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.

Writing Poems - Meeting Carol Ann Duffy and Billy Collins

I don't think it's quite worth saying how relevant it is to write poetry from one point of view of the world, where the single purpose for said writing is that single and actual functions; though every time I write poetry - it will come about like some kind of celestial or biological function - I'll write about five or so "good" poems, and what I mean by good is that I choose not to throw them away and believe that with the one good line in them they'll be forever remembered as that poem he wrote, and thus I cannot throw them away anyway.

But I've always been one to read Sylvia Plath, I love her use of language and I've seen it in no other poetry so I subsequently mimic that causing me to have written something totally cryptic that even I don't know what I have written (this happened in 2007 after reading Virginia Woolf for the first time, I didn't know what I'd written, I've not read her since). So the polar opposite to Plath I believe is Charles Bukowski, whom I also adore, and they are actually similar in that they both write confessionalist poetry (which I've written in an essay before). Bukowski made me write gritty and often vulgar language, but together I see my influence from the two. But I don't think it's quite worth saying that I read only these two poets, since I do try to read others, and one recent influence is now Billy Collins.

I saw him give a reading with Carol Ann Duffy. I met Duffy and spoke to her, told her I was doing a Masters and she signed her book Rapture for me, which I still have, but I went and got Collins' Sailing Alone Around the Room because I like his use of language, very slow and meditated like his voice, and the message/story that I neglect to put into my writing.

I wrote a poem I've posted called Three Men With Suitcases. I wrote it after I came home one night and three men with suitcases where in my way, but I was thinking to myself about a short story I wanted to write which I never got around to (it was going to be called Conversations with the Vicar, and was to be quite violent). My thoughts then moved onto these men in front of me, they were very strange, like tourists at night. In my tired state of mind I began describing smells as colours. The poem I wrote switches from outside and inside; with three men in suitcases in the way and getting past them, and inside with a man seeming to be freezing to death somehow.

I wrote this:

The best thing I ever knew
Was not yourself or what you do –
It was that time you got the flu,
Sat and said achoo achoo,
Covered in a dangerous heat
A swelling down to your feet
Skin white as a sheet,
Tongue a lump of meat –
The best thing I ever knew about you –
Not your eyes (that were blue)
Or your left foot (with it's tiny shoe)
Or your presence (which sticks like glue) –
It was your sickness inside of you
That made you want to sneeze
To explode or pop
And fall at your knees –
It was you and the time you had the flu –
It was always you and the things inside of you.

This was just something that came to me after reading some Collins and the idea that, with being sick at the time and most other people too, we're more sick than alive. And the result being, I more likely fell for the sickness than the person.

Another one:

The heat of me burns,
I glow a shade of red,
Maybe crimson or rose,
I swell and fill with dread;
Then numb to the knee
(and numb to the arm);

My skin is dried fruit
Or rotten apple skin –
Eyes are heavy,

A shadow is slit along
White wall like yin yang –

I then burst into confetti
As I drift into sleep.

This was a small thing I did to get me to write when I couldn't think of anything. When this happens I just describe my physical feelings. The confetti bit was an interesting image that came to me, the reason I haven't included it in my "good" pieces is because the first part is too weak and the end is paradoxical since 'burst' is the opposite to 'drift into sleep.' It's one of those poems that can't really be edited since a change in the metaphor will be a change in the entire thing, which isn't really worth it in the end.

On Poetry and a Novel - Gainbourg Vie Heroique

The previous Poem, Two Mystics, was written over a few hours at night, after reverting back to Sylvia Plath's poetry, which I hadn't read in a while, and she's a huge influence on my poems. It is basically my experience around people and the actions between them. How I could give a person so much - feeling like I've "had to" give something - and then feeling like I have given not enough: "I have given you less than your smiles," and "I have given you hardly a thing."

I suppose it ends with feeling ashamed; with the obvious symbol of "red,"

which then bursts into flames. The title came to me right at the end of writing it, when the line "mysticalstill" came to me (forming one word is apparently Joycean, I got from a friend at our writing worskshop), and I decided to call it, not Mystical Still, but Two Mystics, making the two people seeming exactly the same, as they act so awkwardly around each other in the exact same manner.

