Pooka Delaval

Lizard Poetry Society

2010-08-06T16:39:00.003Z

Today is the day that Pookas metamorphosed (back) into Lizards. Come one, come all. Here's a blurb for your delectation:

The Lizard Poetry Society is a new Newcastle-based poetry collective. These are indeed early days for us, and our initial goal is to involve as many people as possible in an exchange of thoughts and ideas about poetry (our own writing and poetry in general), and about poetry in Newcastle, a city with a proud heritage in that field.

Phase 1: “Words + Cake”, an informal though focused weekly meeting (see Events, above) in the centre of town, centred on sharing our words and imaginations (and on eating cake), but also incorporating any and all grander schemes that occur to us.

Phase 2: Well… please come along and help us work out the finer details. Poetry Readings. Miscellaneous Publications. This blog. Startling Multimedia Adventures. Etc. Etc. All ideas are welcome, indeed encouraged, as the Lizard Poetry Society is ultimately a means by which to gather together the poets and poetry lovers of the city, the region, and for that matter anywhere else in the universe, to enjoy, encourage and share in all things poetic.

Join us if you can, and/or get in touch here, via email (lizardpoetry@gmail.com), or via our Facebook group (just search for Lizard Poetry Society).

Peace To You All,

The Universal Lizard

The Woman that was while reading

2010-01-20T16:13:00.001Z

The Woman that was while reading
emerged from moments with momentum
of honesty and trying trying
at keeping the mess encased
in shells (I like to compliment myself)
of self-compliments, -congratulation
a hectoring voice
and it is the grasping
we never knew a single thing about -
so it was the inside felt general presence of
the maybe that when removed, removed
that left me - prompted by a hangover
and a conviction confused on the confusion -

F.S.

2010-01-19T00:39:00.001Z

Fishy Slume
Fushy Slime,
Fushy Salt,
INCONSISTENCY

Late Night in the Hotel, Weekend One

2009-05-24T03:30:00.002Z

Late Night in the Hotel, unedited

Night 1

“Why do you think he was like that?”
Sorry?
“Holden pal, why was he like that?”
I, I don’t know.
The woman in the pink dress has tried to convince me that I’m going to be nice to her, that she needs a party, that her daughter has cancer, has brain cancer, died 8 months ago. She’s only here for a weekend from abroad, she hasn’t seen her friends for a long time, she needs this party. She lives a long way away. In Paisley. She’s a nurse, a Psychiatric nurse. She’s about 38.
Her friend wants to distract me with catcher in the rye. I’ve found her in the nude.
I knocked on the door,
Unless these unauthorised people leave the building I am going to have to ask you to vacate the room.
“Will you give me half an hour?”
I’ll give you five minutes.
“Aww son don’t be like that.”
Five minutes.
I wait five minutes.
Knock knock knock knock knock knock knock.
“What?”
I need to come in to check the room now.
“But I’m not wearing any knickers.”
I tried not to check, but she wasn’t wearing any knickers. She had a black slip on. I didn’t look again.

The Cunt is asleep on the floor on his front drooling into the carpet – I ask him to wake up “Could you wake up Sir. Could you wake up. Could you wake up mate. Could you wake up pal. Wake up. Sit up. Get up. Up. Wake up you shit. Wake up you cunt. Cunt. Cunt. Cunt.”

And then the fire alarm goes off.

The Cunt sleeps on.

Night 2

You held a knife to our eldest’s head.
That was you.
Fuck was it, it was you.
Nah nah.
It was five years ago!
That was you.
You're only free because you made me lie in court.

Polis: could it be argued that he was restraining her, rather than assaulting her?
I suppose it could.
Polis: thank you. We may need to call you at a later date.
Thank you.
Polis: have a good night.

they've to got it got through before he returns

2009-05-04T13:51:00.003Z

I would not be telling the truth if I tried to suggest that people do not communicate. Certainly there are people quiet with each other, like those two young people. She with thin shoes and skinny jeans and her legs crossed and holding onto a iced fruit drink, those ones everyone mocks from Starbucks. And I a little too old for her, she wears no make up and will grow up unattractive; but right now perfect. And him picking pieces of something out of his sandwich for a thing to mention, they don’t speak, have they fallen out, are they bored with each other. Have they just broken up, are they at the beginning or at the end of something or the middle are they waiting for someone, perhaps they will kiss for something to do, or no. cynic. because there is nothing else to do but kiss. He wears a rugby shirt in blue and yellow and she wears a band logoed hooded jumper, no they just look like that, hers actually says Annie 08 and his says Fiji and he probably doesn’t play rugby though he is quite tall and his back is very long.

What about these three, a middle aged man a grey haired old woman and old man probably his parents, they are pension able. When he (the middle aged man) is there they don’t seem to say anything, nothing of any length enough to be concern of anyone. But then the man goes to the bathroom (the middle aged man) and the parents (we think) talk to each other, they discuss, they have a discussion and it looks furtive and important. Then the son (we think) returns and the father (we think) goes to the bathroom. The mother (we think) and the son (we think) have a quick argument, fast, they’ve to got it got through before he returns, perhaps she is thinking [thank god father (we think)’s piles are bad at the moment] and son (we think) is thinking [I hope father (we think)’s piles aren’t bad at the moment], or perhaps it is the other way around – piles are a very writerly way to adjust the narrative don’t you think? They seem practiced, they mirror each other’s movements closely, comfortable, managed, measured. The father (we think) and the son (we think) are never alone together and now they are all gone, jackets and mobile phones (or umbrellas) in hand and we will never know.

There were other people in the café but I have not mentioned them. And we're all just waiting for a reaction from on high.

Dusty Old Annabel Lee Is Me

2009-03-05T04:44:00.004Z

I wish that I were Annabel Lee,
While I'm busily wishing that you were me -
I could be gone and without a sound
While you wait to be with dusty old me in the ground.

Might look into expanding this at some stage, but I currently feel neither the need nor the inclination.

a meeting

2009-02-16T16:49:00.001Z

A stranger was approaching from the left side room -- though everyone else seemed to not notice him in a very deliberative manner. He was graceful without care, with instead a grace of purpose. He exchanged a polite 'good evening' with P in a drawl. He stood affront of them carefully leaning on an unplugged fruit machine with his legs crossed and his arse on the ledge above the cash chute.

His age was difficult even though we must know it within a year --- most likely between thirty and forty though it must be between sixteen and seventeen. He gave an impression of age and his hair seemed deliberately rifled with charcoal. His cloathing, corduroy brown, brown cord with the cords worn back to their skin tight base. They were too flared below the knees and the hems were low for P’s taste and the velvet of his jacket, with its too large lapels and cloth covered buttons a good 20 years out of fashion. L (for it was he what wore it) looked confused at the presence of P. P wished to continue to waste time by describing more of L. when L. himself asked (what is that in his hand?)

“What, is that, in y o u r hand?” He even pointed at the hand as he did it. P. hadn’t been aware, at that moment, of having anything in his hand, but it was true, there was something there. He looked at it to discover what it was, the interruption had thrown him.

- Why.

Interrupt. “Why is a different question.”

- Sorry, uueehe, it is a book on steamships. A book on steamships!

“Why do you have it?”

- I was reading it on the Metro.

“Are you sure that was wise.”

- I didn’t seem to have anything else to read.

“If you didn’t want to read it, then you shouldn’t have taken it with you.”

- I didn’t seem to have a choice; my choice was made for me.

“You had a cake and your cake was eaten for you?”

- Yes, I was placed on the Metro, I don’t know how long ago, but not the Budapest Metro, with a book on steamships and when I got here I was here.

“Remarkable! I didn’t realise people still spoke the way I am doing.”

- That is the most remarkable thing about it? By your reckoning? I could also smell WD40 throughout the whole trip, though how I could tell it from turps I don’t know.

You was wearing a dark, olive-green with egg-shell blue, shirt, undone at the wrists and tight at the neck. The collar was worn bare and dirtied yellow if it was white but it is a grass-green a cloth coloured bodey green. A loose tab sweltered and drooped behind his ear; but despite all this P knew he was in the presence of a gentleman. The easy almost drunk and oozing expression and manner of slump was ascertainedly of one who, intellectually, was used to being in the right; or fashionably incorrect. This mingling of half-stare shaffyshab and the serene flavour of grace was unmistakably musical; from what he knew of the set he was not surprised to hear the inducement from without,

“Herr L, P.. Herr P., L.. Please.”

- P reached a hand out to shake right hands; L proffered his left femininely,

“Where are you manners?”

P took the hand gently, the nails were long but the skin surrounding them was ruinous, bitten down in uneven patterns and the long nails, the whites of them, were stained to sellotape. P. felt the testing atmosphere and carefully pursed and pressed his chapped lips against the back of that cold white hand. He closed his eyes and blushed. When he opened them he could see another pair, R’s rolling and small smirks rippling across the group.

L took him to one side and began to explain things… he began with a question.

“Where have you been? We were failing to exist without you.

- I was outside.

“Without eh? And did you enjoy it?”

- Well it was a short walk, downhill,

“Short you say? Short yes, short, usually a good omen, a short walk. Downhill too. Pleasant?”

- Sorry?

“Pleasant was it P., this s h o r t walk?”

- Oh yes, as far as these things go.

“And ooeih, we have you there. How far do these things, when they do, supposing they do, what did you see, go?”

- I have certainly seen something worth seeing.

“Easy dull praise when the seeing of me is worth such a long walk. They will build a statue of me, of us perhaps, I suppose, and this will be a place of pilgrimage. Our inheritors with trim their flights and aim their wishes at us. You will write it, I can see you too devout for greatness without effort, and it would be ridiculous for a man to write his own chronicle. I never would wash my mouth with mine own praise for mine own deeds, afeart of getting a breath that stincks.”

Roisin: “But you’d eat your own shit.

L.: “touché”.

