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?