Matt Briggs <lvpurdy@earthlink.net> lives in Seattle.

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Stiff Nackerm

Sound Sculpture Contest

Object: To communicate clearly in gibberish.

Players: At least 4 (suited to tournament play)

Materials: Paper, pencil, several prepared narratives, descriptions, or

characterizations [optional, audio recordable media]

Directions: Your only tools are your mouth and body. You must use speech like

sounds (syntactically emotive noise) or any other noise your body can generate

to produce noise, including but not limited to slapping, thumping, flapping,

barking, howling, crying, murmuring, muttering, and other nonsense both verbal

and percussive. You will be given a narrative, description, or characterization

of more more than 125 words. You have two minutes to prepare your presentation

and then you have three minutes to go. You will be interpreted by three

transcriptionists who will record and then translate your performance into a

narrative, description, or characterization. They will record your name on their

index card; they may not use more than 250 words and have five minutes to

compose the narrative, description, or characterization. A judge will compare

the index cards and score them on a one to five scale of how closely they

correspond. Compare scores and the higher value wins.

A tournament would eliminate players until a winner was declared.

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Jackson politic splatter community relations.

Throughout the end the day the old dogs used to meet and drink from the

dripping leaves of the unpublished imagist vases. It tasted like

lemonhurt and orangepain. Would you like to know how old I am?

Seventy-two days after I went to work for the GGGreat Tony the Tiger.

The Godfather. Ronald McDonald. Maltomeal. Wheat-a-bix.

Surgarholtzmeinkopf weary and shy-of and shy-I slyly follow the old

bagdafieldad. The fellow would like to go to the movies and eat his lunch meat.

Problem is, if it is flavored with peppercorn, is it good to eat? It is good to

speak. It is good to eat a corn of butter and marmalade and marmalukes

at the door with knives and forks wanting to eat the buttered zucchini

and the cured ham and the turkey died last night the one we couldn't

kill and pardoned its life with a note and the whole mess of

kindergartners who wrote it out in their own block letters onto their

napkins and then made little paper flowers to trick the giant

butterflies down so they could have something to eat at lunch. Angry Spegetti

used to write down their songs and she'd sometimes sing them a song she

had worked on herself. She'd sing the song and wait for it to take root

in their minds and then tape record them when they weren't looking.

Place a little microphone in the handball, the soft, indian rubber one

that they all fought for and the most aggressive little girl would hide

in her closet.

Matt Briggs