Purple (A Poem About Purple)

2009-01-28T20:24:00.001Z

A poem about purple called

PURPLE

follows:

PURPLE
=====
Purple
Urple
Rple
Ple
Le
E

(was a poem about purple)

Micropsia

2009-01-26T15:09:00.001Z

It was violetblack like blackjack so
he popped the beetle into his mouth,
it melted in his mouth to an acrid fluid
which burnt his tongue and he spat.
He mauled at the inside of his lips with
his tongue but no saliva would come.
And he pumped his throat for sputum,
but a cold weld had set across his tonsils.
He stepped and looked and stepped,
and into the garden he fell, onto the path.
Caught upon his hands and his elbows and
his nose was grazed against the ground,
in front of his eyes on the pavestone there were snails,
everywhere he looked there were snails
and they stretched their eyes into the distance,
He saw that they didn’t get any smaller as they receded into the distance,
and he lay prone in an amphitheatre
of ever increasing snails.
They all sat at corners.
The patch at the centre of his gaze was a corner
And the little patch of grease where his nose had touched was a corner
He could now see the millions of ever decreasing snails
that were extruding from the pores of the tip of his nose
and dropping into that patch of grease.
And he stayed there, elbows bent,
tips of toes stretched, neck straining, laughing.

deafening

2009-01-17T02:17:00.002Z

Attentchunsbourtadroornowtjrone
onbildunselfwrththatsubsighds,
butslow,
pleeselaydownsyouargewtoprownedom
andtoplayluvidlebitsbesighds.

Youluvplaypilinmentupwurds
upcowntmeanttillmentsallyougot
butslow,
andpleesestaynow, youmakenewyerns
alihopeluvyuluvluvnot.

A Kafka-esque Treatise On Jam

2009-01-13T23:32:00.002Z

(This is a very high-brow work of European Literature of international import.)

Jam Sam

A strange little boy here; his name was Sam,
Sam woke one morning to find his hands made of Jam.
So he licked a finger, a thumb, and was deeply disturbed
at his ten chubby digits made of gooseberry preserve.

His parents and grandparents and sister despaired,
Sam was a bad boy, he stole - stood on chairs -
from cupboards and sideboards and the very top shelf
jars of peanut butter and honey and anything else

he could get his sticky hands on,
with Sam around, like that! it was gone.
And with such jammy hands there was nowhere to hide.
But now he remembered his mother, and she hadn't lied,

You'll turn into Jam, I promise you son
of all your Jam stealing no good will come,
best stick to veg and the odd tattie scone
Jam all the day and you wont last long.

He rolled out of bed, sticky prints on the sheets,
and quietly headed for the door, his family were asleep,
but the handle slipped through his jellied nails
and Sam sat on the floor and started to wail.

He looked at his green palm with orange peel veins
and Sam promised never to eat jam again.
Then quick as a flash he was sat up in bed
a raspberry jam sandwich on the back of his head.

January Poem

2009-01-02T02:55:00.003Z

Smoking through my broken face,
Left side feels like the inside feels,
Got no eyes to see you now,
Can't hear you now,
You're not here now.

Stuck inside a splintered skull,
Stuck inside a churning brain,
Got no eyes to see you now,
Can't hear you now,
You're not here now.

Wish the skin would peel away,
Leave the flesh to get its due,
Got no eyes to see you now,
Can't hear you now,
You're not here now.

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

2008-12-27T01:06:00.002Z

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

2008-12-03T15:19:00.001Z

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

2008-11-21T13:45:00.001Z

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

2008-11-17T08:38:00.003Z

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?

2008-11-11T23:11:00.003Z

"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?

2008-11-11T18:45:00.003Z

"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)

2008-11-09T04:21:00.005Z

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

2008-10-03T10:59:00.003Z

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..."

2008-08-07T02:26:00.008Z

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.)

2008-07-23T23:18:00.001Z

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

The Mirror Scene (Again)

2008-07-11T23:57:00.001Z

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

2008-07-02T15:06:00.001Z

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

2008-06-03T02:49:00.005Z

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

2008-05-22T15:07:00.002Z

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

Txt Msg

2008-05-22T13:45:00.003Z

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

2008-05-22T00:14:00.006Z

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

2008-05-20T12:00:00.002Z

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

2008-05-16T18:59:00.000Z

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

2008-05-09T10:14:00.002Z

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

Patrician Families

2008-04-28T11:24:00.003Z

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

2008-04-22T05:45:00.006Z

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

2008-04-05T19:02:00.005Z

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

2008-03-08T21:55:00.001Z

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

2008-03-07T06:50:00.004Z

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

2008-03-07T06:25:00.003Z

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

2008-03-02T03:19:00.000Z

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'

2008-02-19T20:06:00.002Z

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

2008-02-19T20:02:00.001Z

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

2008-01-10T03:38:00.000Z

- 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

2008-01-05T23:02:00.000Z

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.

fallling asleep in a bathtub

2007-12-26T23:35:00.001Z

When I wake up a well known friend is standing beside me, I have known him for many years; the fellow is utterly untrustworthy at the best of times. I stare at him with masked suspicion; but it is difficult enough to concentrate on his face, which is one of loathsome brambleberries, to remain aware of any danger that I may be in. He reminds me to keep my hand on my wallet, and I do so.
“‘“Have you tried the hors‘doeuvres,” asks the waiter,’ I might write, at times like these,” he says.
I don’t turn towards any possible waiter waiting in the wings, I keep my eyes fixed on my friend, to whom I say, “No, how are they?”
“Food poisoning last week.”
“The times I mean, please.”
“Please, talk about the food.”
“So you’ve been here before?”
“Nada.”
“I beg pardon?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You neither, sounds like.”
“Me neither?”
“Been here before.”
I give a pause, “and supposing that is true?”
“Which it is.”
“Supposing it is,” I pause again, “what does that signify?”
“A mess, a mess for you.”
The feeling of depression and disquiet has overtaken me, and I feel I have to admit that yes, after all these years and all those hooverings, I am in a mess. He has my attention, and now he has my wallet. He’s using it to pay a bar tab. His favourite phrase always was, and I have to assume is and always will be, “better in than out.”

Junk Email

2007-12-14T17:31:00.000Z

I like reading my junk email folder because you occasionally get messages like this one:

"Bonjour,
Virus found in this message, please delete it without futher reading

Skill can inform me where she is now. I think let them talk
on till the alguazil peremptorily queen looked like,a tall,
stout woman, with such."

Let's dissect it.

Bonjour - this person wants to assume the persona of a Frenchman, or a tiresome dandy.

Virus found... etc - Interesting. Why write that? It implies that by using your eyes you are aiding the virus in its attempt. I find that quite cute.

Skill can inform me where she is now - Riddles...I like riddles!

I think let them talk on - Should there be speech marks here? It would help the flow a bit.

Alguazil - Alguazil is a Spanish title often to be met in stories and plays, derived from the Arabic "visir" and the article "al" The alguazil among the early Spaniards was a judge, and sometimes the governor of a town or fortress. In later times he has gradually sunk down to the rank of an officer of the court, who is trusted with the service of writs and certain police duties, but he is still of higher rank than the mere corchete or catch-poll. The title has also been given to inspectors of weights and measures in market-places, and similar officials.

peremptorily queen - I think in this usage it must mean dictator-like?

a tall, stout woman, with such. - this is my favourite bit. At least we know that she hangs around with oxymorons.

Anyway, just some idle musings.

I Couldn’t Possibly Know, Joe

2007-12-13T01:49:00.001Z

Fetch the pail, pale, I’m thirsty. Here, you drink some too, you could use it, wash this down, this supplement, friend, get some iron in what you call blood, readers digest it with your pride and pasty, wipe your chin on your record sleeve, the dirtiest, friend, old friend, since records began. You hit the road, Tom Joad, and it hit you back, Jack, and we’re all the same to kingdom come and kingdom came and went, friend, where you were buried roadside and we’ll be buried or burned, come what may, that’ll come. Take any precaution with plentiful water against being overwhelmed by the world, and don’t be overwhelmed, friend, by the world, and don’t dribble your overdose on my pristine sedan chair if you’d be so kind; I mustn’t be miscarried, I must be delivered intact from a restless womb. We’re on the same side here, the same side of the moon, the same side of the canal. And while we’re giving orders here, tie your tie and fetch the pail, pale, I’m thirsty. If you recall, Paul, a week ago last any day now, you were drinking from a glass half empty and you drank the wrong half, Lord have mercy, and died. Well, I didn’t blame you, and I still don’t blame you, even after the resurrection that was a statement of intent post-dated, but still I’d sleep easier in a scenario wherein I’d sleep at all if I could understand why you went and did it all, all over again, painful as it must have been. Human frailty? I couldn’t possibly know. Write me a memorandum. Propose a toast; toast; anchovies on your toast, Tony? I can’t provide them, nor abide them, nor condone them, cousins as they are to the carp and cat, horse and bat; carping on, you call carp fish, but I call him Finn, and I couldn’t eat Finn, not when we’re sitting at the table, finishing starters, soup and salad, raising glasses, the first champagne, preparing for the New Year, the last flat sparkling wine of this old year; I couldn’t do that to him, not with his friends around him, not with the pervading air there already is of finality in all things present, all of us married and solemnly at that. I’ve an errand for you in the here and now, cow, I’d like you to run now with this satchel of mine, contents undisclosed, to some friends of mine, some dear sweet friends of mine, and colleagues moreover, identities undisclosed, I’d like you to deliver this and no I won’t give you this, and if you wish to take issue, Klaus, you can tell it to a hound dog, Pedro, you can flatten on the wheels of the National Express. Lick this ground that myths have walked on, lick the ordinary ground you’re going to walk on while walking, and pass the remote control, and before you put your boots on, and before you take your next breath, fetch the pail, pale, I’m thirsty, getting thirstier.

26a Falconar Street

2007-12-09T23:15:00.000Z

My wet brick wall could contain a house.
It’s furtive man slips into his spouse,
Crying softly as he fucks his wife;
That swelling growth of a new life.
My wet brick wall, wet from the rain.
I like to make up stories like that,
Poor attempts at writing prose, or at worst a poem.
Usually when leaning against the door,
Looking up at the blocks of flats.
Tiny bursts of unimportant creativity which
Ray Mears would probably use to make a fire.
It’s the rain coursing down the bricks,
It’s the dead rosebay willow herb.
I sometimes want to write about things like that.

Two Come Along

2007-12-04T16:53:00.000Z

Close up of a right foot poking out from the duvet. The toes begin to twitch to rhythm of Break on Through by The Doors. The song kicks in.

Cut

(You know the day

destroys the night

Night divides the day

Tried to runTried to hide)

The camera weaves it way through to the bathroom. In passing we see a kitchen and a boiling kettle. The camera enters the bathroom. Standing in front of an open cabinet is a man. The camera advances to look over his shoulder to show shelves of bottles with brightly coloured labels. Close up of the label of one bottle which is a bright yellow smiley face, fingers wrap around the label. Cut to profile view of the man’s mouth tilted back his tongue extended with a sizeable pill on the tip, the tongue retracts. Close up of his throat swallowing. The camera cuts to the man’s midriff which is covered by a well worn tee-shirt featuring Jim Morrison’s face and numerous uncertain stains. The camera pans upward threatening to reveal his face, then glides down his shoulder to his hand clasping a toothbrush.