Havva I got from Bob Dylan's song Hava Negeila, which is a Jewish song

of the same name. I wanted to put that word in, so I looked up it's meaning and it means "Eve" which I think fits perfectly.

I have begun writing my novel. I submitted the first section of the first chapter to the workshop and got some really good feedback, so I must be doing something right. However, the thing I was worried about was true, which was I wrote something impressive, and then as it went on, it lost the impressiveness to the end. It's like I've push out every bit of stylistic writing I have in one bit, and the next bit its diluted. But with the advice I received, I think I know how to go about writing it.

It's a 4 year old story. I thought of it in 2006 and never wrote it because I

liked it so much I was worried I'd ruin it. I told this to a friend back in May, as he'd already begun his novel, and he'd said to just write it and then see where you stand. But I hate that, when people say "just write." It's really not that simple. It's so comlex that it's taken me 4 years to adapt my writing style to be good enough, and I can now use the previous mad experiences I've experienced into which I can form a somewhat semi-autobiographical novel, which I think Hunter S Thompson used in Fear and Loathing which is called a Roman-a-clef; a story based on real events, turned to fiction.

Because a lot of things have influenced me 4 years after I had the original

idea for this novel, I wonder how long I should take with anything. So if I write and publish and novel and then see it some years later, I'd probably have some better ideas for it.

I'd been using David Foster Wallace, which a friend had lent me, as an

influence. And I was also looking between Catcher in the Rye and Naked Lunch as two distinctly different first-person narratives as influences. But I recently saw the French film Gainsbourg, which I saw after I'd started writing the chapter. The life of musician Serge Gainsbourg is illuminated through Johann Sfar's portrayal in this film, which uses Absurdist-like charactures, including a giant walking head of a Jew that comes out of the propagandist poster of Nazi-occupied France and walks with the young Gainsbourg. Another is La Gueule (The Mouth), which is a 7 ft. tall persona of Gainsbourg, with a long nose and long finger, very creepy to look at, but very funny as you understand that it's just Gainbourg's thoughts personified. This is something in what I wrote, in which the character is somewhat divorced from his own body. Someone had mentioned Beckett's Molloy, (though I'd only read Malone Dies out of The Trilogy). Someone mentioned to me that at the end of season 4 of House, there is another similar concept, in which House views his own mind in the form of a dead person. I will have to watch this. I will have to get writing this thing, having been reading up on more of Pinter and about to read Hamlet for the first time.

German songs - Til Lindemann

Eins für mich
Eins für dich
Gibt es nicht Für mich

Ich bin so verliebt
Ich bin in mich verliebt

*Translates from the German:

One for me
One for you
Does not exist for me

I am so in love
I fell for myself


This is taken from Til Lindemann, otherwise known as the singer of German Industrial Rock band Rammstein. He is a poet himself, and his songs translated to English are actually quite amazing. I like that heavy metal music anyway, but it's hard to recognise poetry like that with the type of music Rammstein make. Which is what, I suppose, Lindemann intended.

That excerpt was taken from Zwitter, which is translated as Hermaphrodite. The word Zweigeschlecht appears, too, in the song, to describe the self as one, rather than the actual noun. But the weird subject is so interesting, it talks about a man and a woman becoming one, and therefore falling in love with one's self, as his lover is now a part of him.

I'm just interested in languages, I guess. But when you get poems with such weird and original images as that, that's when you've created something.

Grav Domma Vit Aether

Black geometric shadows of houses
And priceless armies of women
Expanding like Lycra begin to sing
While batting eyelashes
Thru a concentration of rainbows;
World stops being soup of death
Becomes old veridian,

Love hung like rubies in a cave,
Upside-down like bats their faces
Odd like pumpkins –

Or as impossible as
A baby whistling in the Arctic.


