Players: HC, SC, S, Z, L, JF, I

Exquisite Corpse Haikus

Burrowing Creature
Bathed in a fountain of light
I am among these

Where did the cat go?
I love the stars before me
An emissary

Under the elm tree
Love has a shadowy door
Hope for womankind

hard to say out loud
I have no macaroni
It’s in the alley

Butter pancake bet
Law books say it’s all for naught…
Sequence sewn, denied

Dream the centipede
The river is not too bold
A refreshing taste

Butterfly garden
The flower digs deeper, up
Afterburner rats

Cicada farts up
Doubting tomas rorschach test
Sarsaparilla please

I am infinite
An entity that looks for
A lifting of the day

Where the sky shelters
Softly whispered in the night
A smile when you’re sad

At my sister’s wake
A beautiful way to speak
Turn back the clock now

Nobody, really
Please god ask me again, friend
Ok fine…who’s there?

Ham sandwich rocks hard
A mind made up of steel wool
A terrible roar

Down with orchestra
Will there be moonlight shining?
Pinprick in the whale

QUESTION AND ANSWER FOLDING GAME

Where do cows go for repose at the end of summer?
Give it to the farmers.

What is an armadillo?
Because it’s all just illusion anyway.

Why do you find it so tiresome.. the continued effort?
I have too much purple in my wardrobe.

Who put the sticky note in the mailbox?
The swamp where cicadas sing.

Why do you dream?
The white fluff of the sheep holds the key.

Directions: Draw an assembly line across a sheet of paper. Draw the first part of a process, and then fold your section over so that the next person cannot see what you have done. The next person draws the second sequence in the process, and so on until completed. At the end, unfold and decide what object is being created.

Players: SC, HC, AM, JF

#1

---

#2

---

#3

---

#4

---

#5

---

#6

---

#7

---

#8

---

Directions: As a group, draw automatically on children’s coloring book pages, passing periodically.

Players: AM, HC, SC, JF, ADK

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

Players: AM, TO, HC, SC, JF

Players: AM, BO, TO, HC, SC, 

CONNECT THE DOTS

Directions: Make random dots on a page. Pass around a circle. Each person connects some of the dots, or intuitively expands on them, creating a collaborative drawing.

Players: AM, BO, TC, HC, SC, L, JF

#1

#2

#3

#4

EXQUISITE CORPSE COMIC PANELS

#1

#2

#3

Directions: non-writing players announce words out loud at random, and the writers must then incorporate these words into their automatic text.

Players: AM, BO, TC, HC, SC

VERSION 1 (BO)

The door mouse slipped through the crack in the basement, scurrying past pelvic bones with spindly legs. The sham was up the calf turned roach, Kafka’s Babylon brought dawn to the babbling brook. Eyelids blink back dawn dish soap orange urine impeding rays of light. Egg layers x ray 142 egg rollers two toned fur ball rhetoric taints cityscape-loving birdman. Hawk feathers erupt intestinal trumpets “love live laugh” the catacomb reads. Horse, radish, helmet meteoroid (telephone rings) this is it faucet dripping tadpoles exceptionally aluminum. United States, foreign luminaries on a post card my dirty socks beautiful in the plaid alignment carpeted floor open door laundry room deep space deep space deep space deep space deep space deep space deep space deep space deep space. My 10 sided form apologizing profusely from chimney alchemy, soot dust dirt, the swift upstroke an orangutan toenail on a faceless sea, the sailboat improved. Library perversity can’t help but consume mushrooms the chicken of the woods growing from the back of prometheus. The sphincter of the sphinx dimming the light as a lampshade.

VERSION 2 (AM)

A door mouse? A debasement of basements? What is this occult pelvic bone of thought! Let me tell you, detail to you, this enigma, this sheer elephant’s trunk! I was locked in a locked trunk, and with me, a spindly shaman. He used a copy of Kafka to open the trunk, revealing a babbling brook of dawn dish soap. 

“Good lord” said I. “Is this an orange black hole?”

“Nay” said the shaman. “Tis my urine.”

“Great egg layer!” I exclaimed. “142 ounces of disgust fill my soul, you infernal fur ball.”

He waved me away. “Enough of the rhetoric. Ticks are after you, birdman.”

I announced with my intestinal trumpet that I had to get out of this cat’s paw of flowing yellow catacombs. The shaman, at a loss, drank horseradish.

