hold your horses

I've got something on the way. Not ready yet though. Hang on.

SORRY NO POSTS IN AGES I'M A TERRIBLE BLOGGER

although this was always supposed to just be creative things, and I haven't done any in a while, so that's why. Sorry.
I PROMISE there will be some short stories soon. And a dada poem made from rejection slips. Lala.
But here is a picture of some strapping young men.



wanting

I feel no acute lack in the light that passes
Through that particular sort of dust - the wistful, wandering
Motes defining a sun-beam, strips glazing the exam-hall.

For company, I have a succession
Of blue and green steel mallards and red plastic swans
Making their way like sail-boats down the Euston impasse.

What need I the Rose and the Lily?
For ornament, I prefer the lichen
That sprouts out of concrete.

Whoever mentioned Lilac? Good maybe for flavour,
But Lavender does better, but Soy Sauce
Or Peanut-Butter do better still.

I would tell fortunes, according to the cosmic forces
That shape the cracks in paving-stones.

To whom it concerns,
I have been living a dream.

I came to the conclusion that evening
When nothing of consequence was said
And also, that evening
When nothing of any real consequence was said.

As such I am changing my mind
And have decided to take it
Somewhere less sarcastic
And although it has been my
Pleasure to know you from this point of view,
I cannot face these day dreams any more, of gas lamps
And quarts of love.

Yours affectionately
(because I’m letting go,
But am terrible at falling,)

Edward Sibley
(A fictional character)

Both

Both: Two seperate entities,
Divided individuals, stuck penultimate to 'one',
Two of the smallest elements,
Seperate by their having personality,
Held apart, by definition,
Knowing they are alone, seeing the other.

Both: Indivisible. Two who cannot be
Divided. Two people held together in a word.
The most intimate semantic space,
Defined in terms of what they share.

Tender me all your smiles.

Let us throw them a party,

- In some NW5 student bedsit,

Boasting two litres of vodka

And four two-for-five-pound wines -

There, I will consume them; send them up.

I will give you, then, my bile, and my bitterness,

And my cynicism. You give me your smiles, and

I will eat them, make them into something to throw a party about.

And then, with gathering momentum,

Send me your frowns, so

I can stamp them on my passport

En route to the States! The Biggest Apple Yet!

I will travel to New York, stake my claim,

Or Chicago, or wherever it is that all these

Sultry American poets and leather jackets and icons and geniuses go, and I’ll be

James Fucking Dean and go to the trendiest single branch of McDonalds like they do in scripts,

And later I’ll send you back your smiles,

With mine, and all the things about myself that I had to cross the Atlantic to learn,

So when I come back there will be waiting a better idea of how to caricature myself,

And a conviction that there are only two characters in any story,

And one of them is you, and the other one is everyone else, for better or worse

(See how long that perspective lasts you. Not more than 120 minutes I expect).

And probably the package will get lost in the post

Or lost in the mail, or you’ll pretend you never received it,

Or maybe I won’t even have sent it in the first place, from my room

In the Chelsea Hotel, which I’ll rent when I remember

That a smiling person I once knew threw a party about it,

So we’ll dissolve all our expressions in correspondence,

And I will see you

At the party.

When I saw you at the last one, I didn’t make you happy, but maybe my new hat,

And an alien vocabulary of tenderness, which I’ll find soaked into my 54th

Or Something Street mattress, and bottomless reserves of patience,

And snappy looking US dollars, and all the time I’ll save,

Making big bucks writing poetry and putting on fake eyelashes by candlelight,

And the money I’ll save by destroying myself with madness

(Which is easy and cheap to come by, if all the adverts are to be believed

Or was it something else?) and it’ll be 12:20 in New York with lens flare on celluloid,

And then I’ll come back dressed like a brain surgeon but not like a doctor,

And fix you. I’ll fix you into something else entirely.

Or preferably,

Keep your smiles to yourself, and your bile.

I’d rather you were just happy in London, removed from this transaction.

