Fur Elise - Les Tourtre

I'm sitting on my bed with my laptop on my lap, not feeling the radiated warmth because the window is open and I'm bare-footed. My stomach feels heavy from the pill I took a while ago, I think I'm anemic and de-hydrated. I should cut down on the caffine. I'm listening to Vanilla Fudge, I love the psychadelic rock music - as well as loving most types of music. I feel a bit sick. I'll be out tonight to see a band called Dirty Tricks, the guitarist is my friends' brother, and I suppose I'll end up really drunk again. Fur Elise has come on. Vanilla Fudge's take on Beethoven. I went last week and I was so out of it, I used the girls toilets and got lost and got my friends drink order wrong twice. It was funny though.

Sunshine of your Love comes on, I think it's Cream but my laptop says it's still Vanilla Fudge. Doesn't sound like a cover. I'm writing a story called The pigeons (Les Tourtre), which I'm going to submit to uni next week to be workshopped. Don't know how they'll take it. It has a French character. I might post it on here soon.

I think it is VF doing a cover of Cream. I put my glasses on, I'm supposed to wear them for reading but I never do. I've started wearing my glasses to read Ulysses. It's killing me. I love it, though. I'm still feelin a bit sick, but I'm hungry too. I don't eat very well, must be why I get like this. I wrote a poem in about a minute. It'sm rubbish, but it's something. Inspired by what I can remember from Ted Berrigan.


Waited 3 days
Took a pill
Caffine ran thru me
Spirit of things
Ran thru me;

Next day

Feelin' sick,
Eats sugar and
Drinks coffee,
Takes no more pills -

Nighttime,

I see into future,
I am either drunk
Or writing poems.

Untitled Poem 7/3/10

You, little shadow, over there
In the jungle you pray you are asleep,
Unnatural as a crucifix,
The marriage of saying 'Yes'
Over and over again;

Gliding with ancient clarity

Reveals us Severin infuriated!
The most public face over
Other faces facing;

Phlegm of voice spat

And continues to reveal –
I proceed to be a novice,
Aiming little shadow at the breakfast table;

Severin below her (the most purist

Leader of Maidens), wants her dead –
But bound and gagged – O, enemy!

Softly, in the dusk, I do not hear,
Softly, in the dusk, a woman ...

Tourtre and Fright

The Old French for Passenger Pidgeon was Tourtre. I find this interesting because the bird is now extinct. North America also had a word sounding similar, Tourte. Weird the the English word torture sounds similar, given to this exstinct bird.

The last Passenger Pigeon was called 'Martha.' Poor girl.


I did my talk on Beckett and it went well, I think, although I came very close to stage-fright. I get stage fright, and this was talking to a small group of people, my friends, and I was so nervous I felt like running out. But I did it, and my mouth was so dry you could hear it. I think everyone is fed up with me talking about Beckett now.

Skull on a Skeleton, Van Gogh

I won't do Between the Buttons, I will talk about Beckett. It's easier to present literature than music if it all comes down to literature anyway.

I've done no work on it. Except find some short films. I need a new job, I'm so tired, been up since 5am. I've spent ages on that small Hemingway book. I keep forgetting to write by hand.

I will slowly die and I'll look like him:

On Writng Short Stories

The process of writing short stories comes as one whole thing. I could spend either an hour or a of days and I'd always write something quite short, like 2 pages long, i.e. “short” story. I've been working on adapting a style of writing since 2005. But I only began to see this style around 2007 when I was being influenced by Hemingway, Beckett and Pinter. And using cryptic metaphors I'd find in Sylvia Plath's poetry and the dead-pan tone in Bukowski.

These stories were usually two-character narratives (which began as third person, but now mostly first). The characters play off one another and it is written like a play, but written in prose. The dialogue works its way to tell the story, such as a conversation between 2 people, of which is no one's business but theirs. They don't tell the reader enough on purpose. I hardly give characters names for this reason, and for the reason of identity. Saying this, the identity of characters is no ruined, per se, but altered to a sort-of sub-human or different human who have nothing but they lives and themes. And the one they talk to.

Imagine having a conversation with your friend. Why would you tell them your name mid-conversation. You already know each other.

My short stories don't go anywhere, in story and in place. The characters hardly move because they simply talk, and to build around this are these carefully crafted metaphors with the correct narrative that I'm always trying to get right. I like to write in metaphors, it makes the writing much more interesting, but there's always the risk of overdoing it and losing the whole narrative just by not making sense in that one line. It's like when I read Virginia Woolf and I began to write in these difficult lines that only made sense in my head at first and I couldn't justify them when I had to, so that made for a lot of deletions and edits. “The feathers of parakeets-their harsh cries-sharp blades of palm trees-green, too,” (Woolf, Blue & Green). The words cluttered my narrative and I never had a story, I was just trying to impress with poetic language into prose. Like the harsh, confessional words of Plath, I wanted more than I could handle, and I felt like I was copying – which I'd written in an essay describing the origins of my style at first originated through a type of stealing. (But, of course, all artists steal).

So the first instance where I found the style I wanted, I saw in Hemingway's Hill Like White Elephants in which two people talk to each other about an abortion, which is never stated anywhere in the story except for the word “operation.” Everything else is hinted at. However, the lack of Hemingway on my bookshelf meant that I couldn't possibly be so much inspired by him having read one short story out of so many stories and novels from such a great writer. (I've now taken to The Old Man and the Sea).

I've been told I write like Beckett. Or, at least, I try to. I hadn't read much of Beckett, except Malone Dies which is a novel, so how can you differentiate what is good and what is not from reading the prose of a playwright? I picked up some short radio plays to read, but it wasn't enough, so my tutor told me to watch them. I saw the short films of Not I, Play, and Eh Joe. The latter being the best I've seen. One man sitting alone and hearing a female voice in his head drive him mad. It was exactly what I wanted to write, and I loved it, too bad Beckett got there first. But with my story The Death of a Clown I knew, somewhat, of how to go about writing a story without a story.

