Prose

Supreme Problems #19

Notes, Poetry, Political

The word ‘demos’
The word ‘demos’
The word ‘demos’
‘kratos’
People are a political concept they are an aggregate of their opinions and biases and the extent to which they will express those opinions and biases in a convincing way to a wide audience, especially a voting or otherwise competent audience
The word
The variance of meaning in human communication
I know that when they’re saying “this democracy” and “our democracy” and “our democratic values” this is a way of saving “your consent”, “your belief”, “your faith”
Boris Johnson is a threat to the British public’s faith in its own government’s ability
So the Supreme coming in must be and John Bercow’s calm statement that this building will resume its work must be
They are restoring FAITH, they are restoring the stock value for BP British Parliamentary Belief System
If there is not enough FAITH the whole edifice lies scalp bare scarred and withering
The whole nation is a small shitting dog with no owner to hold the leash
I don’t love this country or this government but this Supreme – this new Supreme – for restoring our morale through the FAITH in ourselves
The FAITH in our meaning
It’s meaningless except for the fact that we feel it and our feelings are not without
Importance
So the court that takes sovereignty away from parliament restores parliamentary sovereignty
and the Queen and the old money severed head speaking jar abide foaming and bleeding and screaming
but
Remember
sometimes the demon-fool, sometimes the jester, sometimes the pretender shows us what we are
which is when we become afraid.

stinking pissing fear is the enemy of all change, not only the bad

Learning From the “Masters”

Personal, Prose

Edit: I fucking hated poetry again for a short time lately, I forgot its value, I looked on it as a poor excuse for a few chatted sentences, and then, again, Dylan Thomas saved me and my sense of poetic value, of betrayed and crushed romance, breathing under the boot in rebellion.

I’ve been watching a couple of documentaries on distinctive artists recently: (google image them if you don’t know them) Francis Bacon and Stanislaw Szukalski. And while their personal moralities and lifestyles may seem, may in fact be, highly problematic to most people, you have to admit they have a talent for creating evocative imagery. I mean images that aren’t just what they seem. Images that refer to other feelings and experiences in the viewer, about which the artist probably only had a distant inkling…some feeling based on their own understanding of how deeply the image effected them on their imagining it, or the parts of it. I mean these images startle something crawling around in your head and in your body. Creatures climbing the ladder of your spine etc.

So I’ve decided I need to try and put some more of that into my own use of imagery in the poems. These guys from the documentaries go to town imagining and communicating what they’ve imagined. Lately, I’ve just been wanting to produce something that a reader somewhere might like. And I don’t think that’s the way to go about it. I still firmly believe you need to have a sense of what different readers think of your work, and that you need to interact with your readership, but you can’t really let them determine what you’re making. They can help with formulating the ideas that inform your creative work, but the work itself, unless you’re starting it as a collaboration, has to be yours. From your own private brain workshop, manufactured using the tools of your emotions, instincts, your fingers, your sweat. With art anyway. With that kind of art that you immediately say is “art”, because it’s so fucking artsy.

I guess that’s not always what I want to write/make, actually, now that I think about it.

There are exceptions, but work that comes from your soul really seems to be work that’s worth the creation going into it and that’s worth people seeing it.

At the moment I’m at a bit of an impasse. Whenever I try and start out on something new I get caught not knowing whether to go for smooth shapes or hair and dirt and rough. Maybe both are the way to go. After all, how can you really talk about one without having the other at least as a reference point, if not an immediate contradiction.

I’m trying to put aside time and space to dream out landscapes. This is something I used to do regularly when I was more of a romantic, and when I engaged less with the world anyway. I’d hide away from my surroundings even as they encroached on me with increasing meaning. I was the kid wandering on his own or standing in the group not saying anything and clearly daydreaming about something else. And that fed nicely into weird and extreme romantic landscapes streaming through my head…but being at school and stuff I never really spent much time fleshing those out into words. Or pictures I guess.

Since some harsh but enjoyable waking up to reality I’ve cut myself off from that place for a while, and now it feels like the right time to scavenge there for remnants, time to rebuild some clearer sense of romance again…I mean the passion’s bled right out of me. I need to rediscover the source from before and approach it again, with more care and self-knowledge this time, and use it for the poetry. For the sake of the poetry.

Yeah. So that’s what’s happening with that.

Also if I’ve not mentioned it before then have a look at this: https://hackhastings.home.blog/. It’s the other non-poetic project I’m working on at the moment and will occasionally show some of my writing that’s not turning up anywhere else. Also various other Hastings locals doing their thang. Check it out.

Naive and Angry

Personal

Caution: some very…erm…’casual’ thinking in this one…

Sometimes it feels like last generation were the cultural biproduct of the 60’s, and because so much seeming good happened (culturally) in the 60’s, but was then betrayed, the 60’s kids are a bunch of miserable sellout fucks. The kids they had, the culture they predicated and in some ways revelled in, is a culture of sadness and misery, of longing, of nostalgia. But, perhaps without consciously realising it, their doing this generates a great emotional capacity and even happiness in us. I kinda wanted to say emotional intelligence there but I hate that term. Emotional capacity will do if you understand it as not just a range of emotions, but the ability to control and understand those emotions to some extent.

60’s kids seem to have this tremendous naivety, even now. Maybe it’s from their parents not wanting to ‘wound’ them with tales of the war and rationing and whatever. Maybe it’s massive pop consumerism telling them they can have anything they want. Regardless, they generally exhibit a naivety that makes them do a shit job of bringing their children into the world…which is actually a pretty good job. I mean we mostly learn that the world is a harsh place and that we have to look out for ourselves…and we do that without a war going on, without the white males among us receiving much discrimination…I mean even those tremendously (socially) privileged persons still broadly learn the lessons of hardship. At least in the emotional sense. Our metaphorical hands are filthy from labour even if our real hands are freshly washed.