If only you’d take a little responsibility for yourself and let others do likewise

Rather than letting the invisible script dictate character, mood and scene,

Then, we could have done with it. And I’d save on plane fares.

It’s not my fault that they’re a consideration.

Dream of a Plumb Line

Asleep in bed, I travelled to a field.
I have never seen a place so flat.
The horizon was the only scenery.
Here and there were tufts of longer grass.
I’d pick a piece and holding it upright,
Blow a buzzing note that rolled away.

As I walked, I came across a plumb line,
A small lead weight that hung straight down
On the end of a string. The string went
Up into the sky. It hung straight down.
The weight was small enough to fit
Into my hand. In a land of horizontals
It was solitary. I left it there
And continued walking.

Two Bad Jokes:

So I used to have this dream that one day I'd play a cover of a fairly early Bob Dylan song and it would be REALLY GOOD but for some reason whenever I played it it came out a bit flat and a bit uninteresting, and I spent hours and hours practising it and trying to make it come alive and take off and actually, for a while it was a bit of an obsession and actually getting a bit damaging to my day to day routine, whole days spent doing nothing but playing it over and over again to try and make it work, but in the end I got a bit sick of it, and I just thought nah, fuck this, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more.

What do London commuters wear in chilly weather to get on and off public transport quickly and efficiently?

Oyster Cardigans.

Also, I did a spot of Guest DJing (along with DJ Starwars, if you know her) on Death To The Author Can Fuck Off the other night, you can listen here, if you want http://rs787.rapidshare.com/files/336283130/DTTA2010show1.mp3

Also, check out what I did to my phone!

Doesn't it look cool?

It's dead.

Bloggery

The last few weeks have been pretty interesting. In between phases of Kurt Vonnegut fug, there have been many vaguely interesting and loosely dramatic things going on, which I have had ample time to ruminate on from the warm confines of the belly of the whale. I've made two observations which I thought warranted posting with a sort of inescapable Polonius bullcrappery:

1) You can take responsibility for someone else's happiness, but you shouldn't.

2) It is the prerogative of the individual to calibrate their own problems.

That is pretty much all.

Also, for the sake of some colour, here is a picture, you should click on it, it's great fun.

The Challenge

Looking ahead was only a way

To see what was backwards -

A mirror blocked my path:

My own reflection blocked my way.

A tea-bag brushed the lip of the pot

As it orbited around in the space above,

And as it moved away the pot closed itself.

I turned the corner past the church,

With a bass guitar!

Soon the banging sound was all drowned out

By noise explosions!

My fingers were alive -

I drew a smile without opening my mouth!

Without words! A triumph worth? One hundred pounds!

Back to square one. But someone else is here, now, too.

Really trying to align this sense of a routine,

But my goodness, but how it is quiet here.

Just our footsteps down the well-lit street -

The pavement shimmered,

And your fingers

Came alive!

Looking up, the snow was charcoal

Against a chalky sky. Looking down, it was white

Against a wet black wall.

It was a matter of inclination.

You are not some paltry image!

Good grief. What is that under your skin, telling a different story?

I knew it. Come here!

What I learnt about Growing Down, when done backwards in Time.

People only grow in one direction, or two.

Your parent’s dull routine becomes your childhood mythology -

The cuckoos in the forest out the window of the cottage

Where you visited your grandma for a week,

And your grandpas box of maggots, which you could never believe,

Are resonant things. And so memories are left to rot,

Like poems, perhaps the ones you know you will not finish.

