Earlier this week, I completed a two-day writing course at the University of Liverpool’s Centre for Lifelong Learning. Inspired by the French literary movement Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo), which explores creativity through rules and constraints, I set myself a small challenge.
Hidden within the lines are clues to 9 locations I visited one afternoon in my fair city of Liverpool. If you’re local, you might enjoy trying to figure them out. If you’re not, just enjoy a stroll through language itself. (Hyperlinks are for cheaters)
Erasure By Redaction
I saw a lot of Liverpool this afternoon, including the Picton Reading Room. A rooftop terrace you’d never have guessed it, where crying seagulls had already nested.
A Jumanji idea tied up in vines to cats committing crimes in number 69a woman on top, a Renshaw Street stop.
We climbed the last steps of a ruin in town,
Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun.
I’m not trying to seduce us, I’m moving to China, trying Confucius.
Bold squeezed, you know where I’ve beans.
He ordered a haunted breastmilk latte to go, but his eyes said the flat white should stay.
A slice of mulberry matcha Meatloaf being tickled by the ivories.
And he would do anything for love, but he won’t do wax.
So yeah, I asked Paddington Bear for directions.
“Up the escalator,” he said, “past Flash Fiction Erections.”
A blind void being led by white sticks.
I accidentally bought a book of Dickens’s pepperoni dick pics.
If anyone was ever gonna rhyme caffeine with Maxine remains to be seen.
Church bell and gutter, Seel’s on the Street,
this next place no longer has samba reggae beats.
Tu es Petrus. But I’d rather be Catullus, in a pub church, raw Latin on a mattress.
A new beauty regime for women: infidelity’s stubble, is microdermabrasion.
I am flying East, the Asian Persuasion.
Meanwhile, we marched like hobbits to Penny Lane’s crown.
HOP upstairs to your lie-down.
D. Towers. Where Saruman held a sign: “Gimp-suited mindfuck, at 6pm sharp.”
He asked if I’d miss him. I tilted my hat, said “Fine”
Had he taken me for calamari, with lemon and wine,
I might have Fritto Mistro’d him, somewhere down the line.
A Domino
Ode to the coder
Voldemort Towers
Epitaphs of Lipographs
Dickens’s Italian showers
A coded affection
Lost in translation
Endless Pendennis Crenellations.
majorloveme 