Formation of a Shared Mask

opening para of a new short story:

. . . after three weeks of sex and intimacy in that hotel room, the same hotel room; after all that burgeoning recognition . . . of tongues playing on skin or otherwise debating the rights and wrongs of their illicit union, of lips caressing body parts and forging sub-atomic bonds, the couple parted company leaving just their amputated mouths on a westbound District and Circle Line train . . . two quivering relics of what had occurred between them . . . These orifices . . . without their respective owners to animate them securely, squirmed and twitched in semi-articulate paroxysms and appeared to the dumbfounded passengers in the carriage to be suggesting that they were in constant agony, that this sudden imposed muteness was the most difficult of sounds to cope with . . . That their fortunes had so recently changed was of course unknown to the passengers; the mouths, once replete of purpose and driven by lust’s animation, now appeared idiotic. Consequently, the passengers could only suppose some frightening existential malaise was bearing fruit there on the coarse, patterned seats; that these gruesome ‘things’ encapsulated a deep, primal and, for the better part of any average life, hidden fear . . . so absurd, so horrifying . . . that there might come a day when each and every one of them would go unheard. The question went round as to whether they should pull the alarm cord and inform the driver of this disturbing imposition to their day or simply ignore it, after all what concern was it of theirs? And surely any assistance that might have been available was too little too late, these ‘things’ were far from being saved . . . So the train howled on through the tunnels, shaking the occupants irredeemably . . .
. . . and the mouths searched deep within themselves for some way to emulate their respective hosts, to draw on the sensual memory of what had transpired between their possessors, but to no avail . . . and they began to quake with grief; the shunt of skin against skin, the sweet awareness of life, the flume of sex - all were gone; how they had been empowered, rich, charmed . . .

sketch - the day of missing people

the Ops Manager was a susprisingly nervous individual for one so physically imposing (over 6 feet tall) - possibly a couple of years younger than me, though with a look in his eyes that suggests he might be spiritually older - very distracted, permanently looking over his shoulder as if something is about to happen that he has to be aware of or that someone is about to give him bad news -

he told me, in no uncertain terms, that the pay would not be good -

it wasn't - it was laughable; truly - so I declined the job

Christ, I'm hungry again. I've imposed a food regime as of today, cutting down my intake by about a quarter, hoping that I'll save on spending whilst I'm out of work and just writing - we'll see -

drank coffee far too late again whilst writing up first draft of short story 'Seven By Five' - couldn't sleep, couldn't relax, so talked to B & A in the kitchen for hours mostly about knife attacks, my getting beaten up in Brixton five years ago, music festivals, and the quality of Madonna's (!!) music nowadays (we all agreed it was crap) -

when I go back upstairs there are three missed calls on my mobile

brand new days (daze)

descending the curved (shell-like) stairs on rickety breath, hungover, a thick & sticky one in the frontal lobe, & into the kitchen with it's late-night midnight-feasting detritus still on the table -so: a baking tray (did we go to that much effort?) littered with greasy crumbs; an open pink leather handbag with secrets in its shadows; an empty glass tumbler (reminiscent of the isle of Oban); chairs askew like some isoceles dance; & plates stacked in the basin waiting for the effort to cleanse them and repair this day - & all thankfully overshadowed by the sweet, citrus smell of freshly cut grass, chlorophyll enriched & sharp as a blade itself (if it can be said that a smell can be blade-like, which in my condition is the way it seems) - the sheer bliss of it goes hand-in-hand, a compatriot, to this wicked day ahead, glorifying the morning & the passions of the night before: the heady tumults & open endings, the neon adulterations - and other details too: the curvilinear separations of an old book spine on a bedside table; the jive of a geeky actor in an elastic body covertly attempting to keep his partner in check (a partner who, it seems to me, is forever attempting to sidle away) . . .

alone in the wilderness

Weight ball in chest – and then vivid (so viv) daydream of a tome (black and white cover, thick type, the smell of electric must) full of Kerouacian words all jittery skitter writing and wonder, inspiring another journey – there on the seafront watching the gulls hover in the gale whilst the brown North Sea churns and foams at the foot of the wall, their legs dangling whilst they try to gain a hold on the wind and move forward but not able to beat the power heading them off, amazing – the dead remain baffled by the day – some New Yoik punkette on the threshold of my imagination stands up in the rain and exclaims (circa 1976): ‘I’m so tired ya know of everyone tryin’ to define punk rock/new wave, I mean, gimme a break here,’ (this she’s telling to her friend the singer Charlie Ember here on these shores, not Manhattan, despite it all) – there was full moon over my birthplace (apparently two full moons in one month) and I was swept up into nostalgia for a time I can’t even remember, a time of myth effectively, related apocrypha and what I recalled was the pounding, thrumming noise of the earth, that’s what I heard out there in the garden for days in the sun resting in my pram/cot with the bees stinging my fingertips -