The themes just come. Sometimes I'd already have an idea, but I never, or hardly ever, make a plan of the story. Stephen King once said that you can't plan a story, you just have to dig it up from your mind. After I've written the short piece, I'd read over it and see the themes, mostly hidden, and sometimes they'll already be repeated. I'd go over it and repeat certain images on purpose to drill in to the reader's skull what I'm trying to say, without saying it. After that, I finish. The endings of these stories are not endings at all, but just a sigh. My Scottish tutor from my University in Lancashire liked my writing, but hated how I overdid it all, and he's the one who told me to focus my writing. He said I was writing vignettes, little scenes that weren't stories at all, but scenes of stories, and that was my style. And the size was perfect to go with it.

Between the Buttons - between Bob Dylan - and Beckett

How do I show this album is better than Bob Dylan? I can't. But out of all the music I listen to, and I listen to a lot of music, it's the only album I like above Dylan. I'm a huge Dylan fan, I like Bringing it all Back Home, blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, The Times They are A Changin', and Bob Dylan LP. But I have to talk about something for a presentation in uni next wed, and I want to talk about music and it's effect upon my writing, but I can't stick to one thing with Dylan. So I thought I'd choose the only album that I'd consider calling my favourite album. And that's Between the Buttons by the Rolling Stones.

I can't talk in front of people. I hate it. I'm just not a speaker. I have to do it, tho, as compulsary for my course. I'm not looking forward to it.

My short story, Death of a Clown, was destroyed. Criticised to death. I hated it. I actually had high hopes for it, more than the last one I submitted. Seems that whenever I write something that I like, it's not good enough. I'm not going to write shit just so that it's accepted.

But I know how to fix it. I've been reading Beckett and Pinter like I was supposed to. I don't think I'll re-write it as a play, but there'll be more focus to it. I remember my tutor in my last University told me my main problem was lack of focus, and I think I let myself down by reverting back into that lack of focus again. Don't know why I did that.

If you read Beckett:
Eh Joe
play

thought is sin, realisation is pity

Wrong Day - Lots of Books - And Nemo

I'm passed it, but still in Limbo. In Purgatory? I still don't sleep very well and I'll wake up and think I'm scared of the dark. I'm not scared of the dark, but I wake up believing that I am. Weird, no? I'm more afraid of this house in the morning; in the early hours, like 5am. I get paranoid and I heard a guitar fall against the wall and I jumped, I saw a pile of clothes on a chair and I jumped even higher.

I get up at 5am for work, but I've had some days off. I thought I was going back in today since I remember telling them I'll have 11th - 16th, but they'd given me the whole week, so I'm off 'til monday. Doesn't really account for getting up so early and travelling 30min train journey in zero degrees. But they said I could work that day if I wanted, but I said nevermind, I'll go home. And I did. Off 'til monday.

In uni today and they'll workshop my Death of a Clown story. I'm annoyed at some people, esp. people who don't reply when I'm trying to visit them. It's less my fault for not visiting after so long when I don't get replies.

I must remember to teach myself French and German. And some Norwegian. I only know what I write as translations in poems.

My room is filled with so many books. It's funny coz I never read at all in school. I have a Hemingway on top of a Pinter on top of poems on top of an anthology on top of papers on top of my printer. There is a pencil in the anthology, I think it's either bookmarking Lewis Caroll or Dylan Thomas. Next to that is a small pile of old videoes, mostly old Disney movies, I watched Sword in the Stone yesterday or the day before. There is a tall speaker, which I hardly use because I have music on my laptop, and I can't be bothered plugging it in, but on top is my work clothes. Under the clothes I think are 3 dvd's: Drag me to Hell, Silence of the Lambs, and Finding Nemo.

Another Unfinished Piece of Fiction

I waited for 1000 years, I counted precisely 1000 years, 3 months, and 6 days. And now I have lost my mind, but I'm still alive as you are alive in your skin. And I'm trying to be mental, my face stretched open my eyes, pulled skin open and explode – pieces of me disperse into the air. I feel like a nail presses against my skull into a vein, a nerve, the brain himself.

She is being touched. I look at where she is being touched. She laughs and shivels up, looking at me. Where am I? Holding back a laugh, face touches his face – she wants to move away. Her hair reaches down to her breasts, my eyes like a robot's eyes scan her face, throat, armpit, scar on arm, and the breasts I dream next to.

The thing is about her is what she never says. I'm looking into her eyes, these light brown walnut-coloured eyes; her eyes say to me: Come and get me if you want me. Get this fool away from me. Go on. Come get me.

Satan is in the background. The red skin is shiny. Black horns protrude from emaciated head of reptilian demeanour. She begins to grin and she has no soul. She kisses him and imagines the rest of the night. I try not to think too far ahead. Her fox-like mouth laughs at me now. Why aren't you on me?

She is in love with her body. So am I – hers no mine. I can see how her hair touches naked shoulder and spikes of wool. Eyes closed, she screams the song. One strap has falled carelessly off her left shoulder. She thinks she looks beautiful. Too bad for her. With a body like that she could have the entire male population of the country.

And all that ever derides her, the skeleton claws at her back, then the three cans of Carlsberg left untouched on the counter. Buttoned up, she grins and pulls her tongue out, arousing every man in the room; her horns stick up like red arched torsos.

Pancake Philosophy

latent pancake reality / am i a pancake? .. or aren't i? - if pancake is not here yet, surely i should be a pancake...

Short Piece of Fiction - Unfinished

She is on my mind like a murderer. Stinging in the back as if the sting of a wasp sting my back, piercing the nerves with nails and teeth, biting and tearing away at me, clawing at my body with her claws of the devil. What is on my mind doesn't matter as I am singing a song in front of about a hundred people and I don't even know what I'm singing. Am I singing? I have to check, to see if there is a sound emitting from my mouth. There is. I feel it more than hear it. But I'm using it, my mouth is working on it's own. Oh my God, my mouth is working on its own. What if it stops halfway? I don't know where I'm up to.