Poem drafted from earlier one 20/10/09. Title is in adapted Latin meaning something like: heavy (important/serious), woman (girl/mistress), life (way of life), universe (time). I've changed it a lot and the structure now stands like a vase-shape, the first stanza as geometric as the shadows. It shrinks; 7,3,2 in lines. The best image was the baby in the Arctic, which by moving to the end is more poignant. I think it's the best image of impossibility I've thought of. The only line I hate is the 'life stops being soup of death,' because the rhythm is different.



You can see how it's come to be this poem from the older ones:

20/10

Impossible things
Like a baby whistling in the Arctic;
Crucified freaks in pinstripes screaming:
I want to die,
I want to live thru oceans
Of red and purple clouds
Of hot evening sunshine –

Black geometric shadows of houses
And priceless armies of women
Expanding like Lycra begin to sing
While batting eyelashes
Thru a concentration of rainbows;
World stops being soup of death
Becomes old veridian,

Love hung like rubies in a cave,
Upside-down like bats their faces
Odd like pumpkins –
I see above a mossy rock
Or an atom in the dust.


AND, this one 10/8, the earlist version, first written by merging two pieces of writing together, which I probably wasn't going to use. I can't remember, but they might have just been notes or lines or just discarded poems.

When I do not love the world I will be alive
And no one will see me awaken
Barefoot and bare like a bloody newborn
I do believe things are impossible
Like a baby whistling in the Arctic –

To love a world that loves no one
But its self loving another is crazy
Afterwards it was odd to be trained in certain
Ways these freaks in pinstripes crucified
Screaming 'I want to die,'

Meaning 'I want to love,' travelling thru oceans
Of red and purple clouds of hot evening sunshine –
Because what beautiful things
Are so beautiful they are possible –

Above geometric black shadows of houses,
And priceless armies of women expanding
Like Lycra begin to sing while batting
Eyelashes thru a concentration of rainbows

And this world stops being a soup of death
And becomes miles and miles of old veridian,
In you love hung like rubies in a cave,
Upside-down like bats their faces odd like pumpkins –

My heart beats thru its skin
All I am is skin, skeleton and a heart,
I am almost nothing; hot petals fall and burn white,
Forces the bells to recede,

Why am I given back the moments of your stillborn?
And no one but me can see miles above
A rock with moss, or an atom in the dust.

poem 13/9 no.2 - expeimental writing

Drink take pill
Political leaders
Sweet girls; Son of Man,
O let me burst
Your last legs?
Series of mechanisms:
“invention” (JFK, Khrushchev) –
Apparatus of production;
Devour our young,
Is there space in the space you
Space in having travelled quite a bit,
Never bring the dawn,
Face like biscuit
Burning fiercely
“it was really him that hailed” -


[Having looked at parts of JG Ballard's Short Stories vol. 2, Literary Theory: An Anthology Rivkin Ryan, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, and maybe Apollinaire.]

*This poem was written fairly quickly using a sort of cut-up technique and appears as I first wrote it. I thought of using Berrigan's technique in his Sonnets, which I have. However, I didn't collect lines, I just glanced over random lines in books and used them. Turned into a nice little piece of experimental writing.

A little more work on that, and it would be a good piece of language.

** Also, the 'space in the space' line comes from Berrigan's line of 'Is there room in the room you room in.'

Automatic Writing 10/8

I am now the old blame
There is no more ale
There is no more pain.

The path he takes up there
A bar of organs
Internal flesh questions.


*** I did this using automatic writing technique with eyes closed. My little sister came up with some of the first stanza. The first stanza was scribbles at first. We came up with:

I am the
El blahe
m cd ale
a pain.

And tried again for:

I am the
G L blame
No and ale
O pale.

I then re-wrote it to what it is now and did some automatic writing to get the second stanza.

Metallica And A Cup Of Tea - And Poets

Heavy metal helps to get you in the mood for writing. Or that, it helps when your pissed off.. either way, I had Metallica on loud (with a cup of tea, lol) and I was reading some poems and sorting out the poets and authors I read.

I reaslise I am a fan of Plath and Bukowski. Also the beat poets. Two French poets. And some who are still alive. They are (other than the French ones) pretty much American and British.

