Saturday, 3 December 2011
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Untitled Poem and Lee Evans
Together at last, a circle of inconspicuous trust
Leaves me here at the very foot of want.
On the bed the pillows are fat.
A mounting wave of quiet.
Here the torments are less so.
Incongruent as the eye-mote,
What is this improper carbon copy of my thoughts?
Even without a word, we lie together alone,
The blackness doesn't touch us in lamplight,
That night burns its bishops alive,
It lights us now – scantily clad,
Half-drunk on nothing,
Lying half-still,
Half-touching – perhaps one of us will never speak.
I wrote this recently after reading my favourite book of poems again, Sylvia Plath's The Colossus. I read it when I was studying my undergrad in around 2007/08. It's about being with no one but my thoughts.
I met Lee Evans in Liverpool, doing a book signing.
Leaves me here at the very foot of want.
On the bed the pillows are fat.
A mounting wave of quiet.
Here the torments are less so.
Incongruent as the eye-mote,
What is this improper carbon copy of my thoughts?
Even without a word, we lie together alone,
The blackness doesn't touch us in lamplight,
That night burns its bishops alive,
It lights us now – scantily clad,
Half-drunk on nothing,
Lying half-still,
Half-touching – perhaps one of us will never speak.
I wrote this recently after reading my favourite book of poems again, Sylvia Plath's The Colossus. I read it when I was studying my undergrad in around 2007/08. It's about being with no one but my thoughts.
I met Lee Evans in Liverpool, doing a book signing.
Thursday, 24 November 2011
poem 22/11
Which children echoing their thoughts?
I thought it was over.
Each one, as myself, a little younger,
Pretends to be an aeroplane.
Do you like to wear Spiderman shoes?
He asks. Whatever you tell it, you protect it.
Now I am the sort of person who forgets.
Rest easy, little glow on the shore.
Slowly in the evening, same place as before,
My shadow shrinks. The sand is gold spray-paint.
I breathe to rid myself of headaches.
Who are the children who once was me?
I thought it was over.
Each one, as myself, a little younger,
Pretends to be an aeroplane.
Do you like to wear Spiderman shoes?
He asks. Whatever you tell it, you protect it.
Now I am the sort of person who forgets.
Rest easy, little glow on the shore.
Slowly in the evening, same place as before,
My shadow shrinks. The sand is gold spray-paint.
I breathe to rid myself of headaches.
Who are the children who once was me?
Tuesday, 22 November 2011
Some Thoughts on My Novels & Poems
Untitled Poem (from 21/11/11)
I have given it all married to my own mistakes,
Shaped to a tantamount of bruises to your early years
as a baby.
I am now pressed to a wind of desires,
Forever compelled to change every pregnant thought.
On this day I discovered myself for the hundredth time –
I am one hundred people whose few gestures tends to motion
the air.
I am a beehive of sleep, kept awake, buzzing with life,
It forms a solitary leader to fix its problems.
The king of death mutters in my ear about me.
At the window, a fog of howling moonlight.
It's possible to think that everything in literature is tantamount to perfect art, like I prescribe myself almost daily on the production of something, to strive to make it faultless and absolute. It's very difficult. To quote a friend last wednesday: "Writing is a pain in the ass." And it is. But only because the pressure of where we are (my friends and I) that were are Master of Arts graduates who ahould be better than the new load of students progressing thru the uni doors and yet miles behind a million faces of great literature, of which names echo around me that form such works that I have not even read.
One being Don DeLillio's Underworld. I have the book and I won't read it until I've finished Murakami's 1Q84, but even these two books I have mentioned are evidence that I'm seeing to great - living - writers, whose style I can't quite understand to be better than what I put on the paper. And so the learning goes on. So I go thru a number of instances of dictating another author's work and call it my own. Then I decide mine is my style, a completely new work of originality and of so consequence to anything else.
So the point being that I wouldn't not know how good I am until I'm out there is plain sight to be either lauded or chastised, and that's scary to think. I spent over a year on my first novel. I loved it at times and other times I loathed it. I finished it a few months ago and put it away. I began an attempt at my second novel being around 1000 pages like Underworld or Infinite Jest, but I stopped. I realised I was pushing myself to hard and it didn't work that way. Bukowski once said you can't force great writing, you just have to let it come out - to paraphrase.
I began novel three. A short novel. Stylistically like Burrough's Junky and similar to Camus' The Outsider. But the same dark comedy resided from my first novel that my peers had liked about my writing. So I suppose it takes another piece of writing to reveal style. My third novel is, at the moment, just over 15,000 words. The Outsider is around 35,000 and is up to 125 pages more or less. So that's a good sized novel or novella. I finished my first novel at near 50,000 words. I think I'll have it published in the next few months. Maybe I could commercialise myself and become a walking TV ad for my own existence.
It took three novel attempts to understand my writing. I read over my first novel yesterday I thought maybe it's not so bad. It just needs one more edit. The 1000 page second novel, my very own Infinite Jest (which I did finish, all nine months later as if I carried that massive book like a baby) I will have to spend some time on. I think Wallace only spent 5 years on that. Didn't Joyce spent 15 on Ulysses? Patience is a virtue but I don't have that kind of patience. I rush ahead and when I don't like it I move on to something else. My wiser self tells me to stop this. Joyce wrote three novels. Wallace wrote three novels. Kafka wrote three novels. So far, so have I, I'd like to join that club, but it's far too exclusive.
My cat under a tree. A cat appears a number of times in my first novel.
I've begun writing poetry again. I went to a reading in Blackburne House last wednesday. I read out a poem called Spanish Fly:
Spanish Fly
It's god bursts forth
Shouting and screaming at the television,
It's only female child loved religiously
Draws a picture addressed to itself,
It's high-and-mighty, selfish personality
Loves itself more than it loves you,
It's only love lasts hours
Destroyed only by an atomic bomb,
It's sideways hallucinogenic dreams of darkness
Once ended up on the outskirts of Kent,
It's only woman who knows nothing about literature
Finds herself victimised from the books she's read,
It's extraordinary delight in the past still and always will
Remain in the deep recesses of it's skull,
It's loud-mouth friend sometimes goes through a number of quiet bursts,
Which it finds disturbing to say the least,
It smashes a glass against the wall
Offering only the words: “No bueno,”
It then seems to hate it's friends
It's un chien andalou eyes roll back into it's head
Stands in a daguerreotype
Juxtaposed against it's parents,
It's parents smile blandly, petting a dog,
The dog is only a memory,
It once knew, at the age of 10, a young girl,
Who appeared in it's back garden, stepping over broken furniture,
It sighs momentarily then melts into the off-screen of reality
Positioning itself to be ready or not ready to talk to people,
It's devil bursts out and drinks and drinks
Whilst laughter of certain gods, who are drunk,
Watch flies kamikaze into the window
On the most un-memorable of afternoons,
It's body and spirit rises through the shit and aether
The glorious stays glorious as it withers out.
I don't get too nervous anymore, but I always get so self-conscious that I'm read ing what I think is good but believe it's not good enough. I hear other people read out. Their words tell things. Mine are, as they always have been, convoluted and weird. I always tried to calm down my writing. Bukowski helps with that.
I put together a long poem. I'm imagining The Waste Land and Howl. It new pieces stuck to old. I don't know if it's yet finished.
i
Nothing: November 16th 2011
What nothing floating over black cities, crying out for mother and father,
That nothing perhaps roots out of trees, where arm-branches and leaves
Of bodies in various shower shapes, that perhaps is nothing and forever
Wanting nothing, and is nothing, and loves nothing?
You only guess a number of times of people huddled in a downstairs café
Reading poetry until it's time to leave with a friend who cares nothing for these.
A night washes the vertigo inside and perhaps dies a little. There is a voice
I love you I love you I love you
Like almost a nightmare and fear is unfair and sadness lasting
Only hours until forgotten.
What unreal people I don't believe in kills its memory with a sting
Of death. It loves it's sister's night. It loves its sudden cold frost
Burning a winter's hand with white cloth.
We sit in a place on Hope Street afterwards and talk about books.
Then, like a collapse of time, streetlights shining oldly, a girl's cold
Words of friendship. Where she used to sit now cold and in the shape of her,
In London spirit distanced with laughter.
I walked home thinking of someone else, perhaps it is nothing?
Perhaps it is something? What is that sound? Cold flower dies quietly.
Frozen petal muted lands down near black iron-wrought gate,
Through which I walked twenty-or-so years,
Each time mesmerised by totally unordinary life until now remembering
As unordinary and beautiful and sadly missed like an old dog –
Pulls open gate as if the gate of night itself,
I was more and more tired and heavy, slowly like mercury,
Blood-coloured moon and cloud over dangerous apocalyptic weather,
Born from angelic navels glowing artificially,
Exaggerated from words spent years unsaid,
Loved for no reason and unachievable,
Beauty and wonder unearthed from beneath thousand year-old floorboards.
Not in the slightest long eternity invites us over are you still cold
Now in this weather?
And I am far from nothing, I am far from old –
I am one thing, you're another to be told.
Where you sleep – the bed you lay, the bed you sleep –
And that was us, or I, muttering at the wall
Standing 6ft. tall – one over you –
And I said show me an ounce
Of sanity in my eyes
And I'll show you the eyes of God.
ii
Black Cabs
Black cabs grabbed with thick fists in the dead of night,
Sat with women of wonderful mystery,
Stood at the doorways of your unachievable love,
Turning around and around, broken down crying wild
Intoxicated on whiskey and ecstasy from glass bottles
Pressed to the lips of Jehovah;
Nymphs in light of earthly streetlight shining orange flame skeletons
Sent sparks of light into their veins
And set their backs alight until they orgasmed in putrid fantasy
Of false hallucinations of this world and the next;
Forever each night beings of the night
Crucified their fathers in mass executions
On every street corner under the streetlight of your soul;
Who now become as holy as Almighty God in his underwear
Praying for forgiveness and more forgiveness and more –
In my head released holy angel into swampy mists of mystic night
A religious glow through heartless crowds of death,
moves and moves forever without a beat,
And moves until its feet begin to bleed
And moves until its skin is sore with the cold distance of love,
And moves while wishing for peace –
Motionless and absent from human skin
Forever moving and moving and moving
iii
Modern Life
The lives of my friends destroyed jaded mental bare naked and born
By circles of touch, solidified to human beings becoming themselves
Gilded and cross-stitched.
Morning each morning is lonely and cold
Rise early and eat and leave for work.
I saw each nuclear personality erupt beyond thinking red eyes
And botched lips. The ghost of lips the old ghost knows.
I hold the girls and think of their touch;
Come back to me each one of you.
The mortality of mothers is terrifying.
I've seen two dead bodies in my life so far –
Three including my cousin's nailed-down coffin –
Four including my father's coffin on my back
Heaving it thru long miles of graveyard –
I saw volatile people breaking bottles, windows, shoving car alarms,
Stony faces hooded violence and hate
Unnatural rebel the heartless conscience
Nasty screaming hateful bastards butcher knives
No beds for these, No beds for these;
I began my work at the end of June
When the stink had gone – my relative shark of time –
My fantasies for each dull cardboard year –
Go now and look for money,
Old politician bastards on their pedestals or thrones
Throw down bits of bread for us to eat.