word junkie dialogue

Nowadays it’s true I can only sleep when I have a book in my hand – What’s that? – Yeah! Honestly. With my fingertips touching the open page where the book rests on my sheet-wrapped body, almost as if I was reading Braille – That must be an odd sight - I suppose. It’s as if some part of the book still transfers itself beyond the act of reading, you know; hypnotising me in the moments before unconsciousness – I can’t say it’s something I’d particularly like, I mean I’d never be able to fall asleep like that - All the characters become accessible to me in one go and even though I know inevitably I am going to dream and would have, of course, without the book, there’s still the warm pleasure of escaping through the actual fibres of it, it’s substance there matters, like it is grounding something and yet at the same time offering me the chance to leap – To leap? – Yes! I know this sounds crazy but things don’t fall apart then; there is form, imagery, access into the world of the book through my half-awake/asleep mind, my imagination goes further, it actually adds to the fiction, playing out new plots, following avenues that never existed until then, all so brightly coloured and rotating on a kind of . . . carousel of words - And what happens when you don’t have a book to hand? – Oh that’s hell. I can’t sleep. Simple as that. Find myself opening and closing the curtains, looking out into the garden, which at night is odd you know because there’s like this orange band of light across the grass and I don’t know where it comes from – An orange light? – Yeah. Well, anyway, I can’t sleep without a book – You tried drinking? – Yes – And? – Nothing. Just makes me feel angry, stifled – Anger is energy – So they say. No, I need the constant of a book, you know, the stream – What happens when you meet someone, I mean when you’re not alone in bed? Do you get all ‘Scheherazade’ on them? – Yes! I read to them – You read to them? – Yeah – Before, after, or during? – Not during, come on, how could you read to someone during – Well, you can do it when you’re sleeping – No, not when I’m sleeping. That’s what I’m saying: I can’t sleep unless I’m actually physically touching a book – So there you go. What do you say after then, post-coitally? Can I imagine the scenario: Wow, that was great, the earth moved, now do you mind if I just put War & Peace between us, I have to touch it? – I’ve never read War & Peace – That’s not my point. It’s just odd behaviour – I suppose it is a problem - You know you should be careful, books are thieves of time, they are procrastination for eggheads – Well I think people are dismissive of themselves when they don’t want to read – Maybe, but there’s reading and there’s reading. In your case it’s obviously an addiction – But how can you know yourself, how can you take yourself seriously in the world, if you don’t read? Uh? – Perhaps that’s so. Your priorities are all out of balance. You need words to guide you all the time, other people's words – You think? – I don’t think, I know – Maybe you’re right - You know you could advertise yourself as The Library Lover, kisses and words given for free – (thinks) That’s not so bad. I mean, I quite like it – Christ, next thing you know you’ll be claiming you’re a goddamn poet!! – Mmm? – Listen, I want to help you, really I do. I knew a guy once, travelled everywhere on buses, I don’t mean just locally, I mean huge day long, week long, journeys on National Express, Magic Bus, Greyhounds, depending on where he was or what his destination was. He was like you – How so? – Well all he would do was read on the journey; I mean that I can understand, after all what else are you going to do? But sometimes he’d only travel so he could read, see? He liked to do one specific thing each time: at the end of the journey he would always leave the book on the bus, whether he’d finished it or not (though usually he had). He’d slip it into one of those elasticised pockets in the back of the seat in front of him. You see he’d fallen in love with the notion that he was leaving a trail of novels across the country; he believed there was the potential for some kind of literary synchronicity, a meeting of minds; that the next person in that seat would pick up the book, read it, fall in its thrall and pass it on; that Fate had somehow offered them this book and it was semi-magical that it was there at all. His theory, his ultimate hope was that, eventually, if these people after him kept leaving the books too, he’d catch up with one and all the subterfuge and gain and cowardice and joy, all the human experience of the ensuing readers, would be in that one tome, that it would have become, somehow, a new book, an archaeological or sociological object, beyond a book even, the most alive, the most living book in the world – Yes. Yes. Yes. I see – You want to know what happens to him? – What? – He dies of a broken heart. This anticipatory vacuum he had in him that he wanted to fill remained empty. He died chasing a dream – Quixotic? – If you must. Sad thing is one book did make its way right the way round the world and back to him – Which one? – Doesn’t matter. The point I’m making is that it wasn’t enough for him; his quest had grown into a spectre within and eventually it was beyond repair. Now a book like that might be your cure, don’t you think? – Do you think? – I don’t know. It’s just a suggestion that’s all - Do you have it? – It so happens I do – Oh, boy! I’d love to read it. Can I read it? – Well, you can have it for sure, but you can’t actually read it – Why not? – Because, somehow, perhaps through sheer use, so many hands on it, moving across it, so many fingertips or bookmarks, whatever, the words have virtually disappeared, utterly worn away – Then, what use is it to me? – Think of it as a clean, empty Pandora’s box; a fresh start, a step that’s all – To what? – I don’t know, just tell it to be your cure and maybe it will become so, fill it with your words and then sleep but promise me one thing – What? – You have to promise, then you can have it – Okay, I promise – Never put it between you and your lover – Sure. I promise that – Here you go then – Wow, it’s so light, I though it’d be really heavy – No – Where you off to? – Oh, don’t mind me; I’ve got a bus to catch . . .