Poets: Sylvia Plath, charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William s Burroughs, Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Appolinaire, Frank O'Hara, Brion Gysin, Heathcote Williams, John Sinclair, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, Harris Schiff, D.H. Lawrence, Wilfred Own, Siegried Sassoon.

I finished my story called 'Spider.' It's weird but interesting, and kinda crappy since it seems kind of rushed, which is the reason I'd be crap writing a novel, I'd just lose all patience and write the end.

I'm going to write some poems now. What I think is good I will post on here. I start my Masters at University next month, so I need all the practise I can get. I don't know how good I am, but I want to be better.

Camping Trip - And Writing Poetry

I've stopped giving my poems titles because I can't think of any and I just want it finished after I churn them out. So I'm just dating them. The last poem I wrote comes from pieces of notes I wrote while on (coming back from) a camping trip to Cornwall. We usually go there in the Summer, and I've had a couple of inspiring moments to write. Well not moments, just memories. I find it hard to write in the moment, if you know what I mean.

One being me and my best friend drunkenly running around the campsite and waking up some German tourists and nearly getting kicked out the site, while our other friend slep in his tent. This time we (me and my best friend) drank whiskey thru the morning after a night out, and play the "lying down game" (from facebook) and just talked.

Things have started falling into place recently. Things were falling aprt once again, but it's come together and hopefully by the Autumn things'll be good. I'll be in uni doing an MA Writing, and my Death Valley bike ride for charity is being moved to November, which I prefer.

****
Some notes on writing

Spend a long time in choosing one word.
Read as you write.
What you write is a skeleton at first.
It will never be perfect until you make it perfect.
Sounds are everything / almost everything - inc. sentence sound/word sound...
If you don't like the poem then the reader won't like your poem.
If you don't understand your poem...
Allusion. ie. allude to other things in literature/art/science/history/life/anything
Try to say something.
Try to speak.

Automatic Writing (Without Looking at Page)

This was a piece of simple experimental writing that I wrote last night, which can be quite annoying because not only do you not see what you're writing, when you do look you can't even read it. It's mostly scribbles and you can sort of make out a couple of letters.

What I got from it was this:

People the way
a dog a
a go g rag
Rog g and dande
Reaper up MR.
OEPt yur -

Your word
ler quickly there
Milk + + ho
Christina is now
him and (on) doorstep
Me of home.

I changed it just before to this, something that vaguely makes sense:

People in the way
Of a dog
And go a rag
Rog and a dande
Reader go up Mr.
Adept yur -

Your word
Is quickly there
Milk and who
Christina is now
Him on doorstep
Me at home.


** I found out "Dande" is a town in Angola, a place I've never been to, but another spelling "Dandy" is a flamboyant man. "Rog" is Hindi for Malady or illness, which is interesting.

I kept the spelling of "Yur" like that because it goes on to use the spelling of "Your."

Christina is a frind of mine, I lived with her for about 3 or 4 months last year. I like the two sentences in the second stanza. They begin to sound like this:

Your word
Is quickly their
Milk, and
Christina is now
Him on a doorstep,
With me at home.

I don't know who "him" is supposed to be. Why would she be "him"? I'm thinking it probably means the guy she was with the whole time I knew her and I was jealous of him. Or maybe the "him" means me.

http://www.justgiving.com/michaelholloway

2 Discarded Untitled Poems

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

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

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

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

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


#2
Mozart and Beethoven
Laughing in the Eiffel Tower

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

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

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

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

Lying in a row,

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

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


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

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

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

Poets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zygote

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

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

Or charm the charmer.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Poems - 'A Glance' (And Sponsor Me)

This first poem was first written I think last year when I was writing 200mph; when I could write a good poem and throw it to one side and write another and go get drunk and depressed and laugh my head off. Was a funny time. So I've collected 14 poems so far and edited them. Potentially they are supposed to be the best I've written, but I'm not sure. Still need my friends to read them.