Living in warm layered bodies burning anciently
Destroyed by the human forms another
Academic war-lords bang on the drum
My friends vanished and re-appeared as someone else,
Death and love becoming themselves
A slow & bashful taste becoming mindless
Musicians searching for a future,
Mindful washcloth; showers scalding,
Blisters bathed and nursed in white plastic rooms
Unnatural foliage, unreal people, crawling and dragging our bodies
Over long miles of hallow ground,
Hiding ourselves selling ourselves hinting
At nothing that exists between concrete,
Soaking floors glistening too much in sunlight
Sweat washed with rain over face,
The smell of half of my life
No money standing
Smoking calling the girls, frightened rabbits at every
Slammed door at dawn bearded sunlight,
Does not even echo,
Poetry to die for in purgatory
Illuminated nightmares
Keel over without eating for hours on end,
Ribs showing muscles still there soft
Atrophied shrivelled tongues being put
In the most natural of places
In Hell with everyone else.
iv
The Death of God: 19\10
I killed God with a knife.
I never prayed at all like I never did,
And now it's dead.
Father of soil now much longer a night can live.
I have always been scared like a fish
Caught onto a swastika hook.
A look of Yad-Vashem from either side you shadow a morning,
World cold, empty and normal, to buy things.
Fear hidden behind smiles frowns and shopping bags.
Grey movements bare claw branches dazzling light over Lion & Unicorn
Radiates power thru window globes of light – orbed like eye-lens –
An earth-explosion howls and speaks to me
The world flashes swells and bursts and reveals
Wet footprints bulge in “O” shapes
Thick shadows like sharp black tongues
Fish-hooked barbed wire anti-clockwise snail-greasy tracks
Trodden one foot on life,
Ave Maria frozen in the gutter
The window steams and outside a man falls to his death.
World dead and bright, garden tarpaulin pulled over – held down
By plank of wood – clean clean invisible air freezing cold
The glowing hysterical road – Dies irae –
Screaming incessantly as two people melt into the ground
Dancing the sky reddens softly
Broken the full moon drools sits and smiles on night
And morning the church is boarded up –
Spires shooting up like vines or weeds,
Chimneys on flat hills with the fullest of blue sky
And dead pastel green soil and sick icy road.
Then vanished from the air; marked wastes cold dark
The damp smell:
The ruined
Blackberry
Living thru the eyes of others
And I’ll refuse to pray
So I can no longer be damned
The air is whispering but the clock is talking,
Heartbreak I can’t change my violence,
Playing with the machine of creation:
See this bottle?
It’s not a bottle,
It’s a machine.
Will you marry it?
One of chief princes settles his violence
Red sky softens.
And I am less of a man
Now that I have no human body –
Now that I'm dead
Now that I've killed you and you are dead,
Now that the vulgar familiars
Of your family break away, and is dead
Like sea foam, is dead,
And I am a giant stomping the ground
Like a spoilt brat, or like a
Man annoyed that he's still not dead.
v
Machine
What brings together the bud of your existence?
An unending dog at every great white guru fleet;
It is only in your heaven your haze of not one woman
Who bore our excess of nostalgia of the doorman –
It is a distinct Ki, Swahili, in different dimensions;
My mind swells like a balloon blown up by a trumpet,
Above sand dunes lying down to the landscape;
I am brought here to destroy you.
I am in the 1980's off-camera, settling the authentic aroma of being
On camera. And this is you: begging to the preacher
Such a strange and desperate creature.
Lying down for hours in a slow rhythmic beating
A good solemn witchcraft by ourselves – while I'm sleeping.
Off to bed still like the woman before me,
Describing her features touching her smooth wintered face
Hard/cold nothing could touch this place.
The heavy not-so-glorious clouds my horizons,
Wet grass shampoo-smell, the glorious monument to our bodies is to drink,
The small microscopic antennae of the masses –
The mesmerising backsteps of anxious children
Sing into a lightbulb the light comes from my mouth,
Fades away a leaf floats in a black puddle,
Man is not like woman, where life may never end
In pools of clear bright and marble-like creatures similar to frogs,
And our depressed relatives look like dogs.
I lust to destroy you.
A great partition of days separate like oil in rainwater
Puddles in roadside gutter on way to school.
Great Atlantis vantage point from insipid cup of tea, sweet-weak.
This weak white morning froze ignorance in its grave;
Poor destruction already done suicidal version of creation,
I don't care about economy or astronomy or the death of a nation;
I just wanna know what brings you to me in your warning adept motion
Culmination the human form, Dog of Dharma,
In a shining world, where your actions are your best intentions,
But I feel the prize is perfection,
Perfect participation in the eyes of growing old.
Best lives will see a glimpse of everything:
Miniscule lives the alcohol raining
Ages of dining with dangerous gaming
Working for hours forever complaining
Always embracing the lives of Yogic liberation.
One who lies there all day, driving his headache to sleep,
Seeking the grey bathtub-water sky soaking
The patchwork wooden tiled floorboards
Of dawn of time dust asleep just waking up like an Indian God.
If I humped my physical gait to the highest light-surpassed
Mountain I would let the hard-nothing hard-summer
Half-light and unreal diamond my un-immortal mists of life;
This tarmac crossroad-black sky mixed light so
Frighteningly different, electric as my body –
Purple pink black – the sky changes,
And we are all in the sky, mourning the lost sexual angels.
vi
Perception
Perception leaps over our vision, inhuman as dogs, tongues out
Lapping up water-colours in state-of-mind love-houses.
Sundries and pretend to smoke, stubbing long, sensuous vampire fingers
Into ashtray, killing themselves in pointless suicides
Across countries and your dreams slowly arriving in mid-air
Heads throb in delight, dryness echoes, sweat like seawater
Evaporated on lose lone-beach rock, cowering at war-art and Bibles
Great grey tones leave us in dark clubs where saxophones play with Sachmo look-alikes.
Mists of eyes and bus-fog, we cave in by mere sights of love,
Holding on to our arms, the great masturbator sees us all,
Taking us all to the river; dancing souls in gaps of bruised smoke inside,
Cups down drinks like nothing. Lapping up like dogs.
Fearful of piercing ourselves on each other, we find no one so bad
As the ones in the mirror; left and slow within hummingbird flight,
It's feathers malted, two great strands of feather-hair; soft and thin.
These flattened in two-toned, new-era fashion.
The Great Eggfly copies the normal butterfly.
In all of such lonesome, nakedness inside clothing,
Where the only skin-touch, we touch breaking day at night,
Behind your closed doors, our apologies are not heard by such strangers
Who touch their eyes, for I can't even hold my mind for three weeks.
Please look me, please notice me, please know that I existed.
See me find myself in some infinite glory,
Watch me peel through the aether and find me.
Call me by my first name and smile.
Drink tea.
A cold air at 7:16pm, central-heated, the almost-darkness causes
Things to pause, the lack of faces in windows, a solar-light lights up
As I watch the cat under a garden chair, on a wet ground, by himself.
The great mystic night winged at its own breast.
Lips to the forceful microscopic sun and the bud between my fingers,
Slowly chokes, slowly flicks away ash into rain as grey as ash itself,
Grey as sick skin, intoxicated on pills and drinks,
The whirring sirens lull me into a timeless sleep.
The evening wind has no pulse. A great fire of anger burns London
Swinging pelvic thrusts into a world for a Dionysus vat of wine
To soak ourselves. I call the cat over. Smoke climbs out of me.
It climbs. It climbs like people climb out of a life they cannot live;
A rhetorical avenue of deceitful 21st century absent and meaningless individuals.
I could call out “I love you” – But she would not know.
Until infinitely gone into the next city and the next.
And I don't love anyone –
Not a soul in the world –
Taken away in a Faustian moonlight,
Looking for what girls I may love, to not love.
Maybe I'll go to Ireland, or Iceland, or India, or anywhere that begins with I.
And I get dizzy next to pale-white Buddah, smiling, hand on knee.
Ash in a plant pot.
Your hands are throbbing, hot, you ache to die or love,
Someone reaches out to you in the shape of helios,
Fingertips touch, you feel the heat pulsate like skin over the jugular,
And you wake up and see I am buried
With my baby in my leather jacket, jeans, boots,
Underneath the soil, too afraid to live, too afraid to die.
People snake and turn their backs into crooked Chinese symbols –
Their American counterparts are the same –
Their dreams are very similar to newborn babies' dreams.
I have given it all married to my own mistakes,
Shaped to a tantamount of bruises to your early years
Forever compelled to change every pregnant thought.
On this day I discovered myself for the hundredth time –
I am one hundred people whose few gestures tends to motion
It forms a solitary leader to fix its problems.
The king of death mutters in my ear about me.
At the window, a fog of howling moonlight.
It's possible to think that everything in literature is tantamount to perfect art, like I prescribe myself almost daily on the production of something, to strive to make it faultless and absolute. It's very difficult. To quote a friend last wednesday: "Writing is a pain in the ass." And it is. But only because the pressure of where we are (my friends and I) that were are Master of Arts graduates who ahould be better than the new load of students progressing thru the uni doors and yet miles behind a million faces of great literature, of which names echo around me that form such works that I have not even read.
One being Don DeLillio's Underworld. I have the book and I won't read it until I've finished Murakami's 1Q84, but even these two books I have mentioned are evidence that I'm seeing to great - living - writers, whose style I can't quite understand to be better than what I put on the paper. And so the learning goes on. So I go thru a number of instances of dictating another author's work and call it my own. Then I decide mine is my style, a completely new work of originality and of so consequence to anything else.
So the point being that I wouldn't not know how good I am until I'm out there is plain sight to be either lauded or chastised, and that's scary to think. I spent over a year on my first novel. I loved it at times and other times I loathed it. I finished it a few months ago and put it away. I began an attempt at my second novel being around 1000 pages like Underworld or Infinite Jest, but I stopped. I realised I was pushing myself to hard and it didn't work that way. Bukowski once said you can't force great writing, you just have to let it come out - to paraphrase.
I began novel three. A short novel. Stylistically like Burrough's Junky and similar to Camus' The Outsider. But the same dark comedy resided from my first novel that my peers had liked about my writing. So I suppose it takes another piece of writing to reveal style. My third novel is, at the moment, just over 15,000 words. The Outsider is around 35,000 and is up to 125 pages more or less. So that's a good sized novel or novella. I finished my first novel at near 50,000 words. I think I'll have it published in the next few months. Maybe I could commercialise myself and become a walking TV ad for my own existence.
It took three novel attempts to understand my writing. I read over my first novel yesterday I thought maybe it's not so bad. It just needs one more edit. The 1000 page second novel, my very own Infinite Jest (which I did finish, all nine months later as if I carried that massive book like a baby) I will have to spend some time on. I think Wallace only spent 5 years on that. Didn't Joyce spent 15 on Ulysses? Patience is a virtue but I don't have that kind of patience. I rush ahead and when I don't like it I move on to something else. My wiser self tells me to stop this. Joyce wrote three novels. Wallace wrote three novels. Kafka wrote three novels. So far, so have I, I'd like to join that club, but it's far too exclusive.
My cat under a tree. A cat appears a number of times in my first novel.
I've begun writing poetry again. I went to a reading in Blackburne House last wednesday. I read out a poem called Spanish Fly:
Spanish Fly
It's god bursts forth
Shouting and screaming at the television,
It's only female child loved religiously
Draws a picture addressed to itself,
It's high-and-mighty, selfish personality
Loves itself more than it loves you,
It's only love lasts hours
Destroyed only by an atomic bomb,
It's sideways hallucinogenic dreams of darkness
Once ended up on the outskirts of Kent,
It's only woman who knows nothing about literature
Finds herself victimised from the books she's read,
It's extraordinary delight in the past still and always will
Remain in the deep recesses of it's skull,
It's loud-mouth friend sometimes goes through a number of quiet bursts,
Which it finds disturbing to say the least,
It smashes a glass against the wall
Offering only the words: “No bueno,”
It then seems to hate it's friends
It's un chien andalou eyes roll back into it's head
Stands in a daguerreotype
Juxtaposed against it's parents,
It's parents smile blandly, petting a dog,
The dog is only a memory,
It once knew, at the age of 10, a young girl,
Who appeared in it's back garden, stepping over broken furniture,
It sighs momentarily then melts into the off-screen of reality
Positioning itself to be ready or not ready to talk to people,
It's devil bursts out and drinks and drinks
Whilst laughter of certain gods, who are drunk,
Watch flies kamikaze into the window
On the most un-memorable of afternoons,
It's body and spirit rises through the shit and aether
The glorious stays glorious as it withers out.