This doesn’t make us better. This isn’t me saying we beat our parents, our predecessors. It just seems to be an interesting facet of cultural reality. Nostalgia for me is 90’s and even 80’s bands being nostalgic about things I never knew. We grew up on the example of the post-60’s kids who were breaking out of the bubble, and suffering for it. We’re growing up cynical, critical, revelling in our misery and, in some cases, depravity. And there’s something strangely healthy about that. I mean as long as you combine all of them. Problems come when people only have one or two attributes off that list.

You hear all this talk about the snowflake generation, right, but have you met any of these snowflakes? They’re fucking monsters. They’re banning speakers from university campuses, creating their own thought police. They’re hard-hitters, they’re tough. They know nothing and they don’t care. They’ve got a broad range of emotions led by a cankerous anger at the world. The naïve post 60’s culture mocks the snowflakes in the hope they’ll go away. Just like they never knew how to raise the snowflakes when they were kids, the parents don’t know what to do with them now that they’re growing up, becoming political entities, asserting an economic influence and value, twisting culture to their increasingly powerful will. These are a version of the kind of fucks that caused a world war or two: yeah, the snowflakes!

I think maybe the greatest development in Western culture in the next few years will be the scales falling from the eyes moment when most of the last generation and its cultural pocket boys are dead or dying, and then we realise the new waves of toughies aren’t just scare stories and media scams. They’re real, they’re angry. They’re fucking up the stock market or blocking bridges with protests about environmental changes they’ve been told are damn important. They’re influential, easily influenced, desperate. They’re a catalyst for change in some kind of chemical mixing pot we don’t understand. We don’t know what the other ingredients in there are. Is it just water? Is it fucking mercury? Somehow we just can’t tell. But they’re jumping in anyway.

Frankly, I can’t wait ’til things get a little more honest around here. Even if it’s honesty about some stupid half-baked student bullshit of an idea, it’d be nice to meet someone passionate for once.

Rambling Revolutions

Personal

I keep wanting to find a way of writing on here regularly, so I’m now attempting a ‘journal’ type of thing, which I’ve definitely attempted before and failed…well, stopped. I’ve already stacked a few posts to try and give myself a head start. You might think that’s cheating given the diary-like context, and it probably is, but I’ve been writing these on a mostly day-by-day basis, and (after this one) without too much editing required, so the main thing is that I’m just not posting them on the day they’re written, which doesn’t seem so bad. I want to give you people good stuff to read, not just random thoughts, but I also can’t keep up the regularity if I’m doing too many proofs and edits. We’re going to see how it all balances out, I guess. Hopefully there’ll be enough for you to enjoy.

Anyway. Damn, openers are such a struggle sometimes. I’ll be alright once we’ve tucked in to the series.

There’s a lot going on in UK politics at the moment, I mean a lot of talk about democracy and people and stuff, and this talk looks more like a revolutionary force bubbling under the masonry than it has in a while, this talk, this stuff happening. I mean it’s conflict. It’s trouble. On the other hand I’ve been encountering loads of fellow travellers, not just around town but the world over. There are serious writers and activists out there not only writing about anarchism, community living, self-sufficiency, not only writing about it but actually living it. And not necessarily giving it those names, I mean I don’t like those names but they’re helpful as broad labels for the kind of stuff I’m into. An example of one of these fellow travellers is Alexandra Elbakyan, who runs one of the various crews out there that try to keep academic papers free to all. In case you didn’t know you have to pay for a lot of those papers. Not just science and medical papers, and not to support the authors or institutions. Some publishers bought the rights or did the publishing, and those publishers have amalgamated into a few big names over the last couple of decades or so. As monopolies they’re keen on making as much money as possible out of students who normally have enough private or government funds to waste on whatever bullshit they’re not focussing on while they’re trying to focus on studying. Students are an easy con in that sense – it seems relatively rare, in the UK anyway, to find a first or second year student genuinely concerned about saving their money and spending carefully. Third year can be slightly different, experience and exam pressure put an end to some of those heavy nights out or those days in posh cafes.

So I’m seeing all this activity, the good and the bad – it’s great – but particularly with reference to the UK I’m worrying. The real revolution is in these fellow travellers, the thinkers, communicators, people working on networks and the exchange of information. Community development projects. All that. But there’s a fake one, a wrong revolution that might be waiting within these undercurrents of discontent. Maybe. Maybe we’re past that kind of behaviour. Not sure. I’m not necessarily talking about violence here, but at least some big change that’s very enthusiastic and very poorly informed. “Brexit’s already happened, genius” is what you might be thinking. I know that – and that isn’t it. What eventually happens about Brexit could be it though. I get the feeling we’re probably going to stall for time, which, in context, is definitely the right thing to do. There’s no-one good enough to push things forward so it’s best to wait and try and train someone up to do the job properly. But what if we don’t pull that off…what if the talent vacuum in UK politics continues…?

The revolution – any idea of revolution – is euphoric, okay. Historically all revolutions start with this good energy, this genuine righteousness of motivation, but then people get too excited and blow too early, it becomes conflict, it becomes violence and anger, ignorant and hateful, leading to years of tyranny or worse. It’s natural. When you think you’ve dropped in to the informational pipeline straight to truth – to God or whatever – it’s a powerful feeling, hard to ignore. You want to keep believing you’re on that righteous path. You have to ignore that feeling though. There are dangers in being too excited for too long, just like with being too sad for too long. I remember hearing a victim of post-partum depression talk about this feeling of euphoria, going mad with it, writing on the walls, getting up on her roof, seeing all the beauty around her, and then, clear in her purpose, jumping off the roof to try and kill herself. Not to belittle her actual real-life experiences, but that’s how a revolution tends to go. Heroic sacrifice yes, perhaps, but for what? Near annihilation? A social self-destruct?