The second poem I wrote 2 days ago while listening to music and probably watching tele. I was just putting words together, didn't change anything because I didn't feel like it, but the main thing was the rhythm because it was meant to be a lyric or something.

My poems can be personal sometimes, and sometimes I don't like this. Confessional poetry sounds too self-centrered. I'd read stuff about war and politics and changing the world, and I've got a poems about how I'm feeling. "feelin' fine." But I recently read William Blake and Philip Larkin (since I have their books, that I kept from school haha). Also read some Bob Dylan lyrics. And I have a variety of themes, inc. 'Our Nuclear Future' and 'Modern Life' (don't know if I put them on this blog), and three Postmodern experimental poems called 'Hypertext Production' 'An Examination of Earth' and 'Cubism.' The latter I'm quite proud of.

Last Note: Please Sponsor me on my bike ride for charit across Death Valley, Nevada: http://www.justgiving.com/michaelholloway

A Glance


At a glance, I am plain,
All salted and personal, the starving soldier,
Up against the wall, the small faceless joke,
It is impossible to tell when she is coming;
The fridge is empty, an aging imposter.
Our weary desire for people
Wears us out;
Everyone’s qualified, the impossible children,
Constant drivel, the outcry of incidents.
My friends, left alone,
Red-faced, she faces again;
She works the world, curled into herself.
Lit from underneath
I headed up generation to generation,
Perhaps our grace graces us all.
The half-decided days wanes into itself like women.
And me, tea-bags for eyes,
The slow baptised dog.




Untitled poem (written in about 20 minutes)

I am sitting here dreaming I
Was in another place different to here,
I’m staring at this painting seeing
Turn brightly I am a
Knight in shining armour,
There aint much use in calling
Out names forgiven forgotten
Outside I am a broken
Washing machine,
There aint much use in writing
Things are useless to me now,
The echo of our righteous
Plays on the negative
I am the rightful joker,
The mother tells the time like a clock
And these deaths couldn’t have been kinder,
I am here I have been shot down,
Someone screams to their mother
And I am not yet invented,
Now the days are boxed in
And it’s dark and it’s old in this North end of town,
And I’ll play this in A-minor.

Professional Drinking - Penny Lane - And Calego

Coming back home from work on the bus on Sunday, I overheard this woman talking quite loud on her phone. I started laughing to myself with what she was saying. Stuff like "He's a cronic alcoholic," and I was thinking, wouldn't you want to keep something like that a little more privite? This was as the bus was driving through the roughest part of the city, all buildings boarded up and filth in the streets and writing on the walls. I wouldn't walk through there at night unless you wanted some kind of drug. I think this woman was talking about her husband (or just a male she knew) and she said: "He might as well be my professional drinking partner," which I thought was clever. I had this in my head all the was until it was my stop.

The bus gets closer to where I'm getting off and it passes the Penny Lane bus (I think it was the number 62, I think it used to be the number 1). It's not a tourist bus, just a normal bus driving these people home. And I look at them on the bus and I'm wondering if they're Beatles fans. I mean, not everyone in Liverpool are Beatles fans, but everyone respects them to a certain degree. Most the old fellahs still like them. I was wondering if those people lived on Penny Lane, I don't see why not, I think there are still houses there. It's not really a tourist spot for me, just a another road to the South of the city.

It's funny because I live here. You get to say: "Bloody tourists." It switched round when I go on holiday and I'm amazed by a bank or something. My brother showed me this website thats sell American chocolate bars and sweets, he knew I'd like that from when we went to Florida in 2001 and we bought a suspicious amount of American sweets onto the plane.

I think I'm going to Wigan on wednesday. Going to see my friends I haven't seen in a year. I used to live with them in Uni. It's horrible that's been the quickest year of my life. I had the best time of my life in that flat last year. Got some good pieces of writing done.

Looking over last poem with translations, and I like these lines:

"Zal silences me."
"I am calego."
"Mannen stalks annen mann
mann stalks kvinne..."

Might just keep them in the final one.