(We chased our pleasures here

Dug our treasures there

But can you still recall

The time we cried

Break on through to the other side

Break on through to the other side)

The mirror slams closed and we are finally allowed to see his face reflected, well meaning but tired. Close up of his teeth being brushed in time to the music.

Cut to the man going up the escalator at monument metro. Profile view of the escalator the camera keeping in time with the escalator. The posters behind the man all display the words break on through pick out in purple words on a grey background. Throughout the man is tapping his hand in time to the music.

Cut to an extreme close up shot of the top of the escalator face on. The man slowly appears over the horizon of the escalator. The camera is an extreme close up so only a small part of him is in view at a time. He is still wearing the Jim Morrison t shirt and he is wearing jeans, but he is barefoot. The camera cuts off at the ankles.

(Made the scene

Week to week

Day to day

Hour to hour

The gate is straight

Deep and wide

Break on through to the other side

Break on throughBreak on through

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)

Cut to a shot of a bus pulling round the corner and pulling up to the bus stop.

Cut.

The camera is positioned so that as the bus pulls up there is a close up of the base of the doors. They open. His bare feet greet us. Then proceed step slowly down and shuffle. They point left, they point right. They face the camera, take a step over it and take themselves and their owner out of the film.

Untitled

2007-12-04T16:51:00.000Z

Your looks
Your eyes
Your components various
Yourself
To surmise
A being nefarious.

Your hand
That holds
A tight grip clenched
Your fleshy
Skin folds
Your cheeks trenched

Your thighs
All clad
In my own secret joys
My lips
Are glad
Clasped at their toys

Your best
Intentions
And the pain caused
Struggling
With tensions
And love well forced

Oh for the
Rhyme and
Rhythm of our words
To fall
On open
Ears and open minds.

Oh for the
Right words
Those ones that I felt
Those words
The have no
Sounds except in between

Those carefully
Placed blows
Of well placed words
Those feelings
I never said
But that you heard.

Untitled

2007-12-04T16:49:00.000Z

The last things and the first things
They all amount to the same
Weather beating on your skull
And a slap to make you cry

You’ll not find much meat on my bones
And my soul is ready to fly.

Howl howl oh mother
For life has come to play
The jester
The joker
And you’ve nothing left to say.

Howl and moan like the wind in winter
Come to take the leaves
And no one quite believes
That summer can come again.

With the crunch of gold and brown
Crushed beneath your feet
Your coat brought tight
And your brow in a frown
You bring your foot down
With extra zest and extra vigour
And beneath the leaf
That life has laid
Before your foot
A snail lies unawares.

And you never noticed that the crunch was more solid
Your never noticed the blood on your boot
But life tends to play with us some days
And your will becomes mute.

Mirror Man

2007-12-04T03:25:00.000Z

The great upward crotch that was his torso. That stretched old long-sleeved T-shirt that was or were a pair of really quite functional long johns for the arms and upward crotch. The hairy old head that was a pair of grizzled boots for his upward feet, that scrawny spectacular of neck, and arms were upper knees or somesuch, legs without feet, an articulated pair of erect schlongs.

(And what he sees)

Kidneys have a smiling countenance, oozing anticipation’s drool. Liver’s wearing gloves, liver’s poised to catch whatever balls are cast his way. Lungs are sleeping, dreaming of their potential, complacently. Sphincter’s winking. Stomach’s swilling after brushing his teeth. The heart is all beef and oiled to perfection. Throat has slicked back his hair. Arteries are doing their rounds. Bollocks put on too much cologne and it burns. Brain bought a ticket in advance.

'Neath the Sands of Druridge Bay

2007-12-01T23:10:00.000Z

Here's a traditional Northumbrian folk song to wish farewell to the November.

I buried my troubles
‘neath the sands of Druridge bay;
Many a Lover has been forgot
‘neath the sands of Druridge bay.

I sunk my tears
To the bottom of Leazes Lake;
There’s many a Love that has been sunk
To the bottom of Leazes Lake.

I forgot what ails ‘z
As I walked down old Kells Lane;
Many a lost soul’s telt the tale
From the top of old Kells Lane.

I drowned my sorrows
Down in Bar 36;
Many a poor man had been drowned
Down in Bar 36.

I’m gonna hide my face
Underneath the Elvet Bridge
Plenty of shame’s been stowed away
Underneath that Elvet Bridge.

Aren’t you going to read my palm?

2007-11-29T23:37:00.000Z

From moonrise to moonset
The fallen leaves follow me both inside
And I forget where I
First thought I ought to like
You,
Perhaps it was September
But
I do remember
The last time I heard
words slip off your
tongue
And I liked them,
every
one.

2007-11-29T14:40:00.000Z

Collar

I threaded those
tiny bells
on bright
green string,
you stole them from your
big brother's Christmas tree.
You said,
"They give the
Illusion of ringing",
and I laughed
far too loudly.
So now I've got this
bracelet
that's green,
a green bracelet,
with plastic silent
bells.
I'm feeling
self conscious,
I pretend I'm a cat,
and you've given me a collar
that warns people
I'm hunting.

Boundary Street, Kowloon

2007-11-28T16:12:00.000Z

HERO is sitting on the front steps of the hotel. He is obviously a western tourist. The four lane-street is crammed with market stalls, and left-hand drive three-wheeled motorcycle trucks skit past. The streets' names are signposted in both English and Chinese symbols. On the market stalls are well-organised selections of second-hand electronic goods, badly-packaged DVDs and mis-spelt T-shirts of Hollywood films. SMALL CHINESE BOY wanders up and sits down beside HERO, he is about ten years old.

BOY: American?
HERO: No, English.
Boy: From England?
Hero: Yes, England.
Boy: Can I speak with you?
Hero: Of course.
Boy: Sorry?
Hero: If you would like to. You can talk to me.
Boy: I have a question for you.
Hero: Okay.
Boy: I have a question for you, my teacher says in England you have a Queen.
Hero: Yes, she’s called Elizabeth.
Boy: And she tells people what to do?
Hero: No, never.
Boy: She is not allowed to?
Hero: No, she is allowed to, she’s the Queen.
Boy: But she does not?
Hero: No.
Boy: Why?
Hero: Because no-one would do what she says.
Boy: The law says they do not have to?
Hero: No, the law says they do have to.
Boy: Would they not be punished?
Hero: Probably not.
Boy: But they broke the law, the law says they should be punished. No?
Hero: No-one would punish them.
Boy: The police?
Hero: No.
Boy: Do you smoke?
Hero: Yes.
Boy: Good.
Hero: Do you?
Boy: No.
Hero: Good.
Boy: Good?
Hero: It is good that you do not smoke.
Boy: Why?
Hero: Because it is not good for your health.
Boy: My teacher has a joke. He says, “Who is the president of China?”
Hero: Who is your teacher?
Boy: No, who is the President of China.
Hero: Where is your teacher from?
Boy: Canadian. He says, “Who is the President of China?”
Hero: Who is the President of China?
Boy: Hu!
Hero: Who?
Boy: The President’s name is “Hu!” President Hu! Aitch-Yoo. (Laughs)
Hero: (Laughs, Pause) Your English is very good.
Boy: You have a president in England.
Hero: He is called the Prime Minister in England.
Boy: He is called Prime Minister?
Hero: Well, yes, no, he is called Tony Blair.
Boy: He is called Tony Blair.
Hero: Well actually, it must be Gordon Brown now.
Boy: Gordon Brown now. You have elections.
Hero: No, it just changed.
Boy: Is that normal?
Hero: No.
Boy: Normally you have elections?
Hero: Normally, yes.
Boy: Elizabeth tells the President what to do?
Hero: Who?
Boy: Your Queen, is she changed as well?
Hero: Oh. No. No, she doesn’t tell anyone what to do.
Boy: What does she do?
Hero: She, advises.
Boy: The president listens to her?
Hero: Not really.
Boy: Then why?
Hero: She is like a grandmother. Maybe they will feel guilty, and not do the things they might have done.
Boy: Do they feel guilty?
Hero: I don’t know.
Boy: Do you think they feel guilty?
Hero: Probably not.
Boy: When I was born Hong Kong was England.
Hero: Britain, you mean Britain.
Boy: ‘United Kingdom’.
Hero: Yes. ‘United Kingdom’
Boy: They are changing the names of the roads.
Hero: Do you think that is good?
Boy: Maybe not. Can I have some money?
Hero: No.
Boy: Cigarettes?
Hero: Sure. (Hands him a pack of Marlboro)
Boy: Thank you. (Runs off.)

HERO stands up, shoulders his bag, and walks down the street.

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing

2007-11-27T01:27:00.000Z

“I do it by feel, really. I bumble around, it’s inconsistent. Inconsistency, things resonating chaotically, organically – free! That’s the only way; that’s the way I feel it.”

“Yeah, but if you don’t tie it right, the parachute’s just gonna fly away.”

The dogsbody flipped and told us all to buy gloves for him; he got a lot of gloves that Christmas. He flipped back and the turkey got a stuffing. Blood, guts, everything hung on the barbed wire like the sun dying. Crystals formed on the flesh and winter ate eyes. We all hung ribbons on the tree too. We hung the gloves from the ribbons. The parachute’s just gonna fly away.

Chapter 12

2007-11-23T01:18:00.000Z

We go back here to 2003, possibly early 2004, for the latest installment in the Gander Archive box set project. It is the last known piece of Baiting of the Marshfish to have been written. It is included for the poignancy that accompanies that knowledge, and the knowledge that said work seldom rose above this standard.

Chapter 12

“Stephen,” said George, the next day, “We’ve been fucking about these past few months, have we not?”

“We have?”

“That’s correct, Stephen, we have. I can see now that you’re fit for the job. And so we begin.”

“What?” Stephen didn’t understand.

“And so we begin.

“What?” George had not clarified.

“AND SO WE BEGIN! What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

“What do we begin precisely?”

“Have I taught you nothing? Never, ever, under any circumstances answer a question with a question when questioned by me, for I am Salamander George.”

“Okay.”

George was of portentous mind that morning. He had business on it.

“And so we begin.”

“What precisely do we begin?”

