The problem with doing anything, and why we don't.

Two principles, Lambton asserted in his cosmography, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world, sphincter and explosion, magic and dullness, rot and purification, the fermentation is never-ending. He knew enough to invoke Asia and the more common European philosophers, and in this manner drew Penshaw deeper into thrall. The fermentation, he insisted, is the key; it stands in opposition to rebellion. In rebellion we have only death, we burn the land and celebrate the new, untrained and untutored growth that comes out of it. It is a false revolution, every revolution is co-opted by hope. Revolutions have always started in ideas and ended in fanaticisms of hope. Grandfather, Mr. Squashed Fly Biscuit, had docked beneath the burial place of our ancient kings in a river swimming with coal dust, and where had it got him? Hope cannot elide into despair, despite the time it takes. No, sincere hope of a reasonable strength in a stable person of reasonable intellect either bewilders or drives into irrationality. The perpetual cynic will survive the revolutions with an iron steadfastness. And it is difficult to argue with architecture. So I must ask, my reader, that you suspend your hope and allow us to continue in a perfectly practical manner.
Pretty Rosin almost choked on her dry roasted peanuts and laughed beyond all measure, the room brushed the hair out of its eyes and glanced over.
Lambton began to talk of his early life, that is to say, he talked about how he would view the things he was currently doing at the various future points he planned to judge himself from. Twenty one is unimportant. At the age of 24 he would find himself frivolous, and blush at the thought of occasionally affecting a cravat and stippled leather shoes, he expected that he would still smoke rolled-up cigarettes for reasons of poverty, but that occasional mistresses would provide him with exotic brands of filter-less cigarettes from the various European destinations available via budget airlines. At the age of 27 he would be satisfied with himself at 16 (which of course is his age now though of course not then), though the torturous naming-parties and inward-analysis that he instigated were tedious at the time and in retrospect, but the 24 year old would have to go. He disdained both’s attitude to sex, the homosexual phase having been well worked out and now part of the furniture. He must take care of himself and the hepatitis. His limited edition prints had doubled in value over the last six months and one of the mistresses had not only become pregnant and disappeared to Ireland via the Port of Liverpool (specifically for the irony) in order to abort but also given birth and had a child christened Oliver in the anglo-Catholic tradition. At 34 he was feted with a desk at the Guardian, its no longer existing not interrupting the point of this exposition; he type onto a screen one day: Two principles are in perpetual conflict for the possession of my world, me, and my past. At 40 he would be down to a single lung and make a hasty conversion to Anglicanism for the sake of his mother and a hasty conversion to liquorice-root chewing from cigarette smoking for the sake of the lung.
Lambton continued thus throughout the rest of his life, and in different ways he achieved many different things. In all those that mattered, he achieved nothing.

Long Haired Cat

THE CAT WAS sitting on the cold platform licking its long black and white hair. The man sat down on the bench. It was a strange bench designed in a way that things imposed now rarely are; to last the length of the age. It was divided into three wide seats by decorative iron arm rests which were colder than the ground – the black and white long hair cat began its ritual for sitting on his lap. First it travelled in front of him whilst looking into the middle distance, its head raised proud -- he was sitting, as usual, in the middle of the three seats, this was right and proper. After passing in front of him it took great care in jumping onto the seat furthest from where it started. He opened a button on his jacket with great ceremony and the cat stepped into his lap. It extended its claws and mussed and fluffed his shirt where the material rested upon his stomach, preparing. The man widely drew his jacket around the cat gently, and it burrowed its head in under his armpit. The wind blew across his chest and he shivered, the cat’s hair was cold, and under his chilled hands it felt brittle, dry and coarse. The pads of its paws felt like soft blebs of ice and the ground glittered like sandpaper.

He remembered patterns from his childhood, a brown flower-patterned towel, thin rainbow striped wallpaper – remembered the brightness and specialness of individual objects in the accumulated and important poverty of everything else around, like polished stones sitting in dust. The cat made him think of people who throw things away; old things because they are messy; or have a room within which messiness is allowed to take place. These people terrify him – there is something in themselves that asks “W h y do we have t h e s e things?” Now he answers, "we have them because they anchor us to the ground, to places. They mark our territory, they prohibit us from leaving at short notice, they mean that someone cannot easily take our place; they mean that small provocations must be worked through, they are a commitment to specific time and specific space – they are at the very least a promise to return and organise, perhaps."

