Untitled Poem 30/5

To take the un-mechanic heat
Of bright blue days streaked
With the vernacular of a slut
Or the beginning of hunger
In a big faceless gut,

Is to slump home un-smiling,
A definite discipline while
The carbon monoxide of a teenager
Is the most tempting substance
To harden the average ranger,

And such tempting tasks
Asks my structure to bone
I moan and groan,
I still don’t know –
I still don’t know if I want to know.

**Wrote this in about 15 minutes from top of my head and haven't edited it or anything. It's how it looks on the page were I wrote it. I don't know if I want to change it.. don't know if I like it.

Ideas came from heat outside, then the miserble time coming home from work, and the last stanza is just words thrown together. "Tempting tasks" is probably what is about. Might make that the title.

faces #1

Some Photos 25/5/09

Automatic Writing While Listening To Manic Street Preachers

I could have been a million and one times the best before you as I can breathe revulsion as tragic shaking kids collapse making a killing, and me a delightful uncle in the stars were I can’t be blessed and more than often to see one more time I wouldn’t ask anymore, and I’d do it all another million and one times and smile and smile while the world grew up and grew down and locked itself away behind barbed wire with the freaks with no souls in the empty hole in the middle shining bright like suns then disappear like a nova and fading like old drunk memory and you weren’t here for me and you weren’t here for them – don’t! You run along, you’re nothing you’re a rat and I could step on you, Look at me – it kills me to see you like this and stand up as you are and collapse to the ground and I miss the old times when we’d have feet to stand on, just as well she can’t see me – I shine I glow – I don’t believe in God because I’m just as ignorant – I am a human animal – I need to see a human, this freak has no human here, finish –

Dream

I work in a library. I have no connections to anyone and I avoid everyone except one man I befriend. I use this man to talk to others for me. We become close-friends.

When a young man and woman arrive there, it annoys me because I hate new people even more than the people around me. I go out of my way to avoid them, so much that they don’t even see me around. I use my friend to talk to them. When the woman comes round a corner in the library and bumps into me, she stops, completely frozen and looks amazed or shocked, then hugs me.

Not knowing why she did that, I step back. The man comes over and looks at me. Suddenly they both look older. The man staring at me leans towards me and touches my stomach and it hurts so much that I scream a little and I have to push his hand away. There is a hole in my stomach.

They call me their son, talking to me like I am a child. It turns out that I had been dead for some time, and they were my parents. I had been stabbed in the past.



**This was an actual dream from 2 nights ago. I actually felt something like pain when the 'father' touched my stomach. The father also looked like Robin Williams when he changed to look older.

2 Discarded Untitled Poems

#1
This dog can’t believe a word you say –
At last desert calls to me cannibal
Music eats itself –

Squares of grass deploy machinery
Into air, they hear everything –
This dog feels waves of fear and power
(It looked like the sun),

This old dog has green eyes
And already has the evil eye –
Mysterious blood with history
And war and peace with no one to listen –
And I am a dog that sits
On Bermuda shores with sand in paws
And Mata Hari outside the gates of Eden;

The chill in the skin of my ear,
The air is a woman
Beside an old dog,
She weeps rose-water in the stars –

The dog sends her to war,
And there are no words to question
And the dog carefully nods
And this dog watches you on your way.


#2
Mozart and Beethoven
Laughing in the Eiffel Tower

They’re planting seeds in the headdress,
Reaping words the brains might flower,

Now the rusty actors in a cage
Praying for rainstorms and pain,

They’re inside the screens wearing their roses
Killing off all kinds of people in togas,

The slaves are hungry now, the prisons are empty
And oxygen-fat Henry riding the rodeo,
Inside the tin shed the beds are

Lying in a row,

I pocket all the watches
And lean against Pisa,
See the cavalry crying
And now the glosol is dying,

See the fat pumpkins
Lying on their sides,
Eating all kinds of fish,
They put coins into a dish and makes a wish.


**Don't think either have been edited, they appear as I wrote them down. I might have moved some lines in the first one for line breaks. First one might turn into something a little bigger, or mix it with something else.

#2 is just an experiment with rhythm. It is a lyric, but I wrote no music for it because I didn't want to.

These are pretty much an example of what I'd discard, simply because I don't like them and have no plans to touch them again.

Poets

Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, William S Burroughs, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas, JH Prynne, William Blake, Anne Sexton, Robin Purves, Peter Manson, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Jennifer Moxley

Musicians: Bob Dylan, Frank Turner, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed

**I have only read one poem of Robin Purves (he was my tutor at University). It is called "Dio Calm." He is friends with Peter Manson, whom I've read, though I haven't met him. They are both Scottish.

Robin Purves showed me a Jennifer Moxley poem. She is an American from San Diego, California, and I've never met her.

I've been influenced by the beat poets, even learning beat rhythm, but mostly learning rhythm from different types of music.

Bukowski helps get rid of that pretentiousness you might get in poetry.