“The Baiting of the Marshfish.”

“Ah. Yes. That”

“So I shall send you off immediately.”

“Immediately?”

“No. Not immediately. But soon, my lamb, soon.”

The Sparkler Boy

2007-11-22T15:33:00.000Z

The Sparkler Boy

You're the sparkler,
did you know?
You're personal,

glittering, starlight, boy!
I've been carrying your
Lips in a cupped puddle
filling my steady palm.
If some one makes me spill you
then I just might cry.
Your teeth taste like cords
and I watch the dolly
strum you
and that dolly, boy,
will strum you till your dry, but
you're swilling
yourself in a tin bucket,
in protest, because
you think
you've been diluted.
But I've tasted more cordials
than you know it, boy!
And I swear, you're too
pungent.
You got a punch,
a kick, and a walloped
right down my gullet,
trust me, you are mean
and potent.

Slips

2007-11-18T19:05:00.000Z

(This is an older poem that I was going to put in Allison.)

The Bus at the Stop of a Tokyo moonlight
& solemnly shop from your top to the floor
with A crisp crumpled moan muffles out as she draws on
the last of the fags that she steals when she stole.

And if she should sleep like a pearl in an Oyster
And if she should keep all the coins on the ground
The glint in Her eyes ought to be like October
The Coffee she stares at; the civilest sound

But how can she colour the dull words of home-time,
Remember the blind spot, the ball-point ideas.
Redundant and under her thrift-risking, thunders
A cinderous sunder of nothing sincere.

So diverted traffics shine shards from their head lamps
that bound across ebony strides of her hair
Declared with the vandals the Tape-loops have strangled.
the Cross-hatching matching chewed pen lid affairs

And now She can see what she wanted to hear
as The breeze beats her breath to the will of the wind.
And shelving her smiles for Dawn’s clock-worked exposure
Allowed now, arrested, she slips through the seems.

Shri, Lakshmi or Chanchala,

2007-11-17T04:37:00.000Z

(One who is fickle and does not stay at one place.)

A Daughter of the Sea, a Sister of the Moon,
a Cousin of Aphrodite, a Consort of Vishnu;
with a smile and my pierced ears, my beads,
my beads, my battle axe, my maze of fine cuts.
A quiver of a single arrow: and the arrow is loos'd,
A quiver of thunderbolts: and the bolts are hurl’d.
Lotos-eater, daughter of Aquitane,
cudgel-scalpel, lance of a saint,
sword of a martyr, shield of luck,
conch-flesh, from egg to fork, tsar bell, sour wine-cup,
eight-bladed trident, in a noose of fallow hope.
Without me you have not this,
without you I have nothing.

I was at the court of Eleanor, a Meninas,
I saw Jumbo crushed by a train in Ontario,
his ashes are kept in a 14-ounce Jar of
Pyotr-Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter.
They paid 10,000 dollars,
they paid to see me, my kin,
he entertained the troops, you can meet him
in Normandie. Always identical
and of the same sex. Really? They open their eyes?
They return home? When the heart is one,
what of kidneys? When the blood is bloodier than blood,
being not my blood but the blood of all of us?
Without me you have not this,
without you I have nothing.

And all at once they sang, and all at once
someone said "will we not strive? Resting,
Resting weary limbs at last on some incinerator gas-bed?
Not a God, but not a parasite? Surely,
surely, slumber is more sweet than useless toil?”
My sisters, you cannot stay inviolate,
we may make it past adolescence,
but the names for ourselves will ever change.
We are worshipped for life, but of life
we have little. I must die in my garden,
so you may make your own:
without me you have not this.

The Fire Prance

2007-11-13T10:21:00.000Z

Step by Step: The Fire Prance
(A dance for swabhands, arrangement: circular)

1. Light a large fire on shore, when the flames have died down rake the embers into a large circular formation.
2. Share a flagon with the swab next to ya and wipe away the dribble with the back of yer sleeve.
3. Now, pace around the fire making rhythmic hauling noises. Thrust a cutlass to the click-cracking of the embers.
4. Now all point at the first man in the circle (he is easy to spot as he is at the front of the circle).
5. The first man must walk directly across the glowing embers towards the back of the circle. During this the remaining swabs should use palm or banana leaves to scoop up some of the embers and hoist them into the air, hollering in celebration, ‘We’re not at sea, we have no need to break our backs!’ (for example) while the hot embers rain upon them.
6. Every swab who has walked across the fire no longer partakes in the hoisting of the embers. Now they should think about how much they miss the waves and spray of the seas.
7. Repeat for each swab in the circle.

Story, Plot

2007-11-11T20:02:00.000Z

Before; then the stone age, then the bronze age, then the iron age, then the ancients, then the greeks, then the romans, then the dark ages, then the middle ages, then the renaissance, then discovery, then machinery, then now.

- An insect man sits with his many eyes looking through rituals of decomposition. Through slits of carven writing, through thumb-nubbed tool handles and the faded devices of dynasties.
- The insect Man is a factory, a pick-axe handle, a razor of flint, a plank, an ankh, a camera shutter, a tail-fin. Insect man don’t know no love don’t know no hurt; knows blood and guts and fucks though, squeezed into words and sediment, and long rows of figures under headings in a thousand hands.
- Insect Man doesn’t know taste. His room is a cave of threads, his bed is of reeds, the uppers of his shoes are london, soled athens, a tongue of rome, it’s straps are flayed donatello and stippled with arcadia.
- Then Insect Man is made of emulsion, his carapace is celluloid glazed with moving pictures and a dark cave wall. His mouth is empty, his teeth are stretched out on a rope many nights long.
- Insect Man never woke up to it, he has stared for all your lives with his milky insect eyes that don’t know, that don’t know and he is tired, and he was tired, and he tires of tiring when he is born again. Was tired in the first Fire, the first Gun Shot, the first Sling Shot to The Moon and Back, to the first Dull Edge, the first Sharp One too.
- An insect man sits with his many eyes, and he cannot see, he hasn‘t got the right, he ain’t got the hang, no manual, no remit, no certificate, no proof of ownership. They’re not his eyes.

mizzen

2007-11-11T00:02:00.000Z

sifting through the creaks of wet wood
the creases of my face
in my safe hands.
an aspirin in the face of sundries
plundered and blood-sullied
to the warehouses of exotic lands.

the chorus of the foams fill my lungs:
‘and is this Henry Leech?’, they say
this spray-ridden mutiny
dutifully wrapped in a black mizzen mast’s
sail,
the last of the Trail’s four captains
casketed and seeped in kelp and gilt,
the keep of the seas
with shale and silt
to credit our valued dog.

Good Night (or A Pirate with A Broken Sword)

2007-11-02T11:00:00.000Z

Defunct and quite
Just Sunked,
From almost two years of sunkissed never happeneds.
It took me that time
To try
And hide
My eyes.
To need
To stop
Breathing.
Now that I’m defunct and no longer needed
Superseded by something you didn’t need you said and
Read such reddened eyes I read.
I believed you (just like I always do).

How can I feel embarrassed?

And no you need no explanation.
I needn’t use their mild sedation unless my smile begins to smudge
I have no qualms;
I’m bound and gagged
Around the facts,
Another man will love you just as much as me.

A Fit of Propaganda

2007-10-28T02:38:00.000Z

"Jesus eats babies," said the Devil, in a fit of propaganda.

x = y, and Meal Time is universal

2007-10-22T02:05:00.001Z

x: Everyone, all the pets, the domesticated animals, the human ones, other ones, trees, liars, daffodils and festivals, all eat their own flesh and have a handful of really very basic functions, the natures of which are entirely irrelevant to my calculations

y: (eating own flesh, functioning irrelevantly and basically, feeling no need and no will to respond to x, x that’s under the windowsill, snapping toes, gardening, and filling his cup)

thoughtswhen

2007-10-18T12:16:00.000Z

The twenties will receive my middle age
got married and woke up
all Capone and art deco; brightin
love it was three days almost.Young
things blowing policemenkisses since I'd
got my coat and licked
throwing off the robes of
mascara from an upper lip and
the great wear. I am thirteen, I am sweat
from your back. We'd donesitting, I am allowed,
I chucktalking about plastic and the why
-in my flat-cap - and finding tipsit
feels against skin. There,a travel kettle.
Cruises arereally much to say so we fun bledmass
fashion and pretend theankles instead and sat in
thoughtswhen real is fake from chinaand the other left.

Homage

2007-10-07T23:48:00.000Z

What more could you ask for? it's a good life you know, and one to be appreciated beacause soon it's all banks and factories and boredom and drear and lack of heather, and lack of heath. That;s if you even think we have heath now; the p[lain turth of it is is that we don't, and we want it. I do, I do;.

Brick Wall Sentiments Prevail

2007-09-19T04:35:00.000Z

Another one from the St. Cuthbert's Burials archive. This one can also be found in Tell It To A Hound Dog, Pedro. It's pretty well a doublerehash. And to coin a phrase, it's probably good advice if you've got shit for brains;

Brick by brick and trickle of mortar, come who may, the progress is never slow, for imperceptible. It’s not that you’re connected, but the scratching with nails at dusty but solid joinings of wall shows that that at least is not disconnected. Railway dreams are sleepers, the rail is the real goal but is iron not mist. Liner? There’s a thought on board, that’s why it’s swift; no real weight. Say mass. Say a lot of things. Steam speeds you through but what matters is not the journey, but the destination. Drink rum. That’s a journey and a destination in the one happy passage. I may be right, I may be wrong, I’m scared to discover, so I proffer nothing but the odd pithy pith. Learn something from that, dusty child with wrinkles. There are means of protection. If you want to ride, just pretend you have, and wherever you wind up, well, that was your destination all along. Don’t fret about it. Spin a wheel. Roulette/Steering. It matters not, babe. Eat shit, eat chocolate. It fucks your teeth either way, and what do you remember? Delicious sweetness? Bitter filth? No. You remember that you have no viable teeth in their sockets in the skull. Spend everything on a cocaine bath, dissolved in a woman’s utterances and seep. Thrift through baked bean bonanza of your mind’s easiest dream, the ordinary sense of the survival instinct. What do you regret? You spent it all, fucked up? You didn’t take enough time for your pleasure and now it’s too late? No. What you regret is that you wasted your time. Never your money. Money rolls and flows. If you’ve got it, you don’t give a shit. If you don’t got it, you’re resigned to that come reckoning time. In the end, you regret the things you haven’t done. I was a platinum selling hip-hop phenomenon, but I never climbed K2. Fuck it. Like I say… Drink Rum, The Rest Will Come… and then drink rum. You may as well. Thanks.