The man had lived his life carelessly, and was grateful for all the things he had lost. He gave away or missed, he never disposed of. The cat was asleep, but a train was approaching. He shifted his weight with his hips and crossed his legs, the cat stirred. He raised himself in the seat and the cat slid to his knees and stepped onto the ground.

Lemons

I never eat them,
I just skit them across pavements
with the side of my feet.
I've got salt in the crook of my thumb

to lick and twist lips at and spute.
My thumb it has flour paste under the nail
like grout, I pick it out with my teeth
and spute it after the lemons.

On my head
I wear my heart-hat
like any of my other hats,
people are polite, "is that new?"

Themed radio takes too long to search and focus,
my legs begin to ache with flu
and the bed I will crawl to is empty and sour;
I bite the pithed lemon.

Limes

I've been on the other side of nihilism,
Found there was nothing there,
But I was in the middle of the earthquake, sweetie,
When I seen it on the telly;

Open-hearted's really nothing,
No more than asteroids or a sun,
Broken-hearted's really nothing
Outside of the mind;

God could be a Cup a Soup,
Nutritionally they're similar,
My fingers, though they're merely there,
Unzip your jeans quite freely;

I chop my limes up sweetly,
I've got sugar on my blade,
I hack at them in a frenzy
And I may not even eat them.

What isn't happening in here?

"Nothing, I suppose."
"You mean...?"
"Yes."
"You mean...?"
"Yes."
"Do you...?"
"Yes."
"...mean...?"
"Yes."
"...mean...?"
"Everything in its infinite purposelessness."
"Oh."

What is happening out there?

"Everything, I suppose."
"It looks like a child beating its mother."
"That would explain the noise."
"Its really going for it."
"How old is it."
"About this high."
"How old."
"40 months."
"What."
"40 months, about.
"About."
"W h a t."
"Leave that window alone."

No-One's Reborn In The Spring (A Gin Song)

Finding myself without poetry, prose or anything else of worth written in the past several months, I'm drawn back to something I wrote in July, when, to my credit, I knew it; it followed a joyously positive night, and a morning where I tried vainly to hang on to that particular exuberance;

I'm really dead
But my body forgot
And my mind is
Six feet under your boots
And waiting and
Impassive.

(Wishful thinking, cunt)


Yes, so it transpired during my dissociative fantasies, before the grand epiphany, the realisation that I really am connected to this skinny corpse, and I'm no happier about it now, having considered it, than I was back in the old days, however long ago it might have been, the last time I felt connected to my body. I hope it either passes or I find a new body. A new mind would suffice, I suppose.

Please do look out for my sober, or at least non-gin drunk de facto denial of this shite. Truth be told, it was written by the fourteen year old, smooth-skinned, slack-sphinctered boywhore down the street. I really ought to have credited him; fuck it; he's hardly in a position to sue.

JOHN

FROM A CLOSE CORNER of the room comes a fractured coughing "help" of a man sure he is dying or dead. Summoned professionals reassure him, but John is not convinced. John is not alright John is dying or dead and every moment that passes by without him in it is another note going to show that no one notices when he chimes with the day. His world is a chair his dictionary is blank he has "help". John is plied with broccoli even when all he can see is a crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to touch not quite, the wrong sort of diction, when a face is a bowl of fruit rotting, he requires the constant attention of the world but still it does not come; and it is always the wrong hour and the clock is hidden by curtains. She reaches into his mouth with a spoon of broccoli, he grabs her hand; steak paste, tea thickened into frog-spawn; he grabs her hand and stares at her. Nil by mouth, please, nil by mouth. She keeps her eyes on the plate and removes his hand, "help", she puts his hand on the arm-rest, and re-loads the spoon, he strains. The chatter of nurses now still the chatter of nurses and then, sex and behind the pale blue, lace underwear. "Help."

"I was a Communist when I was a kid, I'm not sorry..."