The French poets are good for their imagery, and I love good imagery and metaphor, I was even told to tone down my metaphors at uni. I especially love Plath's imagery and style.

I can't play music or write music very well. But I listen to it constantly. Rock, Jazz, Punk, Folk... Bob Dylan is great for poetry in songs.

Blonde

With a face on you’d suffocate yourself
Screaming like harmonica skeletons
Silver like scowling moons
On Earth a god pulls your hair
And a man hanged from a yew tree
Is keeping an eye on you –
Strong-tongued fem
Digs the loam and hem places you inside:
Inside you scream like dogs
Being beaten by hysterical men
That betray you at your
Unwashed feet cracking at thorny brown
Grass beneath feet you shoulder thru
Gaps between myself and you –
Your bad manners place you on shelves –
Your blonde hair does nothing for you,
Each edible morning mattress of fog:
Easily a free heath –
Suckling stillborn, the screaming
Mothers just like you,
Dressed in white and blue
Your brown hair does nothing for you.

(Editorial note: Whole thing written and edited in 25 minutes).

**I like to think this is an angry poem.

Zygote

The grind of train wheels
Slick at the track,
Scares off the rats
That echo in their black waters.

A millennium of winters
Enters each whiskered girl
Which buys each white leg
Grown to charm snakes:

Or charm the charmer.

The bounce of sunrise in cold water
Frosted glass all reflections ghost
Most poppy beds rest tired heads;
Crow abstracts his thoughts absent daughter,
The mirror of fearful backwards man

Makes pseudonym into a grin,
And thanks him for the feast,
And she – a stalk – settles the score
Mirror reads: Tuo;

Our two tawdry minds
Distilled – we embark in single file –
And when songbirds rush to the pulp
Of this embryo, never existed anyway.


(Written in about an hour. Wrote one side of A5 paper of notes, typed up, then moved some lines around. Had a mirror in room, on floor leaning againt wall, and cold glass of water. Heard birds outside. Line: "Millennium of winters" came from Frank Turner lyric "She went winters without me," which I thought sounded like "She went ten winters without me." I just took what I thought, and changed it to millennium.

"Tuo" is pronounced "Two." It is the mirror reflection of "Out."

I also took the first two stanzas and put them in a poem of their own:

The grind of train wheels
Slick at the track,
Scares off the rats
That echo in their black waters.

A millennium of winters
Enters each whiskered girl
Which buys each white leg
Grown to charm snakes:
Or charm the charmer.

Poppy

A painting I did a couple of weeks ago.

Last Day Girl # 1 & 2

Last Day Gil # 1 (First Draft)

Wind sways Earth,
Hail falls to ground.
Scaffolding netting flags
The Earth set sail.
Mysterious winds push planet forward,
Harsh grey sky vanishes Heaven;
Drainpipes point upwards
The suicidal looks down,
A man amongst gods
The movement is electric
And full of very discreet yearnings.


Last Day Girl # 2 (second draft)

Wind sways Earth hail
Falls to ground scaffolding
Netting flags the Earth
Sets sail mysterious winds
Push planet grey
Sky vanishes;
Drainpipes point upwards
Suicidal looks down a man
Amongst gods the movement is electric
And of cautious craving,
I felt waves of fear
And power sensation of warmth
Looked like sun on mountain:
End of world is this really
Hell? The love of my life,
This dog can’t believe a word
You say you are machinery
Made of sparking nuclear eyes.

I haven't written much because I've been in training. I've written some songs just to see if I could put music to them, wasn't a complete failure, but I didn't care for them. This poem here I wrote in about 10 minutes and drafted in about the same time. It came from watching the wind blowing outside; it stupidly ended up about a girl.

http://www.justgiving.com/michaelholloway

Bob Dylan in Concert - and In Training

Saw Bob Dylan on friday and he was amazing. The way he sings now, it's hard to tell what the song was until you recognise a line and you're like "Oh yeah, that.." He did 'Something' by The Beatles, a tribute to the city, which was great, and everyone cheered when we heard the tune. Halfway through some idiot jumped onto the stage and was tacked by security before he interupted Bob, who didn't even falter. It was annoying that people were walking around, going to the bar or the toilet, having to stand up to let them past, as if they weren't bothered about Dylan at all. I heard someone shout "Play something we know" (also, someone told me that someone on the radio said there was booing, but I didn't hear boing).

Thebest part was the final song. After years of not touching his early songs, he does 'Blowin' in the Wind' and it was amazing. I couldn't tell what it was at first because he'd changed the song's rhythm completely, but it was so good to hear him sing that classic.

Afterwards we went drinking in my favorite bar. I snuck downstairs to see a band playing. I came back up to get my friends and we snuck back down. I got home around 2am. I got up for work at 5am. You can imagine how tired I was.

So now I'm in training for this bike ride across the desert. I've raised a couple of hundred so far. But need more to reach the target. I'm so un-fit right now, I ache after a game of football and 10 sit-ups. 4 months to get ready, though.