I don't get too nervous anymore, but I always get so self-conscious that I'm read ing what I think is good but believe it's not good enough. I hear other people read out. Their words tell things. Mine are, as they always have been, convoluted and weird. I always tried to calm down my writing. Bukowski helps with that.
I put together a long poem. I'm imagining The Waste Land and Howl. It new pieces stuck to old. I don't know if it's yet finished.
Nothing: November 16th 2011
That nothing perhaps roots out of trees, where arm-branches and leaves
Of bodies in various shower shapes, that perhaps is nothing and forever
Wanting nothing, and is nothing, and loves nothing?
You only guess a number of times of people huddled in a downstairs café
Reading poetry until it's time to leave with a friend who cares nothing for these.
A night washes the vertigo inside and perhaps dies a little. There is a voice
I love you I love you I love you
Like almost a nightmare and fear is unfair and sadness lasting
Only hours until forgotten.
What unreal people I don't believe in kills its memory with a sting
Of death. It loves it's sister's night. It loves its sudden cold frost
Burning a winter's hand with white cloth.
We sit in a place on Hope Street afterwards and talk about books.
Then, like a collapse of time, streetlights shining oldly, a girl's cold
Words of friendship. Where she used to sit now cold and in the shape of her,
In London spirit distanced with laughter.
I walked home thinking of someone else, perhaps it is nothing?
Perhaps it is something? What is that sound? Cold flower dies quietly.
Frozen petal muted lands down near black iron-wrought gate,
Through which I walked twenty-or-so years,
Each time mesmerised by totally unordinary life until now remembering
As unordinary and beautiful and sadly missed like an old dog –
Pulls open gate as if the gate of night itself,
I was more and more tired and heavy, slowly like mercury,
Blood-coloured moon and cloud over dangerous apocalyptic weather,
Born from angelic navels glowing artificially,
Exaggerated from words spent years unsaid,
Loved for no reason and unachievable,
Beauty and wonder unearthed from beneath thousand year-old floorboards.
Not in the slightest long eternity invites us over are you still cold
Now in this weather?
And I am far from nothing, I am far from old –
I am one thing, you're another to be told.
Where you sleep – the bed you lay, the bed you sleep –
And that was us, or I, muttering at the wall
Standing 6ft. tall – one over you –
And I said show me an ounce
Of sanity in my eyes
And I'll show you the eyes of God.
Black Cabs
Sat with women of wonderful mystery,
Stood at the doorways of your unachievable love,
Turning around and around, broken down crying wild
Intoxicated on whiskey and ecstasy from glass bottles
Pressed to the lips of Jehovah;
Nymphs in light of earthly streetlight shining orange flame skeletons
Sent sparks of light into their veins
And set their backs alight until they orgasmed in putrid fantasy
Of false hallucinations of this world and the next;
Forever each night beings of the night
Crucified their fathers in mass executions
On every street corner under the streetlight of your soul;
Who now become as holy as Almighty God in his underwear
Praying for forgiveness and more forgiveness and more –
In my head released holy angel into swampy mists of mystic night
A religious glow through heartless crowds of death,
moves and moves forever without a beat,
And moves until its feet begin to bleed
And moves until its skin is sore with the cold distance of love,
And moves while wishing for peace –
Motionless and absent from human skin
Forever moving and moving and moving
Modern Life
By circles of touch, solidified to human beings becoming themselves
Gilded and cross-stitched.
Morning each morning is lonely and cold
Rise early and eat and leave for work.
I saw each nuclear personality erupt beyond thinking red eyes
And botched lips. The ghost of lips the old ghost knows.
I hold the girls and think of their touch;
Come back to me each one of you.
The mortality of mothers is terrifying.
I've seen two dead bodies in my life so far –
Three including my cousin's nailed-down coffin –
Four including my father's coffin on my back
Heaving it thru long miles of graveyard –
I saw volatile people breaking bottles, windows, shoving car alarms,
Stony faces hooded violence and hate
Unnatural rebel the heartless conscience
Nasty screaming hateful bastards butcher knives
No beds for these, No beds for these;
I began my work at the end of June
When the stink had gone – my relative shark of time –
My fantasies for each dull cardboard year –
Go now and look for money,
Old politician bastards on their pedestals or thrones
Throw down bits of bread for us to eat.
Living in warm layered bodies burning anciently
Destroyed by the human forms another
Academic war-lords bang on the drum
My friends vanished and re-appeared as someone else,
Death and love becoming themselves
A slow & bashful taste becoming mindless
Musicians searching for a future,
Mindful washcloth; showers scalding,
Blisters bathed and nursed in white plastic rooms
Unnatural foliage, unreal people, crawling and dragging our bodies
Over long miles of hallow ground,
Hiding ourselves selling ourselves hinting
At nothing that exists between concrete,
Soaking floors glistening too much in sunlight
Sweat washed with rain over face,
The smell of half of my life
No money standing
Smoking calling the girls, frightened rabbits at every
Slammed door at dawn bearded sunlight,
Does not even echo,
Poetry to die for in purgatory
Illuminated nightmares
Keel over without eating for hours on end,
Ribs showing muscles still there soft
Atrophied shrivelled tongues being put
In the most natural of places
In Hell with everyone else.
The Death of God: 19\10
I never prayed at all like I never did,
And now it's dead.
Father of soil now much longer a night can live.
I have always been scared like a fish
Caught onto a swastika hook.
A look of Yad-Vashem from either side you shadow a morning,
World cold, empty and normal, to buy things.
Fear hidden behind smiles frowns and shopping bags.
Grey movements bare claw branches dazzling light over Lion & Unicorn
Radiates power thru window globes of light – orbed like eye-lens –
An earth-explosion howls and speaks to me
The world flashes swells and bursts and reveals
Wet footprints bulge in “O” shapes
Thick shadows like sharp black tongues
Fish-hooked barbed wire anti-clockwise snail-greasy tracks
Trodden one foot on life,
Ave Maria frozen in the gutter
The window steams and outside a man falls to his death.
World dead and bright, garden tarpaulin pulled over – held down
By plank of wood – clean clean invisible air freezing cold
The glowing hysterical road – Dies irae –
Screaming incessantly as two people melt into the ground
Dancing the sky reddens softly
Broken the full moon drools sits and smiles on night
And morning the church is boarded up –
Spires shooting up like vines or weeds,
Chimneys on flat hills with the fullest of blue sky
And dead pastel green soil and sick icy road.
Then vanished from the air; marked wastes cold dark
The damp smell:
The ruined
Blackberry
Living thru the eyes of others
And I’ll refuse to pray
So I can no longer be damned
The air is whispering but the clock is talking,
Heartbreak I can’t change my violence,
Playing with the machine of creation:
See this bottle?
It’s not a bottle,
It’s a machine.
Will you marry it?
One of chief princes settles his violence
Red sky softens.
And I am less of a man
Now that I have no human body –
Now that I'm dead
Now that I've killed you and you are dead,
Now that the vulgar familiars
Of your family break away, and is dead
Like sea foam, is dead,
And I am a giant stomping the ground
Like a spoilt brat, or like a
Man annoyed that he's still not dead.
Machine
An unending dog at every great white guru fleet;
It is only in your heaven your haze of not one woman
Who bore our excess of nostalgia of the doorman –
It is a distinct Ki, Swahili, in different dimensions;
My mind swells like a balloon blown up by a trumpet,
Above sand dunes lying down to the landscape;
I am brought here to destroy you.
I am in the 1980's off-camera, settling the authentic aroma of being
On camera. And this is you: begging to the preacher
Such a strange and desperate creature.
Lying down for hours in a slow rhythmic beating
A good solemn witchcraft by ourselves – while I'm sleeping.
Off to bed still like the woman before me,
Describing her features touching her smooth wintered face
Hard/cold nothing could touch this place.
The heavy not-so-glorious clouds my horizons,
Wet grass shampoo-smell, the glorious monument to our bodies is to drink,
The small microscopic antennae of the masses –
The mesmerising backsteps of anxious children
Sing into a lightbulb the light comes from my mouth,
Fades away a leaf floats in a black puddle,
Man is not like woman, where life may never end
In pools of clear bright and marble-like creatures similar to frogs,
And our depressed relatives look like dogs.
I lust to destroy you.
A great partition of days separate like oil in rainwater
Puddles in roadside gutter on way to school.
Great Atlantis vantage point from insipid cup of tea, sweet-weak.
This weak white morning froze ignorance in its grave;
Poor destruction already done suicidal version of creation,
I don't care about economy or astronomy or the death of a nation;
I just wanna know what brings you to me in your warning adept motion
Culmination the human form, Dog of Dharma,
In a shining world, where your actions are your best intentions,
But I feel the prize is perfection,
Perfect participation in the eyes of growing old.
Best lives will see a glimpse of everything:
Miniscule lives the alcohol raining
Ages of dining with dangerous gaming
Working for hours forever complaining
Always embracing the lives of Yogic liberation.
One who lies there all day, driving his headache to sleep,
Seeking the grey bathtub-water sky soaking
The patchwork wooden tiled floorboards
Of dawn of time dust asleep just waking up like an Indian God.
If I humped my physical gait to the highest light-surpassed
Mountain I would let the hard-nothing hard-summer
Half-light and unreal diamond my un-immortal mists of life;
This tarmac crossroad-black sky mixed light so
Frighteningly different, electric as my body –
Purple pink black – the sky changes,
And we are all in the sky, mourning the lost sexual angels.
Perception
Lapping up water-colours in state-of-mind love-houses.
Sundries and pretend to smoke, stubbing long, sensuous vampire fingers
Into ashtray, killing themselves in pointless suicides
Across countries and your dreams slowly arriving in mid-air
Heads throb in delight, dryness echoes, sweat like seawater
Evaporated on lose lone-beach rock, cowering at war-art and Bibles
Great grey tones leave us in dark clubs where saxophones play with Sachmo look-alikes.
Mists of eyes and bus-fog, we cave in by mere sights of love,
Holding on to our arms, the great masturbator sees us all,
Taking us all to the river; dancing souls in gaps of bruised smoke inside,
Cups down drinks like nothing. Lapping up like dogs.
Fearful of piercing ourselves on each other, we find no one so bad
As the ones in the mirror; left and slow within hummingbird flight,
It's feathers malted, two great strands of feather-hair; soft and thin.
These flattened in two-toned, new-era fashion.
The Great Eggfly copies the normal butterfly.
In all of such lonesome, nakedness inside clothing,
Where the only skin-touch, we touch breaking day at night,
Behind your closed doors, our apologies are not heard by such strangers
Who touch their eyes, for I can't even hold my mind for three weeks.
Please look me, please notice me, please know that I existed.
See me find myself in some infinite glory,
Watch me peel through the aether and find me.
Call me by my first name and smile.
Drink tea.
A cold air at 7:16pm, central-heated, the almost-darkness causes
Things to pause, the lack of faces in windows, a solar-light lights up
As I watch the cat under a garden chair, on a wet ground, by himself.
The great mystic night winged at its own breast.
Lips to the forceful microscopic sun and the bud between my fingers,
Slowly chokes, slowly flicks away ash into rain as grey as ash itself,
Grey as sick skin, intoxicated on pills and drinks,
The whirring sirens lull me into a timeless sleep.