Tramping

Strikes me that America has lost its love of the tramp (I mean as icon, emblem, symbol even of its own roving/pioneering psyche) – which I think means it is learning to hate itself. I was looking today at an image of Buster Keaton (one that’s in the iconography slideshow to the right), at the state of his worn shoes, all the miles and miles of uncharted territory encountered within them, flickering b/w dust and creases that are historical and sublime; then of Chaplin’s clown tramp, again striking out into the unknown. But, really I’m thinking of Kerouac, the patriot/priest, and I’m wondering why America chose the path of backlash against these questers. When did it begin? See I don’t think America was once as prejudiced against the nomad as Europe was/is - how could it have been, its modern foundation was born by nomads – so there must have been some turning point. Was it the ‘60s counter-culture; was that period the catalyst for the distancing of what lay at heart of the American soul? Man, look at those shoes – look at the cracked leather, the noisy substance of making passage therein. Or was it boredom? Or actually the discovery that there was nothing but continual movement at the heart of an American consciousness and that realisation scared the poor little white man who had to earn a living, made him run to the governing hill and say enough is enough, we want to expand elsewhere, we’ve seen everything there is to see here, we got to carry on beyond our shores, keep going til we’ve eaten half the world and slapped it bang in between two burger buns and poured the ketchup (blood red of course) onto the meat that’s sandwiched between? But, I mean look at the sadness in Keaton’s eyes, hey? Or the rotten liver of poor Jackie boy as he lay floundering at the bad end of his roving adventures? What does that say? . . .

Orford, After - a prose poem

1
Our father - six foot something – moved in a slow river stride that day, cut off his fingers like seeds & sowed them in autumn heavy silt - he never noticed Charon waiting in the dunes squat-arsed & chimney throated, belching. In spring we pale forms of future Saxon boys n’ girls ripened, Papa held each dormant face & kissed mud between our lips to give us our first sounds, that tidal itch in the throat; & so, job done, succumbing to salt erosion, the bite of the wind, Daddy snapped like a twig upon the sand; & Charon came down, his boots clacking in the mud. We waited while the minnivers & gulls along the shore grew alert to his great passing & cried out over the sea.

2
A mother – not ours – came close with spade & scraping tools, foraging in the cradle area. She ignored us sleeping children of the yellow silt & recovered Dada’s remains in the grey. She knew his face, bent to, & chuckled; funny that she recalled him well having never met him, but his smell & this time together aroused her love.

And what did she do for love? Turned him inside out with a blade as long as her arm, guts free & muscles slapping the kaolin; that blue tongue, his original fertilising organ, she sliced & prepared for us with onions in the embers of his pyre where his dull petulance spat the fat of him out into the shallows & upon the dunes, where it hardened to smelly puce & gulls had their feast of it & pepper grew from its core & we got sick from the stench but enthused all the same realising that was the way to learn more. Our instar bodies gorged with sentences.

Mother walked to the tidemark, leaving hollow steps in the mud, the note of canaries on the wind in her wake. Beyond her tired eyes the Sea closed in. The rich sounds of a port funnelled through the night screen. When she slept she asked questions which she bequeathed us, our juvenilia, things which preoccupy still, some philosophers' misteriosa. Then she became an early skiff, her deck sound, strong; she held kelp between her fingers & carried a sense of the divine along the coast; her ears flapping in a magnetic surge, the point of man's arrival. The blue haze over the water she gave form & solidity, garnishing her tiller with what it became: ocean lapis, icy baubles for marketeers.

3
Now scuppers live close by, they'll be surprised when we awake tomorrow, running blind along the spit, sand flying & tables turned in panic; they'll make their way toward the burial ground, this Saxon swipe, & bloody days will come, vengeance mown with swords or baton rounds & those who are more fortunate will prey on the eventuality of our words, making them their own. Invaders come to name names in woods, along the beach front & crest, treating us as runts to be disowned & drowned, forgetting this was our birth right too: the estuaries ours, mercurial maps of heart & tongue, the cornerstones of history, entry, defence; where the flight paths of the Skua & the shaven-headed warriors converge; our past is direct, combustible, & as sweet as the rock which rots teeth, sours your stomach with tartrazine. Our hospitable, fortunate lagoon, our family, our umbrella, our metaphysical water & our real, our policy of safety in troubled times - where will it go?

4
We are given mercury as fresh aid to our reasonable quest, our exile, to be walked on & littered with our grey dreaming west. The flux of travel toward invisible parenthood no map could give us recourse or parallel journey’s good; no compass the respite of sure direction; too tough, more so then in January's bitter slough we move to Orford; that creature of shale falsehood with pioneers in dust naming horror vehicles their brood, relics of forward-backward motion equally tired, tried sequences of reparation & failed trust, repeating actions that had no meaning, blistered skins falling here to the sound of incoming sin.

And ready items came as no reward - a ketch in shadow, a cutter called Ganymede, bitter cargo in the prow to the Zeider Zee & the Channel Run far; inarticulate references - a ‘Hallelujah’ to end without effort - cold fate in cold wartime & the abrupt cessation of comfort on the shoreline.

5
So mercury coats layers of the smooth coast, marred only by demon breakers & their kiss at sea, pale flesh mocking modality on a tossing plate - which perhaps we might call the anchor of prophecy.

We had brief shore leave before this century began: black-cat euphoria unburdened in alleyways, falling out of open portholes like a leaden madrigal, background noise to squelching mouths in taverns, the vicious quartet of nomads on the jetty, blind setters of the task, able-bodied radar suckers bringing sex & lawless hooves to temptations' angry path. We would survive them, but only just. They asked for bribes, a ready assortment, but they did not realise the deal: a year & a day before chambers flood, kisses eased from dying lips, high tides to carry the horses over apocalypse. When Saturn mounts a fiery birth, combats earth in bitter rhymes as roses might spread in falling through nonplussed gravity. The burning tiger & the unwieldy scribe aboard a chariot. The Jesus metaphor begging to be allowed on board to stow away, to run with us & hide forever. The exodus hunting for parenthood, the restless urge constant, an orbit driven, upending all security, the sweet skulls exposed, the river curving hard against the current & the ship born to rocks & we are not forgiven, for even orphans must sometimes pay their dues.