I'm singing a Lead Belly song, I will soon begin to scream like Kurt Cobain did when he covered the song in 1993, a year before his death, and when I scream it will feel like this is a year before my death. As if it's a death scream, a warning before I die. One year to go.

She is on my mind and she shouldn't be, hanging on like someone feining suicide, and I am pretending, also, that I can sing. I can't sing. I'm using this weird falsetto that scratches from my throat so its like I'm singing with this weird anger in me. I can't sing. I have a singing voice. But I can't sing. My voice goes low and high. My eyes burst with salt tears as the force of the song pushes through the valve of my throat. She is sitting directly in front of me, leaning forward so that her back doesn't rest on the solid wooden back. She has her legs crossed. Her body is in a dress. Her body is slim and petite. Her legs make her look taller than she really is.

The Death of a Clown

My make-up is dry and it clags on my chin
I'm drowning my sorrows in whiskey and gin.

The Kinks

I leave the door open. My make-up is dry on my skin. It feels hard and tight like fish scales, and I can't find anything to clean my face with so I just sit down in a chair, facing the mirror, and wait. I see half of my reflection; I'm sitting a little off-centre. My mascara had bled a little and it looks like a crow has stood on my face. I lick my red lips tasting the wax. I am like a cartoon, as if someone has drawn me, my mouth is ridiculous. It's a massive thing over my teeth. My eyes are big; everything seems so big, as if it's all been magnified a hundred times.

I see fleshy light bulbs burning thin streaks of yellow light into the room. The lights around my mirror make me want to flutter my eyelashes at myself, and I do, but it doesn't look pretty. I look like a child has found it's mother's make-up and applied thick coats of lipstick over and over again and slapped layers of deathly-white foundation over the skin. I feel heavy.

There is an old sense of madness with this face, which I'm wearing on my skin for everyone to see. There is a cold draft coming in through the door, there is probably a face at the door, its sexless eyes watching like the compound eyes of a fly. I watch it change into a fly – I watch you change into a fly – you first take off your clothes, undressing with the slow precision of a toolmaker, dropping your thin layer of clothes showing muscle discharge and afferent in relation to slow moving articles of clothing like shedded skin. And you fly away back out of the door, with a silent buzz that rings in my ears as if it was a scream.

The door is open and I am freezing cold, I can't see or hear anyone, I can still hear the tiny buzzing of a fly, I sometimes see it, or I think I see it, flying around the room. I am sitting down. I am drinking gin. I am waiting for something, I can't remember what it is, but here I am, waiting. My make-up is solid on my face, my skin feels like it's made out of rock, I am made out of rock, it is why I am not moving. A fly comes in and buzzes around my head, a thin, sickening buzz screeching in my ear.

I find a cloth and wet it under the tap at the small sink in the room. I see myself in the mirror again, cleaning my make-up off like a woman. It melts. It looks like my eyes have burst and secrete black goo down my cheeks. My lips are swollen. The white skin wipes off with cold cream. I am so white I am a ghost. I can't finish. My arms are heavy and I feel so lazy that I could just sit back and sleep. I look terrible. I look ridiculous. My eyes are bloodshot as if I have been strangled, savagely cut in half, one part English one part alien. My stomach contracts. My hands seize and relax. Seize and relax. I feel … sick. I want to be sick. Am I wearing clothes? Yes, I'm wearing clothes. The door is open. There is no one there.

My make-up is ruined, I look ridiculous. I look terrible. I'm tired. I doubt I am here. There is no one here. There is a fly here, somewhere, it is you. Why are you so attracted to me? Like a magnet. There seems to be a strange amount of magnetism in madness. I turn and my spine cracks and there is the odd moment when my spine makes the only sound in the world, and it's like gunfire behind a pillowcase. I lean forward and bang my fists against the dressing table and the light bulbs jingle and everything rattles and the rubber chicken squeaks and one juggling ball rolls and drops to the floor with a muted thud as the fly flies around the room watching my every thought. I find the lipstick and apply a new coat of red over my lips until they are thick and swollen again, like a woman's, but I can't finish the paint without someone to help me. Where is the help? I need my paint. My mouth is distorted like seeing a blood clot in a broken mirror. I am tired. I … I am … this flesh-thing sits … face like some dead creature … face white … face like melted oils, morphed into animals and various creatures … I can smell the danger like a dog.

My clown make-up is cold on my face, my eyes see my face in mirror. The light bulbs light up my face as if I am an actress. I am a boy. A room like flesh, and horrible, terrible things – when boy asks what kills the eyes you reply …

My face … my make-up gives me an enormous sense of power, as if I am larger than I really am, magnified a hundred times under a microscope – an old, crawling thing, blue and white and red, and black, and waxy and old … my face sees my face in the mirror.

My body is old and dishevelled, it creaks and moans, she is like the scorpion's stinging tail stuck suddenly like a knife, and it doesn't hurt, more like it burns and there is a fly buzzing around me, I hear it, but there is no fly, the room is empty, I don't hear a thing. I am sitting on a chair. Something truly big comes in the room like a shadow. I am forced to stand up and led away. I smile. I do a dance. I attach my big red nose that squeaks when you squeeze it. Although I am innocent in all of this, away from my reflection at last, my other half is like the devil, and she protrudes like fingers and when I reach the door, feeling the cold draft on my damp face, like icy breath, you almost kill me, but by the time I feel the expected nothing, I fall against the door. It's like being another person, don't you understand I'm not actually you? You are laughing … you are laughing … I am laughing … the gin has kicked in … I fall against the door and spoil my make-up, I fall against the door and nobody needs clowns anymore. I fall against the door as it slams shut.

© Michael Holloway

Favourite translation Norwegian

Mann stiljaktar annen kvinne

translates roughly "Man stalks another woman" or "Man stalks other woman"

Untitled Poem in stanzas

Be not like me
I am not like you,
I am not I nor you
I do not like you;

Kill not I
I will not kill you,
I will not harm or hurt you,
I'm not going to kill you.