The evening wind has no pulse. A great fire of anger burns London
Swinging pelvic thrusts into a world for a Dionysus vat of wine
To soak ourselves. I call the cat over. Smoke climbs out of me.
It climbs. It climbs like people climb out of a life they cannot live;
A rhetorical avenue of deceitful 21st century absent and meaningless individuals.
I could call out “I love you” – But she would not know.
Until infinitely gone into the next city and the next.
And I don't love anyone –
Not a soul in the world –
Taken away in a Faustian moonlight,
Looking for what girls I may love, to not love.
Maybe I'll go to Ireland, or Iceland, or India, or anywhere that begins with I.
And I get dizzy next to pale-white Buddah, smiling, hand on knee.
Ash in a plant pot.
Your hands are throbbing, hot, you ache to die or love,
Someone reaches out to you in the shape of helios,
Fingertips touch, you feel the heat pulsate like skin over the jugular,
And you wake up and see I am buried
With my baby in my leather jacket, jeans, boots,
Underneath the soil, too afraid to live, too afraid to die.
People snake and turn their backs into crooked Chinese symbols –
Their American counterparts are the same –
Their dreams are very similar to newborn babies' dreams.
Monday, 20 June 2011
Untitled Poem 19/6
Motionless and absent in prophetic bedrooms,
Lost in a dusk of extraordinary delight,
Terrified of sexual euphemisms and celebrer,
Forced to be advertised to;
Chained to our bodies to the ground to our jobs,
Working for hours or a lifetime of devilish misery,
Stuck under a heavy moon, fat and pregnant with
The child of your discontent;
Big eyes suffering in the head of huge god-like babies;
Black cabs grabbed with thick fists in the dead of night,
Sitting with women of wonderful mystery,
Ending up at the doorways of your unachievable love,
Turning around and around, broke down, crying wild
Intoxicated on whiskey and ecstasy from glass bottles
Pressed to the lips of Jehovah;
Nymphs in light of earthly streetlight shining orange flame skeletons
Sent a spark of light into their veins
And set their backs alight until they orgasmed in putrid fantasy
Of false hallucinations of this world and the next and the next;
These so-called beings forever each night
Crucified their fathers in mass executions
On every street corner under the light of your soul;
Who now become as holy as Almighty God in his underwear
Praying for forgiveness and more forgiveness and more
Until the heavenly is addicted and the
Holy angel in my head is released into the swampy mists of mystic night
And glows angelically through Satanic crowds and heartless beast,
And moves and moves forever without a beat,
And moves until its feet begin to bleed
And moves until its skin is sore with cold and death
And moves while wishing for peace and more peace
When in reality, motionless
Absent – and away from human skin
Flapping like flags, forever moving and burning and moving and moving
Lost in a dusk of extraordinary delight,
Terrified of sexual euphemisms and celebrer,
Forced to be advertised to;
Chained to our bodies to the ground to our jobs,
Working for hours or a lifetime of devilish misery,
Stuck under a heavy moon, fat and pregnant with
The child of your discontent;
Big eyes suffering in the head of huge god-like babies;
Black cabs grabbed with thick fists in the dead of night,
Sitting with women of wonderful mystery,
Ending up at the doorways of your unachievable love,
Turning around and around, broke down, crying wild
Intoxicated on whiskey and ecstasy from glass bottles
Pressed to the lips of Jehovah;
Nymphs in light of earthly streetlight shining orange flame skeletons
Sent a spark of light into their veins
And set their backs alight until they orgasmed in putrid fantasy
Of false hallucinations of this world and the next and the next;
These so-called beings forever each night
Crucified their fathers in mass executions
On every street corner under the light of your soul;
Who now become as holy as Almighty God in his underwear
Praying for forgiveness and more forgiveness and more
Until the heavenly is addicted and the
Holy angel in my head is released into the swampy mists of mystic night
And glows angelically through Satanic crowds and heartless beast,
And moves and moves forever without a beat,
And moves until its feet begin to bleed
And moves until its skin is sore with cold and death
And moves while wishing for peace and more peace
When in reality, motionless
Absent – and away from human skin
Flapping like flags, forever moving and burning and moving and moving
Sunday, 29 May 2011
The Art of Struggling
The art of struggling to achieve some success comes at a price of over exhaustion, lying down seemingly forever and unable to keep your eyes open until the day is gone, and all you had was some hours very early in the morning spent stacking shelves in a department store. Of course, this price may or may not be worth the outcome. Depending on what outcome you're after.
I, for one, am after at least some success with my writing. I'm struggling now because it makes me so tired and frustrated. That I don't know what I'm doing and that self-doubt, no matter how how much the rule insists that you avoid such a fear, is always present like a shadow.
I suppose it's with knowing every word and every sentence I've written of my novel so far. Like when you repeat a word over and over until it loses meaning. There is nothing else but what it is. I have nothing else but the words. And it's annoying when it gets to the point that I only have the words and other people who read it can see more into it. People who can tell me if it's good or if it's not good enough and in retrospect I then see it. It's like I'm staring at a brick wall and my friends look through a window.
I've written 27 chapters so far. That's about 40,000 words. It is in first person present tense. It was originally in present, I changed it to past, and I changed it back to present. I was going to change it back because I've read some people don't like first person present tense and that it's too intimate and almost suffocating. Terry Pratchett said this and I'm not a fan anyway. My friend said the present tense is much better.
The only books I know of in this tense are Fight Club and One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest. Also, Black House by King and Straub, which is a long novel and I read that ages ago, I'd totally forgotten it was written this way. So if I was to write in this tense I would be in a small group of novels that do have a kind of style to them. And another friend of mine, who is further into his novel, said that mine did have a style to it. The immediate voice, introspective and funny, all come from the immediacy.
It's kind of poetic to say things happening right now, though it is close to second person like most poems are written in. Most short stories are present tense. I do write like this naturally though. I like to write 'he says' or 'she says' and be so immediate and intimate as if the narrative is my actual thoughts. And I suppose some writers can get away with it only if they pull it off really well. And I think I'm able to. People can be deterred when told they're not good enough. Though, I wish I wouldn't tell myself I'm not good enough. Maybe I should stop re-reading my work so much.
I, for one, am after at least some success with my writing. I'm struggling now because it makes me so tired and frustrated. That I don't know what I'm doing and that self-doubt, no matter how how much the rule insists that you avoid such a fear, is always present like a shadow.
I suppose it's with knowing every word and every sentence I've written of my novel so far. Like when you repeat a word over and over until it loses meaning. There is nothing else but what it is. I have nothing else but the words. And it's annoying when it gets to the point that I only have the words and other people who read it can see more into it. People who can tell me if it's good or if it's not good enough and in retrospect I then see it. It's like I'm staring at a brick wall and my friends look through a window.
I've written 27 chapters so far. That's about 40,000 words. It is in first person present tense. It was originally in present, I changed it to past, and I changed it back to present. I was going to change it back because I've read some people don't like first person present tense and that it's too intimate and almost suffocating. Terry Pratchett said this and I'm not a fan anyway. My friend said the present tense is much better.
The only books I know of in this tense are Fight Club and One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest. Also, Black House by King and Straub, which is a long novel and I read that ages ago, I'd totally forgotten it was written this way. So if I was to write in this tense I would be in a small group of novels that do have a kind of style to them. And another friend of mine, who is further into his novel, said that mine did have a style to it. The immediate voice, introspective and funny, all come from the immediacy.
It's kind of poetic to say things happening right now, though it is close to second person like most poems are written in. Most short stories are present tense. I do write like this naturally though. I like to write 'he says' or 'she says' and be so immediate and intimate as if the narrative is my actual thoughts. And I suppose some writers can get away with it only if they pull it off really well. And I think I'm able to. People can be deterred when told they're not good enough. Though, I wish I wouldn't tell myself I'm not good enough. Maybe I should stop re-reading my work so much.
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Dog Snoring Like An Old Man [un-edited]
It was daylight at six in the morning. The dog was snoring like an old man. Before colour absorbed into the room, Wilton Mone sat and waited for the clock to reach seven. Two dead light bulbs in the ceiling, two lamps and a television all switched off, asleep. A musty smell of sleep came in the form of breath from up the stairs.
Wilton sat and thought about his life. He was afraid of dying. Terribly afraid. And he couldn't go running to mother about it since she couldn't prevent death. No one could. Still, he went through his memories of people that might be able to prevent his death, but they all seemed far too human to help.
By seven o'clock he left the house and got on the train into the city. It was even brighter and getting warm. A sparrow flew past before the train began to move.
Out of the window he saw a wide open space of dirt and further away were rows of terraced houses. He saw the wind blow a Union Flag. As he got closer to the city it got a lot more windy, trees silently danced side-to-side.
When he got to work he met his colleague, Nelson Buth, who was the editor of the newspaper they worked for. They were actually quite good friends, having known each other for little over two years. Nelson was an idiot who thought of himself first thing in the morning. He touched his face when he spoke, just to feel his own mouth working. 'Do you have the press release?' he said.
'Which?'
'The press release. For our client.'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'I didn't know how to write it.'
'You're useless.'
'I know.'
'I need it written up by this afternoon,' Nelson said. 'Can you manage that? Or shall I get someone else?'
'No no, I can manage,' Wilton said. He set about writing at his desk in an empty room. There was no colour in the room. Everything seemed grey. Trees slowly moved outside.
After work Wilton and Nelson went to The Farmer's Arms for a drink. The barmaid served them. She said: 'See that man over there?'
'Where?'
'There. By the window. With the hat.'
'Yeah.'
'He's been coming in here for fifteen years and used to be the life of this place. But now all he does is sit there, drinking til he's drunk stiff.
'What happened to him?'
'His dog committed suicide.'
'That's terrible.'
'I know. Hung itself with its own lead from the banister.'
'How did it manage that?'
'God knows,' she said. 'All's I know is that man's not been the same since.'
The two friends sat down near the door. It was cool there. The light was dissipating. There was no colour in anything. Nelson drank. 'Imagine that,' he said.
'What?'
'A dog killing itself.'
'Yeah,' Wilton said. 'I thought only humans did that. Not a dogs.'
'You're wrong, then. 'Cause his dog killed itself.'
'I know.'
'Makes you think how ridiculous it would be to kill yourself.'
'Or how ridiculous it is to die.'
'Dogs committing suicide,' Nelson said, shaking his head.
Later on, when it had become dark and there really was no colour, Wilton headed back home. The wind had picked up considerably. It blew his hair. Made his eyes water. On the train he saw the Union Flag in the dark. He doubted sunlight for a long time to come.
When he got home his family were asleep as if they'd never woken up. He somehow felt good about himself. He took out the shoelaces from his shoes and scrunched his tie into his pocket so the dog couldn't get hold of them. He walked into the living room and sat down. It was dark. Two lights, two lamps and the TV were off. The smell of his family, sleeping. The dog snoring like an old man.
Wilton sat and thought about his life. He was afraid of dying. Terribly afraid. And he couldn't go running to mother about it since she couldn't prevent death. No one could. Still, he went through his memories of people that might be able to prevent his death, but they all seemed far too human to help.
By seven o'clock he left the house and got on the train into the city. It was even brighter and getting warm. A sparrow flew past before the train began to move.
Out of the window he saw a wide open space of dirt and further away were rows of terraced houses. He saw the wind blow a Union Flag. As he got closer to the city it got a lot more windy, trees silently danced side-to-side.
When he got to work he met his colleague, Nelson Buth, who was the editor of the newspaper they worked for. They were actually quite good friends, having known each other for little over two years. Nelson was an idiot who thought of himself first thing in the morning. He touched his face when he spoke, just to feel his own mouth working. 'Do you have the press release?' he said.
'Which?'
'The press release. For our client.'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'I didn't know how to write it.'
'You're useless.'
'I know.'
