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

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

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

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

The Mirror Scene (Again)

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

Demanding Higher

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

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

Goodbye, Bo

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



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



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



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

if only everything was the cinema

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

Txt Msg

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

Poem on the Back of Jack's Face

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

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

London - Verse One

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


I live in a crack den in Camden,

Those crack fiends stole most of my cheese,

They invited me to their crack party,

A party of cocaine and thieves.

childhood trauma

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

Observation

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

Patrician Families

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

Poor Pedro

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

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

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

An excerpt from the upcoming.

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

Bendy Satan - a synopsis

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

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

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

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

Contains scenes of unmitigated terror.

Funfair #1

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

Funfair #1

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

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

Candyfloss! (We might as well…)

Trouble comes whispered as you lie half-sleeping

Before it closes –

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

In the morning – hard to analyse)

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

Why are you dreaming of the funfair, sister?

What dodgem schemes are up your sleeve

That you don’t know?

Candyfloss? We might as well –

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

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

Dreams are inevitably analogue…

The subject, unsurprisingly, the object, worryingly,

Changes – changes – changes…

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

merry… candyfloss… we might as well…

Get sticky, put your sticky toes in my mouth…

Ride dodgems, war with other children…

Would you like a cigarette?

Let’s smoke behind

The bike shed, baby,

What’s this funfair with a bike shed,

Are you dreaming?

Candyfloss, we might as well… eat it?

Suck it slurp it wake the neighbours,

Dribble down your chin all pink and – sticky!

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

Now it’s rising in this carousel,

The pinkest tide of your sweet spittle,

Rising – sticky! And it’s reaching

To our noses, how much longer can we last?

Candyfloss? We might as well here as

I dive into the mess and lick your

Tiny anus, but not clean.

February 2006