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?