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. . .