Orford Ness & Suffolk elsewhere - 2006-08

Johnny - spectre

He’s always been there (at the crossroads?) since the birth of rock ‘n’ roll – the figurehead of leather-jacketed daring, wide-eyed, wandering, a warrior – he was born & christened (sired by Chuck Berry) ‘Johnny B Goode’ in 1958 & he was a child prodigy, a musical genie, born with a guitar in his hand & a dream of fame & capable of an immediate sexual power (remarkable in such a day without medical advance). He was then imitated & stolen by others; some would never let him go, they brought him back even after many had thought him dead, his body jack-knifed across decades, & would not let him rest. ‘Johnny Remember Me’ they sang as if he could reply. But he turned up in a basement ‘mixing up the medicine’; he’d dropped out, become the psychedelic demon-king, the archetype & alchemist of a new generation hidden away below ground. Within a few years he was shown a mirror, his former self retreating in glories of feedback, howling in the (agent) orange dawn as his original song was dismembered & pieced back together by new spirits of rock ‘n’ roll, whose horizons now reached the moon & beyond – ‘Johnny B Goode’ was alive & well & kicking (out the jams) with Jimi Hendrix as his sparring partner, & they boxed & fought & blooded his memory with good howling until once more Johnny had to sleep - & he slept a panicked slumber, something was not right, deep down he could feel it: he was being forgotten, his part would never rise again – until, in New York, a waif woman with a street-punk hairdo & direct communication with her pantheon began to draw him back up, her necromancer’s risky business spread like graffiti on the oily walls of Max’s Kansas City & CBGB and she began to chant his name regular like, anywhere & everywhere, & she made him dance like he had never danced before - the Twist, the Watusi – over & over until he lay there joyfully bleeding on the ground, his head & heart pumping the blood of rock ‘n’ roll’s history & he knew his legacy was ensured & so he could retreat happily, defined as he had hoped at his birth, his name flashed in neon greens & blues on the arcade - & he lay himself down & expected to be left alone then to communicate with the other archetypes, in the sump where they go, where they congeal & mix & boil at the base of human consciousness, partying, frolicking through sun-drenched fields of Elysium no doubt – but not Johnny, he could never have that luxury, people needed him too much, they craved the illicit, the daring far more than he had ever realised & he would be hauled back on some lonely avenue, where a loner/hoper in gold lame pants is whittling away at an arrangement, words & themes criss-crossing on the page before him (or her), trying to resurrect the source, the human form of it.

charnel house days (a free roaming meditation of medieval ghosts)

black wind in the hollows & we three are fumbling, laden but without substance; fandangos & brine for air; wretched carnal creatures dividing lust & passing through these nocturnal avenues, simpering pimp corners – our homesteads now; we rise at the foot of night and retreat on the edge of dawn & between our feet stamp/beat/cajole a rhythm for the insane, corrupting, insouciant, taking hold of the nubile (male, female, other) & run them to earth like sweating horses, corrupted skin bleeding white foam & other muscle agonies/ecstasies until released & we’ll watch them baulk for more, the rev & pump of their flesh engines, wild banners skit & flap, leaping players, card sharps there in the latent blue shade where the whispers of deathly mediocrity have dispersed, the fruitful summoned down, the tiny ivory angels coming to roost, singing in their throats, battering their wings on the doors of the houses of administration willing downfall; & on our way the smell of bodies rising from the grass blades, the tree creepers etching pretty patterns, scars of exposed sap & in there too the seeping red miasma of human blood, scorched, delineated by ages and history’s chanting, subtle vowels, the arc of a new language in the gullet straining to leap, to gather pace & value & form; we three listen like mutes, we snuck up in motley; then in the last hour are laughing, coarse, extreme; we linger at the edges no more, come down among them kissing shoulders & rallying the deviants, making merry with gods & goddesses, the rolling, writhing irony of belief laid waste, shoved into itself & replayed for the next generation; the dawn strikes the bell, the clanging gorge of metal turns the ribald asunder, the charnel house opening its mouth & spewing out ancestors for one last view, one last breath of air, green, gaseous air passing into dead lungs & escaping, hissing, from the rotten forms until they are banged up once more, returned to their depth, hidden in stone & we three, watching the shades of the living retreat, hurrying like ants, back to their homes before the day can strike them are turning once again to the place from which we came . . .