'I need it written up by this afternoon,' Nelson said. 'Can you manage that? Or shall I get someone else?'
'No no, I can manage,' Wilton said. He set about writing at his desk in an empty room. There was no colour in the room. Everything seemed grey. Trees slowly moved outside.
After work Wilton and Nelson went to The Farmer's Arms for a drink. The barmaid served them. She said: 'See that man over there?'
'Where?'
'There. By the window. With the hat.'
'Yeah.'
'He's been coming in here for fifteen years and used to be the life of this place. But now all he does is sit there, drinking til he's drunk stiff.
'What happened to him?'
'His dog committed suicide.'
'That's terrible.'
'I know. Hung itself with its own lead from the banister.'
'How did it manage that?'
'God knows,' she said. 'All's I know is that man's not been the same since.'
The two friends sat down near the door. It was cool there. The light was dissipating. There was no colour in anything. Nelson drank. 'Imagine that,' he said.
'What?'
'A dog killing itself.'
'Yeah,' Wilton said. 'I thought only humans did that. Not a dogs.'
'You're wrong, then. 'Cause his dog killed itself.'
'I know.'
'Makes you think how ridiculous it would be to kill yourself.'
'Or how ridiculous it is to die.'
'Dogs committing suicide,' Nelson said, shaking his head.
Later on, when it had become dark and there really was no colour, Wilton headed back home. The wind had picked up considerably. It blew his hair. Made his eyes water. On the train he saw the Union Flag in the dark. He doubted sunlight for a long time to come.
When he got home his family were asleep as if they'd never woken up. He somehow felt good about himself. He took out the shoelaces from his shoes and scrunched his tie into his pocket so the dog couldn't get hold of them. He walked into the living room and sat down. It was dark. Two lights, two lamps and the TV were off. The smell of his family, sleeping. The dog snoring like an old man.
Friday, 1 April 2011
Helix Piercing
This is what I did to my ear. I don't know why I decided to do it, all I know is that I did just decide and went and got it pierced. I had my lip pierced 3 years ago (not anymore) and this hurt a lot more. It wasn't so bad with the actual piercing bit, but it still hurt and a couple of hour after, it hurt a lot more. It's been a week now and it's healing quite well.
The guy who did my piercing was talking to me about writing because I told him I was a writer and he told me that he did a tattoo on Frank Cottrell Boyce, the writer of 24 Hour Party People and Millions. I told him that I'd met Frank at uni when he did a talk and that my tutor knows him personally. When I told my tutor this she laughed and said she'd love to know what tattoo it is. It's funny because I knew Frank was from Liverpool but that tattoo parlour was right near where I live. I didn't know he was from like round the corner from me.
The guy who did my piercing was talking to me about writing because I told him I was a writer and he told me that he did a tattoo on Frank Cottrell Boyce, the writer of 24 Hour Party People and Millions. I told him that I'd met Frank at uni when he did a talk and that my tutor knows him personally. When I told my tutor this she laughed and said she'd love to know what tattoo it is. It's funny because I knew Frank was from Liverpool but that tattoo parlour was right near where I live. I didn't know he was from like round the corner from me.
Thursday, 31 March 2011
Night of the Window - Nocturnos De La Ventana (Lorca Translation)
Night of the Window
1
Moon rises high
Beneath the wind
(My eyes look for a long time
Exploring the sky)
The moon sits on the water,
The moon is in the wind.
(My eyes look for a long time
Exploring the sky)
I hear the voices of girls.
The moon in the water,
Effortlessly I go to it
In the sky.
2
The arms of the night
Enter through my window,
Great brown arms
With bracelets of water.
On blue crystal,
I played in the river at dawn
I watched the wounded moments
Pass away.
3
I place my head by the window
And the wind cuts it with a blade
In the invisible guillotine
I place my head and all my desires
It fills the moment
With the smell of lemon
While I become
Blossoms of silk in the wind.
4
There is a death in the pond,
A girl in the water.
When she is pulled out,
She is covered in soil.
A fish crosses her body
From head to her legs.
The wind calls out to her
But cannot wake her.
The pond releases her.
She is now algae
And grey breasts of air,
Quivering like frogs.
Nocturnos De La Ventana
1
Alta va la luna.
Bajo corre el viento.
(Mis largas miradas,
exploran el cielo.)
Luna sobre el agua,
Luna bajo el viento.
(Mis cortas miradas,
exploran el suelo.)
Las voces de dos niñas
venĂan. Sin el esfuerzo,
de la luna del agua,
me fuĂ a la del cielo.
2
Un brazo de la noche
entra por mi ventana.
Un gran brazo moreno
con pulseras de agua.
Sobre un cristal azul
jugaba al rĂo mi alma.
Los instantes heridos
por el reloj... pasaban.
3
Asomo la cabeza
por mi ventana, y veo
cĂłmo quiere cortarla
la cuchilla del viento.
En esta guillotina
invisible, yo he puesto
las cabezas sin ojos
de todos mis deseos.
Y un olor de limĂłn
llenĂł el instante inmenso,
mientras se convertĂa
en flor de gasa el viento.
4
Al estanque se le ha muerto
hoy una niña de agua.
Está fuera del estanque,
sobre el suelo amortajada.
De la cabeza a sus muslos
un pez la cruza, llamándola.
El viento le dice “niña”
mas no puede despertarla.
El estanque tiene suelta
su cabellera de algas
y al aire sus grises tetas
estremecidas de ranas.
Dios te salve. Rezaremos
a Nuestra Señora de Agua
por la niña del estanque
muerta bajo las manzanas.
Yo luego pondré a su lado
dos pequeñas calabazas
para que se tenga a flote,
¡ay! sobre la mar salada.
1
Moon rises high
Beneath the wind
(My eyes look for a long time
Exploring the sky)
The moon sits on the water,
The moon is in the wind.
(My eyes look for a long time
Exploring the sky)
I hear the voices of girls.
The moon in the water,
Effortlessly I go to it
In the sky.
2
The arms of the night
Enter through my window,
Great brown arms
With bracelets of water.
On blue crystal,
I played in the river at dawn
I watched the wounded moments
Pass away.
3
I place my head by the window
And the wind cuts it with a blade
In the invisible guillotine
I place my head and all my desires
It fills the moment
With the smell of lemon
While I become
Blossoms of silk in the wind.
4
There is a death in the pond,
A girl in the water.
When she is pulled out,
She is covered in soil.
A fish crosses her body
From head to her legs.
The wind calls out to her
But cannot wake her.
The pond releases her.
She is now algae
And grey breasts of air,
Quivering like frogs.
Nocturnos De La Ventana
1
Alta va la luna.
Bajo corre el viento.
(Mis largas miradas,
exploran el cielo.)
Luna sobre el agua,
Luna bajo el viento.
(Mis cortas miradas,
exploran el suelo.)
Las voces de dos niñas
venĂan. Sin el esfuerzo,
de la luna del agua,
me fuĂ a la del cielo.
2
Un brazo de la noche
entra por mi ventana.
Un gran brazo moreno
con pulseras de agua.
Sobre un cristal azul
jugaba al rĂo mi alma.
Los instantes heridos
por el reloj... pasaban.
3
Asomo la cabeza
por mi ventana, y veo
cĂłmo quiere cortarla
la cuchilla del viento.
En esta guillotina
invisible, yo he puesto
las cabezas sin ojos
de todos mis deseos.
Y un olor de limĂłn
llenĂł el instante inmenso,
mientras se convertĂa
en flor de gasa el viento.
4
Al estanque se le ha muerto
hoy una niña de agua.
Está fuera del estanque,
sobre el suelo amortajada.
De la cabeza a sus muslos
un pez la cruza, llamándola.
El viento le dice “niña”
mas no puede despertarla.
El estanque tiene suelta
su cabellera de algas
y al aire sus grises tetas
estremecidas de ranas.
Dios te salve. Rezaremos
a Nuestra Señora de Agua
por la niña del estanque
muerta bajo las manzanas.
Yo luego pondré a su lado
dos pequeñas calabazas
para que se tenga a flote,
¡ay! sobre la mar salada.
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Reading Out and World Book Night 2011
I read at the "Next Up Showcase" at the Bluecoat last Thursday. I was chosen as one of three from my University. There were others from Manchester, Chester, and Edge Hill Universities reading. There were 12 in total and I was seventh. I knew the man who was before me and that was when I got nervous because I knew I was up next. I'm usually very nervous (and this was only my second reading) but I was unusually calm. I drank half a pint of beer and tried to stay focused (I met the third guy from my uni and he was up first).
It came my turn and the woman who was hosting gave me quite a good introduction, although (and we joked about this afterwards) when she quoted a line from my work, which she's meant to do, she read out my opening line. My tutor said it was one of my best lines, and she almost ruined it by quoting it like that. The line was: "A black hole opened up in my living room."
I read it well. Though I didn't look away from the page on the lecturn, I didn't want to lose my place. I got some laughs at the funny parts and held their attention at the evocative parts. Later on in the pub someone thought I was reading from an actual novel, and I had to say No it was mine. I was surprised at how many liked it, and some said I was one of the best. A man stopped me and I thought he was giving me his card, like an agent or something. He was a photographer, and showed me a picture on his camera of me reading. I wrote my email address down for him to send me the photo. (Haven't got it yet).
I was a volunteer for the first World Book Night. I was given 48 copies of Seamus Heaney's poetry to give away for free. I left copies on the train, in the train station, in a bus stop, in a phone box, on benches, with a message inside saying things like "You've found me!" and "Have you thought about reading poetry?" The rest I gave to my friends and family.
It was a good thing to do, though I should have chosen a novel to give out. It was out of 25 titles.
It came my turn and the woman who was hosting gave me quite a good introduction, although (and we joked about this afterwards) when she quoted a line from my work, which she's meant to do, she read out my opening line. My tutor said it was one of my best lines, and she almost ruined it by quoting it like that. The line was: "A black hole opened up in my living room."
I read it well. Though I didn't look away from the page on the lecturn, I didn't want to lose my place. I got some laughs at the funny parts and held their attention at the evocative parts. Later on in the pub someone thought I was reading from an actual novel, and I had to say No it was mine. I was surprised at how many liked it, and some said I was one of the best. A man stopped me and I thought he was giving me his card, like an agent or something. He was a photographer, and showed me a picture on his camera of me reading. I wrote my email address down for him to send me the photo. (Haven't got it yet).
I was a volunteer for the first World Book Night. I was given 48 copies of Seamus Heaney's poetry to give away for free. I left copies on the train, in the train station, in a bus stop, in a phone box, on benches, with a message inside saying things like "You've found me!" and "Have you thought about reading poetry?" The rest I gave to my friends and family.
It was a good thing to do, though I should have chosen a novel to give out. It was out of 25 titles.