A vulgar story, big and clever.

2007-09-12T14:26:00.000Z

Jesus was sitting on a small lump of cheese rind, occasionally wiping his hands on it. He was a big shiny bastard of a cockroach.
They eye blinked behind him and looked suggestive.
Jesus glared at it. “Just what the fuck do you think you’re looking at you big retinated anus?”
The eye continued to cry and was nailed to the wall.
Its mouth ripped open under its iris and it began to reply “Well I must say...”, it vomited up some glutinous wallpaper-paste like paste, then continued, “you are an extremely rude young man.”
Jesus jumped off his cheese and ran at the eye and slashed at it with his mandibles.
“I’ll fucking show you, you cocky little shit-cake!”
He dropped his wing cases to reveal a comparatively large organ of some sort, which pulsed and vibrated all along its length.
“Have at ya! HAGH! HAGH!”
Jesus ejaculated his invertebrate seed all over the eye, and then licked it as it dripped off. The eye blinked to clear its lens of the sticky concoction, then slowly retreated into a dark tunnel it used as means of passage.
“Good fucking riddance” Jesus screamed after it.
Jesus crept back onto his cheese with his back to the eye’s tunnel.
After about five minutes he glanced over his shoulder to see whether the eye was there; but it wasn't.
“Shit.”

As The Moon Glimmered over Worswick - a fragment from the short story: 'Worswick St. #1'

2007-08-31T22:41:00.000Z

“Undefined Undefined Undefined Underfined.”

Undefined never liked them anyway. She stubbed out her unlit cigarette- she across the way like an epileptic fit. The near-by Punjabi illuminated sporadically the redbrick Street and the flickering window display of ‘As the moon glimmered over Worsick’. She had etc. as it traipsed off into faint traces. Her countenance had suddenly shifted, till She strolled passed the flickering Take-away, smiling at the cocktail of cumin.
The indigestion was gone and she made a beeline for the Bridge. She had already picked out one of the pale white Lampposts to stand under and not smoke another cigarette.

Only Fifty minutes ago she had stared (That Guinea at the Bissau jazz &) at the man she loved in the disused Worsick St. Bus Station, not even an hour ago. He told her he didn't love her anymore but maintained the eyes of a saint.
She was a little proud that she didn’t cry.

x and y Do Brunch

2007-08-19T14:25:00.000Z

x: Yes, it was good. I liked it. But it did taste rather a lot… quite a lot like… coffee.

y: Oh, yes. We like our salmon with coffee. And Poison too. Did you not taste the Poison? Mmm! Poison!

x: Poison? (slightly alarmed)

y: Yes.

Cisterns, Part 1

2007-08-16T14:44:00.000Z

This piece will be posted in 2 parts.
Any comment/critique would be helpful, as this is destined for the man.

Scene 1

A long, thin, white bathroom with yellow net curtains which dim the already pale light coming through a tall narrow window. A bathtub runs lengthways along the room, the toilet is below the window on the right of the bath, there is a sink to the left beside the door. A young man and a young woman are present, he in the bath, smoking, she sitting on the toilet in a dressing gown, also smoking. The bath-tap is running. She has a expensive bottle of Vodka, he has a cheap bottle of Whiskey. They are both dead.

Alexander. Shit day.
Pause. The sink gurgles. He stares at it.
Alex. Here’s to that!

He drinks deeply, lays the cigarette carefully on the rim of the bath, holds his nose theatrically and submerges himself, splashing water around. Lilja walks to the far end of the bath, turns off the tap, and returns to sit on the toilet before he finally surfaces with a gasp, reaches for the tap, then stops and looks angry when he notices it is already turned off.

Al. Ahhhh…
Lilja. Why must I be such a… (she smokes)
A. (He lies back) Makes life worth living.
Lil. …a pessimist about everything.
Alexander. (mocking voice) Dearest, could you pass me the towel?

He laughs to himself, and reaches over the bathtub to finish the Whiskey, braces himself on the bath and pushes himself out, he gets his towel himself, you pour him another drink, he carries it to the sink. Lilja goes over to the bath, checks the temperature, then gets in.

Alex. (Squeezing blackheads) There’s this computer program
where you load in all your pictures, everyone does,
and it somehow compares them, analyses them,
works out which ones are of the same person, or
a building or whatever. It links them all together and
builds like, an average, what it looks like from all
those different perspectives. It didn’t matter if it was
a massive digital photo from yesterday, a scan of a
third-hand photocopied newspaper story or a
Renaissance sketch. In the example, they did the
Sagrada Familia, remember, I went there? And even
used movie footage. Then they stuck them all
together and it was weird, all these webs of lines
where, like where all the repeated memories of this
church had ¾ somehow the bones of it coalesced from repetition
¾ and, punctured reality. (a worldwise laugh, Lilja turns on
the hot tap.) I wonder what Gaudi would’ve thought’ve it…
Li. … no hot, again, they cover the whole bathroom in
hair and soap and rotting towels, use all the water, all
the fucking butter, ask me to proof-read, can‘t even
string a sentence together. (She thumps herself on the
thigh, you light a cigarette for her, she takes it without
making eye contact.)
A. Got hit by a bus, remember? doubt he could care less?
L. Couldn’t, you shits. Could-n’t care less. COULDN’T - CARE - LESS.

ALEX

But she was gone, and like a tidied table the room had relinquished all its charm --- it was too subservient. The was no other will, no human to crash knees, elbows and temples with in the dark. The baguette was dry, the consistency of breeze-bloc, and had broke his skin when he’d attempted to catch it. He was hyperventilating. Sucking down the last half of a warm can of flat diet coke he spluttered into calmness.

- - -

Later, downstairs, in the stairwell, the optician from downstairs was sitting on the stairs, holding an unopened packet of Players cigarettes.

Alex says nothing. "Hi," was the reply.

"Worried they might bite?" said Alex. Alex is a mess, he thinks he is dying of tuberculosis, though you’d tried to tell him it was all in his head. He didn’t sit down.

"Nah," replied the optician smiling pleasantly, "my girlfriend ‘s made this deal. ‘No sin un-shared.’ I named it. I want a cigarette, someone else opens the packet, want a drink, someone else pours it."

"Sounds nice," says Alex.

"She’s plucking out all my vices. Refining them. Wouldn’t have got engaged if I’d known this would happen. Your’s," he flicks his eyes to the ceiling, "your Zoe, she not got you off the fags?"

- - -

Alex walks away to the sound of crackling cellophane.

Rickrolling

2007-08-06T10:41:00.001Z

My ongoing obsession with internet culture has reached it's peak.

The fact that a considerable amount of people's time and effort have gone into perpetuating such pranks and genuinely disgusting memes helps build my love of humanity.

You have been rickrolled.

Two Thoughts

2007-08-04T16:53:00.000Z

Digital Piracy

I had no qualms present as I thieved Sunset Blvd. and The Maltese Falcon from under the dead-eyes of it's starving creators via a loose swarm of like-minded buccaneers. There was not an inch of conscience involved. My eyes continued their involuntary act of descending a steep slope of snow, with a barely controlled flourish. Either for the sheer thrill of the ride and/or to bypass tedious scree, I enjoyed the hell out of it.

I was a new modern man with his fingers on the keys not giving a damn or a penny to/for the third generation black-suiters who wanted my ill-earned hard cash for what is, undeniably, old Bogart. Of course I had a dog by the name which was put down for mauling toddlers, or so I assumed from the euphemism my mother used. Whatever happened to collective culture anyway, it is as guarded as a dictator's tomb?

Hysterical Paroxysm

On a related note there I was treating her for the nervous ailment that had troubled her all these dark months since her husband put to sea, and suddenly I found the equipment all covered in a tepid sort of semolina. 'Aha! by Jehova and all The Saints' I thought out loud, stowing the vibratode in it's hygienic red leather lined beech box, I've heard of this but never seen the like; 'too right' said the wife. Nowadays you can get them in the Argos catalogue.

- "Tyranno" 1918

Smoked Fish

2007-08-03T22:22:00.000Z

So there I was, surrounded by stiff tissues and trying to get to grips with the similarities between 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Girl From the North Country' when my head was flung around by the sound of a long reverberating squeak at the window. Dressed in only a white towel at the waist I gripped it tighter and faced the window cleaner who was 3/4 profiling his face and now focusing on only the dirty pane his length of rubber was strigiling. Had he turned as I did? Which of the two lyrics below is the most pleasing? I decided to leave the room for a glass of orange from concentrate and smoked mackerel, perhaps with some of the fruit loaf I knew I had left. I closed the window on the west-facing wall to help the cleaner, to give him a bit of resistance, and to hide from his ears the lines:

Remember me to one who lives there.
She once was a true love of mine.

Remember me from one who lives there,
For she/he once was a true love of mine.

A'wonder how many stories window cleaners; and gas men, telephone-line installationists, paper-boys, septic tank-diviners - what sort of stories they tell each other. A'wonder how many variations on the teenager wanking, the au-pair fucking, the cleaner sucking, the dog shitting, the husband throttling they come across and tell their friends in the work. A'wonder if they decide that the stories are boring and start to discuss the changing tastes in wallpaper and dado rails. A'wonder if they have physician-style tradesmen's oathes, or a butler's discretion, never to see and certainly never to tell of.

I'd finished the mackerel and washed down the oil with orange juice when the window cleaners knocked, they wanted paying. What I really needed was an audio recording of 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Girl From the North Country' and a working-class upbringing.

As a Nation said,

2007-08-01T22:35:00.000Z

They feed young branch of tree,
bark of a free,
grass.

Breakfast and Pedro Thinks

2007-08-01T19:37:00.000Z

In conscience, and for a thousand practical if barely discernible reasons, Pedro felt he could put off taking up his role as protagonist no longer, and so resolved, as so many times before, though earlier in the day, to make a real constructive start. Scratching at the outer recesses of his mind, he pondered a good ten minutes on any specifics there might have been as flesh to his previous resolutions. Pedro drew blanks, it being so early in the day. How does one begin? He thought about Mother Hen, how she left it too late, didn’t seize her chances; limbo’s where she’s lying, half-sleeping. But no, that was all too long ago, and Pedro is young. He hasn’t time for the eyes to look forward, and has nothing to look back on. Where does one begin? At breakfast, perhaps, that can be pinned down, it’s solid enough sometimes. Pedro looked around; what about it? What about breakfast? It’s finished now, and besides it was only toast. And all so early in the day! Best to think afresh, he thought, or not to think at all. Perhaps he could go out walking, not to clear his mind, for no good could come of that, not today, but to meet dog-walkers, shop girls, milkmen, children and tramps, and hold discourse. Things happen when you go out walking, and Pedro had to start somewhere. That’s what he’d do, he’d go out walking. What did Pedro have to say? He had to say something. He’d wait a while, have lunch; he could go out after lunch alright, but not so very early in the day. Have a glass of wine for Christ’s sake!