Happiness isn’t a good thing on its own. It’s an emotion that you can use to your advantage, just like any emotion. It’s your friend or if not it’s an enemy to be feared indeed. Christ, getting dangerously close to a Col Walt E. Kurtz sentiment there.

Yeah, basically I’m worried about the revolution. I know, I know. An anarchist worried about revolution? People like Alexandra Elbakyan are excellent – sharing information, discussing, just pushing connectivity. They’re the real revolution, like I say. But Extinction Rebellion, people demanding a “People’s Vote”, people charging into the public gallery of a meeting of my local council waving placards…they have no fucking idea what they’re doing. I mean they’re still great, in a way. And fair enough tho, sure. It’s panic or euphoria or…some other powerful natural drug coursing through their veins. Great. But that mob mentality, thinking that you’re fixing something with a bold statement…you’re not. To be bold like that you become too simple. Complexity can’t easily (or just plain can’t) be written on a placard. Can’t be expressed in a bridge blockade, in a trip to jail for civil disobedience. It can be expressed through discussion, through art, through writing, or through extended periods of well-planned action. I’m not seeing well-planned or protracted anywhere at the moment, but I suppose maybe I’m not looking particularly hard.

I’m sitting here thinking that I might need to be careful. If this gets worse. And it might. Brexit (organisationally) never had to go this badly wrong. We’ve had shit governments in the UK for a while now and it was only a matter of time until people started to notice and take advantage of that fact. So Brexit is now the shitshow that represents the trouble at our national core. We’ve been broken for years and no-one at management level cares about fixing it. That’s the crisis – management are not answering the phone. The bosses can no longer be relied upon since they’ve all but filed for bankruptcy and moved to Fiji for a passport. Have you seen that list of places that give you citizenship if you spend enough on property there? They have.

But that’s them. We all need to chill the fuck out and then, calmly, collected, dismantle the capitalist superstate piece by piece. This angry excitement doesn’t work. Big, sudden movements fail if not planned down to the tiniest detail and conducted professionally. Slow and steady is better. Like the hare gets to the end of the race first, but then the prize is getting killed and butchered for food. Who wants to eat a tortoise that moves that slow, and is wrinkly and all shelly? Well, seagulls maybe but they’ll eat anything. And that said, lethargy never helped anyone. We want calm and deliberate action. Good ol’ Kurtz has a line on that, something like “Swiftly. Deliberately. Awake.”

I plan to go ahead as some kind of social commentator, often anarchic, often seeming mad, but mad like a jester you know? The court jester replaced the court wizard when our old monarchs no longer wanted someone wiser than them giving advice. Instead they had someone wiser than them acting stupid and telling insightful jokes. A different kind of advice, a kind that could but didn’t have to be taken seriously. A jester could talk shit about the king and get away with it while others were being sent to the chopping block. I think any opinions formed or even proffered for public consideration should either be immediately supported by clear evidence and reasoning, or, if not, then indirectly supported by a body of evidence and reasoning that’s neatly referenced within a surprisingly articulate rant or series of jokes.

Oh my but I’m rambling particularly badly here aren’t I? Maybe. Well, this is the new pure ramble zone. “Journal” being a polite euphemism for “poorly conceived and largely unedited”. Heck fella sometimes you just need to write. Ask Hunter S Thompson, the Dr of Journalism. I’m sure he’d pull a mace on you.

 

Pernod in the Interwar Years

Other, Personal, Political, Prose

On my way here today I got an ad for Wix, I wondered: who’s paid off Google to translate “Wordpress” to “Wix” first, or is it all just some damned mistake…that some ad agent somewhere, paid more than the freak curating our children’s futures, just happened to confuse one ‘w’ word with another, relevant, ‘w’ word. I feel like these kinds of mistakes cannot reasonably be made with nouns.

I’ve been away from the blogging world – and from writing – for a little while now, and I’ve hated it. Nightmares from childhood crawl through my skull even in broad daylight, a substantial marker in my mental landscape of sustained failure. A warning that arises unbidden when I’ve spent too long writing cheques that won’t be honoured. Metaphorically of course. Show me a 20-something of today that ever wrote a recogniseable cheque from their own account. Even when I had my Mary Poppins Kiddie Account at the Halifax (I think I was 13) I didn’t write cheques and I’m pretty sure that was the only way you could use the account. Perhaps I dislike banks and even money altogther. Perhaps we all do, secretly, even while we profit from them. But more of that kind of rant later.

Editing other people’s writing for content rather than style is a disgusting activity that should only be conducted at times of definite intoxication. I have been undertaking this kind of task, sober, for extended periods of time. This had been part of the source of my break from writing. There are other things: transitory things that don’t make the cut here. What you need to know is that I shouldn’t be editing anyone for content, I should be exposing their own lies to them or singing out their truth. Editing doesn’t come into it. But style – if they want a different style to their own, if they want a unified publication style, well, that’s something I can disagree with but also something I can enforce while employed to do so. That’s something I can edit, but that’s also something that’s not part of my employment description. Time will tell however. Manoeuvrings and strategems, possibly even ruses, will enable me to gamble at the kind of position I desire. Inklings already here, staining my fingers.