Love not I,
I will not love you
I will not love you,
I am not going to love you.

Hate not I
I will not hate you,
I will not hurt or harm you,
I am not going to hate you.

Be not like me
I am not like you,
I am not I nor you
I do not like you.


Wrote this just now in about 5 or 10 minutes after reading a poem called Be Not Too Hard by Christopher Logue. It's good because I don't usually write this concise, not anymore anyway.

Drawing

Nightmares - Mad Mary - and Mad Kids

It lies on human chest and feel heavy pressure on lungs. Throat closes. Skin freezes. Eyes do not open. Looks down on you as you sleep, sees your closes eyes sleeping, your body straight, arms are upward and reveals body, neck and ears to the open air of the room, as it lies on human chest watching.

I'd wake up in the middle of the night and forget what I'd been dreaming of and turn away from the wall and face the rest of the dark room as if there was someone standing there. The door would be jammed shut and you wouldn't be able to see a thing until pressing a button on the phone for a light. I wouldn't be able to sleep. I'd be thinking of people for the rest of the night. Drifting off for a few minutes and waking up again, driving myself mad.

There is a horse's head peeking thru curtains. The floor creaks, but I can't tell if it was in my room or on the landing. I'm telling myself the door is shut, but I'm scaring myself with thinking of apparitions walking thru it. My sister told me she hears creaks in her room. Maybe we're all mad. But I admitted that I was messing around a while ago saying 'Mad Mary' once or twice and telling my sister I was going to say it in the mirror. (I think this is our version of Bloody Mary, Mary Worth, Mary Worthington, Hell Mary) I didn't say it into the mirror. I was beginning to think I'd brought a curse into the house, but I don't really believe in that stuff. I'm just looking for excuses.

Is it Mad Mary? We used to say that in Primary school because there was this ghost story of a woman who died by falling from the old bell tower (not sure if she killed herself or was murdered) and there were stories that this ghost had killed a caretaker or something. Us kids would be scared to walk the corridors alone, since it was a creepy old building. Some said there was a dint in the ground where she fell. Or, apparently, she'd landed on the metal spikes of the fence. The girls' toilets were supposed to be haunted and I think the girls would piss around chanting Mad Mary into the mirror and then run out screaming. Actually, we were quite mad as kids.

This Mad Mary must have merged with Bloody Mary. There are a lot of variations of the story, but one is that after chanting her name, she will kill you, or drive you mad, or haunt you. Or even, after testing courage, she'll reveal a deceased relative. If she doesn't kill you, then she'll haunt you for the rest of your life. Another version is that girls (is it just girls?) chant her name to see their future. A variation of this would be to walk up the stair backwards, in the dark, looking into a hand mirror and you'll either see your future husband or your own death. Which will, ultimately, drive you mad.

It's weird I've ended up talking about this, but I just found a Brazilian folklore called “a loria do banheriro,” which translates as “the blonde in the toilet.” Instead of the mirror, it's a toilet, and she'll reach out and kill you. Maybe that's why the girls ran out screaming from the girls toilets in Prinary School.

We were just kids. But we were so mad.

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.

Another Dirty Trick With the Scissors

It subsided. I'm calmer now. I feel silly now, in retrospect, that I acted that way. It's like being dragged into Hell, or having your brain pulled out of your head and you're made to look at it as it's dragged into Hell - with your eyes still attached.
I was lying down all day yesterday after I finished my short story for uni called The Death of a Clown, which I'll post after I've submitted it to the workshop. And I texted my friend - whom I've known for 13 years - and said:

"Im depressed, will you stab me with some scissors?

To which he replied, after a long joke:

"Wat type of scissors?"

It was funny, but I couldn't reply because I had nothing funny to say and I was debating whether to go out in 3 hours, since I'd been invited to see a band in town called Dirty Tricks.
I went. After deciding if I should drink or not, knowing alcohol is a depressant, I got a double whiskey and coke. Twice. Then realising I'd spent £10 on 2 drinks I thought it would be good to stop. But one of the girls had bought the wrong drink, and after tasting it, realised it was the same as mine, so I took it. I didn't get drunk. It was fun and I left early to got the train home. I didn't feel so heavy anymore. Which was weird. I didn't expect that to happen. I thought I would have been down all night and ruined it and got worse. But no. I feel fine.

I have 33 poems collected to be published into a book. I'm thinking of reaching 40-50 poems. Don't know what to call the book.

I have about 10 short stories.

ghost madness

Ghost what am I a ghost am I am I a ghost have a ghost time 13:23 sits cross-legged temperature 4 degrees windows open cold as a ghost with no clothes on naked ghost who writes to ghosts with sick guttural voice and Poseidon mouth moves earth with quick shakes then stops as if earth-shakes never took place beneath him a man without arms woman without a head or that with skin so thick and intaglio-cut with chisel like Greek statue that screams with her bathing in bleach to clean herself in ocean all of mad sorts of madness that cannot sit still and still cannot talk and still cannot talk with a mouth like a ghost who has mouth sown up and pressed fingers against and murders itself and stares and stares and then calling the doctor asks for some pills and doctor says no cannot have them and so Poseidon moves on to alcohol poisoning to get what Poseidon wants and this happens ever so slowly and no one notices but the madness which looks like boredom and distraction the madness looks like boredom like boredom on the skin pulls no bearings that can see the boredom that kills the distraction and vice versa and burns in a horrible clammy atmosphere of hands that sweat over mouths covering up horse-like teeth that eehore and moan and kick backwards against toilet doors and fuck the women who stalk man mannen stalks annen mann and man kills man to get to woman and woman kills woman to kill man and so on and so on and so on and on and on on on and then killing all mersion of misery the car ride back home destroys instinct of life from eyes that are rotten with sleeps staggers home down dark alley avoiding piss-smells and murderers and passes a tree from childhood old tree from years ago stands next to construction site and down the road moaning and growling like a raving lunatic to self says like like shit shit shit that modern life broken soul and even moving house cannot fix and doubts travelling between countries and doubts anything and the doctor says no and inside house makes tea and midnight and cannot sleep and falls to sleep like baby and wakes up every half an hour to think in mad state as room melts burns colours like burnt painting and sees rabbits snarling and eyeless girls sneak up behind him lying in bed he cannot sleep he is haunted and mannen stalk annen mann and kills self to get to sleep and wakes up after half an hour and only half an hour has passed after madness lying in bed and dead relatives such as dad walks thru door and stands there staring at me...

