100daysandnights:

Monkey Boy didn’t want to go to school. He had almost fully detachable limbs and organs. In class, he entertained his mates by being in the front and back of the class at the same time. His restlessness drove his teachers mad. In PE, he played alone against an entire team, which wasn’t physically possible so he didn’t make the yearbook. His dexterity was so unheard of that he didn’t turn into a legend. Instead, Monkey Boy became Monkey Man, the town freak. He now lived alone in a large house at the edge of the city. Inside the house, he grew a rainforest, watered by his tears, where he could hide even more deeply and climb all day long. Though his head understood why he had to live apart from others, his heart never did. Luckily, it was also detachable. Monkey Man put his pulsing heart on a window sill where it gathered dust, sobbing silently, aching for love. 

#19/100 Days 2011. Illustration:drawing by Taffimai: “The Monkeyking.” Text: Marcus Speh

speh:

King Cat Kincaid holds on to you. Time trickles from a branch. Coffee sloshes on the sad elephant’s back. From your wounded hand blood seeps into the mother sea. The Jesus tee-shirt mollifies the Christians. The serpent of understanding leaps from your forehead. King Cat Kincaid wants you to cut your hedgehog hair before presenting yourself to the crowd that will welcome you as their king. You admire her balancing and self-possession on the breezy top of her cork soles. You admire her moustache: those stiff, black bristles blend extraordinarily in the whole gestalt so that her figure gains womanliness. But behind the wall of silence waits the usurper already. His thick nose drills down your dirty laundry. His envy ascends in clouds up to the sky and rains yellowish down to the earth. 

[German original] [Image: © Marcus Speh with Taffimai Metallumai [CC:http://bit.ly/O4Yo2p]

Illustration for “Tinpot Love” by Marcus Speh. Published in Olentangy Review.

two napkins: “the princess that sat on the world’s biggest pearl” and “streetart”.

[Read blog post “The Titan’s Curse”]

«What is puberty? How can we hope to help our children through it if we can’t remember much of it in an understandable attempt to protect ourselves against shattered identity, because that’s what life has in store for us between 10 and 20, even though you may just call it growing up, it’s carnage for the heart. What is puberty?»

speh:

«I’m an online writer. Apart from a few print publications, I can only be read online. Sometimes I feel “online” is like a birth mark: can’t get rid of it. Follows you everywhere. Obscurely related to your gene pool. Not pretty perhaps but, in the right light, one might take it for a giant tick or for a smudge. Of course “online” is not a smudge. It’s the dog’s bollocks, the bee’s knees of contemporary writing. It’s writing for billions out there, potentially. It means striking fear into the very heart of the publishing industry. It’s “occupy literature” before anyone thought of occupying anything anywhere. That online community, however, is a tent settlement, albeit of unknown extension. It doesn’t really occupy anybody else’s space either: rather, it creates land where it needs more. A little like the Dutch people, who wrestled most of their land from the sea at no small a price. Though the modern Dutchmen, I hear, have plans to save the money for repairing their dams and will instead live in houses that shall float when the flood comes to fetch them. …»

[Full article at: Northville Review][Image: Marcus Speh by Taffimai]