Forest Moves

A long time ago – 808’s were still a novelty; there were police squads roving the land, looking for trouble post-Beanfield, banging on the big bass riot-shield – I was coming of age, out of the teen swill and I was bargaining with the new angel/devil mix of speed and LSD – ten or twelve of us (including: Poet Mark, Angela, Stu, Smiley Tim, Turningworm Jayne, ‘Em’ Emma, Sir Clifford Rees, my brother and some others besides) piled into the back of Angela’s red van and Smiley Tim’s swag wagon, wheels clunking on over-weighted axles – shucks – the wily stars of spring just blooming of an evening and riding the tinted windows with us; left on a kind of magical mystery tour (Stu whistling Krautrock riffs as he dowsed his first tab with Ribena) returning to yesterday – we kicked off heading north from Hertfordshire via Royston, catching up with the Roman road somewhere around St. Neots maybe, until we wound up truly lost in Thetford Forest without any idea how we got there or how to get out - following dark tracks into the woodland, at the end of which we’d reach sinister wire grilles with giant red words ‘MOD Property Keep Out’ spread there like we’d stepped into another land, some South American banana republic or something under the thumb of a strict n’ sinister military junta (well actually we were! Only we didn’t need to go to Nicaragua for e.g.) – Angela started to cry, exasperated (she was coming up) and all she wanted was to get into the open with the Roe deer we’d seen ambling and scatter as we drove through their significant hideaways, eyes shining twilit. Eventually we found a glade, god knows how, but there was a streak of light and the smell of warm earth there and enough room to park the vehicles and build a fire and tell stories and wag and dance – Tim piped up the swag wagon’s speakers and laid us all out with some chiming and we strayed into the shadows or broke the night with wild reflections of the fire on our faces whenever we stood close to it – and stray creatures watched from just beyond our claimed territory, I could hear them breathing and their hearts pumped into mine (but that might just have been the drugs) – and Jayne held my hand and we discovered the fallen bole of a tree and used it to drum along to Tim’s swaggering beats and the wood seemed to breath out with us and throw back that hollow noise, right up to the first swatches of dawn through it’s canopy, whereupon we all crashed out round the fire under sleeping bags and polythene coverings; Poet Mark set us all up for snoozing with his tales of love, his paeans to Orwell and the meaning of self-will and the new scriptures of modern bohemia (he was good that way) and then it was my turn and all I could do was sound idiotically profound and so we all laughed until we dozed and the warmth of the day began to search through the coolness of the tree cover. The first dog-walkers started to arrive frowning at this bunch of chilled fools before them, this refugee camp for the intoxicated. Some tutted and claimed us as disgusting, others were bemused and amused and waved and whispered to each other because this was the like of which they hadn’t seen – eventually I strode off alone, trying to find where all these domestics were coming from and discovered we were camped not far from the edge of a kind of park with what looked like a stately home at the far end and that, this being the middle of the week, people were out walking their pets before they headed off to work or mooched back for housekeeping – it was odd (joyfully) to turn back and see that camp of good-lookers and musical urchins nestled into the boles of trees, the leaf matter for pillows and the soft bloom of some ambient track spilling out and grinning good morning and to turn around again and see suburbia holding its hand up and waving and wondering why it hadn’t quite ever been as halcyon as what it had just witnessed. And last night I found myself driving once again through the Forest for the first time since then - all those faces came back to me, those memories and I began to perceive that my life was pretty rich despite the hounding money chasers and the municipal Greys and the calls from credit card dealers and and and . . . now I'm there with newer friends, newer fools, older, maybe wiser, but who can tell??

goodbye cat

The powers of personality are not the exclusive right of us humans wandering and wondering – they’re evident elsewhere – I’m thinking of dear little Holden who passed away today – he was unique; he held his own. Large fluffball, with a purr like a Sopwith Camel and soft, wild pantaloons hugging his thighs – a beautiful voluptuary, in the end ripped apart by disease that was not fair and gave him no way out –

Whilst here, the female mallard escorted her ten chicks all the way along the main road, under the factory gates, along the drive therein, clucking and watching all the way whilst her little fella’s legs ran nine-to-the-dozen to keep up, their little chirrups of awe emanating all the way, until she got them to the down-river pond at the bottom of the brewery complex and they sidled off together into the long grass, hidden and no doubt happier. . .

suicide line

Every life is a tragedy waiting to happen, in the end ‘tis only luck and grit that sees us through; a small dose of the right stuff is enough to change the course of a dream to a reality (even tiny) and then what? The sun may blaze and kiss the necks of lovers, may shine on history and let us know how lucky we are to be where we are but that does not mean it’s the same for everyone. Some awkward moment can be enough to throw a person down, then where are you? I’m scrabbling for words here, trying to ascertain the fine line between hope and despair, the electric charge that causes someone to throw themselves in front of a train in the full knowledge of what will happen, willing it so, surrounded by natural beauty, the delicate calls of birds at their heels, the shy temptation of Roe deer etc etc. How could they determine to miss that? That is their extreme, pulling at them, making them know their insides better than any other stimulus. I’ve been there, but I‘ve never been that close. I know the awkward anxiety, the waves of unfathomable despair, the daily shock of it and the hold that it can manifest, tight, leather-like grip, but I always found a way out. I was fortunate. Here, in this corner of Britain, on the line between Suffolk and London they choose to do it on a regular basis. Why? And who are they that would sacrifice life; these sorrowful souls desperate for release? Are they young tragedians lost in some final ACT of teen misunderstanding; lost in some emotive puzzle that they believe cannot be answered? Or are they gone beyond life’s youthful hope and found only repetition and turmoil, too many subjects left to balance?

