I’m feeling a bit weird at the moment, maybe because I don’t travel much and I’m going to Finland in a couple of weeks. I told a mate of mine I was going and he said “Finland – what a beautiful city”. I’ll let you work out what’s wrong with that.

Spark-ling eyes, tender-cheeked free
Inebriate, base, elemental creature
How tender, even
Feminine as it charms,
Soothing in the blanket
Adoring conversation
And vibrating wine, drowned to the eyeline
Coke-mugged, shamed Temple goes
Friend in hand home, where the dripping
And licking and moist whispers
Penetrate his mind’s ear howling
Bouncing bed, books and blood
In the heroic past midnight
Those super-human greats, those gentle
Words, kind gestures:
So dandied, proud and unafraid,
Thinking of her he takes him in
For little words and warmth,
Miasmic pleasantries that trip off
Tongues lolling beneath,
Reassuring in the soberless sweats
But bed arises and
The angel-daemon stripping erect
Languished in love in smooth sheets
Alluring smiles, scorching in the summer
Dark. Temple falling closer to his lips,
The beauty in her eyes, the curves of his
Face, her handsome beauty and willing:
He asks, like a gentleman: it smiles lips
Touch and tongues squeezing, the
Elemental covering and feeling and
Our dear Temple is locked in the flames.
And they lie there, that elemental baby
Head safe on his breast,
Fingers stroking unruly
A bellybutton, erstwhile
Flames now a little
Cooled and tender
Licking skin on skin,
Nuzzling wet nose
Until
The sun
Appears
And
The light
Goes out.

This is an old one, like probably a few years now. There’s a bit of a religious string going through with the Temple and stuff – I kinda wanted to leave Temple as more of a person originally, but now I’m more keen on it as a symbol. I did a real quick edit to put this up but I think I might try a full rewrite to make it all a bit more thematic. This is like another, more emotional take on the “story” in ‘The Lusty Abbatoir‘. I wrote that one after and it did a better job expressing some of the content here. So yeah, there’s room for adjustment and development of this one. Honing.

Earlier this week we found a seagull that had been poisoned/poisoned itself, was just lying on the beach and my friends said it couldn’t even support it’s own head. Poor little thing was barely breathing. I arrived as they were calling various numbers to find a working seagull rescue service. One friend was supporting the dying seagull, one calling the rescue. I said, well, shall I get some wine? They nodded. I brought the wine back and we all agreed it was suffering and – because of that and because it’s a fucking seagull – we kinda wanted to kill it. But, a rescue service had picked up and since they exist is seems wrong not to use them. When they arrived, they said it’d probably die before they could get any help to it anyway, and it did. Got me thinking of this video on youtube where some environmental activists in a vet open up a dead seagull to show how bloated it is with plastic pieces. I mean we should get rid of plastic, but also if the creature’s stupid enough to eat a ton of material with no nutritional value…while pissing people off…and then choke on that nutritionless material…

I guess we can all agree human society hasn’t exactly been designed with ecosystems in mind. Maybe we should be thinking about that, not so much for the animals and plants (though I do like animals and plants) but for our own designs. If our cities and towns and industries are fucking up the world for everything else, surely that says they’re fucking it up for us too, that the design is wrong or inefficient? It’s old now but I like to mention it – there was this study by a guy called Calhoun, on rat colonies. He’s remembered for the experiment in which all the rats grew to live in shit then killed eachother. But he ran a lot of other colonies, basically enclosed environments set up to encourage different behaviours in the rats, and many of those ran well, often reaching a stage where the rats independently started maintaining their numbers, instead of growing. In other words, it reached a point in some of the colonies where the rats were just content. It seemed like Calhoun had found that our environment changes how we feel about eachother and how we deal with life. He thought specifically our cities could do with a bit of a review, bearing in mind that the rats in the poorly designed ‘city’ had destroyed themselves. But, in the end, this positive side to the research was buried under the panic caused by the colony that self-destructed, and all the people who believe we’re going to run out of space on Earth. Contrary to their opinions though, evidence suggests we just need to better manage what we have.

I just got to thinking about this because the poem above is based on a pretty chaotic drunken night I had, in London. I mostly remember the nice parts but there were some seriously bad moments too. And everything, good and bad, happened in more or less a square mile. A relatively small space, crammed with the whole range from deepest pleasures to sharpest pains. Forgive me for wondering how useful or sustainable that model is.

Some fucking amazing music that gives the feels, on romance, on urban environments, on all sorts: Da Vosk Docta. Polish dude about town. His soundscape is just so absorbing, like some kind of neon honey. Neon honey, by the way, is probably a pretty decent way of describing 30% of my musical tastes. And this guy’s not the usual synthwave that’s probably inspired that description. I’d also recommend the synthwave though. Check Confused Bi-Product of a Misinformed Culture on youtube, also NewRetroWave.