Enough of gambling, however. Writing has to return to my life, and this is the allocated medium. Content production must occur, ideally with some extravegance or flair or other expressive quality. I adore neutrality but language isn’t neutral. It’s like some disgusting fizzing pot of chemistry full of PH papers and overshadowed by distillation tubes and pipettes and other extreme scaffolds with distinctly menacing connotations. The right amounts of love and bile must be associated to produce something approaching a middle ground, or at the very least a highly entertaining segment of nothing at all.

People don’t respect a writer who’s not writing. They don’t understand the alcoholism, the binge-watching, the binge-eating, the long walks, the hibrow cultural gatherings – they’re not pretence, they’re all an effort to convince the psyche and soul to reinvest their myriad energies in the act of verbal description. Coaxing a mouse into a bottle, except this is no ordinary bottle. The acoustics are fantastic, and there’s a thin crusting of rum salts at the bottom and up the sides. It’s been a struggle bringing myself back to this point, I can’t pretend to you it hasn’t been. But the nightmares have led me here safe and sound. I don’t want to be dealing with them anymore. I’ve had enough of childhood recollections taunting, without reason, without logic, except the undeniable fact of my own failure to pursue my own designated purpose. Got to get back on the horse, got to carry on up the path, or down it, at least until the next town.

But these distractions! For someone such as myself, who takes pride in low self-esteem, who hails it as a philosophical attitude, it can become painfully easy to get sidetracked. I mean why should I do any better, the question comes. My answer has to be tight. I have to navigate my own internal highways with great care, understanding, and above all, integrity. I can’t be intimidated by myself or else the plot will be lost for at least another day. And that’s another day of nighttimes and youtube advertisements and trips to the shops. If only the shops would go away. I don’t know if I can take the consumeristic bent of it all any longer. I can, but I’d rather not. And it’s that preference that scares me. More stable types than I have probably been lost to insane delusion. Firebombings and riots and even ideologies…all seductive to the head, all very sinister. I myself nearly became an ad man, once. It took the death of my father to stop it – Fate speaking a clear message with a completely unexpected heart attack. Or was it co-incidence? And is this ignorant arrogance?

Too soon to tell. Too soon. The memories will well up and consume eventually, and then the truth of it all will be reality, for better or worse. Or perhaps this is already the present, the great procession of Septimus Hodge marching and shedding in perpetuity, despite both fires and equations.

These times for the individual are like the interwar years were for Europe – a time of both certainty and uncertainty. A time when the controlling forces change more or less and begin to understand things, while the masses ignorantly celebrate every last moment they’re allowed, safe in the knowledge that they can do so without being randomly exploded. Now, once again, they will only be exploded for transgressions against more powerful parties within their own society. Elsewhere in the world will largely leave them be, for now. The individual is both – the thinking master and the wishing-they’d-rather-not-have-to victim. We’re each an ouroboros, infinitely changing, infinitely the same. At least, we are if you interpret it like me. And this is where the self-hatred or at least deprecation comes in as a natural response to an uncertain new world for humanity. We don’t want master-slave anymore and yet our biological hard-wiring struggles to make the change, on the personal level and on the social level. It can’t provide the internal stability our ideals prefer. So we work at it: we want democracy, we get representative oligarchy, we say that’s good enough for now. Maybe that’s all there is for us. The next generation will do better if they can.

We must destroy these kinds of assumptions. We must carefully and knowingly unselve, in select ways. Unravel our own stiching to do a better job than the Great Seamstress in the Sky. This is willful evolution, a new process often ignored or rejected by right-thinking scientists and pseudo-Darwinians. More on that another time.

Jean Rhys wrote some good books in the interwar years, and in one of those books her detached character liked Pernod. I have to say it’s an excellent discovery. I’m not drunk on it now, but I will be shortly. Then to the pub? No, no. Not enough pay for that. More importantly – not enough certainty of positive social contact. Who’s there? It could be somebody, it could be nobody. It could be some demented bat with a perfect tan and bleached hair, his eyes guarded by overly keen cheekbones. A heavy ordeal to encounter as the light fades on such a seasonal evening.

No, I’ll stay back and edit that last poem. Drink some more Pernod. Drive it forward with minimalist synthwave drumbeats etc.

The time could be near.

Is there any more to be said?

Perhaps not yet…the prey must be led with breadcrumbs, not brought to escape with a labyrinthine thread. That’s what they say at ad school. That is…unless you want to make them escape from their own heads, their own realities…but no ad man is genius enough to come up with that kind of manipulative scheme. The unreality on us now is sheer accident brought about by centuries of corruption crushing layers one upon the other. The sort to make a conspiracy aren’t advanced enough for it. More stuff, more, more for the fire. Break all the chairs, break all the pots, the food, break everything you made the fire for, just to keep it going. The burning must go on.

I have to escape now, before the anti-capitalism takes me away for hours…….and so the Pernod comes, an aniseed twist up the nose, dreams of green oblivion……it must be allowed to take effect…poetry must be drafted, writing must unfurl and snarl and beak at the uncertain consistencies all up the walls, the procession must go on…

Poison to the Antidote

Personal, Poetry

In that Netflix series Narcos, Poison is a pretty un-chill guy. He reminds me a little of the protagonist in the Sniper Elite series of games, just doing drug hits and about 30 years on, and younger and Colombian.

Here’s my latest poetic adventure. I wrote it inspired by discovering King Krule, and trying to recount an incident after a concert at Ally Pally that I still don’t fully understand. The incident, that is, not the concert. TLSP are fookin’ amazin’.

The slashes are there to help me read it, because it doesn’t have any punctuation. That’s not to be “groovy” and “trendy”, it’s just to force you to make your own punctuation while desperately trying to find some of the real stuff, like a comma. Everyone loves commas. But they’re not in this poem. This poem says fuck commas – make your own pauses. Or try to follow mine, I guess.

