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

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

Long Haired Cat

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

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

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

Lemons

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

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

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

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

Limes

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

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

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

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

What isn't happening in here?

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

What is happening out there?

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

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

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

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

(Wishful thinking, cunt)


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

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

JOHN

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

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

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

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

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

The Mirror Scene (Again)

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

Demanding Higher

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

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

Goodbye, Bo

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



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



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



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

if only everything was the cinema

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

Txt Msg

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

Poem on the Back of Jack's Face

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

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