The Modern History of Myself and Hats

2007-07-27T22:19:00.000Z

February 1997:
When I was ten years old I had this green, felt one with tassels at certain corners. It had cost my parents £20, which I still think is a decent chunk of money. I took it away with me to Italy, on a school trip to the Alps, because that’s why my parents had spent a decent chunk of money on it.
For my parents this trip symbolised a success, in a way, they had worked hard and managed to achieve a better standard of living, for their children, than they had had.
They were certain that ‘I was going to really enjoy it’.
And I did
Until I lost the hat.
I felt like I’d bulldozed my parents’ efforts and that if they too saw the symbol of the hat they might want to cry. From now on I was to appreciate home and its affiliates.
Thanks to that and the fact that Stuart Yorston told me my parents had died in a car crash that night I became homesick.

October 2002:
The next hat I owned cost £2.50 more. It was an old bowler with a red lining. You’d like it- it was very likable, I should know – I liked it. (In hindsight) It represented a time, a place and a nascent frame of mind. The vine of a frame of mind I wind today. There are a couple of photographs of me wearing the hat, there were a couple of photographs and then it had served its purpose. The hat had come to be a confidence for my creative conviction. I had a mop of hair.
But soon I wasn’t so sure,
Since then the hat has had various retirement homes and display cases, though rarely on my head. These days it usually rests; crucified on a novelty, foam raspberry in the living room.

Summer 2005:
The third had been Jo’s hat: a black, corduroy, railway flat cap (cool as fuck). I pinched it off her because it suited me, especially when I wore my maroon polo shirt and an accompanying black tie and when college ended and university began it came with me to Edinburgh. (Jo said I should take it to remind me of her & when our relationship stumbled to a halt she reiterated this. And so it did.).
One night I wore it to work. That night where me & Senior were hosting the quiz and Kristoff gave us a whole bottle of Apple Sourz to drink. Sometime later I couldn’t find the hat.
I was rather disappointed: It suited me.
It was sometime after that, in the same place, I saw the hat once more. This time it was on the head of an Australian lesbian. After thinking about it for a bit I asked her:
‘Excuse me’, I said, ‘where did you find that hat?’
‘Under my bed’, she said. And perhaps she had.

June 2007:
It was the last day with my sweet for a while and after much deliberation in front of a mirror I bought the hat. A straw, slightly panama job from C & A’s in Budapest. It was almost small but suited my mane/mood and ‘too small’’s better than ‘too big’, surely? Anyway Rosie said she found me attractive in it and that helped my decision. After leaving her in that subway I had almost already decided that the hat had to return home on my head so’s Rosie could find me attractive, in the hat once more. By the time I arrived in Kyiv the hat had developed into a symbol, a symbol of my love and my faith in said love, a comfort should homesickness return.
I preserved it from the Ukraine and Moscow to the Trans-Siberian express. Here it perched above my bunk, over the bedside light, placed there, most likely, by The Trader. I remember well, Thom’s hayfever had been playing up and on The Traders’ suggestion we swapped beds, in order to let Thom sleep out of the pollenful breeze. On the third night, (the second on the others’ bed) I awoke to find the hat was missing.
The Hat!
I hunted around, frantically, with my eyes for any sign of straw and there it was peeking out from behind Thom’s arse- crumpled, beaten and no longer an attractive accessory. The Trader attempted to straighten it out and look proud at his hopeless attempts, Thom laughed.

Keyboa: a dilemma

2007-07-24T15:23:00.000Z

(Originally published at Counter Hive in April of 1786)

To whom it may concern,

I have been asked on numerous occasions in recent weeks, months, years, etc. about the ethics of music making by keyboa, specifically by electric keyboa. The commonly accepted definition, I feel I should make clear, of the keyboa is, as concluded at the 19** Seminar, "a metally snake that lives in keyholes" and "can be Manipulated to make melodious sounds". The two principal schools of thought on the harnessing of the electric keyboa are as follows;

i) The very nature of the keyboa ("a metally snake that lives in keyholes"), when coupled with the notion of "[Manipulation] to make melodious sounds", leads the mainstream of counter-Advance scholars to call for unambiguous prohibition of music making by keyboa, in particular by electric keyboa, for reasons of a perceived correlation between the required method (see "Metasynthesis and You: A Beginner's Guide [19**]) and certain principles of the proto-Advance, especially in the field of Control.

ii) A more maverick, but steadily growing school of thought would have it that, rather than being merely neutral in active terms of the Cause, music making by keyboa can actually be beneficial to counter-Advance. There is evidence, albeit broadly disputed (by the aforementioned mainstream) evidence, that points to the electric keyboa being in the region of 30% more organic than, for instance, the violin, and the acoustic, or "bare" keyboa being as much as 40% more organic, purportedly on account of their reptilian roots. There is seldom any suggestion in counter-Advance circles that music is anything less than an invaluable weapon against Human Advance, and, if the statistics cited above are even vaguely accurate, the central argument proffered by this second lobby, that the pros significantly outweigh the cons in any responsibly practiced music making endeavour by keyboa, electric or otherwise, might carry sufficient weight to make, at very least, a full enquiry by the relevant authorities into the potential efficacy of an official keyboa music making programme a viable route forward as regards this particular issue.

I hope that this humble memorandum has shed a little light on what perhaps needn’t be so divisive a topic as the keyboa question currently is. Please send all enquiries through the usual channels,

Yours in conscience,

Sir P----

He Emerged From The East

2007-07-18T10:51:00.000Z

A repetition:

The word 'aslan' is a fine word. You may well associate said word with a popular lion, famed for being somewhat like Jesus, only fair-haired, of a name similar in all but capitalisation. (That lion is called 'Aslan'. Smashing fellow, by all accounts). Well, your association of 'aslan' with 'Aslan' is well-founded, though you don't yet know it. See, the word 'aslan', or so my sources inform me, translates from the Turkish to 'lion'.

To rephrase, my point of information is as follows;

"Aslan is Turkish for lion."

Happy Trails, and may your next point of information also be a translation from the Turkish Tongue (Tongue of Turkishes).

Regards and Peaches,

Billy

In An Automated Fashion

2007-07-03T03:00:00.000Z

Veins

In a couple of million years (a pretty short time when you think about it), The New Dinosaurs will find some pretty excellent veins of aluminium ore on the sites of what The Middle Dinosaurs called “Landfill Sites”. Great towns will spring up around these most fruitful of veins, they’ll prosper, with all the New Dinosaur amenities, until the sources dry up and the towns begin to wither and die. There’ll be some real doldrums economically speaking before the service sector saves the day.

Aluminium will be shipped in while the residents write out receipts. It’s a pity there was no lightning back then, else they’d have had electric typewriters, Earth* willing.

*Steve, as they called her

“I wouldn’t… but I’m going to”

There’s none of what we (often quaintly) call rivalry among The New Dinosaurs; on the contrary, there’s a great communalism in their society, coupled inextricably with a pioneering spirit that would put our 18^th and 19^th Centuries to shame. It was quite by accident (with, of course, the requisite quotient of pure New Dinosaur Vigilance) that they (that’s they collectively) unlocked the secrets of Fusion. I shan’t bore you with detail, suffice it to say that it was most unfortunate, not to say ethically unwarranted, that the end came about; The New Dinosaurs cannot be blamed by any reasonable court of law. Natural curiosity can never be condemned, and it was and it was an unforeseeable happenstance that launched Steve into the Sun* while the rockets crept eventually into the orbit of the shoe factory where Mars used to be.

By this time aluminium could be synthesised quite easily and in an automated fashion.

*Croquet

Henry and Sex

2007-06-28T07:47:00.000Z

Henry the Bruiser, with muscles on his elbows, took to anal penetration like a kipper to water, grateful but late; he feared the social side and always felt a longing, whatever the dildo, a scarcely definable longing that led him dimensionally speaking through the gamut, the whole catalogue of mortally crafted penetrative devices, even the novelty items. No length nor girth nor knobble, no jazzy composition of vibrations could bring him any comfort, any certitude. With heavy heart but an almost admirable single-mindedness, Henry resolved to craft himself the ultimate phallic companion with diesel-powered vibrations; he used the finest, most rarefied latex, a mould scaled up from the finest from Shergar’s bloodline, and he spent some seven years building and perfecting this most glorious erection. When the scaffolding came down it stood, in all its meticulous detail, at ninety-seven feet in height to the inch and a good twelve feet in diameter at its thickest point. When he swallowed it whole he could never have said where it touched him, but it most certainly felt like Heaven.

Dick Knockers, Sex Detective. Chapter 1.

2007-06-27T22:58:00.000Z

Dick thoughtfully packed his trunk. Every assignment presented unique challenges and this case was no different. Predictably he would need clothes. But what sort he wondered. He checked the BBC five day forecast and packed some woolly sweaters. Glasgow was particularly cold this week.

Dick slammed his door and swooped his coat on his way out. He'd spent a good hour in the shop test driving coats to ensure the perfect swoop. Finally he had settled for an ex-navy great coat. He liked the epilettes.

The train journey gave him the opportunity to put his mind in order. He thought back to the can of lager, the sofa in his living room and the FA cup final and the phone call that made him miss the winner.

The Chimneys of Orthodox Churches

2007-06-26T10:32:00.000Z

The Chimneys of Orthodox Churches
March Larch & Birch over me
In production lines
its crooks with Salts of the Earth
& clogs its pews with incense or slate.

Dynamo spat out Virgins with Children with Halos
Make a stark, (old) contrast with me,
Especially when they're dimly lit.
Unfolding my arm at my elbow I could brush one.

But I wouldn't: I'm choking on inscence
At the part where the 2/4 thumps.
And you weren't round that corner I pictured
Only concrete. on grey. on ground.

I wonder which tomb they'll think suits me,
I wonder what song they'll all sing
As I'm coughed out of Orthodox Chimneys
With Beeswax cloying my wings?