I read the Communist Manifesto when I was ten or eleven, something like that; don't know when exactly, but I was still at little school. I went to some sort of fancy dress extravaganza at that same school dressed as a guerilla, wearing red bandanna, carrying a red flag (home made hammer and sickle), anything else that seemed appropriate, and of course was appropriate. I've slipped in many ways since then, what with my decadence and all, but there's zero doubt about my end of the political spectrum. I don't know to what degree it was the influence of what I read back then and to what degree it's a whole host of other environmental factors (and it's innate for all I know), but I definitely say, GET 'EM YOUNG.

(For the record, if I were to define my current political outlook, I would define it as anarcho-syndicalist, some days plain old anarchist, though, that said, always syndicalist, and frequently sexual. Always humanist.)

Obviously you can step into the same river twice. You appear to be mistaking it for a long thin pond.

The Mirror Scene (Again)

We see Penshaw; making tea in the morning. The house he is in is tidy, it is his mothers house. The tea is in a tea-tin, the milk is in the fridge except at the moment it is on the counter waiting to go in the tea, the boiling water is in the kettle, boiling. He stands still, frozen, reaches into his pocket and watches the screen as it rings a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh time; the back-light pulses slowly, out of time with the ringing, the phone vibrates, out of time with the ringing. He is wearing gingham print pyjamas and a little eye-make-up. He answers the phone;
Where are you?
time
I thought so.
time
Where I left you. Okay.
time
The kettle boiling, he fills a glass with water and walks out of the kitchen and there are acne scars on his shoulders by the way as he goes back to his bedroom where Mira lies on her side with her brow furrowing her eyes closed.
What’s matter?
“I can’t get up?”
There is wine on your lips.
She had arrived drunk in the early morning with the damp light between dawns. There is a deep shadow of purple on the inner of her lips and outlining her teeth, and as they had had messy sleeping drunken sex the night before he had tasted mulled-wine burnt and mashed with mince pies and coal – this morning a staleness had set in and he could smell a ferment, too sweet, sugars turning acid. She doesn’t look well.
“Don’t feel well.”
She sits up and, weakening, falls back onto the bed facing the wall. He places the water on the bed-side table.
“No. Thanks.”
Going to the bathroom he pisses deeply, emptying his bladder and enjoying the stretching feeling as it shrank back; indulging the hot sting that came of being still slightly sensitive from the night before. He looked for where the hole of the urethra tip would be a little engorged and extending pink, notices a red crust on his foreskin.

Demanding Higher

The inside of my new home is coated in rusting you, an old film is an exposé of subterranean baby-boom homosexuality, or are those hair-cuts late forties? What can actually be done about the sheer extent of poverty. “If we can’t get them one way we’ll get them another.”
“Worrying about shooting a black panther" – they’ll forgive you please if you pray, singing up the brown men of your semi-dreams of murder is all for the best if it solves your problems of impotence. Imagine the missus’ cunt is the sphincter made by a thumb and fore-finger around the neck – does it surprise you that you must tired-muscle spasm the rest of them must squeeze into action to squeeze the life out of the cinnamon stinking bastard – why must he be discoloured, the lips and foreskin in ape a dirty shade of whatever the colour you are – simply pretend that you can build them again. Remember when you loved her, when you could make love to her, when the imaginary, larger cocks of your work-mates did not make her glisten with pleasure in your dreams the way you never tried in case you didn’t want to try and because you didn’t want you knew, knew you never would be able to. Do sheep do it that way? Is that the way the farmer presents the ewe to the ram?