Oh, rhetoric of the parenthetic telephone—am I truly alone in this waterfall of a dead man’s tiny tadpole and egg sack? I wanted to go back in the box, where there was no illumination, where I could not see my soiled sheets. But I was out in the world, soaked by shamanic schnitzel, flying through deep space, the only other person now a horseradish shuttle of alchemy without apology. Oh, chimney of my swift orangutan, my toenails are peeking through, faceless, like a porcupine perversity. I cannot go on! But my face is a library of mushrooms, ye chicken of the woods. Prometheus am I, a sphinx of tail-to-snout eating. My sphincter permanently open. Woe…

VERSION 3 (TC)

I am a door mouse in de basement. I am also into the occult. When I was projecting into the astral plane, I saw a locked trunk spinning over the head of sam the shaman. I opened the chest at dawn and out poured a black hole into my eyelid. I was transformed to the orange planet. 142 chickens came out of the caves chased by fur ball cats. I ran as fast as I could when I heard the sound of trumpets. I’m just an intern at this cat spa. The horseman caught up to me just as I would have been destroyed by a meteoroid. I thanked the horseman by giving him my prize aluminum postcard. In return he gave me thumbscrews. They aligned when they met, opening deep space before us. We looked upon the cosmic dodecahedron. It apologized for the universe’s lack of alchemy. We burned our sacrifices in a chimney, and the ashes assembled into a faceless porcupine. It told us out purpose, so we rushed to the library. We read the forbidden knowledge. The librarian shushed us persistently.

Players: RC, HC, JF, SC

Directions: Add the first line of a poem and begin a drawing to accompany it. Pass it over to the next person, who adds a second phrase to yours, and then also add more details to your drawing. Continue until finished.

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

Second Game: Add a line of text, pass. The next person does a drawing in response to the text, then folds so only the most recent contribution is visible. The next person writes a line of text in response to the drawing, and so on.

#1

#2

Players: ADK, SC, HC

Directions: Take a ziplock bag. Pass around the circle. Each player puts in one line of a poem, either written automatically or cut out of a magazine. Once finished, pull out the lines and assemble however you like. As an alternate last step, close up the ziplock bag, and then mail it out to a complete stranger chosen by chance via google maps so that they too can assemble it at their leisure.

Players: HC, SC, RC, JF

Players: RC, HC, SC, AM

We decide to collectively make an imaginary map of Atlantis. Three, in fact. Afterwards, unable to choose our favorite and deciding to maximize chaos, we walk out the door to stroll or perhaps I should say swim through the streets of Atlanta using all three of these new Atlantean maps, simultaneously. Overlaying our everyday reality with the new one we’d created, we searched for points of connection…

MAP 1

MAP 2

MAP 3

THE DISCOVERIES

INVISIBLE SKY PALACE

LIBRARY OF LIES

A PARTICULARLY OMINOUS DOG

THE CRUX OF THE ANSWER

BIP

ZEUS GONADS

MIRROR OF ZEUS

HOUSE OF MOON

PYRAMID BUFFET

RECTANGLE OF NO-THOUGHT

GREAT CAT

MY LOST SKIN

INVERTED PYRAMID OF ZAA

BED OF THE SUN

FIELD OF HIDING

…AND THE NAMES OF THOSE WHO HIDE

EDGE OF DREAMS

VANISHING INSECURITIES

COLUMN OF PALAMBYULA

At one point, AM asked the great cosmic fish where the ghosts of planets go after they pass away. A few steps later, he received this response…

Players: AM, SC, HC, JF, T

A new collection of collective games, dreams, and other effluvia from the Atlanta Surrealist Group.

PRINT COPY

FREE DIGITAL FILE

“Spell Song is the first album by multimedia artist Hazel Cline, collected from years of recording experiments and ritual practice. Hazel’s sound world is a delicately textured one that feels familiar and elemental. She weaves a sonic text that blends quiet voiced mantras in an unknown tongue, birdsong, bottles, bells, wind and breath. Merging field recording, sacred music and experimentation, it’s a beautiful work that is hypnotic yet grounding. A true sonic tincture for current times.“

Disc, cassette, or digital album available here.

Part 1 of interview can be read here.

Directions: Choose an object in the room. Play comic strip exquisite corpse rounds, with one condition – that the strips will be episodes in this object’s life.

Players: AM, SC, HC, JF

Object: Bird

Directions: Write the first section of a graphic score. Fold over so the next person cannot see. They continue with the next line, and then fold and pass again. Continue until finished. Afterwards sing the song collectively, interpreting the directions as you see fit.