Who has any right to judge? In their seeming cowardice they take a brave and humane decision to stop their pain, as any animal would. The tragedy lies in the loss of hope and in the means of their departure, the foisting of its appearance on others, innocents on a carriage and a driver who is not expecting anything other than signal failure to be a cause for concern on a Sunday afternoon. That it is so public makes the tragedy the concern of everyone, because it is also in some way an exhibition, a final cry for proof of existence.

Kestrels hover and the land twitches, and spring revels in itself.

I once had a girl or should I say . . . ?

We no longer (as Santideva states in The Bodhicaryavatara) ‘perfume’ our minds, they are not given that tiny grace or gift. Nor do we allow the perfume to be imperfect, it is the hope of perfection (unattainable) that has the ability to destroy us, and we are frenetic in our attempts to keep things perfect. Cannot be. One carries one’s karma each day (it cannot leave) and the karma can be changed by so many things but too many things are dependent on something or someone else and therein lie the routes to agony and despair. I am not one to judge. I can only receive the sadness at the extent to which someone had to go to relieve their agony. But I have to wonder and concern myself with the repetition of the act in one location; what is the fuel (to use a topical metaphor) for this suicide engine?

eyes widening lotus

The moment I picked up a copy of The Bodhicaryavatara things began to change, a quickening in my guts, around my heart, some recognition of past desires and questions, a fruition maybe now coming full circle – as I walked with the book under my arm I noticed I had already slowed down, my pace, my steps, had to turn the iPod off and listen outside myself, remain in the present, in light; I was then aware of the buds on the trees, burgeoning, sap-filled, sticky and sweet, some perfection of form in the abbey grounds – a lotus unfolding? – In the words of only the first few scriptures I recognized synchronicities, references to the sacred threes that an author pays homage to at the beginning any work – Death past then in the form of a cortege, beneath the wetted oak trees and the tumult of their shedding water, the clear drops falling at the roadside, onto the leaf matter, making sound, applauding the passing corpse . . .

I vow to meditate on at least one verse a day.

Mystery Lane

S’a strange thing to be walkin’ east-west through this town and to know that there is a lane, a cut, part of the medieval grid that can get you shortcutwise into town BUT when you return i.e. west-east, the lane has gone, disappeared, not to be found despite lengthy meanderings up and down the locale. Yep, jus’ gawn. Medieval alchemy and divination at work? Some wrinkled furrow-brow sitting in his garret with the stench of quicksilver ‘n’ lead pouring forth in the lee of the Norman gate, putting a curse on some enemy and ne’er getting it off again so we still tumble down the confusion centuries later? I think so. Yes. So Whiting Street and Bridewell lane be accursed! Sheesh. Disorientation, enthralling disorientation like Alice, up and down we go without any real chance of deciding for ourselves . . . who shall we be following, sirrah?

The party howlers arrive and disgorge their fat love in the living room, urinating epithets of mutual appreciation and pseudo-celebrity love-in-ness. Fantasy island in the Suffolk hollows . . .

And bleary eyed ne’er do wells linger in the doorway eager to fry the fat and taste it too. Shittin’ a brick for jesus replacements and other class A’s. S’all in there for a few hours. While the older man upstairs, his lingering scribe ancestry depleted for an evening, sleeps fitfully, disturbed by their reverie and calls out (unheard) for the world to shut its mouth til morning and leave him in peace approximately. Oh aye! How they move these magi. Wandering and arched down Sparhawk Lane or lost in the Kevelaer shadows, with the brook idling in their ears and the sweet marjoram stuffed in gills and nostrils.

e$den – the fold (no misprint)

Arguably the day should have begun like any other except this one never did and never will – atmospherics hemmed us in, insolent rain and low slung mist like a poison gas cloud, eradicating all matter beyond a couple hundred yards (petro-dollar cloud?); we become prisoners, artificial for hours, on the brink of knowing but learning nothing of ourselves except paranoia and doubling, the consequences of that (sheepish dreams, bounding nightmares, Gothic masterpieces played out on the inner screen); lazy hours pass as the world attempts to clarify itself, coughing and spluttering back into existence, stepping out – the smells of roasting and frying wafting along the street, the old dear next door attempting bizarrely to clamber over the wall at the foot of the garden, her wild hair soon bedraggled by the damp, matting on her shoulders and against her cheeks; scratching beneath the surface, she becomes simply another fruitcake on the watch, another howler for the charnel house poor love – all matters are delinquent today as far as I’m concerned –

A message in a bottle is found by two young(ish) men whilst walking along a beach (Hebridean?) - there is a pencilled sketch of the ichthys (Christian fish symbol) and the handwritten words: keep pure thy heart among the mortals - at the bottom of the page the name LAURA is scrawled in quick, flighty capitals – attached to the whole by a paper clip is a photograph of a woman (maybe twenty-one or two), long auburn hair and red lips, standing at an old-style box microphone evidently in the midst of a song, her eyes turned dolefully toward the camera, blue half-light across her face from a spot maybe – both hands touch the microphone, one grips just below the head and the other deftly touches with fingertips the stand itself, it’s a classic pose caught somewhere between 1940 and now, who knows? Who is she, beyond the evidence that she is the aforementioned Laura? That’s what they’ll aim to find out I’m sure, these two logger boys. Or at least one of them will. He’ll become obsessed with discovering her identity and why it is she’s sent the message out across the ocean. Whilst the other will think of his friend as just a crazy –

This is a story rattling round my head . . .