Monday, 28 February 2011
Novel Extract pp.46-47 (unfinished/first draft)
For days I sat watching the turntable with record after record playing music through its scratchy sound. I heard a lot of early Beatles LP's and upon trying their patience by throwing myself against the wall and knocking myself unconscious three times, they changed it to Booker T and the MG's, only until they got me some later Beatles songs or maybe even some Dylan. But they never gave me what I wanted most of the time, and all I asked for was some good music – no Mozart no Beethoven, they said I'd heard too much of that and it had warped my cognitive thinking, by which they meant Mozart had driven me to the brink of madness and I had only Doctor to thank. D. was a Judas. He'd left me sitting in that room for so long, shivering with the cold, the room was just a while cube (the record player was black), and I began to believe, as no one came back, that I was in fact dead, and that I was either in Heaven or Hell, only I had to figure out when I died, up to which point in my life was I no longer living, and how it came to be that I was no longer of that world but another … It occurred to me, sitting in that room, as I then reverted to a lying-down position, that I was never alive at all, not really, my life (or whatever it was called) was just a moment of excess, a collection of drinks, pains, laughs and songs … I only had the fortune or un-fortune to experience such a moment in time because … Well, my parents had the displeasure of creating me … I then forgot, not that I knew, that I was not real, and so with being unreal, I was able to work a destructive way into myself, blind to the consequences, uncaring of anything beyond that life, for beyond it was a white room with a record player playing early Beatles songs, which go on and on and on, and you listen to them, without much of a care, because even this existence, though you may think in your head, is not real, because there is only you, and you are not there …
A woman came in. She had dirty blonde hair tied with a hairclip at the top of her head, I imagined wasn't very comfortable-looking, pulling the hair tight – everything about her seemed tight; I could snap her in two. She wore a white nurse's uniform. She pushed a metal trolley, on which sat a blue tissue with a large syringe filled with a pink-ish liquid, which she then squirted upwards to remove any air bubbles inside, which would give the recipient a heart attack if they actually reached the heart. She placed the needle back down. She read off a small chart that my ketone bodies were high (β[beta]-Hydroxybutyric acid, and Acetoacetic acid [CH3C(O)CH2CO2H], which, as an acid decomposes to both acetone and carbon dioxide like this: CH3C(O)CH2CO2H → CH3C(O)CH3 + CO2,), and that was a sign of ketosis from my not eating well, I was fasting, shall we say, and I had lost some weight, not a lot, just so you could see it in my cheeks. 'I did not see this as a problem per se, no, my dear, I was merely maintaining a disciplined regimen of meditation, like, aiding good health and spirit.'
'Okay,' she said. 'But, you see, you are quite underweight, and while you are here you must regain your physical health as well as your mental health.'
'Well, as I say, I was maintaining … '
'I heard, but you are wrong. You have done some damage to yourself. You are a sick boy.'
'I'm not a boy, I'm a man.'
'Yes, but you are a boy.
'Am I a real boy?'
'Look at yourself. Sitting there, legs crossed, listening to your records. Do you like how the record spins? Do you like it?'
'Don't patronise me.'
'I wasn't.'
'I want to leave this place right now.'
'I'm sorry, not just yet. The doctor would like to see you before you go.'
'Doctor. I hate the man. He is no Doctor! He is the Devil!'
'Yes yes, okay, my love, now I'll need to give you this needle.'
A woman came in. She had dirty blonde hair tied with a hairclip at the top of her head, I imagined wasn't very comfortable-looking, pulling the hair tight – everything about her seemed tight; I could snap her in two. She wore a white nurse's uniform. She pushed a metal trolley, on which sat a blue tissue with a large syringe filled with a pink-ish liquid, which she then squirted upwards to remove any air bubbles inside, which would give the recipient a heart attack if they actually reached the heart. She placed the needle back down. She read off a small chart that my ketone bodies were high (β[beta]-Hydroxybutyric acid, and Acetoacetic acid [CH3C(O)CH2CO2H], which, as an acid decomposes to both acetone and carbon dioxide like this: CH3C(O)CH2CO2H → CH3C(O)CH3 + CO2,), and that was a sign of ketosis from my not eating well, I was fasting, shall we say, and I had lost some weight, not a lot, just so you could see it in my cheeks. 'I did not see this as a problem per se, no, my dear, I was merely maintaining a disciplined regimen of meditation, like, aiding good health and spirit.'
'Okay,' she said. 'But, you see, you are quite underweight, and while you are here you must regain your physical health as well as your mental health.'
'Well, as I say, I was maintaining … '
'I heard, but you are wrong. You have done some damage to yourself. You are a sick boy.'
'I'm not a boy, I'm a man.'
'Yes, but you are a boy.
'Am I a real boy?'
'Look at yourself. Sitting there, legs crossed, listening to your records. Do you like how the record spins? Do you like it?'
'Don't patronise me.'
'I wasn't.'
'I want to leave this place right now.'
'I'm sorry, not just yet. The doctor would like to see you before you go.'
'Doctor. I hate the man. He is no Doctor! He is the Devil!'
'Yes yes, okay, my love, now I'll need to give you this needle.'
Sunday, 27 February 2011
Off-Perfect Like Time (Short Story)
I am at the train station. It is cold and the sounds of trains are an off-perfect 15 mins. or so scream. This designated scream occurs when I least know, and wakes me up from a dream, where I sit slouched on this cold metal bench, which displaces the blood from my legs, absorbs into the atmosphere in the form of vapour and I become constricted and white/blue, shivering until it hurts my shoulders and cannot recover the muscle so I leave it spasming as some kind of electrode in me.
I slept here. I always sleep here. No one knows I sleep here. If they find out they wouldn't let me, but I'd find another place to sleep because I always have to sleep. No one else sleeps but me. The world keeps on moving and I keep still on this bench. I feel so tired. When I wake, on the off-perfect time every 15 or so mins. the devil bursts out of me with laughter and hopes to kamikaze in front of a moving train, but cannot since I must catch the train soon, and if I am dead then I cannot get the train. I only need to rest now. Just before the train gets here.
It is night. It is cold. I am surrounded by unfortunate dreams of darkness in a medium of motion, always going away from someone's arms, and then the scream like this: Aaaaahhhhh! But kind of electrical, too, like Zchurkkkkk or something. The blue flash frightens me, lights up the whole world, reveals this unreal world of black and white lines like a broken TV – lasts a second and I relax and go back to sleep. I am so tired.
I'll catch the next train. There is someone I want to be with. When I get there I will hold her in my arms. I'll just rest first, then I'll go. I'll catch the next train. I don't know how long I've been here. The night seems to have been here forever. The night is my best friend, we've always known each other – I sleep and no one else sleeps, so we get along pretty well.
I had a conversation with the person I'm going to see. I remember it perfectly. It went like this:
'I do love you, you know.'
'Oh yes, I do know that.'
'Don't you think we should get married and all that?'
'Oh yes, I do think we should do all that.'
'Yes, why the hell not, eh?'
'That's just fantastic for me and for you.'
'Yes, it is fantastic.'
'We'll be together forever.'
' … '
' … Forever.'
'Forever?'
'Yes, forever. We'll be together forever. And we'll die together.'
'We'll die?'
'Yes, we'll die together.'
'We can't die if we're not together.'
'But – '
' – I have to go now. Bye.'
Oh that's right, I was going away. I'll catch this next train now. I hear it on the other side of my sleep. It's coming in an off-perfect time of 15 mins. or so. But I feel so tired. It is very cold here by myself.
I slept here. I always sleep here. No one knows I sleep here. If they find out they wouldn't let me, but I'd find another place to sleep because I always have to sleep. No one else sleeps but me. The world keeps on moving and I keep still on this bench. I feel so tired. When I wake, on the off-perfect time every 15 or so mins. the devil bursts out of me with laughter and hopes to kamikaze in front of a moving train, but cannot since I must catch the train soon, and if I am dead then I cannot get the train. I only need to rest now. Just before the train gets here.
It is night. It is cold. I am surrounded by unfortunate dreams of darkness in a medium of motion, always going away from someone's arms, and then the scream like this: Aaaaahhhhh! But kind of electrical, too, like Zchurkkkkk or something. The blue flash frightens me, lights up the whole world, reveals this unreal world of black and white lines like a broken TV – lasts a second and I relax and go back to sleep. I am so tired.
I'll catch the next train. There is someone I want to be with. When I get there I will hold her in my arms. I'll just rest first, then I'll go. I'll catch the next train. I don't know how long I've been here. The night seems to have been here forever. The night is my best friend, we've always known each other – I sleep and no one else sleeps, so we get along pretty well.
I had a conversation with the person I'm going to see. I remember it perfectly. It went like this:
'I do love you, you know.'
'Oh yes, I do know that.'
'Don't you think we should get married and all that?'
'Oh yes, I do think we should do all that.'
'Yes, why the hell not, eh?'
'That's just fantastic for me and for you.'
'Yes, it is fantastic.'
'We'll be together forever.'
' … '
' … Forever.'
'Forever?'
'Yes, forever. We'll be together forever. And we'll die together.'
'We'll die?'
'Yes, we'll die together.'
'We can't die if we're not together.'
'But – '
' – I have to go now. Bye.'
Oh that's right, I was going away. I'll catch this next train now. I hear it on the other side of my sleep. It's coming in an off-perfect time of 15 mins. or so. But I feel so tired. It is very cold here by myself.
Saturday, 26 February 2011
Review of C.W. Stoneking -- Bido Lito Magazine
[Published in Bido Lito, Feb 2011, p.28-30]
http://www.bidolito.co.uk/
C.W STONEKING
Brownbrid Rudy Relic
O2 Academy 2
“It always feels a bit American to be drinking on a school night,” my friend says as the O2 Academy 2 stays rather subdued with the on-going music of the support act – BROWNBIRD RUDY RELIC – who is impressive, to say the least, and we realise that we have unearthed a cult following for a musician not many have heard of: C.W. STONEKING.
This man steps onto the stage wearing a 1950's style barbershop jacket and holding a banjo. It's him, but something's not right. Why does he look like one quarter of a barbershop quartet? He begins singing and playing the banjo and his voice resonates right through me as if I am hearing Louis Armstrong incarnate, a wailing sorrowful sound that makes each person gain once inch in height as they step onto their tip-toes to get better look at this man with a voice from another time. Around him are his band: trombone, cornet, tuba, snare drum (with brushes), and the cello hidden behind C.W.
There is an ominous feeling around us when the stage lights go out, and we don't know if it's supposed to happen, but C.W. is singing Jailhouse Blues and the audience begins to sing the chorus, either because they are his cult and know the lyrics, or he has hypnotised them with a mournful voice of a forgotten era. Lights back on, he bursts into a rendition of another bluesly song – Jungle Blues is a favourite – some quick-paced some not, spit flies out of the cornet, hits a photographer, flashbulb lights him up for one second prior to said spit, the leader of his cult, who were probably hooked when they saw him on Jools Holland a few months ago. He is a Crooner with a lisp.
There is a point when he speaks more than sings, but the subdued audience are attentive, and he recites a story of a talking lion, and it's hilarious. He's like a comedian halfway through his performance. He then makes jokes about himself as he pitches too high with his voice or sings too loosely. He jokes about not having a harmonica, the reason for a gap in the middle of one of his songs. It's this strange accent that fluctuates between Australian and The Deep South, which sounds constantly sad and broken, and he jokes about a story of three Americans on a ship to Africa who “loved the Blues, but they also loved the booze.”
At this point I should mention that C.W. was once a Hoodoo Witch Doctor's assistant, and only those who have seen him play will understand the hilarity, though someone shouts out “you can't kid a kidder,” to which C.W. smiles gentlemanly at the realisation of how far-fetched his stories are – so why do I believe him?
He is loved in Liverpool, it's the humour, he is funny, but it's difficult to see how he does it. He doesn't make sense, and it's incredible. He is like an Australian time machine into 1950's New Orleans.
Michael Holloway
Friday, 25 February 2011
Records, My Rare Vinyl LP's (The Merseyboys)
This must be the rarest LP I own. It is a 1964 Merseyboys album composed by John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. I don't know much about this record, and why they released it, since the first Beatles album was released in 1963. I do believe it was made before 1964 however, I only date it from the copyright date. It contains songs from Please Please Me, which is confusing because it seems like this would have been their first album had they not changed to The Beatles and took on Rongo as the drummer. It must be after The Quarrymen and before The Beatles.
In the top right hand corner is the word Decca, which is the studio that turned down The Bealtes in 1962. They were turned down by a number of record companies by this time. George Martin had produced studio recordings of their songs (this was with Pete Best who would be sacked from the band this year).