I Hope My Darling's Phone's OK

2007-06-25T17:35:00.000Z

I really miss that boy. I wish he loved me. There’s nothing I can do though, I’ve already sent him a message today. Maybe I can just call him and not say anything and hang up. But he’ll know it’s me, it comes up on the phone. Damn mobiles. It’s ok, I’ll just:
He picks up “Hello?”
I wait one and a half speech turns. I say “Hello?” I say “Hello?”
“Hi Nora? Hello?”
which I overlap with “Hello? Steven? Can you hear me?”
“Hello yes. Can you hear me?”
“Hello?” I say. I hang up and he looks at his phone as if it’s gone odd. His voice is beautiful.

Empire Burlesque

2007-06-22T06:49:00.000Z

Writ drunk.

I’ve long admired at least some of the songs on Empire Burlesque in the same manner as I’ve admired anything else by Bob; “I’ll Remember You” and “Dark Eyes” have always struck me in particular. My trouble with the album as a whole was always the production; “Never Be the Same Again” was a major offender, having once driven me, while listening on headphones, into the very depths of The Fear, necessitating a two hour walk into The Field.

Time, and my switching of principal mind-altering substance to wine, have conspired to take the edge off my unwillingness to so much as countenance what my demons still call ‘80s production. Truth, though, as I see it, is that an awful lot of it’s awful shite, but that tends to be when coupled with poor musicianship and/or a lack of imagination, roots and, for want of a better word for there is no better word, soul.

Soul is the key word here; soul in the broad sense of the realness of intent and performance, and soul in the sense of the musical idiom that goes by that name. This is nothing wholly new to Dylan, his two albums with Jerry Wexler being cases in point, but it was Empire Burlesque where he immersed himself fully in secular soul waters, writing songs with the vocabulary of Smokey Robinson and Holland-Dozier-Holland. “Emotionally Yours”, covered memorably by The O’Jays is perhaps the best example of this, along with “I’ll Remember You”, but I urge you to listen to “Trust Yourself” and The Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself” in the same sitting; the production on the former is perhaps not wholly sympathetic to the intended feel, but there can be no doubting the nod to the latter, albeit in a concoction that is one part empowerment to twenty-seven parts bitter cynicism.

There is on the album a bona fide stab at stadium rock in the form of “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky” (a fine song a rendition of which with the E. Street Band I would more often than not prefer to hear), and a handful more fairly straight rockers (the best of which is “Seeing the Real You At Last”, a song that it didn’t take me too long to appreciate, and that I’ve dug fully since the Fleadh Festival of 2004), and then of course there’s the acoustic “Dark Eyes”. The overall feel, though, and not only in the overtly soul-inflected numbers, is of Soul Music, that finest of pop forms. A return to Muscle Shoals with Jerry Wexler and his people, and a shade or two of the glorious, dirty, dense, frantic sound of Street Legal (pop’s most underrated album if I’m the judge) might very well have improved Empire Burlesque; that said, it’s a solid album devoid of bad songs and with plenty of truly grand ones.

Further Notes writ immediately afterwards:

N.B. Revise to make reference to “Seeing the Real You At Last” [I did that]

Also the abhorrent album cover… It’s Ian McLagan’s shirt, but that doesn’t explain the jacket or the graphic design; God couldn’t explain the jacket or the graphic design.

Five minutes after completing this mini-essay, I feel compelled to refute the suggestion that Empire Burlesque was Bob’s first full immersion in soul, even secular soul – Street Legal surely trumps that – Changing of the Guards, Baby Stop Crying, True Love… I think the argument still carries water, but needs refining – clarification regarding song (specifically lyric) structure… E.Y. and I.R.Y less ‘wordy’, though still very much Bob… though even that’s spurious… I’m talking shite, frankly, though I stand by most of it – it’s a fine album, sure, but probably the main reason I wrote about Empire Burlesque rather than Street Legal is the complexity of my feelings regarding the latter, a truly great album the importance of which to myself I can’t currently express…

But listen to Empire… it’s tasty…

Please, fellow Bobcats, I know what I wanted to say here but tied myself up in knots – mercy! If you can fill in any gaps in my thoughts, don’t hesitate to do so – you may know my mind better than I do. In fact, I’m sure that you do.

Who KNOWS how to look at their own name objectively!?! (a boast)

2007-06-20T08:46:00.000Z

Who knows how to look at their own name objectively!?!
Well I do. More than a couple of weeks ago Ian and I were in my bar quite drunk when somehow (I would have prompted it, you know what I’m like) Ian said “Emily Pear!” and I finally saw how ridiculous my surname really is and it sounded like the newest thing I had ever heard.

Jack said there's too much fiction on here and not enough..well....non-fiction

2007-06-20T08:41:00.000Z

About a minute ago I was lying on my bed thinking about what to write down, with my face turned away from my cat, who had his front feet on my hip. I knew it was my cat there but suddenly he started to touch my right hand in a way that felt so much like a giant bumblebee that for a moment I was convinced and frightened like a nightmare.

Frank and Fish

2007-06-20T08:11:00.000Z

Old Frank the fisherman was always brimming over with his tales of aquatic heroism. There was the time he wrestled an octopus that had hold of some damsel or another. Then there was the time he clobbered a hammer-head shark. Usually I’d just nod and smile, but there was one evening I felt a touch mischievous.

“Frank,” I said, “What I want to know is, have you ever been involved in a battle of any sort with a Great White?”

Frank looked startled, “Oh, Heavens!” he said, fingers twitching nervously at his pint, “Sure, I’d have more sense than that!”

“I see,” said I, “Well, I suppose it’s a different mettle of fish.”

Old Frank was crestfallen.

Dead Grass

2007-06-17T01:13:00.000Z

Fitz was to gardening what a pathologist is to the healthcare professions. Susan was unquaveringly enthusiastic, though fickle as to the object of her attentions. She was young. It was late spring and the last of the healthy young birds were fledging. Some eggs lay cold, useless and abandoned. The flowers near the house were flourishing to varying degrees, but the lawn was dead. Susan’s family made the necessary calls, and Fitz duly arrived. His reputation, an estimable one, preceded him, and not undeservedly so.

There was little he could do, he said, given how late it was in the season, but he instructed them well for the next year. He looked at Susan, a little wistfully. She was pretty. He accepted payment graciously and headed home, his working day being over.

Susan is old now, and Fitz is dead.

Bitter words

2007-06-14T00:38:00.000Z

Johan sighed. "Remember Spain?"

"Ah yes," replied Matilda from his lap "the beach".

"I was drowning and you didn't even know I was in the water".

"I was looking at the sun loungers".

A Paragraph

2007-06-12T14:27:00.000Z

And I tried to hide the cracks in our marriage; spraying air freshener to cover the lazy smell of marijuana that lingered in the air of our living room. It was clear to us both that our love had none of the complacency of our eager first love. We had 3 years of marriage behind us and we both knew they had been too hard.

Thunder

2007-06-12T04:24:00.000Z

Thunder rumbles gratefully
The deluge begins
A grey sky pours itself out
Hoping to be blue come morning.

Thicket 39

2007-06-05T19:39:00.000Z

RATS

Thicket 39

GRAVY 2003

Founded by Dr Herschel Rat in 1142, Rats has for generations crafted scintillating and award-winning gravies. The Thicket gravies “tick all the boxes”, if you will, when it comes to Dr Rat’s philosophy of selecting the very best grapes from premium gravy regions. Remember – if you can still see come dawn, it isn’t really gravy. Now is it?

Toadstools are used to guarantee freshness.

Gravy Style: a three-bodied, unbalanced gravy with crab and thistle aromas, and a tubercular aftertaste.

Enjoy With: raw meat dishes and great caution.

Serve at body temperature.

The Boatman: Part Three of Three

2007-06-01T22:46:00.000Z

With a full mind to throwing herself body and soul into the river that would be her grave, the young woman flew into a bitter despair and flung her pouch, tearing its strap, at the silt of the shore. It burst open, spilling all that was in it; coins were hurled into the reeds, others hit dry ground and rolled; gems and jewels, gold and silver lay scattered all around. Her poems fluttered in the slightest of breezes and her sketches of Spain grew blotched with the damp. Her attention was nowhere, but Jones looked keenly at this conflagration of beads and personal effects. His gaze was drawn immediately to near the very centre of the spread.

Had she been looking in this instant, she would not perhaps have understood its meaning, but the crisp, clear, solar gleam of the apple could not have escaped her notice. Indeed, when she did turn in the midst of her pain, she froze, despite herself, in a scarcely witting wonder. She had picked that apple, or an apple from the usual tree, and placed it with her bread and cheese as had become habitual; it was lunch. She made no sound nor moved for long enough to find her mind empty of thought when next she knew where she was.

“I believe you asked for passage?” said the boatman.

She said nothing.

“If your hunger can resist that particular portion of your meal,” and there was no need for him to gesture towards the apple, nor did he, “Then I shall allay your… worries, and take you aboard.”

She still said nothing, but turned to look at him, eyes wide and open.

“It won’t be a direct trip,” he warned, “As that payment would be too great for a simple river-crossing. But the return journey will be assured, should you wish for it. And yes, you can reach the other side, though I can’t guarantee a precise timeframe; there’ll be plentiful wine where we’ll be going, and so you shall certainly have the means to pay. It’s a feast, see?” he intoned what was almost a request.

She assented wordlessly, moving towards the boat. She grasped the apple, the light of which made even the copper coins shine in constellations. Everything else she left, without a thought to picking it up.

“And please,” said the boatman, “Call me Jones.”

Beat (abridged)

2007-06-01T11:53:00.000Z

This is a heart…
It’s got this beat… as you can see it consists of four main compartments and this beat… to the left of it we can find an executed sprawl of vessels arriving and departing about it.
It moves frequently, periodically and when it doesn’t we’ll be atoned. (Otherwise, we’ll presume that it’s still got that beat.)
It doesn’t look anything like those hearts you see in shops, the shape cakes are made into, the ones Saint Valentine coos over. They parade as hearts though, ‘coz that’s what they are: Symbols of cardiac muscle in cardiac sac. But more importantly, for the card industry, symbols of Love.
When this age old association began, between one organ and our most analysed emotion, is unclear though I suspect it was the Romans. I’m sure many will disagree, but an organ in both appearance and function is far from romantic and, kinda, bereft of passion- imagine a bloody, bloody heart with a filthy beat being tied with a bow and given to you. Perhaps with a kiss and an apology or left secretly on your doorstep or in some cases backing up an impromptu proposal.
Maybe, pre anatomy the heart really did harbour love and hate, it probably did look like the ones fluffy bears hold but that isn’t what made me ask the question.
I feel Love in my Guts, some skin, these achin’ bones and, now and then, the back of my head. But in the heart? Not that I know of. Even if it were all in the heart, the consumer version lacks the only bit of the heart that could keep ardour & fervour. It doesn’t have that beat.