Apotheosis

I flew out in a spiral, orbiting, upward.
Smeared out towards the hills to the south,
As I passed, a silhouette drifting along a beach
Looked up from his whimsical discontent
By the peach-tinted sea, textured by a smouldering sky
To observe that the all the world seemed to lingeringly gesture towards the lady.
The clouds were smudged towards the top of the arc of the sky -
Where the throne is -
And then I was pulled west, to where a disseminating leaks out
In all directions, up and away. He is a walker too.
(The ones my eye picks out cannot seem to be still)
He fights out of his body - it does its utmost to lull him to a bed,
And make him soak into a puddle and stop,
But he won’t be a puddle - aspires to a gas.
The onset of night occurs in space, not time, outside his window,
And it darkens as it reaches the place where -
To the north and east now. I cannot match the lady’s gaze
Until a scratch myself free of all these mouldy rags.
I scour through the branches. Each tear and snag is a release.
My fever drags me. The branches seemed inhuman, spreading out at every angle,
But this is wrong. They are like people, Growing only polar ways. Down,
Towards an outline, walking, effervescent. The world laps up against her.
She is a bay in nature - her eyes glow, and make you forget the question
That you had to ask. Other branches up, or course -
I have left my shape amongst the shadows in the north, tangled in the trees.
What I lost is wound around them. Now I am in the centre of the gyre.
Upon their backs, upon a hill, gazing straight up, through me,
Immune to the indignity and fire of a smouldering sky,
These poets I have seen, two of them converge,
Its amber fire becomes their entertainment.
The blazing hidden question is forgotten,
And the sky cannot perform its purpose.
No, now he is a bowl, with a question behind it, that I went to ask the moon.
The couple see my lady through me, and ignore the substance of the sky’s display.
No wonder those two figures, cheek to cheek despite the cold,
Look, but pay him no attention. Now he becomes a fool.
He would be emptiness, seeped light blue, not some
Course florid display. Their indifference increases
His anger, and so the flames grow in intensity.
To them, it is a florid, powerless display.
And all his anger
Fails to touch my lady.
The thunderer increases.
Then later, he is gone, beneath the city
Without a sound. Then the lady shines.
The watching couple shift their eyes straight up.
The bowl, naked, indecent, stops lying.
There is nothing after the little fashions and distractions people roll the earth in.
In this truth, my lady finally shines.
Above the city, the haze and smog hide her competition.
She is the only thing in the night sky, here.
The question is as transparent as I am.
I would be falling if she wasn’t there for me to catch.
A traffic island. Noise falls in all directions all around.

Last year, winter in London meant places like Waterloo Bridge, Portobello Road, Camden Market, Hyde Park, lots of walking around trying to keep my feet warm, buying presents and whatnot for people ways off like some sort of lonely idle tourist. However, this year, winter in London has found me about 78% less lonely idle tourist, and the pre-Christmas spell was all Tufnell Park, Highgate Road, Keats' House, Brownlow Mews, not so much Big London Places as Local London Places That Are Better. The reason being, these are all places where people are. A more accurate list of Things That Characterised The Last Few Weeks would actually be more like an alphabetical list of people's names, which is an excellent thing, really.

Also, here is a little song I was putting together in my head walking around Brighton earlier, I'll make it nice one day but I was in love with the spontaneity of it so thought I'd make a quick tune and Internet the hell out of it for all and sundry x

Thoughts From Notting Hill in September

Wrote these when I was trying to find some work at the end of the summer - was mooching around in Notting Hill alternately handing out CVs and stopping in various nice Notting Hill pubs to read Beckett and drink coffee. I guess I was thinking about timelessness? I'm really worried about capturing zeitgeists recently. Like, you know how you have a sense of, say, what a certain summer felt like as a child. I feel like time is flying by so quickly recently I need to pin it down somehow to stop it going so fast. Anyway, here goes:


I

A sensation (not quite symmetrical) of one set of membranes against my own; a third, more dextrous one between, and again with that strange symmetry. An onlooker might form the obvious conclusion, one of passionate disaster, a clean cut violation, a redistribution of the fine sort of human relation that is not supposed do be shared.
The combination of these elements, the harmony of giving and taking, of sharing, enough to transform a random arrangement of shapes in air, of glands, fibres, tendons and signals (against mine) into a pattern of broken intentions. A particular way of interlocking the interlocking parts renders intention a violation, a curious thing that wounds by remote control, which trespasses on someone who (god forbid the alternative!) (a parenthesis is voicing guilt - a clue?) isn't even there, when the subtraction of one set of these mucous membranes could be as innocuous as the alternative is abstract.

