By Sean Brijbasi, UK (Published in Issue 11)

Lyography (1-35)

1.      I joined a cult in Amsterdam because they did laundry.

2.      An Irish girl named Jackie slapped me because I told her she had a spunky face.  We were in a bar in Ulan Bator.

3.      I visited a friend in Montreal who kicked me out of her house because I didn’t love God. 

4.      My girlfriend left a note on our hotel bed to tell me she’d be right back.

5.     I called my mother from a Berlin jail and told her I was dead.

6.       I’m French.

7.       I met a Spanish girl named Carmen in Tivoli who was a fashion photographer.  I slept with her at the same time  her fiancé was taking a train to meet her later that night.  He called her while we were in bed but she didn’t answer her phone.

8.       I’ve written 76 poems about construction cranes.

9.       I graduated Summa Cum Laude from Yale but I changed my name.

10.   My name is Sean.

11.   Two Russian girls cut my hair on the banks of the Tauber. 

12.   While in Calais, I broke into a car to sleep.  The next day I woke up in the car, which was on a train, which was being carried by a boat across the English Channel.

13.   I have 12 fingers.

14.   When I was 8 I had a dream that I could play the piano. 

15.   I am aroused by earthquakes.

16.   I crawled until I was 4 years old.

17.   At a hotel in Paris I would wake up earlier than all the other guests and steal the croissants that room service  left for them by their doors.

18.   I took a vow of silence and said nothing for 183 days.  The first word I said after all that time was ‘residue’.

19.   I can drive a train.

20.   I was an unpaid extra in the German remake of the British movie ‘The American Soap Queen’.   I botched my line and was deleted from the scene.

21.   I have a twin brother who had plastic surgery on his 21^st birthday.

22.   I was on board a submarine when a fistfight broke out and eighty men were killed. 

23.   Given the amount of time it takes for me to approximate distance, I nevertheless always arrive on time.

24.   The first word I misspelled was science.

25.   I think about breathing.

26.   I draw three-dimensional pictures of people and leave them about.

27.   When I was a child I did mannish things.

28.   I am lost in a labyrinth, in which I tear minotaurs to pieces.

29.   I have abnormal blood.

30.   My heart has never been broken.

31.   The first book I read all the way to the end was Crime and Punishment. 

32.   I have been cut open.

33.   There are people in my life.

34.   I remember being born.

35.   I mean you no harm.

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BIO: Discarded moments. Unfinished gestures. Lived [not lived] in London. Resident of Sweden [no more]. Lives in Washington DC [near]. In East Berlin before the wall fell. In Russia before glasnost. Jazz in Copenhagen. Switchblade in Paris. Lost in Helsinki. Bar fight in Auckland. Awake for 3 straight days in Reykjavik. Bored in Brussels. Green light in Amsterdam. Red light in Hamburg. And more... http://www.seanbrijbasi.com/