Bio: Tyson Bley was born in 1978 in South Africa and at the age of 30 moved to Germany, where he continues to live semi-reclusively with a malignant Internet addiction. He has been featured in MyFavoriteBullet and Whisper And Scream.
 
 
 

"Anti-Hero"

Wait a minute. Who gets to be ostracized and who gets to start
the macho epidemic? So sweet: the methane gene had a brief
run until someone had the idea to souse it in baby breakfast,
bare hands now able to compress a scrapyard like a
Styrofoam coffee cup and strangle important investigations
of Superman - our favorite anti-hero. Talk about suppression.
Talk about preying on the hunger of a desperate assembly
of misfits…
People's fears spin off the President's garden stuff,
the palatial CVS cashier he keeps behind the dilapidated, leaning trellis
in his backyard, the act of falling in love
swirling around in a cracked tractor tire…
I think he even recommended we all lift weights - after collectively calling
Us
an 'extinct frog.'
Funny the use
of the singular …
Don't
trust anyone who tells you to stay this way: he needs your help,
his hat's on backwards and so it merely looks like he's traveling
backwards. She keeps praying to a flash and flutter of cosmic
bat: knowing it will
know the way to staying in a tiny cavernous life. It will come to pass that
she will find it precious: a single
item of trash.


© Tyson Bley 2010

"End Of The Road"

A butler in a horror movie with the looks of Abe Vigoda
in The Godfather who could pop his eyes out scared
Jamey more with his accidental simultaneous
hydrogen isotope-release that each such eye-popping stunt
in the movie facilitated. I remember having to guide
Jamey through the mysteries of fusion energy and
it was a great help getting me off my addiction to mail-
order self-help books - but it was rather similar to
seeing yourself on television when, one day, while
the same Abe Vigolaesque horror creature popped
his eyes and I had to explain to Jamey why technically
it's possible to make an H-bomb from an owl bolus,
I was reading about fusion energy in this really
tacky self-help book I'd mail-ordered and had opened
on my lap specifically for this occasion: it felt like
having copper clockwork revealed in a forced
brain scan pinned down on a poolside recliner
by greasy, hairy, gold-chained thugs in Speedos.
I'd been reading about bad parenting and its incidental
links to racism, for Christ's sake. Even whilst reading,
I was thinking to myself: 'I'm not really addicted to such
terrible books - if I can help myself to being less of
a bad parent, why, I could have the bonus of being
less of a racist.' Even though I wasn't a racist. And didn't
even know whether a non-definitive article came
before the word 'racist.'
But what the hell, right? So now, in the terrible aftermath,
I was thinking: Why the sudden switch of topics -
to hydrogen isotopes and H-bombs and bone balls?
Why the horrible overlap of horror movie and tacky
self-help book? Will our road trips also die out just as I'm sure
that freak page in the self-help book marked the end of
our horror-movie sessions? I'm not always 'absent' on
these trips, Jamey - even though it might look as though
I'm not listening to what you're saying, I am listening.
I just like staring out the window a lot.


© Tyson Bley 2010

"The Condom That Wanted To Be Normal"

One of the last things always witnessed by the bleary
witness at rough parties where photographers are hired
to capture celebs at their worst for ironic
publicity purposes is a cephalopoid in a hot tub,
one that always gets the skunk eye and whose
screwdriver spray a hot chick finds repellent always.
The witness knows this creature as the resident
party photographer, who on the irritation scale tends
to be high, with that three-blade safety razor cutting himself
in the locked bathroom, at first drawing a few knocks, then
a few disinterested fuck-offs … The tentacled mollusk is - with
his social awkwardness and pariahdom, hanging
around guests who see through him - like
a wedding photographer only drunk and not articulate
anymore: usually meant to follow black lines to keep
him on track, but no longer turning nicely when one red-eye
censor beneath his carapace strays from the line of
decent, civilized behavior. You read about how
their self-promotional efforts with those quaint
stick-on tattoos they peddle in a refusal to go home
begin to tragically cloy. But why not just pack up and
leave? Before you embarrass yourself? Before you do something
you might regret? He'd insinuated himself into
the pageantry of a carbonizer product launch party
with his camera - less 'insinuated' than walked easily into
it ('cos people pay him to do that shit) - but inevitably
hauled out his own gimmicks, and together with
his eerie social intercourse took on
the general aspect of condom electronics.


© Tyson Bley 2010