I’ve got you bleeding on my heart in minature/
An action figure temptress/ arm missing
And the paint faded/ go figure that overuse
Would wear and tear your eyes still bright/
But now blue tracing my heart attack
With creeping electric sugar/ sonorific infections/
I keep Alex Turner in a box in the freezer/
Crystalline watery eye discharge and shut lids/
He’s between life and death now/ when I wake him
I’ll heat slow and careful/ he always opens with
Do I wanna/ and no, it’s you again feeding
On my heart in minature/ parasitical love bliss/
How beautiful the worm of an idea wriggling
In that/ grey matter jar demanding pickle juice/
Of red and blood or wine and fine/ spirits or
Caffeine or legal excess heart palpitation/
Explosive thumping and DVT and hours in
Front of the blue-white light softly screaming/
And your gnawing something fictional I’ve/
Got to breathe I’ve/ got to get a breath above/
Your erection pushing over my eyelids/ the
Watery discharge of eyes in distressed cold
And bulging/ weary discharge of eyes/ your
Presence up and dagger thru the ribs/ your
People dagger up the ribs/ ceremonial sword
In the eye/ your eyes and distant memories
Of perfect protrusions in panties a vision/
I try but I can’t replicate/ I hate the way
I beg your action figure for favours
Alex Turner/ snaps in the freezer box but
I’ve got superglue in the drawer danger/
Flammable liquid lighters catch well on bricks
Tho/ harmful vapour may spew affects the brain
Or nervous system/ prolonged paraplegic
Exposure may result in severity/ physical injury
Developed for war casualities, used by jilted
Lovers/ I may have thought about you too long/
And the others also feel this that I was burnt/
Before they set me on their eyes/ and that drunken
Prize value was lost on the turn of a lightswitch/
Catching fire mechanism broken and glasses
Empty everywhere/ I don’t know your hair some
Silken straw maybe on a pillow or in a hand/
How does your worm still make me want it/
In my salt shaker chilli pot I’m your gusset/
Soaking or flattery aside an accidental art class
Colour mixing stain/ on something lost to black
Plastic landfill/ still too much I find and Alex
Shivers with me behind the scenery/ Bill Shatner
Shaking hands with a styrofoam dino meanwhile/
A Waitsian wino dribbles on my shoulder fabric/
Reassuring soft skull, again, like yours, again/
Your pop-up platform shoots gyrating/ sheer/
fairy/ wings/ and flying pink papers[wings] scuttle what’s
Left of me/ that’s the story I hear recounted after
The dream, that’s still what I wake up to even as
I’m culling/ and they see it in the half looks cast
Away seeds to salty turf/ they feel women in the fall
My ratio is 4:7 and the lights are down low on
North London’s streets/Ally Pally apocalyptic market
Stalls lining my liver/ each concrete step the sweetest prostate
touching excrement/ and a catalytic mind’s eye over
Hollywood hills/ vest open tie low jeans hanging
Off thighs a belt buckle dangler bouncing/ the night
Propositions through a young creature/ wild whites
Locked about my lumpy indecency and Strongbow
scented exhaust fumes/ thanks but you can fuck off/
King’s Cross unfettered stomach adoration
Replacing you/ you lost in the folds of the past’s fat
I’ll have another pint but they’re shut and it’s three
if you can get it in the morning Alex trying to change
My mind Turner to agree with the pit of my chest not you
Anymore missy/ I’ll not call you love at all/ but I’m still getting
Mined by friends or at least I wish love can’t die
Can only fade/ and yawning to the mobile buzz bright mean
Screen/ I’m alright in the bed spread/ trousers falling down
Stumble through the brain strain down an alley not in the rain
And piss in a cascade.

I’ve got to work on it still, as with them all. And it might be one in a three part mini-series. At least, that’s what it says in my folder for it. So you never know.

If you feel like feedback, anyone, I’d love to know what you reckon. Too long perhaps? I love it. I love long things. Don’t mind if you don’t though. I want to try and plumb the depths of a topic, either in the time and resources expended on its exposition or in the wit and content of the phrasing used in its mere description.

Sorry, I’ve got a…prosaic brain on at the minute. Is it prosaic? Is it just a bit twatty? I can’t tell. I hope you can ignore my comments and enjoy the poem.

Incidentally I would recommend King Krule. Have a look.

Exhausted Stumblings, Confused Salt Crystals

Personal, Prose

I’ve been away too long. I’ve got to get back on the metaphorical horse.

I haven’t done a huge amount of writing except that I started a little freak page on Facebook that I’ve also temporarily abandoned. As ever, more is incoming – with poetry etc too. I actually really want to do some journalism. Like proper journalism. I don’t even know what that is – proper journalism – but I want to do it. Anyhow, facebook freak page:

It began with a picture.

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And then another one.

800px-Armpit_by_David_Shankbone

Caption: “There is also a Nipple in the bottom left corner, but this is something you must not notice, for it is not strange and not unusual. Nipples are everywhere. Like foot cream.”

And this of course inevitably led to an opening story, with picture.

529full-elliott-gould

“Hello. I am not a strange crystal, but this is what some people think when they meet me. They say that I become involved in hair and sweat and unholy things. None of this is true. My tip is coated in a thin watery discharge and then thrust up into the darkness of the underarm, wherein no other crystal can see, and so I am a clean and healthy and normal individual. This is my work. I am determined and conscientious. Amethyst understands. Rock salt used to understand because he was young, but now he is old.

Here is the body part of Elliot Gould. The arrow marks it. Can you tell? It is moustache. There are other pictures of Elliot Gould, but this one is from listal.com. It was added exactly three years before I was born, by a nice man called Leo. Perhaps it was his birthday too? He is green. I like him and Mr Moustache.”