This album could be one of the original demos they recorded for Decca and was subsequently rejected because "guitar music is on the way out" and "The Beatles have no future in show business." However, The Beatles would later hire Ringo Starr and become signed to Parlophone, and would record from 1963 - 1970 twelve criticality and commercially successful albums and would become one of the greatest bands in history.
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
Records, My Rare Vinyl LP's (Beatles For Sale)
This is probably my second oldest LP, and also one of the rarer ones. It is an original from 1964. Their fourth album proves to be a turning point in their music, which was important to how they would sound in their later music. It still has that early 50's based rock n roll sound, but some bluesy sounding songs, such as my favourite off this album, Mr Moonlight, which is a cover of the Roy Lee Johnson song. It has Lennon singing with this scratchy, wailing sound, like wailing at the moon(light). I have used this song in my novel as the song playing when the narrator loses his mind, and subsequently argues in his head about the best Beatles albums.
This is one of the finer Beatles albums, which is usually overlooked for the 'greater' ones. I think it's the transition into a maturer sound that proves to be a quality to this album.
I'm a Loser is another fantastic song with blues-style lyrics, but with that quick-beat 50's style rock n roll. With both Paul and John on chorus "I'm a looooser," and then John singing the verses, he said it was him in his Dylan period, and I wish he'd kept it longer, I mean John Lennon calling himself a loser while blowing into a harmonica is just incredible. It was recorded the same day as Mr Moonlight.
The malpropism Eight Days A Week is the memorable melody, which I believe is used to signify this period The Beatles were in. The sound of strums on the guitar at the beginning and repeated at the end is the mature sound of four musicians who were, in their fourth album, becoming something new and big each time. Like The White Album, I don't play it that often, but when I do I just love the sound of them, this must be their best "early" album.
Friday, 18 February 2011
Records, My Rare Vinyl LP's (The Times They Are A-Changin')
Bob's first fully original album (albeit his third LP) was proof of his genius songwriting when he actually attempted to be himself in his music rather than mimicking Woody Guthrie as he did in his eponymous debut. It his regarded amongst his early folk LP's, amongst the lauded Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which many believe to be better than Times, though I think I prefer The Times They Are A-Changin' for the simplicity of it, the rooted folk music so obviously learnt within the space of two years since his first LP. It not only works on a level of folk music, but acts as an instrument of social change throughout the 1960's, with songs about racism and poverty, it represents such a strong movement in human thought, for liberal thinking and a change in us as people.
Out of ten songs, the title track is easily the best, with its memorable poetic lyrics and ominous leadership sounding us to follow in the tide of change, and calling for us all to realise the change happening in the world and ourselves. With such a powerful message coming out of the mouth of a 22 year old, he was way ahead of everyone else, and is no surprise everyone hung at his every word.
The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll is another favourite of mine, with it's simple chords of C major, A minor, E minor, which was one of the only songs of his I learnt to play. It is a sad song with a story about a woman who was murdered out of a racial attack. I think this kind of song highlighted what was going on at the time, no one wanted to hear it, but they had to listen, because those kinds of things were actually happening.
I bought this album from Hairy Records in Liverpool. I had just started buying records and wanted a Bob Dylan one. I found this one hidden between Saved and some other one, which I have no qualms with (Saved is actually a good album) but Times is understandably an early masterpiece.
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Records, My Rare Vinyl LP's (Goats Head Soup)
I bought this LP from Hairy Records in Liverpool, which was given to me quite cheap with a Best Of The Rolling Stones record, when I was looking for Beggar's Banquet and couldn't find. From Goat's Head Soup, I'd only known Angie, and as I bought it the guy behind the till said 'That's a bloody good album,' and I believed him as I walked out, slightly disappointed that I didn't get what I was after. But when I listened to it, I agree, it is bloody good, and there are songs on that album that will have you listening over and over.
Angie is such a good song. Kind of sorrowful but still optimistic about love. The song's title name is based on Keith Richards' daughter, Dandelion Angela.
Another song is Dancing with Mr. D, the opening song, and one which has actually given me some ispiration with my novel's character named D. D. in the song is supposed to be the devil, ie, "dancing with the devil," and what I'd written was meant to represent either the devil, death, or a doctor.
Hide Your Love reminds me of The Beatles song Hide Your Love Away from Help!, and I love both songs, with The Stones' song being more of a bluesy song whereas The Beatles' song is more folk rock. With Jagger's voice sometimes incomprehensible singing "How do you hide your love."
The whole album is a gem out of the many, just coming out of the longest streak of amazingly successful albums in concession.
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
Records, My Rare Vinyl LP's (Abbey Road)
Abbey Road is my next LP, which is an original print and this album represents The Beatles in quite a mature artistic presence, which is evident in the way it looks - suits, ties, no smiles, order. The ambiguity of the sleeve gives the album as much mystery as some of the others like Magical Mystery Tour, but this mystery is less about highs and more about experimenting with music.
The whole 'Paul is Dead' myth surrounds this album like mist and they played to it, as one of their jokes, because they found it hilarious. Each walking across the road in an Egyptian-style side-view, they represent mourning or a funeral: John = Preacher, Ringo = Mourner, Paul = Corpse, George = Gravedigger. The beauty in this art as a picture is equal to the art of the music it contains.
Come Together I think, relied on absurd lyrics and drum/bass sound that emerges the solo of George's guitar. It is a very well put together song, which lasts with John's gently wailing voice. A strange song whose lyrical ingenuity has as much artistic merit as the cover. I.e., the lyrics represent each member of the band: "he's one holy roller" allegedly refers to the spiritually inclined George Harrison; "he got monkey finger, he shoot Coca-Cola" to Ringo, the funny Beatle; "he got Ono sideboard, he one spinal cracker" to Lennon himself; and "got to be good-looking 'cause he's so hard to see" to Paul.
One of my favourite Beatles songs is Something, which I always state was one of George's songs (I had the pleasure of hearing Bob Dylan sing this in Liverpool 2009). Such a beautiful love song which isn't too mushy, but shows someone admiring from afar, being attracted 'like no other lover' and being moved by her love, there's just something about this certain person that you can't escape. (I have two versions of this song, one is not from the album but I can't remember where I got it, and is George by himself with guitar with no other sounds from the band, just brilliant).
Geroge Harrison wrote Here Comes the Sun from this album too. Shows that he's still my favourite Beatle. Some other songs such as Mean Mr Mustard (which I have two versions again) becomes these great Liverpool-style folk songs the band would know about with being from the place, and I know too, with being from here. They're similar to Irish folk songs, usually funny and witty. Polythene Pam is another one, it's like a joke in a story in a song, about Pam, "She so good looking she looks like man."
Abbey Road is a a cryptic album of hidden lyrics and music specifically engineered out more of jokes than art, but the Beatles couldn't help it, because they were so damn good.
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Records, My Rare Vinyl LP's (White Album)
Probably the greatest album created in music, The Beatles (The White Album) is a great collection of 30 songs, which most have some sort of artistic presence that have a timeless quality and preserve the actual creativity of the band, being such that no one (or not many) could match their creativity in music. Even one of the lesser songs of the album, Piggies which is a kind of annoying old-fashioned baroque sound with a harpsichord is an intelligent social commentary on corporate greed. Not my favourite of George's songs.
My favourite might be Happiness is a Warm Gun. It has a three-song structure, which contains a kind of misery and fury and love. It explodes now and again by loud/quiet rhythms along with the beautiful songwriting on the lines of happiness, which is either a sexual symbolism or in the grip of suicide.
Someone in work once said to me that the best song he heard The Beatles do was Long Long Long, which I wasn't too familiar with at the time. It, too, has a quiet feel to it which then changes so suddenly into a burst of sound. It's a strong but gentle sound, reflecting how good George was, I mean almost every song he made was good, and he didn't have to team up to do it.
This album is one of my favourite, though I do like the other later one's (Let It Be, Revolver). And I suppose it gives to music more than most things have given, being that essential creativity that lack now, and it existed the most when they made this album. This one I've got, (No. 0125403) is rare and is a statement to what music was and must be. I know I read articles now saying Rock n Roll is dead. I don't know. Maybe it died when John Lennon died, maybe it just got wounded and suffocated by the corporate crap that surrounds us now. As long as these kinds of songs still exist, then music will be fine, because we don't have to listen to new stuff.
I'm around new unsigned bands a lot, and I see some with potential (some I lie just to get my name as a writer heard) and most of the time I don't see the same power. No Morrison, no Cobain, no, Dylan. If people decide to treat music as an art again and make it disregarding what money could be made, then the love for music should return along with Rock n Roll. And The Beatles, who just so happened to be one of the earliest rock n roll bands, may or may no have been the greatest band on earth, but the fact that they lasted and they were wanted and were/are listened to, shows that they were doing something right.
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Long Poem Ideas
I'm thinking of writing a long poem of the size of The Waste Land and Howl, by merging some poems I've already written, including my poems Transition and Modern Life, which would in effect kill those poems, but for the sake of one greater one. I don't know, it might work, it's pointless having those poems that I do nothing with, and I could always keep them separate anyway. One of the best things I learnt was not to cling onto the things I write. You should treat your writing as useless until artful. If they're are useless, it won't matter if you attempt to destroy them to form something different out of them.
Anyway I just wrote this:
Holy me and holy you,
The great Don, Donnie, Donald,
Rob, Robbo, Roberto, Oh Oh Oh!
And Oh, great, too, the Ja, Jimmy, Jay,
Beginning here and there where me,
Your only God, hysterical, of fucks –
Fuck fuck fuck!
And ask them, great minds in the sky:
'Why don't you fuck?'
And see them dead living singing
Songs thru beards and teeth of white suns
Burning burning inside outside glorious words
Where always always lonely alone
Running screaming crying, tears burning down
Soft fat cheeks let steam in the ocean
Of great mystical calm and soothe
The only mind on Earth saying fuck!
Anyway I just wrote this:
Holy me and holy you,
The great Don, Donnie, Donald,
Rob, Robbo, Roberto, Oh Oh Oh!
And Oh, great, too, the Ja, Jimmy, Jay,
Beginning here and there where me,
Your only God, hysterical, of fucks –
Fuck fuck fuck!
And ask them, great minds in the sky:
'Why don't you fuck?'
And see them dead living singing
Songs thru beards and teeth of white suns
Burning burning inside outside glorious words
Where always always lonely alone
Running screaming crying, tears burning down
Soft fat cheeks let steam in the ocean
Of great mystical calm and soothe
The only mind on Earth saying fuck!
Friday, 11 February 2011
Novel Extract (what I'd written today)
Sometimes I'd stare into the mirror for hours trying to decide what I look like. Whether I'm ugly or not or if by coincidence I look like someone I know, and by knowing nothing at all, see a face with cheekbone ridges and chlorophyll eyes buried deep within moments of anger that now seem so subdued as if the ripples on the pond have settled and now there is quiet. I could stand there not moving for so long and feeling sick in my head and stomach but the world dims through chrysanthemum window where outside is fighting and screaming and I am in a nightmare. The absolute powerlessness of it all was confusing, making me stand in one place unable to see things as they really were, which I did not understand anyway, making me stand in one place, unable to move, corrupted to the point of a kind of sense of humour: knock knock, who's there? Olivia, Olivia who? Olivia, so get out of my house. I heard a boom outside and I thought the sounds were getting closer and closer to me, and there wasn't a single thing I could do: absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.
I was so sick I couldn't eat, the cramps were cutting through me. I never knew how to handle these kind of things so I usually ignored them, usually attaining to a high-fibre diet, carbohydrates, protein and the other one, (50g fat, of which saturates: 4g),sugar; though my diet usually contained aspartame mostly made up of Carbon and Hydrogen in a methyl group (R----CH3). This information was usually pointless to me, yet it was stuck in my head, words upon words, numbers upon numbers.
