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.