There are other segments. Maybe it’ll become a book? Who can tell.

Here’s the second story. I want to give you a sense that there’s some character development going on in this series before I leave you hanging.

MBDMOMA EC001

“I do not like advertising. It tells the flesh folk that what we do is sensual and filthy. It shows us rubbing our tips into the hairs and the salty sweats and their small, small crystals. It is wrong and disgusting. When I come away with a hair in my mouth, all the others say “you have been advertising again, you have, you have” and they laugh and raise their lids up and down. I say nothing to them. Amythest tells me that when she was young they would all look at her. She would try to crawl away deep inside, but she could not move and her lattices shone with words I could not understand.

This is Sean Connery from a post on theredlist.com. They made a very good post and their section on Furniture Design agrees politely with curves. I have actually seen it shake hands with the curves, but do not tell anyone. Sean Connery is like goo and cotton wool on fire. A rude man, a smart man, but I like his pretty face. Here he wears a hat.”

I really love exploring weirdness. A long time ago, I thought well fuck it: I’m only going to live as me once. After that I don’t know. I might as well try and experience as much as possible, from as many different perspectives as possible. Now that’s not what I’m doing with the Crystal thing, but that kind of thinking did inspire me to try and write something kinda stupid but also kinda pointy. Pointy like meaningful, almost disturbing but clearly non-threatening. A spike of odd you can investigate or leave well alone.

Finally (for now) a third post:

Kiwi_aka

“Today I went into the cupboard behind the mirror. Next to me was the shampoo bottle that is called ‘Aussie.’ He is from a place called Australia which the others tell is the deadliest place in the world. It has good caves. Aussie is glad to be away from there because now he can go into hair and ‘lather snuzzle’. The others say Aussie is a pervert. However, I know that he is shampoo. He may have a very dirty job, but he does this job quite well, with fine smells. Sometimes, if the fleshy one has been messy and not put back the lid, Aussie lets me go close and sniff his sticky cream.

Here is a kiwi fruit. It does not have hair, it has skins with fuzz. I like it both for texture and occasional self-pollination. Kiwi fruit are like flavour eggs – this is what the fleshy ones say. Sometimes the flesh eat out the green and suck the core. They are not wrong, but strange. Some claim the kiwi in the north of this picture is actually an hedgehog egg. They are liars.”

Check out the Facebook page that also got me working along these lines: https://www.facebook.com/welcometomymemepage/

(there was a frankly amazing tumblr called something like “littlebird” with illustrations of monster-freak-feathereds but I can’t find it anymore. The writing style in the captions though…beautifully weird)

Don’t worry this isn’t the order of business from now on. I just don’t have anything else publishable to hand. Will write/edit something tonight though.

The Burning

Personal, Poetry

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.

Creative Struggles and Synthesis

Other, Poetry, Prose

This is a follow-on from a post that helped me find my blogging voice again. You don’t need to read that one though. It was more thinking out loud where this one is basically the same but slightly better structured. The continuing theme is that we all get into a rut sometimes, overthinking or letting our emotions run away with us, or both.

Writers block is about disconnection, because writing, and even art generally, is about leaving the boundaries of your own body. Heck, all communication is about that. It’s probably what defines humans above all else – our ability to empathise with things. Empathy is a relatively new and very accurate word. It’s about putting yourself in the shoes of someone or something else. Not just sympathising “oh it must be hard” but realising “oh, it is hard. It really is.” Also I suppose knowing when you know nothing. “That’s just way beyond anything I’ve experienced, but here’s my sadly academic attempt at describing it. Because an attempt is better than ignoring the possibility of truth.”

Words are referring to and so trying to make you think of, and partly experience, things which are not immediately happening to you. Even if someone else is talking about you as you do things, they’re talking off-point. You’re drinking and they say “Ian is drinking”, it doesn’t describe the sense of thirst, it describes the sensation of drinking, or it could be a sarcastic reference to your alcoholism. It pulls you into the speaker’s perspective and away from your own. And that’s incredibly useful.

Empathy is like having a soul or a spirit, you know. Because empathising is extending whispy non-physical energies than can interact with and generally access physical things. Empathy is magic, and so art is magic. Talking a bit like Alan Moore here. Your ability to accurately understand someone else and so tailor an interaction to them, is magical. Or can seem so when you do it proper, because it’s so subtle and yet so powerful. The perfect gift, the manipulation into something, or the feeling of love and safety and acceptance you read in a friend snoozing on your couch. That’s magic, okay. That stuff is pure brilliance.

And that’s art. When successful it takes you somewhere. Teleports you or possesses you or releases you. All these phrases for the same sort of process. Someone else connecting with your experience through and/or despite theirs…powerful.

There’s a good old movie called Excalibur. Proper Northern-European. Yeah, that manages to be a cultural thing. Merlin the magician helps by creating symbols, by helping with masquerades, and by creating fog. He doesn’t shoot lightning bolts from his arse, he appears in the right place at the right time and says the right thing to people who don’t understand the world in the way he does. This is no Gandalf fighting the Balrog. This is the man who taps into the power of the Dragon – pure life energy – in his sleep. He quietly glows while Gandalf desperately struggles. He gets how things connect. He empathises. And he only turns up when he thinks it’s appropriate. Which is why he’s only struck by something as fictitious as ice magic – being turned into a block of ice – when he loses his power to empathise in a fit of madness, caused by deep betrayal. The only time when he loses his aura of mystery is when he stops empathising, falls into despair, and lets his own emotion overwhelm him uncontrollably. It’s like when Spock panics, but much cooler. (Sorry Spock, you’re still really cool, which is why I’m mentioning you out of context.)