The appointed hour arrived on time. It was the only thing that did. At the proper time all the proper and desired actions were not carried out, did not emerge, did not trumpet their way into view – it was to be expected, though the circumstances (narrative) might have suggested the distinct possibility of perfection logic unwaveringly declared this as an impossibility; and therefore was this hour present. Its contents, simplicity itself (a ringing Nokia, was not) this was a distinct disappointment, especially to one who, believing that one must make his own luck, realises that he must not have made it. Failure is a cruel mistress to all, but especially to the cynic who prepares for ever eventuality with rigorous steadfast systematicarity. Still, he had taken a chance, but the tree would not fruit. He would become a fathomologist after all

Goodbye, Bo

This here is a slide show type deal just posted by some cat, the songs being "Who Do You Love" and "I'm Bad", both from '56:



And a fine, sprightly rendition from '72 (in London) of a particular favourite of mine, "Mona":



And for good measure, a damn fine "Bo Diddley" from I not where nor when, but it looks like the '60s, maybe early '70s; the lassie with the legs would seem to signify the former:



Rest In Peace, and Keep on Originatin', sir xx

if only everything was the cinema

Othello at the Buryat-
-Mongolian Театра,
Ulan Ude. Gambo
Tsidenjapov as Othello,
Maria Stepanova as Desdemona.
Nine-
-teen Thirty-Eight.

Txt Msg

MacBetty
tonight?
Shakey's a filthy
wee bastard but
i reckon i can
handle one a year

Poem on the Back of Jack's Face

Give me your lost ones
any day of the week
the ones who look to the sky
but shuffle their feet
Give me your mild, your meek
for they shall inherit
you'll find me among the helpless
and weak

Give me your burned
they've their lessons learned
They've experience in their eyes,
but, alas, no alibis.

London - Verse One

This a poem I might try and write over a few installments, charting my unpleasant stay in London.
This is the first installment, upon which I discover my flat in London is inhabited by individuals of dubious nature and questionable morals, especially regarding dairy produce. It's not very elegant, or beautiful, but it's from the heart damn it.
You can kind of sing this verse to the tune of 'I want a party' from Charlie and The Chocolate factory.


I live in a crack den in Camden,

Those crack fiends stole most of my cheese,

They invited me to their crack party,

A party of cocaine and thieves.

childhood trauma

well I’m onto the almost come off now
missed the pavement
tripped fast high and ceiling shallow off a fourth floor flat
while weeing from the window ledge
snakes below nursed their young
snakes bellowed buzzard’s eggs into an eagle’s nest
with a taint of utility
and wee

Observation

A used condom lying on the pavement.
It fell out a pocket
Someone forgot it
A tender love locket

Patrician Families

Watching breasts.
Spent all of 2003 watching breasts new breasts firm breasts slack breasts non-existent breasts. I formed bodies from breast components, they were my Archimedean solids, one for the shoulder, elbow, ear-lobe, cheek, nostril and ball of foot. They became breasts and breasts became them. I was an architect, in best modern taste, obsessed with curves. Each container I wished to smooth of burrs and round, mould and encompass in human constant y=sinxes.
The ratio of a river’s length to it’s distance straight (as the crow flies) from source to mouth is defined by π, with modifications based on the hardness of the environment through which it runs. From mouth to vagina via the skin is surely ruled by the same calculations. If you could take a route straight down the esophagus, with a cutting through the gut – no detours, no taking a racing line down the small and large intestines but burning straight through with some burning beak - it would be much quicker.
Π and Sine is what I was after all along. I thought it was the roundness I was looking for, a depression, a dimple a press on skin relates to the amount of vitamin C you have been taking in recently? When, as a smoker, you go to the dentist, hey find it difficult to make you gums bleed - they have to push and scrape the probes vigorously to confirm that you are starving your mouth of oxygen. But it was the intrinsic inhumanness of curves.
Sitting in the conservatory of a pleasant villa in northern Italy - LIE, seaside cottage while the wind howled - LIE, the wind was audible periodically and he was in a suburb of a large post-industrial conurbation - BETTER.

Poor Pedro

Poor Pedro got caught with a wee baggy in his shirt pocket he'd forgotten, filled with stalks, none of it of use, all of it inviting the litigious. Heaven, if there were such a place, would be filled with those easy with themselves, unaware of or unconcerned with the effects of their condemnations of no-one who hurt anyone, unaware perhaps that they were living human beings.

Pedro took his linen and hanged himself in preference to all that we desired for him, and the shit that hit the floor had more psychoactive potential than the scant botany that had rendered him an undesirable. Pedro was the sensitive sort, y'know?

Earth and Eggs (Again) / Two Good Friends / Him and The Friend

An excerpt from the upcoming.