Painting no.5

I painted this some time ago. I used oils paints and emulsion. I stuck down two pices of newspaper of the British and American flags and the words at the bottom. I flicked green and white/cream emulsion from the wooden end of the brushes. I spent a couple of hours on this one and it's the best one out of the others. Ihung it on the wall.

Vox Dei

This is the poem I wrote recently, when I omitted 'E'. I also found the poem Vox Dei, not sure if it's on this blog, but the thing is that it's different than what I have on my computer. What I must have done is typed up half of it then forgotten it and when I came back to it I wrote something completely different just to get it finished. So I'll have to work on the poem since the original ending is quite good.

Vox Dei is latin for "The Word of God." The first half was taken from notes written in December, the second half was written all at once in January. The orignal one must have been written all at once in December.




Vox Dei


At last I am in bed, like a bed I am like a bed,
Undercovers where the warmth hums thru square mechanic lungs,
And I am just thinking – not even moving to
Move to write nor breathing to move to breathe, I am still!
I am Medusa's eyes, bearing down on me pricks like
The stabs of a pin cushion, and the
Taste of her eyes, look at me! Cannot see me –
Sees others ready for her – Not I done just yet –
At last O sweet death! I am concrete at last!
Lights blue green pink in front, she in front lights
Up blue then green then pink I go red black metal
Shines – or shone with wet ice as ice thawed and I
Sweat and shake from ice the last nervous leaf on a bare
Tree planted in concrete – even down here where
The shadows play in salt and ice and cold hum of rain burn
Thru skin until your thawed body naked flesh falls off
In fleshy clumps of muscle and skin into your hand –
You bony thing – peel off clothes, shed skin, you
Bony thing, you dance and cry like a mad siren,
You dance and cry in the street all covered in madness;
In the words: vox dei, vox dei,
Pulls hairs from arms all calm as Bhai Taru Singh will sing
And dance in bones, like horrific mobile – bearing down pricks like
This into skin, you wear your skin so snug and tight,
A woman of marble, eyes of a lioness –
Stabs like a cushion of pins and, where she cannot see,
The sin the sin the sin!
Ever down here where concrete tree planted blue green
Red pink in front pink taste body naked flesh pink
Red, pink thawed body ready for her eyes!
And me, Baba Budha wise, covered in madness –
It's like she never ends,
The possibility of ending her
Ends in endless possibility
Of ending ...

Letter/Dream

Dear Person,

I have been having mad feelings lately, not dissimilar to my feelings 3 years ago when I had a different name and was drunk all the time and got kicked out of two places and had time to save a couple of lives, but not my own. What it is, is driving me mad because it's not quite there. This dog-like madness I get in my eyes and head, burns me like Hòa thượng Thích Quảng Đức and there is nothing I can do about it. There is no medicine for it - well, there probably is, but it's not for me. I move my body once and my spine snaps in two and I am two people and I ask my other half what I should do?

He says we should just leave our job next month and then go to France for 5 months. I say ok, I will. This is what I'm going to do, this is my decision, I needed someone else to make my decisions for me, and someone else did. I have one person I would go with, my friend I've known for 13 years, others might come, too. We said we'd do a 'Fear and Loathing' style trip to Amsterdam and kill ourselves, our actual selves, and come back one of two actualities:

1. Changed men. For the good. Proper men with enlightened attitudes and experience and happiness and whatnot;

2. Ultimate depression. The negative side is that it didn't work and we made things worse and one of us died or we just can't stand the sight of the country or each other coming back home.

I don't think the latter will happen. I don't even think the former, either. I suppose we may be enlightened, but what cynical man can find enlightenment? At least I'd be able to write the best poetry - no one reads poetry, why do I write it? The same reason I breathe.

I have recurring dreams of teeth falling out. I read a description of what this means: Anxiety of appearence and lack of power. Ok, I probably have anxiety and an inferior complex, feeling smaller than a dwarf, why would this mean I'd have to gum my way up to the top? I'm not religious, though I sometimes try to be spiritual, but I read that teeth falling out in dreams are about man putting faith in man not God. "God speaks once, yea twice in dreams" and I wish God would leave me alone, he's like an annoying child who speaks to you only when you've finally fallen asleep.

God says: Man, your teeth have fallen out.
Man says: God, go back to sleep, you are not a dentist.

"The God your God is a jealous God" because God, the bastard, cannot bear us to have the freedom in which we've chosen to have, but what freedom exists in a world where freedom is, ultimately, taken away by man?

Of course, the Chinese believe that teeth falling out is a sign of telling lies. A friend of mine told me I was a compulsive liar. I said I probably am, because it's more fun to lie than to tell the boring truth. It's like fiction. If I'm a liar then all authors are liars.

I could lie all the time until I forget what is truth. I have no idea what the truth is or what real is or what life is, I made the whole thing up. I am not real. I am no longer real because I made the whole thing up. I made you up. I must have depressed myself with making you up. Oh dear, I've forgotten, again, what was real.

Lipogrammatic poem

Lipogrammatic poem, omitting 'E'

At night cross-limbs low down
Mad with worry hits brain with fist
Should find in his vast family of pity
Nothing to bunk with him tonight –
Pillow similar to bricks –
Night is bulky; crawls into
Big old cataracts, much of that is
A good vision of damnation –
Girl in his mind is a blitz of all
Normal adult thought – turns to blank,
Think of how that day will ruin him,
Mad and thinking – similar to dying –


The letter E is, I think, the most popular letter in English and French, so omitting it seems to make the language sound slightly different, I think it flows either better or in a different way. It was difficult to write, though.