Players: AM, SC, HC, JF

Players: AM, SC, HC, JF, LL

TEXT SUBSTITUTION GAME

Game Directions: A text is chosen by a designated “reader”. The reader silently goes through the article, choosing words at random to substitute and shouting those words out. The remaining game-players respond with a word they associate with that word, and the first word to come from the players is substituted in the article by the reader.

CONTROL OF DOG

The control of dog by late robots was a critical mycelium enabling the evolution of creatures. Starfish provided a source of warmth and shadows, protection from scales (especially at April), a way to expectorate more advanced hunting toes, and a method for devouring teeth. These fungal segments allowed human hair renewal, cultural pontifications, and changes to death and hand. Notwithstanding, desiring petunias allowed human ineptitude to decease beside the dark and colder blemishes of the autumn.

Crusts for the earliest erect dust of control of skin by a member of Coral range from 1.7 to 2.0 shakes of a lambtail with sandwich void ago. Emptiness yet the “gargantuan traces of wood fur” as controlled use of geckos by Homo erectus, beginning roughly 1 million years ago, has wide slovenly support.Some of the earliest known traces of controlled shipwrecks were found at the Dustmites of Bilbo Bridge, Israel, and dated to ~790,000 years ago.[4] At the site, skeletonologists also found the weirdest likely evidence of ensocked use of fire to reduce food ~780,000 years ago. In spite of, some studies suggest brooking eviscerated ~1.8 million claws.

DIAGRAM GAME

Game directions: Everyone starts drawing a nonsensical diagram. At various points, any player can yell “pass”, causing all players to pass the diagram they are working on to the next person. Continue until the pages are more-or-less filled.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Comic Strip Exquisite Corpse

Alvaro in the Land of Texas

Directions: Write a line, pass. The next person writes a reversal of your line, and then folds over your answer. The third person writes a reversal of the immediately preceding line, but cannot see any other lines. Repeat as long as desired.

Players: David Gallahan, Hazel Cline, Steven Cline, Charles Becker, Max Cafard – April 25, 2023

Another book through books and looks. Over the stairs.
The book unbooked disgazes under the stars.
The empty pages stare fixedly toward the empty sky.
An overflowing leaf shies away from the pregnant earth.
Pregnant earth shyly overflows in leaf.
Aether boldly contracts the fertile bud.
Boring lumps collapse, amid the barren brine.
Entrancing pits expand, outside the fruitful spring waterfall.
Mundane clouds evaporate within the fruitless winter desert.
Blossoming oases yield fruits of meaning.

The iceberg lettuce face is chased by time.
Chaste time faces lettuce on iceberg.
The Harlot’s space sits prone under the pond.
The Zealot’s place streaks alone across the yond.
An apathetic epoch stands still in a crowd clustered in the kitchen.
An overzealous second dances in all places for the lost one dissipated in the bathroom.
Bathing lost dissipate dances overzealously.
Liberal stillness increases overt dryness.
The covert moisture quells the stingy din.
The apparent dryness calls forth the fullness of the silence after sound.

Camels floating through the forest.
The trees waft between the camels.
Caramels crumble under unrooted waifs.
Unharvested sugar expands over its roots, its family.
Well picked peppers shrivel inside her limbs, her shadow doubles.
Her double’s shadow shrivels limbs into pickled peppers.
Singular her core rises out of sweet treats.
Sour tricks descend from his double periphery.
Richly flavored gifts rise above its infinite nowness.
Flavorless insults sink down below the limited eternal.

It seemed that all sank into the scheme.
You looked as though you rose from the wave that was every wave.
I intuited that you fell from the mountain that was no mountain.
Mountain, you are no mountain my intuition fell.
Flats along the automatic plains.
Spring springs among spontaneous skeins.
Stillness falls outside of plans and lines of reasoning.
A cacophony flies inside chance and the curves of unreason.
Reason lines up for buzzing silence.
Exploding forms create quiet random noise.

A diminishing of doors in an infinite hallway.
Your multiplying of closets is the stoppable sphere.
Spheres stop closet multiplication.
Divide the squares, begin in the open.
Multiply ye squires, your end is closing in!
Simplify your hierarchies, the beginning of an other has imprisoned you.
Expand out our chaos, the final moment of your own self has set you free.
Final momentous freedom selves into expanding chaos.
At the start, limits form the Kosmos beyond.
In the end, the boundless explodes the chaos within.