Downstairs Him was measuring the distance to all the countries he wanted to visit. It was 37cm to Tokyo, but The Friend was claiming that the globe did not correctly represent the vast distances. On the contrary, Him argued, “though I see your point; it is well known that the Earth is in fact not a sphere, more of an… ovoid, and egged shape. But not like an egg quite, more like a ball with a pinch on the top and the bottom, a football you are currently sitting on, a beach-ball sagging under its own weight. But if the top is flatter than that then really it will just make the distance shorter. It’s about tangents, though I don’t mind over estimating, it’s always a good idea to leave a little space in your calculations.”
The Friend looked exasperated. “If the earth is like an egg, this globe is like an egg within the egg, therefore this egg must be smaller than the other egg. Tokyo is a lot further away thank you think.”
Him: “but the earth is not an egg, more of a football; or as I said, an ovoid, remember the planes of symmetry: two, required. An egg, thankfully, has only one, for the avoidance of rolling,” and so on. The Friend: "if I wasn't such a good Friend I might believe you were becoming deliberately obtuse..." but Him was having none of it and, seeing as how it was such a short distance to Tokyo, he was all for setting off as soon as possible.

Bendy Satan - a synopsis

The following is for y'all to get a couple of your smaller teeth sunk into:

Disaster has struck the village of Pooka Delaval – somebody stole the vicar’s hat!!! Jack and Paul must call on Cousin Mithras and his mysterious companion, Mr Gander, to aid them in their time of crisis. But can they find the hat before it’s too late…?

And who or what is this Bendy Satan, heard whispered, rumoured by the wind?

With a riveting score by acclaimed beat combo St. Cuthbert’s Burials, this classic fable is every bit the equal of The Seventh Seal.

Contains scenes of unmitigated terror.

Funfair #1

In a first for this here Gander, I shall post what, by means of its lines not reaching the edge of the page, must surely be a poem. It was written some two years ago; it's almost ready to walk. But not quite.

Funfair #1

What are these toffee-apple questions that you’re asking?

Funfair, just where? that’s what I’m asking…

Candyfloss! (We might as well…)

Trouble comes whispered as you lie half-sleeping

Before it closes –

(It’s a jittering grizzled influence on half-sleep

In the morning – hard to analyse)

-- We may be talking dreams, but it’s all consciousness --

Why are you dreaming of the funfair, sister?

What dodgem schemes are up your sleeve

That you don’t know?

Candyfloss? We might as well –

You’re sticky and I’ll lick it off you,

Grease the tunnel of love now don’t be vulgar…

Dreams are inevitably analogue…

The subject, unsurprisingly, the object, worryingly,

Changes – changes – changes…

Candyfloss… get sticky… let’s lick and roll… let’s go round

merry… candyfloss… we might as well…

Get sticky, put your sticky toes in my mouth…

Ride dodgems, war with other children…

Would you like a cigarette?

Let’s smoke behind

The bike shed, baby,

What’s this funfair with a bike shed,

Are you dreaming?

Candyfloss, we might as well… eat it?

Suck it slurp it wake the neighbours,

Dribble down your chin all pink and – sticky!

Now it’s dripping down the cleft of your buttocks,

Now it’s rising in this carousel,

The pinkest tide of your sweet spittle,

Rising – sticky! And it’s reaching

To our noses, how much longer can we last?

Candyfloss? We might as well here as

I dive into the mess and lick your

Tiny anus, but not clean.

February 2006

Fredrik Fernandez

Fredrik Fernandez sneered into his black coffee. The whole proposition was ridiculous. Yet he was obliged by bonds of friendship and honour. He had no option other than the one which, given other less strenuous circumstances, he would have avoided with great care. However his other options would signal an end to any sort of companionship between himself and Madison. Of course, the friendship would continue, but it would never be the same. There would always be an unbreachable distance between them, and since this was the one friendship of his existence, he didn’t want to screw it up. He didn’t want to go to the trouble of finding another like minded individual, establishing a dialogue and befriending them. His social skills weren’t up to this, not since last summer.