II

We have left a little sphere, floating in the air, a totally unnatural, utterly artificial white sphere, that will remain there forever. I could not destroy it any more than I could touch it, any more than I could stick my fingers back in time and pry apart the moulds that made the thing apart, because all moments are instantaneous, and that is what the sphere is - just a simple, white sphere, that exists only in the isolated minds of the beholders (it has a twin, inside the brain of someone distant, which may not ever be discovered).
The sphere means nothing, suddenly coming to exist in a particular arrangement of bits and pieces, really made for ins and outs, not for creation.
But, it does reflect the damning light of intention, in curious, distorting ways, which are cracks, violent and allowing the flow of a certain kind of love whose fluidity it is our responsibility to check, according to the maxim "Happiness is a solid. Joy is a liquid. Satisfaction is a gas."
But the cracks spread somehow, tangential to the flow of time. The egg is always hatching, always hatched.

Holidays

I'm going back to Brighton tomorrow! Very much looking forward to being by the sea a bit and things.

These fragments I have shored against my ruin?

Distance

A bearded man, a shrivelled,
Destitute Falstaff, starving, lonely,
(He had been alone for weeks,
Or at least, it seemed like weeks)
Found himself at last, with all his petty vices
At the foot of the long stairway
That lead down, under the forest,
To the ice.

It was as though he had stumbled across an eternity
Of empty space and nothing,
And as if that wasn’t cold and inhuman enough
The void had changed to ice in all directions,
With tunnels spreading through it, so you could visit
Desolation from different angles.

"What made this?" he thought in awe
"How did this come about?"

The corridor ahead was frosty blue.
The walls and floors were lit by a pale ambience,
And all was made of ice, translucent and dead.
The walls were smooth, and made a cold
That radiated out like backwards heat.
The floor was sheer. He had a pair of sturdy boots
-Thank God-
He took them from a man in Pentonville,
Who had no need of them.

"It is cold, and something terrible
Has happened" thought the man.
"Something grand, and horrible, and human."

Because this was not a piece of nature -
The labyrinth in which he walked
Bore the mark of somehow of some intention.
A majestic stillness filled the place.
It had, perhaps, been undisturbed forever.

And then he realised, peering through the ice
Thad had made this strange museum
That there were shadows in it.

"Who could do this?" In his panic
(at first he was afraid, but soon this too was frozen)
"Who could trap a great leviathan like this?
Such mighty life, entombed in the foundations
Of this place!"
A whale arched overhead,
Motionless in space above him.

He cried then.
Where his tears landed, they melted tiny sections
Of the floor, but soon the cold prevailed,
And fixed them to the substance of the place
And so his horror froze, and when he saw
What else was in the ice,
And over weeks began to understand
The measure of this thing, his cold domain,
He barely shivered.

In one room, from which a dozen corridors fanned out,
He saw a couple, lying side by side
Upon their backs, beneath the ice, like figures on a tomb.

There had been a holocaust, of sorts.
But holocaust is wrong -
Not here the fire, the monster tearing through the air,
No raging heat had caught these people.
Here a ship, and there, an aeroplane,
Were fixed into the walls,
And people too, in groups, sometimes,
And sometimes on their own.

"And how, how has this happened?"
asked the man, in moments of lucidity
(For he was growing fast insane,
As he meandered, the only beating heart
Among so many) "What is this mind?"

The ice was one.
There was no seam, nor gradient
To the opaqueness here or there.
It was clear, one dimensionless piece
Of carved blue glass.
How had it happened?

His footsteps echoed, in his waking hours,
Down the web of even tunnels
And when he felt the cold, he pulled his clothes
(Which were now to big for him, and hung about him
Like a limp balloon) a little closer to his body.
He ate little, drank what water he could thaw
From those dead walls,
And after weeks
(Or, what seemed like weeks)
He had still not found the end.