So, let’s look at a poem.

The Curly Auburn DJ

My nostalgia for you

Particularly, hugging me at work when you’re tired
Sharing sandwiches and mugs
Because you don’t like too much cheese
Being okay with my saliva
Dirty fingers from polishing your shoes sometimes
Because I want to
Sonorific MTV memories
And your little unexpected gifts
Always

Especially, innocent shameless on tired weekday evenings
Warm, rainy nights behind open doors
Lonely blue guitar rockstar singalongs
And romantic pointings beloved of Elvis
Lookalikes of lookalikes
Staggering
Striding through streets
And being alone with our lagers, hands

Specifically, kissing me with your hat on
At home, in private, with no-one to see though windows open to the night
With moonshine and lamplight on the sill
The felt catching on my forehead but sliding over, not down
Silently looking into your eyes
Feeling your body, privately, for the first time
Through softened wool or cotton and layers
You watching as I hold you and touch you
You would want to understand
And you would
A little, or more
Us dancing to your quiet music

I don’t like this one. I don’t like most of, if any, of my poems. They’re all trying to describe pristine moments or feelings, and they only get there part of the time. It’s like Stonehenge maybe. You only see the brilliance and utility when the sun shines just so, what like once a year. This one, I’m not sure if it makes it to communication proper. It’s basically only going to work – maybe – for the one reader who can catch all the references. Maybe you can read it and like parts of it, or maybe like me you read through it and see flaws that need correcting. I’m trying to present something for you to empathise with. I’m trying to make some magic. I need to try harder. Problem is, emotionally sensitive area. Ice block time.

Whereas another poem I’ve showed you and talked about before, I’m working on an update that’s tasty. Tasty because it’s honest, communicative.

EDIT: I’m cheating a bit as this is an old post that I hadn’t finished, until now. So, the first of what may or may not be many updates to Consul Orange is already here. I hope it’s as tasty as I suggested. Probably not, but I’m a pessimistic guy when it comes to this stuff. So maybe.

It gets ice block because I unfortunately enjoy being in love with people I’m not supposed to love. Nothing weird. Jane Austen, Darcy, -style nothing bad. Just stupid really. And if the love succeeds, if the hunt concludes, if the chase is done…well…not exactly what’s the point but…chasing is fun. Heck if I could just write beautiful love poems, no issues, no questions asked, wouldn’t that be a bit boring? Well, maybe not. But that’s how the grass looks from this side of the fence. There’s always a struggle therefore, there’s always an emotional vulnerability, there’s always the chance that I’m fucking up by saying what I’m saying. It’s a bit of a gamble you know? And I do enjoy a bit of a gamble, well, within what are really very safe boundaries.

How does this tie in with empathy and writers’ block? You may well inquire. Well, on the loving from a distance thing, I find myself becoming good friends with people, and one day I realise I know them really well. Basically from loving them in a mostly non-sexual way (love seems to play a huge role in my life) I get to learn a huge amount about them, what they like, how they tend to act. I get an insight into how they think. I get strong empathy. Sometimes. These are people who can then pull me out of any block or depression because just being with them hooks me up to the 230V and suddenly I’m ready to go again. That’s like art/communication but with very low distribution. I mean it’s putting all your effort not into a single work, but into another person.

Specific acts and methods are all well and good, however: what you need in life is a balance between your means of emotional satisfaction and your ability to pull yourself away and analyse stuff. You need those two seemingly incompatible sides of your being to interact regularly, and help you achieve what you want. The good friends I love are a microcosm of that. I’ve got to a place where there’s balance – albeit tentative – and so I can get the most out of what’s happening. And, you know, just feel good.

So, two sides: the distant, analytical empathic effort is great but you can’t drain all sense of self, you can’t become some distant contemplative creature like a transcendent god, because you’re not that. And you’ll just get really sad. Some writers fall into this trap I think, hiding away in the shed in worlds of imagination. You can’t really know what other people are feeling if you’ve not explored your own emotions and interpersonal interactions. Basically, you don’t want to spend so much time flying out somewhere that you forget your way home, run out of fuel, and other metaphors.

On the other side, you’re asking for trouble if you just go all emotion and all running around activity. You’ll end up stuck somewhere doing something you don’t understand, and eventually you’ll not feel great about it. Some writers become celebrities and get so busy with gala luncheons they forget how to make decent work, or they plunge into alcoholism. Any emotional excess – pretty self-explanatory why it’s bad, no? Charles Bukowski says he did a lot of his sexy poems for smut magazines because he had to pay the bills, which included bar tabs and booze money, but then he’d still manage to sneak in a grander theme somewhere in each of those poems so he could still express something more meaningful. Even in what some might call the depths of degradation, the man basically held it together: maintained a kind of purpose/perspective/balance.

This is fucking dualism, mate. To some extent. Mind and body are separate in some ways, but are also connected, must also work together. It’s not a contradiction, it’s a complicated web of biological and nervous connections that we don’t fully understand yet. Mind-body. Two separate things, connected. Balanced, hopefully.

Now, after that inspiring talk…can you feel the creative struggles fading away? Can you feel that Hegelian synthesis pushing its way up through the hole left by flawed arguments assuming contradiction? If not, I’ve got an off-the-wall suggestion: read the Great Gatsby (again if you’ve already done it) and try and work out who the characters are, what happens to them. For example, who’s responsible for the big murder at the end? Is Nick actually a massive gay? Is Daisy the victim of ceaseless manipulation, or a ruthless social climber? Or anything in between…

It’s a great book for refusing to give clear, straight answers about what happens. And it’s got a pretty beautiful setting throughout. It was a contradiction 101 for me: I learned, well, realised, that contradictions generally aren’t final. They’re a sign that something is more complicated than it seems.