So shackled by friendship Fredrick waited, with his coffee and buttered toast, for Madison to arrive. He did so promptly at seven o’th’morning clock, trailing Mia and a trunk. This did not brighten Fredrick’s mood, he did not appreciate the early morning, nor did he appreciate the unexpected inclusion of Mia. She did not fit into the plan, and Fredrick was a man who liked to stick to the plans, no matter how foolish those plans were. Mia’s relationship to the plan was comparable to taking a square peg and attempting to ram it into your ear. Upon arriving Madison helped himself to Fredrick’s sparse kitchen, emptying the contents of his liquor cabinet into a bowl of cereal.

And thus it came to be that the overly drunk Madison, the reluctant Fernandez and the ill fitting Mia, situated around the trunk, contemplated the task in hand.



Fredrick first met Mia at her wedding to Madison. It was a small service, complete with vicar and church, attended by only the closest of relations. This extended to Fredrick and Heinrick, Madison’s dog. At the time Mia was fifteen and had been plucked by Madison from her previous life of suburban monotony. Fredrick took an instant disliking, as did Heinrick, both subsequentially urinated on Mia, Heinrick on the Honeymoon and Fredrick when she had been stung by a jellyfish.

Mia was now sixteen and had adopted a disconcerting fascination with her own death, disconcerting to Fredrick; Madison seemed more interested in his own pleasures. Her frequent proclamations of imminent doom appeared to have no effect on Madison, Fredrick believed that he didn’t care about her at all, she was merely another symptom of the persona Madison project, one of thorough disreputability.

She was a stubby, rotund blond girl, she would never be called a woman, completely unsuited to the name Mia. Her parents had had illusions of an idyllic family with engaging children and had decided upon exotic names for them. Mia was the eldest and her brother, Philippe, was the youngest of the two children. Fredrick could only theorise that her marriage to Madison was some sort of attempt on her part to compensate for her complete lack of character.

The Vulture

Not even the strongest generic pharmaceutical gap-filling cement could have kept his torso from the armpits up from remaining detached after thirty-five hours in surgery; that lump of metal, the incidental shell, hurled at forty-five degrees away from where the party was really at, had a party of its own. Sparing him the usual indignity, Jim’s bowels emptied up through a gap near where his left lung, gripped plaintive and instantaneously by the shoulders and head, might otherwise have been, had fate had it differently. Fate’s a funny thing; were Dr Rudolph not in that particular village at that particular time, surgery would most likely never have been considered an option. Circumstance (secular fate), however, had it that Dr Rudolph was in the boudoir of some local yokel whose wife was in the throes of “stress-induced anal distension”, as diagnosed. Trepanning and Hippocratic semen were intrinsic to the cure (notes on that case are smudged at best and cogent at worst; besides, that’s a tangent, and reports such as this will be tainted with nothing of the sort).

Jim was in a horrendous state when the nearest Fraulein reached his sodden dying patch of ground; it couldn’t have come as much of a surprise to those present at any point in the affair had they been told that fragments of bone and other bodily shrapnel had been flung as far even as the battlefield. Nobody was in any position, however, to tell them anything of the sort, or otherwise.

'Thomas Father' and 'Finn'

a household is about to be repossessed

We had been married for only a few years, our only child was called Finn and my wife, Peggy, the best woman I could imagine, died during the birth. So I raised him on my own, I clothed him, I taught him how to walk, I noted down how his face fleshed out into a distinct likeness of my own. I put words into his mouth, his first words, he said, Father and I was proud. I educated him, gave him improving books to read, stitched him up when he was injured, helped create for him a place in the world. And he loved me for it and The End

will come, you have given me a life and you have made for me a place but Father I will never be grateful that you murdered for me, did you murder for me, said Finn, did you create her from nowt and murder her dead just to leave me with a potent life?

You'll know you place or have no tea, son.

Did you spill her blood-red blood across fresh white for the sake of a story? Are you accusing me of chauvinistic imposition, I retort.