Whether he was lost
(And that cold pair, who presided over the place like king and queen,
He had seen them several times by now)
Because the place was haunted,
Or just devoid of landmarks
(Save that central room)
And the gentle sweeping curve of every corridor
Made keeping North in mind impossible,
Or perhaps when he slept he moved somehow
(He never did see night, not once,
Nor day, whilst he was down there)
He did not know. He never found the enterance.

And so the place became his home,
Although it ate into his bones.
And still, he feared
That he had at last found proof
Of some real, hateful force
That could somehow make this place,
And trap these people underground.

"But how did it happen?" Still he did not know.
And then he came upon a clue-
If the water had frozen gradually,
Perhaps (Oh dreadful thought)
The people knew their fate
Before they froze
And perhaps their faces would bear the mark
Of one last panic.
And if it happened suddenly,
Why then, they would not have known
(Although, they would have been under water
When it happened,
If it did happen)
And so their faces merely show
Whatever emotion they were wearing at the time.

And so he dug. He found a figure,
A woman, standing upright, facing the corridor,
Her hair held in the ice like sculpted fire,

And he began to dig, and as he clawed his fingers at the ice
He thought "The human body is all water,
And if it's frozen, it is ice,
So these people are ice, and of this place
More surely than they are of the earth above
And more than I" And he no longer felt at home.

But still he dug, and soon, he had made a channel,
No wider, at its far end, than a handspan,
Ten feet into the ice, to see this woman's face.
And when he got down on his belly and crawled,
Away from the floor his feet had known,
And when he was near enough to see her face
(For the ice was pearly clear but his eyes were poor)
He found he had forgotten
How to read expressions.

And so he saw her face, and the shape her eyes made,
How they lay in conjunction to her brow,
And the line her mouth made beneath them,
But it meant nothing, and feeling his own face,
For a point of reference,
He found he couldn't make the muscles there
Bear any resemblance to his feelings.
Or perhaps, as he was so uniformly lost,
His face had settled down into a sort of frozen vacant gaze,
Which couldn’t move.

All he had to offer solace was a fact he had recorded in a journal
(Before his ink had frozen, early on)
Where he observed
"That the couple in the ice, in this,
The central room, are near the surface, and they seem
Indifferent to their final resting place. Perhaps a touch downcast,
But nothing shows. In their final moments, they were passive."

And underneath, another line

"Their fingers do not touch."

Perhaps he found the thing he wanted there.
He did not know. He had forgotten what it was
That had lead him on this quest,
And so, tired, he set himself down to rest one final time,
And there I met him, and we spoke a little,
And soon I'll find a more permanent space for him,
And make him part of all the rest, and he shall figure
In this other, frozen place.















Having last line difficulties, in truth.

The Clouds Roll In from the North

Leaden sky,
The colour of my distant cousin, the Halloween ghost
Who is shaped like a grave marker.
In Highgate I linger underground for a while,
With my childhood,
And my dead limbs.

Here is a brother - he
Was buried with all his words.
His final act of theft was to extort literary history
To the tune of one exhumation,
But he was caught out by the policemen of indifference,
And here he rots, with all his florid stanzas.
Now, all here is all he’s been.

Hello!

I thought maybe I'd get a blog?

And then I'll be able to show people some of the writing and music and things that I've been doing without recourse to the horrible facebook machine, which I have been a-using for this purpose. And I will be able to put all my eggs in the one basket, which will be nice. I think that particular figure of speech stopped working at around the same time that people actually put eggs in baskets. I suppose the risk is that if you put all your eggs in one basket, you might drop the basket and break all your eggs? Or lose the basket or something. However, I am fairly confident that there is no way of dropping the internet or breaking it, so that is OK. The risk abounds of dropping or breaking the little box in the kitchen that the internet comes out of, but I am reliably informed that this is not actually where the internet itself is, which puts my mind immensely at ease. That said, however, it would be delightful irony if I somehow did break the entire internet. Here's hoping!

Essay now, will post some kind of writing soon. x