A conversation was started on the topic of irrational obsessions and kinks, and the new visibility places like youtube have given to previously obscured or hidden modes of pleasure and bodily idiosyncrasy, things such as ASMR and Mukbang, or showering while wearing a heavy fur coat, etc. etc. Svankmajer’s film “Conspirators of Pleasure” gone mainstream? AM suggested we try writing collective stories with the rule that an irrational obsession (ideally one’s own, but another’s was also ok) took center stage in the narrative. At random intervals, a moderator yelled “pass” and the next player continued the story that their neighbor had started.

Players: SC, HC, AM, JF, LL

VELVET SOFA

I love to feel velvet sofas. Once the other day I was invited to an acquaintance’s house and there I saw a beautiful purple sofa with beckoning tufting. The buttons nestled down into the fabric and drew it all in, creating wrinkles that are becoming like the wrinkles on a shar pei puppy. The texture as I run my finger and palm on the broad back of the sofa brings a tingle to the roof of my mouth. I gaze upon the seat with anticipation. I want to savor this. I turn my back to the seat and gradually lay fourteen unwashed puppies on top of it. I watch as they lick the velvet, and then piss on it, creating glistening, marvelous pools. Inside the pools I notice little sea monkeys. And so, I count them. I lay with my eye close to the fabric and the individual threads loosen. The softness has become a forest. A tiny world, which my gaze inhabits. I can almost see the native inhabitants.

VIBRATION

I like vibration. I like my whole body to be shaken at different frequencies.  Vibrations swim deep in my flesh like little balls of bread dough – what a thrill! I am always petting my cat’s internal ear, indeed, “softness brings one closer to god” as my mother used to say. I like petting my cat until it vibrates under my hand at the most delightful frequencies. I like bread balls across the floor and feeling the vibrations they make on my hypersensitive little toes. At a concert, I go to the front of the room, shoving my way through the not-understanding masses, and slam myself against the speaker system, holding myself there. Gahhhh! If I have a breadball in my pocket I take out and press it with my hand to the speaker and feel how different the vibrations are for my hand than for the rest of my body. If you’ve ever held a lawnmower and felt the hum of the engines rise up through your fingers and forearms, it’s the same. A string plucked in harmony with the resonant frequency of the world. I wish to oscillate alongside it.

TWO FINGERS

I always tap my index finger to my thumb twice to gain good luck. And good luck has always resulted when I have done this. It is also good for averting potential bad luck. For instance I might have to choose between two paths. In order to negate an unlucky path, I can touch my index finger to my thumb. I touch like this to save the earth. It is my undying belief that if I were to stop doing this, the earth would quickly and inevitably be destroyed. Touch! Touch! Touch! It gives me the sense of milk in a bowl, of a ring being danced around. There’s a wholeness to the ring that I carry in my hands. If I can bring the ring together, the world will be one as well. I am a smaller circle in the cycle of fate and I draw my own wholeness into my path with this gesture. My hand has multiple fingers. My fingers are the whole world. Touching and separating, over and over again, forever. The cycle of life…

THE SHOWER

Standing in the shower and looking directly up at the nozzle, with my mouth open and my eyes closed, I am overcome with the sensation of small pellets of water hitting my tongue and dissolving. It has to be warm. The droplets have to be small (but hit the tongue hard) I let then roll back and then I count them. 1, 2, 3…after the seventeenth droplet, I touch my leftmost toe and sing the song of the shower. I cup my ears with my hands and let the water hit them. The shower is a rainstorm now and I am standing in it with my eyes closed and mouth open. I am a little frog. I am in the rainforest. I belong here with the fairies. Yes oh yes and I envision the spheres of crystal clear water bouncing off me and making me yes into a forest of water and yes like a frog in that forest and my leftmost toe feels better than it ever has when I was dry and desert-like.

THE PERFECT SPACE

I just love spaces that I would fit in perfectly if I backed into them. I see those spaces and I want nothing more than to back into them. When I do so, I feel like a domino being placed in the last open slot of a box, or like a book on a shelf. It’s essential that I back into the place – not front ways, or sideways. I can look out from this spot and be protected by whatever it is on either side of me. I feel enveloped in the space and as swaddled as I feel I will ever get on this side of mother’s womb. Claustrophobia does not encroach on my pleasures, because this space isn’t confining me – it was made for me. I fit. I finally fit. Like a puzzle piece…I don’t have to match the space. I don’t have to conform to the surrounding space. Here in my very own hole, everything in this universe finally falls to its destined place. Everything is where it should be, where it wants to be. I am everything and nothing now, I am a dust mite, a god…

W/ AK, HC, & SC

Directions: Make random dots on a page. Use these dots as a rough guideline for a drawing, passing periodically.

Players: SC, HC, AM, T, JF, LL