I am calling you a callous bastard, dear Thomas Father. In a word you create a masturbation siren for yourself and in a word you take the life of an innocent. You have no right to accuse me, it was your birth, you are born of sin – Hypocrite – born in sin – pure shit I was born of you, half-baked, half-real. I lost her first. You had no care once I was weaned, you sent her away. What the fuck do you know about it, you're just a foul little fuck emanation of sex-starvation fantasy – what eloquence! – I'll rub you out again and so – what creativity! – We had been married for only a few years, our only child was called Finn – stop, father you're confused because: Thomas Father was a bitter man, the death of my mother was a test too far I felt he never loved me. Never loved as I needed loved. "Stop this," he said, "stop this it isn't fair, not how things go, I did not know," said Thomas Father but I watched how you played with her, how you teased her – I was in your mind from the start – I saw your perverted activities fashioning her tits, her cunt, her hair, but her hands were smooth no nails, and I seen you, dancing in your room with a half-skinned corpse with a stolen name and I have named you, and I can see you and you'll die in a ditch Thomas Father with a cleft in your skull Thomas Father died in a ditch with a cleft in his skull The End.

It is not.

Cotton-Floss Hair

Cotton-floss hair I bare my make-upsheen
In a drunken stare I have no blemish, I enjoy the fare,
I’ll come again, I’ll come again,
I like it here, on your shoulder your rot-black shoulder
And a mild rumbling snoring through your chest. Hair,
Cotton-floss hair I bare my make-upsheen
To the rain and the wind on the street
I contort over roads with a clip-clop stride.

Methods of Writing

- Why don't you hang upside down with your pen between your teeth, writing on a tippexed millipede?

- It would be more difficult that way.

A HISTORY OF MODERN TOM

This is the first part of an indulgent work. And very much unfinished.

Week 0 : exploration

I have set three aims ahead me in constructing this book. First, to be made aware of my own intentions. Secondly, to make aware of my own intentions others [1]. Thirdly, to prepare subsequent pathways, allay fears and disclaim [2].
Though I may later accuse myself of selecting it for purely aesthetic reasons, the numbering system I will be using to describe the process of both creation and subsequent analysis requires some explanation to be useful.
However before we get on to our ripping into the real fleshy mass I wish to note the general nature of the comments which I will be collating. For each of the texts I have selected not only my own opinions but also the opinions of colleagues, family members, celebrities, deceased royalty, imagined archetypes, floral displays and calloused feet. I have chosen to include opinions based solely on one criteria; the intention (though not by any means the successful realisation) of illumination. As a general rule I have favoured the interesting and novel above the strictly true, plausible, logical or rational. I have also pilfered, plagiarised and contradicted wherever seems appropriate. They are drawn from a wide variety of cultural, educational and existential backgrounds and it is chiefly the sheer range of interpretation which we are concerned with.
Whatever the mood may be, in concern to the method I see no reason or justification in being organisationally lax or un-systematic. To this end each discrete comment with be labelled according to the strict decimal system briefly mentioned earlier, with reference to content, in a suitably graduated manner. I will comment on the comments as I see fit. I should also mention, for the sake of completedness, that this is only a small selection of available content which could have been printed in the work, those other items were not selected, in the main for their obscenity or worthlessness.

T.C., Tynemouth, Winter 2007

[1] I am reminded of a conversation I had many years agowith Yosef (sic) Haddad. Both aware of a general distaste amongst the artistic at the activity of explanation, we neither of us could come to any consensus whether, as a rule, the creator should ever comment on their own work. This becomes an exponentially more thorny issue when that artistic activity becomes solely comment. I am thinking of the possibility of a body of criticism being raised up around a vacated object. Where the original work has been destroyed or lost, dismantled or forgotten, but its trace, like a fossilized foot-print, remains. Haddad suggests, in his seminal lecture given at Keswick, England in 1999; that it does not matter whether the centre of this academia has been vacated, or never existed in the first place. Much like the disgraced Richard Bacon would inflate a balloon, cover it with paper-mache, pop the balloon and removing it unceremoniously with a coat-hanger, then proceed to paint a terrifying faux-death mask with powder paint adulterated with that ubiquitous profusion of poly-vinyl-adhesive upon it, is the whole bloody edifice. Analysing anything is much like riding a bike, at the end of your journey you are more bicycle than man, the bicycle more man than machine, and you may need a shave.
[2] Aims tend to increase post fact, see 1.31.