terrible passions, the wounded hug their tormentors like
angry bears.
SURREY/LONDON 1973–5 (Revised 2011)