Reading Between the Lies

I am sitting here at 9:33pm where small lamp is my eyes,
I am falling behind with many things – writing, sleep, and people –
The deep depressing rooms lived with me since 1991, each death
Built in mechanically. What ghost does is what ghost sees.
I am being eaten alive by fleas.

A hair on the paper makes a shadow of me –
I am forcibly rubbing my skin for clarity: my arm, my neck,
Regret silences me because the horror of memories;
Because Christina screams out to me!
Because now I’m thinking of three people:
Man stalks another man
Man stalks woman...
Trapped now in these terrible impact talks,

I make impacts – they are dangerous paradise.
It turns to 9:54pm; the hot buzz of the halogen warms the room,
My feet are bare and veins appear in my hands from heat.
The werewolf is angry and says ‘why are you such a stranger?’
The banana is so laid back;

I am the city, I am all around,
Gotta see this city to the end,
Stuck in job till Doomsday – back in work on Monday –
Beard ten-feet long and mounting pressure of waiting still.

Dylan Moran and Basho, gotta see it,
Bout 2:30-ish, if that’s alright?
She’s busy all morning, free in the afternoon,
Comes down with glandular fever, and we’re all doomed.

“TV is shit! I wish I
Ws gettin pssed.”



I got the title from the last piece of notes I had so just threw it in as the title. I don't like it, it doesn't make sense as the title.

[This following one is the same poem with translations to some of the words. Languages used are French, Indonesian, Polish, Dutch, German, and Portuguese. It was just an experiment to see what the words would sound like:


I am sitting here at 9:33pm where small lamp is my oko,
I am falling de balakang with many things – writing, sleep, and people –
The dalam depressing kamar lived with me since 1991, each death
Built in mechanically. Ghost, co nie jest tym, co widzi duchy.
I am being eaten alive by fleas.

Un cheveux on the paper makes a shadow of me –
I am forcibly rubbing my skin for clarity: my arm, my neck,
Zal silences me because the horror of memories;
Because Christina screams out to me!
Because now I’m thinking of three people:
Mannen stalks annen mann
mann stalks kvinne...
Trapped now in these terrible impact talks,

I make impacts – they are gefahrliche paradise.
It turns to 9:54pm; the hot buzz of the halogen warms the room,
My feet are bare and veins appear in my hands from heat.
The werewolf is angry and says ‘why are you such a stranger?’
The banana is so laid back;

I am the city, I am calego,
Gotta see this city to the end,
Stuck in job till Doomsday – back in work on Monday –
Beard ten-feet long and mounting pressure of waiting still.

Dylan Moran and Basho, tenho que ve-lo,
Bout 2:30-ish, if that’s alright?
She’s busy all morgen, free in the afternoon,
Comes down with glandular fever, and we’re all doomed.

“TV is shit! I wish I
Ws gettin pssed.”

My Methods for Writing

What I do is (when I'm in the mood or if I can put myself in the mood to write) drink very sweet coffee. (I drink tea most of the time, but that relaxes me, and I don't need to relax). I put music on loud, which can b something heavy to help me think, but I can also go for lyrical songs form Bob Dylan, The Doors, etc. Then I need to have some books out in fron of me; inc. what I'm reading at the moment (Dharma Bums), some random novels, books of poetry (all I have is Philip Larkin and William Blake and some anthologies, one of which has my own poem in).

With my glasses on and cross my legs sitting on my bed, make sure no one can come in, I get writing what falls into (or out of) my head. Write in notes and fit the pieces together, at the same time looking at lines of poems (not the full poem) from books and websites.

Poets that I'll definately be reading: Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski..

I think it's safe to say that I hate writing. But it's the only thing that keeps me sane. I remember sitting in a pub in Lancashire, talking with one of my creative writing tutors, and she asked me why I like to write, and I remember I said to her that I don't, but I feel lke I have to.

Who was it that said never create anything?? I'll look that up.. But I only half agree with that. It's one thing artists, mothers, and gods can do. "Playing with the machine of creation."

... Picked up guitar again. Bought some plecks (or picks). Missing high e string, so switched some round and have a lower sounding out-of-tune guitar.