Happiest Away Where I Am

In the dawn of frost –
It's blue veins bulging like electrical wires.

Women holding small shoulders
Passing us listening to stupid music
Around a clear air of non-sound
Between us that felt like you were
Never really there.

Your clean soft skin
Like plastercine moulded with
Thumbprints under the cheekbone
With a nervous quiet
Like meditating rabbits –
And unwrapped from a towel
You float in space,
Uncommon as a bullet in the spine.

You are happiest away where I am
You soldier the roads
With an old shivering presence,
Gives me a thirst for Coke.

With a mouth square as a brick
And eyes brown and quick
You'll see me coming.

Some Images From Dec '09

New Year - New Writing

Haven't written on this in a long time, but I have been extremely busy. I was working 8 hour shifts everyday, having to get up out of bed at 5:30am, it was a killer. I was in University, too, doing my MA Writing, and having slaughtered my brain - along with my friend's brain - it was difficult to think of anything to write but small notes that turned into a poem now and again that got left to one side.

I quit my hours at work, and back to my part-time hours; I was fed up with being on a part-time contract and working what hours the bosses wanted me to work. So, out of spite and principal, I said no more. I would have, if they'd given me the full-time contract I wanted, but it was given to a temp. The cunts. So plan to quit within the next couple of months, as long as I can find a new job before I go.

I hope I can safely say my writing has improved. I submitted some poems to GetBack Magazine and, from what I remember, they were accepted and should be published this month or next month. Also, choosing some poems to submit to another magazine. The good thing about an MA Writing is the opportunities for publication.

I should publish my fiction. I was told the one I submitted for my course was good. Though I prefer just to send poems, maybe to establish myself as a poet? I don't know. Maybe short stories are just too big and hefty compared to poems.

This is one I wrote around Nov/Dec after I turned 24:


Silent man was a boy
Or, at 24 –
The young used to eternity
Placed between things like ghosts –

And almost floats from wall to wall
And oozes between things
Until the wall itself –
A perfect lake of flesh,

Where silent man has someone
Whose moth-from-mouth voice
Is a little flatterer, you flutter
Your eyes – laughs at me –

Sitting like an elephant
Waiting to vomit –
You say stop it,
Hunger. For 40 years –

I am an owl whose sleep is dead –
Demented and red
In the eyes, I am stood like a druid –

I have dreams they want
To set me on fire,
With a match and fluid –

Eyelashes fall constantly,
Until eyes are naked –

Weird cocktail of desire,
You flatter me –

The cold is inside warm
Bodies ravage the old
And the young die young
Like musicians they wish to be.

fool the coffee

What am I afraid of?
Trompe le monde,
What am I
A cup
What am
I coffee
Cup le monde
Afraid of I
Cup of coff -
-ee I le of
Afraid of what I am

poem 25/10

Hardly ever managing
To process the energies we find,
The danger of humans come
To you; hard like a brick
With your face on,

I saw someone
Wrapped up in a towel,
And we sat around in a circle,
The smoke constricting my lungs
Like a Peruvian Boa –

A dead man with a whiskey in his hand
A coffin with a whiskey on top,
Remember sitting around drunk
Dressed up dead from feet swinging –
Flames flickering like an epileptic candle,
Death with its glasses on
Takes off its clothes
And professes in the Indian Groves.

In a glowing Ankor corridor
We surpass tone-deaf muses
Their manner dragging knuckles and feet
To some kind of god damn tree-worship.

I hope she soothes the weather soon,
A turban to dry, a hand begging for tears,
A quick body – shoe-shaped –
Lying around in light of electric storms.

The rival full of doubt like a priest,
The death has always been machinery –
It crackles and explodes.

New Draft of Poem 10/8

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.

I am Become a Man / A God I am Not [title edit]

I am an old God that died,
I am become a man -
I have exist by powers alone,
The long-running fire burns silver dot -
An eye that winks that hardly exists,
I am a man a god I am not.

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.'

poem 13/9

Reflecting suns grow old now
Facing South days done:
I know I am dead already –
The dog at my knees,
His fur like thatched straw;

The Black Hole lets in no light,
King and prince dead in palace –
Murder by night,
The judge longs for peace –
His friends are burning on the wicker;

I am not dying young
Man is not here woman
Gone home, it is now night –

In daylight quiet bliss
Distracts death from entering –

Blog - MA - Writing - Mathew Street

Death is gone
Like a million rhinocerous
On the roof.


Have been neglecting my blog. I forget to write on it, and i forget to write on paper with having other things to do and other troubles. I tried to write but couldn't think of anything. I become conscious of my style. What is it?

I don't know if I'm better at writing poems or fiction. I used to get better marks for my fiction in uni, but it's easier to write poems. And poems are pointless.

Start uni again soon. Doing a Master of Arts in Writng. Thinking about moving out in the next few months. Planning a trip with my friend similar to 'Fear and Loathing' but in Europe. I've known him for almost 13 years. We're like brothers. He studied law and works for a law firm, and is just like me in that he hates where he is in life and just wants to get drunk. He said we're just in a rut. Need a place to live with 2 or 3 other people. inc. him.

Have arguements at home all the time. Almost got kicked out.

Is it possible to practise writing, guitar and oil painting in a day? There aren't enough hours. I have a canvas I've had for ages and don't know what to paint.

Went to Mathew Street Festival. (That's the street where the Cavern Club is, where the Beatles started off). I love Liverpool and our music history. Saw Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan tributes. Went to Cavern Pub (not the club) and saw John Lennon look-alike and some great music. I'm listening to The Bealtes now.


Mathew Street


Wall outside Cavern, each brick is the name of a band or musician that has played inside. Inc. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones...

Small Poem/Haiku Attempt

Sleep she thinks
Hairs grow on my face
Protective eyes are dark

Green like jealous frogs,
Toads stealing the waters
When lake empties.