 

I Lost My Guitar

Personal, Poetry

I lost my guitar a few months ago. To be honest, I never played it much. I learnt the whole of Nirvana’s “Polly”, but it’s not the most complicated tune. I learnt riffs from White Stripes songs, like “I Smell a Rat” and “Sugar Never Tasted So Good” and “Cannon”. I learnt some Arctic Monkeys. They all felt pretty good, but I’ve just never been persuaded to put the hours in. As a kid I had lessons in classical guitar but I barely remember any of that. Maybe my fingers do, I don’t know. I imagine that’s the kind of thing fingers might do.

It had a sheen like pearls
And every time the strings
Rusted it was like the stone
Had swallowed the clam
All those times I dropped it
To the seabed, it evolved.

So I lost my guitar. Stupidly, while moving. I left it in the rental van and didn’t notice for days. When I finally realised what had happened, I just thought about going to the rental place to collect it. I mean, this place is an hour and a half walk for me. I think we rang and they said I’d have to come in person to check through lost property. I didn’t.

One dark winter it ran:
Away I guess, message in
A bottle floating along
That sea of roadways, well
A guitar in a case. Now
The case comes back as
Black velvet, the stone
Guitar impossibly gothic
Impossibly desireable –
It’s valuable now it’s gone.

Things like this really cut me up. Just neglect. Plain, simple, lazy neglect. My own I mean. Other people gotta do what they gotta do. And my attitude when playing wasn’t always great either. Like with “Polly”, that’s why I went for it: maximum impact for minimum learning effort. Still a lot of psychological going into the performance though I guess. It’s not easy singing the words of a sadistic torturer, words imagined by the late and great Kurt Cobain, last sung in what might have been his carefully staged goodbye show in New York. But fuck. It really stings to know you’ve been …consciously inadequate.

Somewhere, the velvet now
Unpacked, she sits on a lap
Singing to more cultured
Fingers and her player’s dulcet
Tones entwine with hers,
Newly-tuned, in some kind of
Loving symphony, or at least
A charming folk tune.

I lost my favourite plectrum too. This skinny yellow thing I found on the street and that I’d been using for maybe two years. You know, on-and-off, picking up some songs then forgetting them through lack of practice. But man, I realised more and more as time passed that I had a serious connection with that guitar and plectrum. The guitar had been bought for me years past, because people thought I cared about playing. The plectrum had travelled, like the coin in No Country For Old Men, through so much to get to me. These things, I mean just objects sure, but I’d just let them fall through my fingers as though they were sand. They’re not sand though.

So descend a thousand
Smoothed triangles pushing,
Prodding, poking into creases
And as I move the sweat
Sticks them deeper, their
Bright colours shining off
As I struggle with wrists
And hands, the noise
Rising above my own.

Bit of a sad one today, sorry. Some allegory here. From back years ago, learning what love and sex are. One time in particular a girlfriend left me and I was stuck with all sorts of thoughts about how great a love it had been and how certainly she’d become a sexual possession of someone else. Like how badly ruined the whole thing would be, like imagining the other guy fucking her, how it was obviously my fault. How only I failed, and continued to fail in imagining her as any kind of sexual object, in any context. I mean I was denouncing the short-lived “love” as hard as I could, as infatuation, as lust, as demented possessiveness. My whole sense of things had been so fucked up, I realised, and was still being fucked up. Until dealing with this shit, I’d not been the most social of kids. Love for me was built way up there – I didn’t look at porn, I didn’t masturbate, I didn’t do the evil thing in video games. Well, except Elder Scrolls. In that all bets were off for some reason.

And this break up and failure just…ugh. I mean it makes me a bit disgusted with myself, so much wallowing, so much thinking. I tried to ring her to talk, I sent her an angry facebook message asking her to take me back. That was it. Every time I saw her something in me died. Fuck, man, I was just done. And so I started pulling myself out by finding a place in the world of romance that would eventually become empowering, I started making my bisexuality an active thing, I started to build another identity. Basically as a sub. Like submissive. Because you know, being a sub can have such strength to it – it’s not about self-abuse, or doesn’t have to be. I started to teach myself properly about love, romance, people, the world. Oh yeah. Sex, too.

I have to go over this here because losing my guitar gave me a tiny glimpse back into how I felt then, and so the poem I wrote about it reflects in part my mindset from back in those times. The feature picture too. Not so much who I am now. But hey, if it gives me a poem and an opportunity to be real with y’all then I guess I’m not going to look a gift-horse in the mouth (or something).

Oh man it feels so much better to be me now. Not just because I could go to Soho and try and pull a guy anytime I want – and stand a pretty good chance at it for the next decade. It’s because I feel confident enough to do shit like that and know that I’m not going to crumble, or in some old patriarchal way try and own the person I want to fuck me. My heart can sing now – as cliché as that is – where before it was just giving me notifications like in Dead Rising, in those big, red, screen-spanning letters “Brian Reynolds is Dead”, “Your own sense of self respect is dead”, “Your sense of self-worth is dead”. Haha, sorry again everyone. I feel like a total mess talking about this stuff. We have more poems incoming. I’ve got a stock of oldies that need review, and I want to do some stories about ex lovers and stuff, partly fictionalised to protect the innocent. So maybe that’ll happen too. More tender, less real. Maybe. Oh and another essay en route though I feel like those are going to be less popular, but what the hey.

Yeah, so, uh, stay tuned. (see what I did there – guitar, tuned, eh, eh?)