Excerpt from 'Dharma Bums' - On Poets

'They were all meeting in the bar and getting high. But as they stood and sat around I saw that he was the only one who didn't look like a poet, though poet he was indeed. The other poets were either hornrimmed intellectual hepcats with wild black hair like Alvah Goldbook, or delicate pale handsome poets like Ike O'Shay (in a suit), or out-of-this-world genteel-looking Renaissance Italians like Francis DaPavia (who looks like a young priest), or bow-tied wild-haired old anarchist fuds like Rheinhold Cacoethes, or big fat bespectacled quiet booboos like Warren Coughlin. And all the other hopeful poets were standing around, in various costumes, worn-at-the-sleeves corduroy jackets, scuffly shoes, books sticking out of their pockets. But Japhy was in rough workingman's clothes he'd bought secondhand in Goodwill stores to serve him on mountain climbs and hike and for sitting in the open at night, for campfires, for hitchhiking up and down the coast.'

(Kerouac, The Dharma Bums p.13)


I read this while sitting on the train going to work. I really like the different images of poets and the difference between the upper-class intellectual and the scruffy working class poet.

New Job - Bob Dylan - And Ulysses

Finished 'Naked Lunch.' I'm on 'Dharma Bums' now, by Kerouac.

I'm applying for a new job. It's at the university library, and seems the perfect job for me. And it pays £17,000 a year. That 4 times as much as I'm getting now. If I got that job I could finally get my own place. I've got until the 23rd jan, and my app seems good since I got a degree, but I'd have to put referees from my uni tutors, even though I haven't seen them in little under a year. Now way I'm using anyone from the job I have now as referees.

Going to see Frank Turner on saturday. Can't wait, going to be a good day. Drinking comes early. Bob Dylan's getting closer too, and I was talking to a guy at work (an older fellah) about Dylan. It was cool because he said he'd listen to Dylan in the 60's. Went to see him on London Road, and Joan Baez was playing too.

Watched 'I'm Not There,' which is an amazing film, can't believe anyone has the nerve to criticise it. Also been listening to Damien Rice, can't beieve I haven't listened to him before.

Got back into my reading of Sylvia Plath for a little bit. I don't know why, but every time I read something I end up copying that style. I know I do have my own style, but I do tend to mimic another style after reading it. I end up forgetting what I'm writing. It was like that with Burroughs and Bukowski, I've done it with Coupland and Kerouac. What I really want to read it Ulysses. I've got it some where.

Tired - American Poet - And Short Story Thoughts

Been dead tired recently, that's with getting up around 5am almost everyday for work. Only working the mornings, but it's killing me. End up sleeping thru the day and feeling far too tired to write - and if I read then I'll fall back asleep. Must have some sort of iron deficiency or something. Not that tired right now, little bit of coffee helped.

Just read some Robert Pinsky, an American poet. Really good. Going to start writing more, as in simple notes because I don't even do that anymore, I'm too lazy to be a writer. Saw a girl at the train station today (she looked like a porcelain doll) and she had this little note book, writing stuff. I wondered what she was writing, and then I thought why don't I write while I'm out and about? I'm thinking up stuff all the time, but it'd just come out crap on paper. Even a mate at work had a notebook, noting down bits of comedy becuase he does stand-up. I thought about writing comedy, thought of some stuff, never wrote it down.

Not done anything on that short story. Don't want to. I just wanted to put it on here. I think I like it, but not sure. It's not religious or anti-religious (I'm neither), but it's just interesting to use religion, and mix it with the narrator's thoughts on socialibility. I know most parts don't add up, doesn't matter as it's a first draft. The last bit with him turning into a robot was strange because I was just writing off the top of my head, describing the metallic taste turning him metallic. It has a funny social-sexual theme going on; the final words were meant to be funny, though. Like, he's becomes a social robot and so does everyone else with socialising and drinking alcohol and taking drugs, and disregarding religion for whatever reason, and they just say to get him up. Whatever, it was a little like my christmas eve.