Malister

Teenage mums laid in the glory of god under queen bitches and snitches with bedraggled eyes and upended nerve endings in the sugary cloud of the Brit Sugar factory; twenty four hour puppets on call with halitosis and cheap suits, all walking toward Bedlam for a pint whilst still blindly surfing the internet internally, playing it out, milking it for all it might mean –

Bury St Edmund’s

The division of Spring

She (Ruth) wheels a tiny
Pushchair down Kevelaer Lane
She is forty 'n' fat, clothes ne'er
Washed & in the pram
A yellow teddy bear & raggish
doll-cum-puppet
Are her children
The children Ruth ne'er
Had; its in her cataract teardrops

In pilot shades Arty
(Ruth's one-time one and only)
swills Bacardi neat
from the quart
chased by a measure of Coke -
mixing them both en gob -
Street mouthwash at the bus stop

Burt St Edmunds is built on/protected by/enshrouded in the medieval - vague shades thru a late blizzard I catch & I return to where I began - the lilt & tilt of the world - followed by the brightest sunshine & looming hulks of ancient ruins topped with singular crows & adamantine cuts of sidereal light - yews creak - lovers are abandoned for shelter:

"Our walks were like marker posts; I alwaYs (the 'Y' sounded bigger than the rest to my ear)returned with clarity, reinvigorated than before we embarked
And then there was the unquantifiable pleasure of passing on information & learning
Seeing things afresh & through your eyes & things that I would not notice too
Timeless forays into unknown places."

Last views of city post hailstorm/thunderstorm whilst outside the bingo hall & opposite Zorkot barbers the Good Friday wrecks are hawking & sobbing, their alcohol intake pushing the limits . .

the division of feelings

He worked around cooking fat; his clothes stank of it, when he opened his mouth to speak (on the 68 bus for instance) his breath reeked of it for it clung to his teeth and tongue: a forever film - viscous and emblematic of his lowly status.
He had never had a lover that he had not paid for & even then it could be difficult finding one that would repeat an arrangement. He was not aware of the reason (as with any olfactory stimuli he had grown accustomed to the smell, unaware of it's caustic behaviour on others) and the girls, well they just didn't want to get close.

She sat on the steps of St. Mary's church in Borough, in a short dress (despite the cold) & sneakers. She smoothed out a newspaper with the palm of her hand over and over (a hundred sweeps of her hand, maybe more) until it was crease free, perfectly pressed. Then she looked round & got up. She didn't read it. Why?

There was something in the air.

Oblique Strategies website today says:
Display your talent

Sunday a.m. rest of the world still waking; Crown Point in throes of litter and glitter i.e. the morning meets the night before (casualties and such). The woman who runs the launderette is still celebrating Burnley's win over Chelsea and getting teary nostalgia trips for her childhood in Sutton when she would watch the local team playing from her bedrooom window, a steaming cup of Lemsip on the sill - in those days she did not want to become a launderette maid, spending her time completing service washes and reclining on aching insteps, charged with Nescafe, but then she fell pregnant and that was it, life had been consigned - for a while all was ripeness and glow (but then maybe that's the way of it) and she retreats into those memories with more frequency now she's looking at the looming edge of Fifty -

out in the street, picking up my feet over lumps of sticky mud dispersed from god only knows where (cats, dogs, frogs fall from space - so why not hunks o' mud?) I am gripped in the hand by an overly friendly, crusty-skinned black guy who is beaming whilst he downs a can of cheap strong cider - he's not wasted (not yet) - and shakes it like I'm his long lost brother. Looks me straight in the eye and fixes the gaze there for the extent of the conversation:

'Margaret Thatcher is still alive,' he says without giving away how he feels about this. The ex-premier had been released from hospital after being taken ill overnight and her prim figure was displayed on many of the front pages of the Sundays.

I nod without speaking - I'm not sure I want to get into a street chat; the hawk in me is flighty after all.

'She's not dead yet,' he carries on, this time shaking his head.

I laugh at the caustic admission, the underlying hope that he is pressing at. Seeking to find in me.

'Not yet.' I give that much. A concession.

He is determined to draw me out - his gaze, almost hypnotic and his affable smile.

'Tell me, come on, wha' do you think of her? You're a serious man, I can tell.'

I tell him. It pours out. Can't help myself:

the rancour
the disappointment
the anger
the sorrow

the feelings of many that recall her premiership - nothing new in this - (lucky ones to have survived, christ knows there were enough casualties)

dark days of battle and confrontation (plural) -

of the dismantling of social cohesion and respect - of the great, plague pall of destruction that is her legacy

This stranger takes my hand once again and at the top of his voice says:

'Man, you must put words down - I bet you do - your voice is strong; you got to be a writer or a crit, eh? C'mon what are you?'

I feel embarrassed and at the same time enthralled by my own words, by the emotional resonance of what I expressed on the hoof

'No. I'm just someone who regrets what she did and what's happened since. The ironing out of political difference and nuance, the aneasthetising of self-expression and radicalism, of protest. These politicians are all the same and it's because of her. She took the strength out of our nation. That's why no-one wants to vote any more.'

'Enoch Powell,' he says then, out of the blue. Leaning toward me as if we have become conspirators and supping from his cider can which was secreted about his person somewhere.

Then he gets to his point, the thing that's been begging at the door of his anger

'And what about the brothers who say there are too many immigrants ruining this country?' He indicates the row of shops nearby. 'I hear them saying these things.'