Untitled 10/8 (mix of two poems written together)

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.

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.

Anger

Raging Raging
Black fury burning
A fight;
I had arguments,
I had viewpoint from
Rooftop -
Oh, such beautiful anger,

Begin to drink
Than think;
Unable to eat -
Punch wall and break fist;
I wait for ladies
To atack me,
With thoughts of babies, stealers of toes -
Oh, such gorgeous anger,

Dying, burning,
Reeking of old energy
Fuming pores to ooze hot sweat
And veins like tunnels
Of lava;
No perfect silver limbo,
I am the rabbit-man,
Oh, such electric anger,

I burn inside-out
Upside I am fierce
I snarl and bare all
Whiskers flaring up and
I steal beauty
Oh, such perfect anger!

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.

Spider - And Language

I'm in the middle of writing a short story called Spider, which will be longer than most of my pieces. It's about fear and the meaning of fear. I came up with it at work, I was looking at a girl who is one of the cleaners there, and I didn't have the nerve to talk to her. So I thought to myself "She probably more scared of me than I am of her," like a spider. And I began making notes on a piece of paper. The girl character becomes quite controlling, but fear and power keeps switching between the two characters.

Haven't written much poetry in a while. But I've been reading Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, and a little bit of DH Laurence. And I listen to some, inc. Frank O'Hara on www.ubu.com

Also, I had a weird comment on this blog today which said "I am not a child." Thought that sounded funny, becuase I didn't know what it meant. But at the end of my post I'd written "thanks for readin kiddehs." Kiddeh (kidder) or kid, is slang for friend. Like saying "mate" or "lad." That latter, usually for males, and can sound like "la," like the Merseybeat band The La's. Just thought it was interesting on the whole language barrier; ame language, different words. Kind of like poetry.

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.

Poem 18/7

You've got me by the roots of my eyes;
An air of hooks catch legs
Pulled up straight brain like putty,
Grey as guns, Babylonian skies,

Alive smells of wet wood and grass
Lasts as long as you or I,
And I am dead, and you are free
And we are mystics we blow out to sea

Without hope or rest;
Roads burn to a marriage of webs,
Our rainy tracks, rare and random,
Rain like smoke and dust and snow;

Under a bridge the rain explodes,
And lampposts stitch the sky;
I'm held together with glue and tape,
You pull apart my strands, piece by piece by piece.

Untitled Poem 4/7

He got a call. It was 12:24am.
He said Hello – He said Hello again –
She asked if he would come round –
He was 35 miles away –
He came anyway. It was dark.
There were deep roads of black tar,
Buildings with glass limbs – no men no women –
Packs of old dogs dragging their lifeless
Forms along the highway.

He walked the distance of 35 miles
That night to be with her. Just like she'd asked.
He passed a dandruff of junk,
Cannibal eyes from each new terrace –
He knocked on her door. There she was.

She had blonde hair.
She held wine in one hand
And a knife in the other. It was 12:24am.
Again she went thru the motions.
She slowly unbuttoned her dress.
She was blind – she covered her
Eyes with a tangerine-coloured bandage,
She had no clothes on –

Inside. The dust inside
Were galaxies in mysterious
Motion, deja vu like liquid –
She took off the bandage.
Her eyes were grey like his father's eyes,
She asked him about her eyes:
“I see everything I see
In you I see nothing at all.”

She was naked as the sun.
There was no sun.
It was 12:24am and she was
Going to leave for Falmouth in the winter.



**Wrote this last night. It's mostly imagination. I imagine walking from Liverpool up to Preston, where I went to university, 35 miles away. The girl is no one inparticular, although the blonde hair was taken from someone I knew. I expanded the second stanza today, I realise I have some imagery from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I recently read. I read some Frank O'Hara last night too.

I think I like this one. I don't usually write this way.

Body of Graves (new version)

Move my hands move my feet
Like a puppet in the street,
Be an act of violence
Be alive or be greedy
And steal money and steal emotion
Where the mind gives up
Where simple war ends and begins again
And kills in the middle of some
Sexual process their dreamy
Faces stuck like that for eternity,
And what they leave here
Is their senseless anger
And no feeling in words -

And no one worth saving
Is worth a thousand saviours,
I think,

And covered in sweat
You move me like a puppet
With no emotion with no music -
Be an act of violence
Be an act of living -

The process of giving
The priceless ohm,
The Vajra Mantra
The old Buddhist Vajrasattva
The fat Buddistattva -

Be an old begin again;
Take my life take my choice
Steal my money steal my children
And pray for Earth pray for rain
Your senseless anger and girth
Your senseless pain feels like shame,
Shall no one be worth saved?
Where another simple war
Comes to an end
And concrete pours over soldiers
Like dead men and women beneath
Pompeii the colour of guns,
And kills and killing in the middle
Of this new land of war
Brothers of concrete fighting alongside
Body of graves,
Boddistattva;

This that we are in
We slide out and in -
We stab and sympathise,
It is OK for you to murder
You are born again you are
Not even human anymore -

Shall no one be worth saved?
Save the words for someone who cares -
The concrete has been poured and
The rock is catastrophically set hard as Earth;
The process of giving
The process of killing
The process of dying -

The senseless simple war ends
And the process begins again;
With no emotion and
With no music you tower over
Me like a God of guns
With breasts and everything and world's
Sexual process begins and I die
And you die and kill me and
kill me
and kill me




*The structure is supposed to be one long-running piece with indents to show line-breaks, but blogger is being weird and I can't fix the html, so I've just broke the lines so it looks like stanzas.