I'd try to decide if I was real or not, like I did when Melissa asked me “There's nothing on TV” so I decided she couldn't possibly be real; all/ most thought now was based around TV, and so if I think therefore I am then and there is nothing on TV, then existence ceases to be – of course my sister took this the wrong way decided that our two separate existences were tangent to each other in relation to certain mathematical spaces. I didn't understand what she meant so I made some tea after she'd left and took it upon myself to make sure I knew I existed, but I didn't know how so I smoked in the back yard contemplating calling (--) who now hated my guts, and I had a vague idea why, though now it seemed impossible to set things straight since it was actually all her fault and not mine. She was somewhere else by now, probably weeping into a cup of tea, moaning like a fucking ghost, the propensity to attack one another for the sake of love, by which we come to the conclusion of “angry love” that exists furiously to one seeking to ability to forbid the other.
My Website: http://www.student.ljmu.ac.uk/mcamholl/
I was so sick I couldn't eat, the cramps were cutting through me. I never knew how to handle these kind of things so I usually ignored them, usually attaining to a high-fibre diet, carbohydrates, protein and the other one, (50g fat, of which saturates: 4g),
I'd try to decide if I was real or not, like I did when Melissa asked me “There's nothing on TV” so I decided she couldn't possibly be real; all/ most thought now was based around TV, and so if I think therefore I am then and there is nothing on TV, then existence ceases to be – of course my sister took this the wrong way decided that our two separate existences were tangent to each other in relation to certain mathematical spaces. I didn't understand what she meant so I made some tea after she'd left and took it upon myself to make sure I knew I existed, but I didn't know how so I smoked in the back yard contemplating calling (--) who now hated my guts, and I had a vague idea why, though now it seemed impossible to set things straight since it was actually all her fault and not mine. She was somewhere else by now, probably weeping into a cup of tea, moaning like a fucking ghost, the propensity to attack one another for the sake of love, by which we come to the conclusion of “angry love” that exists furiously to one seeking to ability to forbid the other.
My Website: http://www.student.ljmu.ac.uk/mcamholl/
Just Something I'm Thinking About
I've just found myself writing the end of my novel. I'm not near-finished, I just realised that I wanted that put in the end, so I've been decided what to do with certain characters and where to place them, quite surreal that I'm writing the end of it though. But this novel is more trouble than it's probably worth. It's already had the longest workshop discussion in class, going onto the next day by email, with one person threatening to quit, and then me discussing my 'future' on the course with my tutor because not only can I no longer afford to pay for it, but I just don't want to anymore. I'm only staying for my friends there, whom my tutor told me are my sense of security and protection, which made me feel quiet good, because they are, and I'd been in a pretty bad way recently, and being in that class with someone was hard for me, though I was still able to bite my lip and carry on and then pitch my novel idea to an editor as part of my assessment.
Certain things have made the class fall apart. People turning against each other in a mad wave of hysterical depressions that overwhelm us all, and three of us laughing our heads off at the mere thought of letting those things break us down, because we can write well and if either of us leave then there's less hope.
I stopped being sad but then returned to it when I think back. It was a tough week. Quite pathetic really, but that's why I don't talk about it, and got on at work, and stopped lying around. I know I have friends I can trust as well as people I no longer trust, which hurts, and there's nothing I can do about that.
My Website: http://www.student.ljmu.ac.uk/mcamholl/
Certain things have made the class fall apart. People turning against each other in a mad wave of hysterical depressions that overwhelm us all, and three of us laughing our heads off at the mere thought of letting those things break us down, because we can write well and if either of us leave then there's less hope.
I stopped being sad but then returned to it when I think back. It was a tough week. Quite pathetic really, but that's why I don't talk about it, and got on at work, and stopped lying around. I know I have friends I can trust as well as people I no longer trust, which hurts, and there's nothing I can do about that.
My Website: http://www.student.ljmu.ac.uk/mcamholl/
Monday, 7 February 2011
Things I Learnt From A Young Age #1
Things that I learnt from a young age are:
[…] That, what would begin as a game, certain ingredients would, in effect, result in the toxification of young people, and that it is actually possible to snort liquids through the nasal passage, notably Tabasco sauce and vodka, which you would think would induce a fast-acting effect upon the brain, but really the sensation is much like a simulation of vomit in the nose, and subsequently induces actual vomiting thereafter.
That on the way to class your school friend whom you've known and trusted since primary school and trust with all your heart (at the time) will offer you a small tin, the contents of which is a powder that he would snort in the business studies classroom before class had started and you would say no to that but accept pill he calls a Gary, which is named after Gary Ablett, but you don't know who that is, and we are later told he was a football player who played for Liverpool from 1983 – 1992, and still didn't understand (Ablett rhymes with tablet).
That, on the subject of toxicfication, at the age of fourteen you sneaked into a park near the Seaforth Docks, which had a peculiar smell of cabbage, and you smoked pot with with your brother and his friend and had to run away from a policeman who was only attracted to the effeminate giggles deriving from the dark bushes because the high which was induced is quite difficult to subdue once active.
That, during P.E., you opted out of any sporting activity on account of the exact same inflamed knee condition of your friend whom you've known since primary school, and the teacher, with disbelief, has no choice but to send a group of us to the other side of the school building were we smoked – or attempted to smoke as I coughed each time I inhaled and became very paranoid about my asthma and I panicked thinking I was going to die, so I gasped in lots and lots of air until I collapsed with the over-intake of oxygen and the group of boys laughed at me when I hit my head, which hurt for the rest of the day, and I subsequently told a girl in my next class, which was Spanish, that I was in a fight with a boy, but the attraction soon goes away once another boy asks who you had a fight with.
That during exam leave we decided to go to someone's house and get drunk for the first time in our lives, and I inhaled a solvent from a glass which was just deodorant and was like inhaling perfume, making me choke and spit. With the excess deodorant I sprayed it onto my friend's arm and set it on fire, I'm still not sure why I did that. The smell of cooked skin and hair roamed the house for several hours, it made us sick at first, then we got used to it. After three or four more hours of drinking I awoke half-naked in the front garden with a bloody nose as some kids were coming home from school.
That you chose, without any moral standings whatsoever, to draw penis shapes on the plastic bus stop window in black marker, you then drew some girls name on a park bench, you then wrote your name over the plastic outer-casing of a Jurassic Park poster outside a cinema, which you got in trouble for, but you didn't understand this was because you'd written your name on the poster.
That, although I was terrified of girls at that age, I liked to be around them when a group of us hung around this social club at night and then went inside to be a even more social, but as I said I was terrified and I felt more comfortable to hang around the streets at night when the girls had gone, and then the boys had gone too, and I'd have to go home because I'd get in trouble with the police who roamed the area like rats looking for kids doing nothing.
That when we'd skip school because we were bored and sometimes just go into town and walk around or buy a magazine and a coke and sit on the field near the school and read about what was happening in the music scene in the late 90's and early 2000's, discovered a tiny grave of a hamster with a cross made from sticks, although we only guessed it was for a hamster because I was too frightened when you tried to dig it up.
That even as a kid, women were mystifying creatures. And men were my dad with different voices.
That the mere mention of sex in school was only terrifying to those who had done it.
That being 'mathematically challenged' at a young age meant you were permanently made to believe you were a lesser species than the maths teacher, who degraded you to the lowest set, but at the same time rose in sets in English, improving grammar and stylistics, which improved grades, but also rose the ability for sarcasm and hatred of the mere fact of both words and people.
That love was a dangerous thing to be a part of, when one girl fell in love with me and I fell in love with her but she vanished from my life simply because I forgot about her. (This would recur more often in later years).
That drugs, alcohol and school mixed together was an hilarious combination marred only by the mere fact that doing these things resulted in premature depression leading to me to the ridiculous decision at one point in my life to take an art course in Lancashire, where I lived for three years, doing much the same thing.
[…] That, what would begin as a game, certain ingredients would, in effect, result in the toxification of young people, and that it is actually possible to snort liquids through the nasal passage, notably Tabasco sauce and vodka, which you would think would induce a fast-acting effect upon the brain, but really the sensation is much like a simulation of vomit in the nose, and subsequently induces actual vomiting thereafter.
That on the way to class your school friend whom you've known and trusted since primary school and trust with all your heart (at the time) will offer you a small tin, the contents of which is a powder that he would snort in the business studies classroom before class had started and you would say no to that but accept pill he calls a Gary, which is named after Gary Ablett, but you don't know who that is, and we are later told he was a football player who played for Liverpool from 1983 – 1992, and still didn't understand (Ablett rhymes with tablet).
That, on the subject of toxicfication, at the age of fourteen you sneaked into a park near the Seaforth Docks, which had a peculiar smell of cabbage, and you smoked pot with with your brother and his friend and had to run away from a policeman who was only attracted to the effeminate giggles deriving from the dark bushes because the high which was induced is quite difficult to subdue once active.
That, during P.E., you opted out of any sporting activity on account of the exact same inflamed knee condition of your friend whom you've known since primary school, and the teacher, with disbelief, has no choice but to send a group of us to the other side of the school building were we smoked – or attempted to smoke as I coughed each time I inhaled and became very paranoid about my asthma and I panicked thinking I was going to die, so I gasped in lots and lots of air until I collapsed with the over-intake of oxygen and the group of boys laughed at me when I hit my head, which hurt for the rest of the day, and I subsequently told a girl in my next class, which was Spanish, that I was in a fight with a boy, but the attraction soon goes away once another boy asks who you had a fight with.
That during exam leave we decided to go to someone's house and get drunk for the first time in our lives, and I inhaled a solvent from a glass which was just deodorant and was like inhaling perfume, making me choke and spit. With the excess deodorant I sprayed it onto my friend's arm and set it on fire, I'm still not sure why I did that. The smell of cooked skin and hair roamed the house for several hours, it made us sick at first, then we got used to it. After three or four more hours of drinking I awoke half-naked in the front garden with a bloody nose as some kids were coming home from school.
That you chose, without any moral standings whatsoever, to draw penis shapes on the plastic bus stop window in black marker, you then drew some girls name on a park bench, you then wrote your name over the plastic outer-casing of a Jurassic Park poster outside a cinema, which you got in trouble for, but you didn't understand this was because you'd written your name on the poster.
That, although I was terrified of girls at that age, I liked to be around them when a group of us hung around this social club at night and then went inside to be a even more social, but as I said I was terrified and I felt more comfortable to hang around the streets at night when the girls had gone, and then the boys had gone too, and I'd have to go home because I'd get in trouble with the police who roamed the area like rats looking for kids doing nothing.
That when we'd skip school because we were bored and sometimes just go into town and walk around or buy a magazine and a coke and sit on the field near the school and read about what was happening in the music scene in the late 90's and early 2000's, discovered a tiny grave of a hamster with a cross made from sticks, although we only guessed it was for a hamster because I was too frightened when you tried to dig it up.
That even as a kid, women were mystifying creatures. And men were my dad with different voices.
That the mere mention of sex in school was only terrifying to those who had done it.
That being 'mathematically challenged' at a young age meant you were permanently made to believe you were a lesser species than the maths teacher, who degraded you to the lowest set, but at the same time rose in sets in English, improving grammar and stylistics, which improved grades, but also rose the ability for sarcasm and hatred of the mere fact of both words and people.
That love was a dangerous thing to be a part of, when one girl fell in love with me and I fell in love with her but she vanished from my life simply because I forgot about her. (This would recur more often in later years).
That drugs, alcohol and school mixed together was an hilarious combination marred only by the mere fact that doing these things resulted in premature depression leading to me to the ridiculous decision at one point in my life to take an art course in Lancashire, where I lived for three years, doing much the same thing.
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