'Brothers? What brothers?'

'The brothers there . . . who, you know, have these places.'

He's referring to the Asians that run the newsagents and mini-marts.

'I don't have an answer. All I can tell you is this: when I was growing up anyone of any colour was pretty much fighting a common cause: to gain respect and equality within society. It came close at a street level. But, Thatcher did her best to make a mess of that. That's why people are divided now - she made sure we all became afraid of each other. That's what I mean by her destruction of social cohesion. What nobody can understand is that underneath we are all migrants: everyone comes and every goes.'

I'm sure we could have talked for hours, him getting progressively worse for booze - who knows - but my bus arrived and we shook hands and parted company.

I felt proud of something I could not identify. Myself, perhaps.

On the way home I noticed a garden full of statues of the Buddha -

I thought about that

early morning Cheapside, London bread and song, sushi being prepared in a window by four head-down workers in hats and latex gloves, dancing industriously around their preparation table; a city girl already proving on the street outside, her voice abandoned to the corporate money-speak and her shoulders pumped for the fight to come:

Tonight, the task in hand for me is to listen to and not be afraid of the silence, you know how it is . . . ?

Granny says, these modern women they don't know what they want any more

walker

I walk (it's what I do) for the memory of Steve Aston, of childhood walks along Dick Turpin's old hunting highways littered now with leaf matter, railway cuttings and alarmed blackbirds . . . but now I'm a peregrinator in the City, falling in step with a different pace and finding so many questions . . .

blood stains on a pavement in the shape of a palm tree . . .

A mood of timidity and exhaustion here, tangible in the air, giving the end of the week a slight holiday feel at 7.43am, an expectation of free days to come perhaps?

rancour

11/2/08

sat next to some fat, stinking, grouchy nobo-daddy on the X68 southbound, who gazed ahead of himself with eyes open but asleep, like a crocodile's lids hypnotizing the ready dead and guzzling down chain slurps of isotonic sugar drink whilst refusing to look either to his left or right -

tall woman by St Paul's whose botox face was falling apart – she was epitome of the proverbial mutton, though somewhat surprisingly she was stepping out fast paced through the thronging masses on their way to work, yet she must have been at least 110 years old – or maybe the chemical mask misled me?

7/2/08
a ball of nasty barbed pain (heartache) sits in me, right in the guts of me, that I wish I could cough up, expel readily like an owl removes the bones and matted fur of all the prey its eaten in a succinct little pellet of internal refuse, watch it shoot from me and sit there on the pavement so I could laugh at it and dance around it, out of me, gone, eradicated – but, no of course, it's here for the duration – ba boom!

listening to Brian Eno's moonshot music The Ending (Ascent) repeatedly

taking the place of sleep is the cold wide-awake deliriums whereby I listen to the house whilst my body freezes beneath the blankets - i dream fitfully of the wild west and Arthur Conan-Doyle entering thehouse with a bloodhound but not telling me what he's looking for - saying cheerio with a big smile as he walks into the cupboard under the stairs never to be seen again

sit on the edge of the bath like some steaming drunk and pine for the woman i love so far away - some blues - gut wrenching, kicked there by the sweeping suddeness of it - who are we if we don't exist for love?

interestingly Oblique Strategies today suggests:
'Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place'

watching a love affair develop between a monkey and a pig is as wierd as watching a spider crawl across a soap bar

at work i spend time off-loading out-of-date files that can't be kept longer than 7 years in light of Data Protection Act strange to be putting evidence of lives away into plastic bags; watching histories depart ready for the shredder - could almost hear them calling out 'no' echoing all the way donw to the hard bumpat the bottom of the bag

in that dusty backroom I feel like Bukowski's factotum carrying some burden of work and displacement and wonder (I mean a kind of existential wonder- questions and shake-of-the-head realisations) - maybe I'm in my post cage and need to put pictures up to brighten my imagination

Red kites in the sunset

Old ladies gravitate to me - tell me of their widowhood & arthritic shoulders

The bookseller in birmingham provides me with a free magazine & a tempting offer & I accept the free magazine full of reviews of literature & books & I sit reading it & imagining one day i'll create something like that; something that people admire, something filled with beauty

I hit london at rush hour & immediately feel utterly lost in the fight, the haste, - my head aches within minutes - I forgot I was awake at 5am - I long for the solace of the woman I love, the companionship even when she dislikes me is my treasure & my faith; but she is a world away in a place where the hills are painted ladies of grace, patchwork Annies

I watch a woman on the bus drawing in a sketch book; blue & green coloured patterns

Funny then that a drunk old duffer with grey dreads should stumble on the kerb edge and flail forward smacking his lip on the concrete mashed up, & when I offer him a tissue to clean it he starts rail & rant & leaves a glance hanging in the air between us - one more try with the tissue & he shrugs it off & starts to shout at my departing figure shrinking away in the lamplight

first night blues

What animal was that before dawn, wailing beneath my bedroom window, bringing up the sun?

Truth is the carpets are filthy and the more I look the more I realize I don’t think they’ll ever come clean – what’s worse is that the stains are sinister: wine or blood?

The empty rooms haunt me; I feel guilty that no-one occupies them - perhaps I should rotate my sleep arrangements or provide them with avatar occupants?