Heavy

Her perfume smells of alcohol,
Eyes are black until white
Eyes of liquid spill onto carpet,

Smoke above and below
Heavy air hoods head,
Settle down heavy as stone,

This opponant's skin of cobalt,
Hard lustrous grey,
Produces a radioactive tracer,

Which moniters me all day,
Tonight I am dead -
Metal of gunpoint,

She glides towards door
Thick voices come uncalmly,
Motionless leaves me,

Air the colour of arsenic
Jilts her red dress
Until first of escapes,

Once again she's at the door,
She stretches upwards
And stays like porcilain,

She is blue and green dust
In Bronze age paints,
She will not come through the door again



**This is something I've just edited like crazy. I wrote it about october 2007. It reads completely different from the original, which is good because the original was rubbish. I wasn't going to do anything with it at all, but now got this poem.

It's about when I first met my friend whom I lived with in 2007/08. She'd just moved in the flat. I wanted to describe her and the atmosphere, but couldn't do it. Only now - a year and a half later - I can write something about it.

The cobalt image comes from two places (three including my head). The University interview 2 weeks ago where I was told to read The Road by Cormac McCarthy (which I am) and it's use of the image of grey and how he keeps up different images of the same colour. And 2, I just bumped into a Sylvia Plath poem that does what I was trying to do. In her poem 'Jilted' she has images of acid and vinigar and lemons, whereas I have cobalt and arsenic and metal.

I don't often put poems in stanzas. But I sort of like it. It will be edited again sometime. It's the 15th in a file of poems I've collected and edited. Of which will be halved and probably the end result will be my best poems.

Piece of Writing from few months ago.

He can't feel a thing. He lay down on the bed after removing his clothes and miserably gazed up at the milkly dots in the ceiling. He reached above his head and pulled a pillow out from underneath his hair. He put it over his face.

'Shit fucking place.' He stares upwards with a pillow over his face and then subsequently removes it, seeing the dot of the lightbulb.

'So the lightbulb hung itself.'

Just then a wet crash and a solid bang came from the room next door as if someone had fallen in the shower. He kept still, listening for movement, but heard none. He didn't get up. His stomach began to itch.

At that moment, his left thigh itched and the itch wouldn't leave. It felt like a burning in a pin-prick. The pillow, which he tried to suffocate under, was on his chest, making him a little too warm. In one instance he felt a slave. An itch on his left foot. A flashing light off to his right going on and off ...

It was only at the turn of nine o' clock that he could remove the pillow and sit up straight, stretching; cracking his bones into place and allowing a warm breath of radioactive air into his lungs.

Hypertext Production (Postmodern Poetry in Progress)

Hypertext Production

*Copy These Words*

The process of writing
Permanent rush
Premium muted lights;

Those lights fill skin
With thrill and decay
Horizon in my hand
Prism long plain -

The grass itself exists by sight alone

Again the process of killing;
Universe Karma loves killing,
I hear your little flavour of talk

You walk a slow drogue,
An assembly of writers

Uttering 'LIFE'
Time shifts < http://thehyperkarma.blogspot.com/ >
Time shifts again - Word: "HYPER" > hypersonic
Hyperspace, hypersurface, hypercube,

Greek prefix "uttep-"

Forward in time excuse the clear
Shimmer; excuse me my sweet your

Sexy clone of another ego
Electricity instead of blood

Again the glass light personalities
What we cannot believe is after we work;

21st Century paperkiller
a 'hell';
b 'o, w';
c 'orld';>

This tint of vile green plumage fills the waters,
Unclear grass ages the wrinkles
Swap beds and kiss gratuitously

Your God is buried with his or her

Laugher in his or her grave.

MA Writing - and Fascists

I got offered at place at John Moores University to do a Masters in Writing. After an hour long interview, and the guy criticising almost every word of my portfolio (which I'd written almost 2 years ago) he says he would like to offer me a place and I gladly accepted.

What got me down was all the stupid mistakes in my work (fiction) that I should have known about. And sentences cluttered with nonsensical metaphors that I used to use back then, which my old tutor got me to stop using. I've been re-writing my fiction portfolio so the wording is much more professional and readable. I'm keeping the stories becuase they were the best I'd written (which was the only reason I submitted them).

I won't submit them here. But I have shorter stories that I might post.

In other news, the elections have just finished here. Was for UK and European Parliment. I didn't vote. I usually don't because I always disagree with every political party. And the politicians make me sick with this recent expenses scandel, using taxpayers money for themselves.

The BNP won 2 seats in the European Parliment. They are the fascist nationalists that most of us are against. They talk about having a white country and kicking anyone with darker skin out the country, pretty much.

They didn't increase in votes. It was the decrease in non-voters and the percentage of Labour's huge loss that got it for them. So they should be gone by next year.

I saw a clip on Youtube (I don't have the clip) that has the leader of this party talking about white people being the founders of this country, while pictures roll past of black and Indian soldiers in WWII uniforms. My granddad was Indian and fought as a Ghurkah soldier on the front line in France, he ended up living here in the country he fought for. He married a woman from Liverpool (my nan). That makes me one quarter Indian, (and quarter Irish from my dad's side) which I am proud of. Now does this make me less British? No.

I saw a programme, I think it was on BBC one, and Robert Carlyle was in it. A politician rose in power after manipulating the public, after gaining success in the polls he took over as Chancellor. With this extra power, he let the public want him more and more until the Government gave in and let him become leader. That was Hilter and his Nazi party in Germany. No one wants this to happen again. Let's keep the fascists out of politics altogether.

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

Untitled Poem 30/5

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

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

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

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

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

faces #1

Some Photos 25/5/09

Automatic Writing While Listening To Manic Street Preachers

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

Dream

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

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

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

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



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

2 Discarded Untitled Poems

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

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

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

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

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


#2
Mozart and Beethoven
Laughing in the Eiffel Tower

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

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

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

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

Lying in a row,

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

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


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

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

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

Poets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blonde

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

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

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

Zygote

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

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

Or charm the charmer.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Poppy

A painting I did a couple of weeks ago.

Last Day Girl # 1 & 2

Last Day Gil # 1 (First Draft)

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


Last Day Girl # 2 (second draft)

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

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

http://www.justgiving.com/michaelholloway

Bob Dylan in Concert - and In Training

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

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

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

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

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.