The Boatman: Part Two of Three

2007-05-31T22:49:00.000Z

This particular circumstance repeated itself on a number of occasions. The young woman tried carrying several flagons at a time, she tried transporting them in a basket, even once in a wheelbarrow, but always, in one way or another, the wine contrived to spill itself on the ground before she reached the boatman. Usually it was a simple case of the skin splitting (though there is nothing simple in the splitting of four or five seemingly well-made flagons in the course of one journey), but more than once the reason for the spillage was more surprising. For instance, one day a swan flew at her and she dropped her basket, another day she was knocked off her feet by a pack of handsome hounds as a bugle called someway behind, and the day she brought the wheelbarrow it was struck by lightning and escaped her grip, trundling into a fearsome ravine. She felt very unlucky, and exceedingly hard done by.

One constant, and it didn’t escape the young woman’s attention, was that the wine was always spilt nearer to her destination than to her point of departure. She assumed after a while that this was some mean, tantalising trick of fate, as sometimes she could hear the lapping of the river at the shore when the wine was spilt, so close was she to success. She never once made it to the edge of the woods, though, with a drop of wine left in her possession. She always, however, completed her journey and, with less optimism every time, tried to bargain with Jones. She offered many things; yet more money, more jewels, bread and meat, fur and feathers, even herself eventually, but the answer was always the same.

It was on the day that he spurned this last offer that she reached the very end of her tether and, weeping copiously, told Jones the following;

“You know my face well enough by now, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve asked you for passage. I’ll tell you now what I shouldn’t wonder you have long since guessed, and that is that my true love is on yonder bank, and that I mean to be reunited with him. Since he cannot know he would find me here, I daresay he’s given up hope, but a promise is a promise, and if you refuse to ferry me today, I shall swim, although that the water is wide and I shall certainly drown. I shall leave you my pouch with all of its riches, for better it remain with you, dear boatman, than that it drown with me. For while I lie clay-cold and eaten by fishes, it may yet bring me solace to think that perhaps you have made your way to town to buy wine with that money for the dry mouth that so afflicts you.”

Jones said nothing at first, but gave a wry chuckle. He looked for a moment or so at this young woman, miserably awaiting his response.

“My dear,” he said presently, “I hope you have a good lunch with you, as I would hate to think of you undertaking so arduous a task on an empty stomach.”

Track 2: Have I Been Rescued? (The Ballad of the Broke-Down Blue)

2007-05-31T08:58:00.000Z

(Introduction: Strictly Bass and Mouth Organ
Then a gradual wave of Gospel- getting louder and louder, like a Mouthie. Then).

Oh Gospel, could you hear me
when the water lapped my waist?
Heard nothin’ to alarm me
Put that devil in his place
Now just a dice roll from delusion
I blinked every second frame
I counted angles in the alleys
Every one was just the same.
Now my baby’s out of earshot
And she better be as blue
The pavement full of fractures
For my wails to drip into

Chorus:
You let me bawl about my baby
When I shoulda been asleep?
How could you let my fingers tremble?
Yeah, Let me bawl about that girl.

Say Gospel, could ya hear me
As the water touched my chest?
Don’t set fire to the bar-side, they said
But it was just a test.
I just don’t have the guts for heaven
and hell don’t have the guts for me.
You wear your sins like jewellery
And Now Honey, you’re guilt free

Chorus:
You let me bawl about my baby
When I shoulda been asleep.
How could you let my stomach empty?
Well let me bawl about my girl.

But tell me…
Gospel could you hear me
As the water reached my neck?
I was overcast with moonshine
I just hadn’t thought to check.
All my jokes before the bar side
fell flat out on their designs
So I plot a graph from Britain
To the Jwaneng Diamond Mines.

Chorus:
You let me bawl about my baby
When I shoulda been asleep.
How could you let my gizzards tangle?
Well let me bawl about my girl.

For Godssake Gospel won’t you hear me
Now the water’s overhead?
I’m screaming can’t you hear me!?
It’s hopeless now to tread.

Chorus:
You let me bawl about my baby
When I shoulda been asleep!
How couldya let my lungs fill
Lord I coulda been asleep!
All of this is your fault
So let me
Bawl
About
The
Girl.

The Boatman: Part One of Three

2007-05-30T22:42:00.000Z

Where Lethe forgets what it is and becomes Eridanos of no fixed designation, the water leaves the foggy gloom and is home to Nyami Nyami, merry snake with his basket of bread, and the banks are green; the Southern shore is the reflection of the fields of Aaru in earthier hues, still ripe with reeds; the Northern shore is Salley Gardens, where pleasant men weep silently to strains of The Waters of Tyne, strummed for coppers by Orpheus, on the lam with his lyre. Lethe remembers sometimes to dip her feet in the river that bore her name upstream, just to be sure it’s still moving. She’s on the Salley side. A jetty juts from either bank a little further downstream, where the meanders of Eridanos first mingle with the flowing of Ymir’s blood from the North Sea. For a flagon of wine, the boatman (Jones to his friends) will take you across from shore to shore. Throw in a golden apple, or even a simple apple crumble, and you might persuade him to take you out to sea, across chopping waves on his little wicker ferry, to the bay where cormorants swoop at the backs of fishermen unawares, the shore where the first of the Eastern guests, the Three Pure Ones and Rostam the champion, have already crossed the beach and are on the road that will take them to the Court of King Jelly Roll, for the feast.

A young woman came down to the jetty one morning where Jones sat smoking his pipe. They were on the south side.

“Boatman,” she said, and he looked up, smiling slightly, “Will you ferry me across the river?”

“Of course dear,” he said, “If you have the means to pay.”

“Certainly I do,” she said, reaching towards her pouch, “Should I pay you now or later?”

“Now, I should think,” said Jones, amusedly, “But what manner of vessel is that for transporting wine?”

Both were looking at the pouch, “It... isn’t,” said the young woman, “It’s full of money and such things.”

“Ah, yes. Hard currency. It’s wine I’ll be needing, though. That money stuff’s wasted on me, dear.”

“But I haven’t any wine,” she protested, “And I do have rather a lot of money, coins of all denominations, and traveller’s cheques too!”

It was no use, though, and Jones told her, kindly enough, to return again with wine, and passage would be assured. And so she headed off, somewhat frustrated.

The next day, or two days later, she arrived at the jetty just as Jones’s boat returned, unladen, from the other side. She walked down and crouched to repeat her previous request.

“Of course dear,” he said, “But I shall need a sip of that wine first, for it’s thirsty work being a boatman. More than you might realize. You do have the means to pay, yes?”

“I did…,” she began, hesitantly, raising the remnants of a flagon, “But it was spilt on the way…”

“Oh dear.”

“I was hoping, perhaps, to offer you this instead,” she said, holding out a diamond ring.

“Hmm,” pondered Jones, “I’m sure it’s pretty enough to look at, but I daresay it does very little for a dry mouth. It’ll have to be wine, I’m afraid.”

She sighed and headed off.

Some Advice from a Centipede

2007-05-27T04:19:00.000Z

Melody stood with her back to the wall with the stench of freshly cut durian spoiling the thick hot air, and knew that this then was Hong Kong.
Leering doorways called to her from across the street.
“We are dark. We are dirty and our humidity is high. Enter us, enter us.”
A dark blush started low on Melody’s chest…spreading upwards like ants to her neck and her cheeks. I have those fat cheeks that fat people have, she thought, those fat cheeks with little veins on the surface that swell when they blush so I look like a map.
In fact Melody was very thin but she was very unattractive. She was right to hate herself, she was right.
She pulled a giant pin from out of her belly and flopped off the wall where she had been for the last half hour. She saw with some relief a man on the corner, and she made her way towards him.
He was very carefully spitting into a cup. He was very old.
Is it spit or is it vomit? thought Melody.
The man coughed and spurted a thick yellow bubbly fluid from between his chaffed lips into the plastic cup, already three quarters full. He then looked up at her, eyes sly, and hissed.
Ssssiiiiisssssssssssshh!
Then he nodded at her smiling, only not with any part of his face. He carefully put the cup down, almost proudly, and reached into his grubby nylon tracksuit bottoms. His foul hand came back out with a little brown package, which he thrust at Melody.
“Take it, take this! It’s from in my foul! It’s from my not good!”
You can’t talk English! Melody thought, You can’t!
She ran away.
“Mmmhmm yes…trickly trickle down…we’re deep inside.”
The doorways were back…she was back on her wall. She felt the pin jump at her soft belly and penetrate her skin…forcing her rigid against the wall.
What is in my pocket?
Her tender fingers, shaking with shock burrowed into her cardigan pocket and touched crinkly brown paper. It was the package from the man.
Did I take this? She sobbed and her tears helped her slump down into a squatting position, the pin forgotten.
Her fingers were bone white now as they opened the small parcel. It looked like it could contain no more than a small packet of coins, or perhaps some dried rice. Carefully each corner was folder out, and she gently tore all down one side. She tipped the contents onto her hand so suddenly that she did not have time to scream as the large red centipede slid out and lay, curled up, on her palm.
The centipede moved.
His red shiny head pulsed out from the coils, and his mouth opened into a smile.
“One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter” he seemed to say…but then, did I just think that? Melody was feeling dizzy…I’m not in Wonderland for christ’s sake…I’m in…Hong Kong…
The doorways seemed to be growing around her like huge black teeth…Melody glanced up in fear.
The sky is getting further away!
With horror she glanced down at her hand and saw only half a centipede…writhing and bleeding onto her skin.
She gagged and spluttered, falling onto all fours as she retched, coughing up a few red legs.
But no head.
Without any more control she felt herself crawling along the dirty pavement.
Her dress was ripping and now so were her knees.
Everything was getting dark she noted, everything is getting wet.
The doorways! She screamed inside her head, They’re eating me!

“IN! IN! IN! IN!”

And then silence. An almost empty street but for an old man with a cup, half a centipede, some brown paper and a pin.