and so it goes

A.D. Concrete

2006-05-19T21:41:00.000+04:00

Yes, there were fallen blossoms by the kerb, but when walked through they became whipping little twisters of unheard, disqualified words; a whirlwind of petals. A presence in the empty attic bedroom reasons that it is no longer empty. This presence riots at the opera, it demonises the private to an audience of deaf-mute swans who listen with their eyes. In the street below manx cats prowl for restaurant rats while a lone young man cuts at the overgrown tendrils strangling his window. The loft has become pregnant with triplets of ideas.

Asbo Music

2006-05-17T17:14:00.000+04:00

Disapology

2006-04-14T18:44:00.000+04:00

Decahedron stage and high walled theatre
the Victorian chambers of public post mortems
that house the poet’s nascent contortions and not
once in two hours do I take my eyes from his,
and hers.

Luminous the sandflies streaming through the frosted window,
luminous the moonlight filing smooth the brushwood porch,
luminous the plastic turned upon an aged lathe
at the order of a carnival-macabre.

“The swans and their mistress,
the swans and their mistress,
the swans
and their mistress
will fall.”

“Alcospas”, I shout, the swamp’d Thames coiled
round vox bloodied strips of eurodisco and candle-
lit beefpunks and burgerlungs all dryhumping in a
damp Westgate cellar. Bottles in diamonds and
crowns - that one with its paper like a butcher’s cut
sealed with wax, that one a token of the past, she
whispers, that one good for the breaking -
and a display case of cigars on serene rotation.

I wear hotpants and a head-dress made of feathers
and howl at the glitterball for hours:

“The swans and their mistress,
the swans and their mistress,
the swans
and their mistress
will fall.”

2006-04-04T02:21:00.000+04:00

2006-04-04T02:19:00.000+04:00

Calender

2006-03-28T00:10:00.000+04:00

With you, I cast my net
over id’s silver ideas
that shoal beneath cell
walls like the stickles we
caught in summer lost,
and let go of. Pendulum
exposure is a postcard
from the road and I faint
and I laugh at our fate.
Concentrate velocity
diluted with spring water
has the autumn come too
soon and gone again. With
you I revere winter green
and celebrate in song the
lines that bind us all together
till the time when time is
done.

No Look Portraits

2006-03-27T23:21:00.000+04:00

Monolord

2006-03-23T05:25:00.000+04:00

Every day the barristers come with faces sharp from leathered text and empty chequebooks, red from wine and the quayside air and underscored by bone structures designed to tear flesh and leaf. We share astronomical formulae in the contractions of the iris, we share the accounted aromas of the restaurant, we share a space.
I watch the single mind of the far clouds whilst absently polishing glasses and think about the conditions of my friends in turn. You who have had it tough, you in your tennis shoes and your velvet jacket, you with your porcine face and dramatic personas, you who said nice things to me, you with whom I watched the waters draw in at dusk, you the migrational, the pendulum, the fulcrum, the counterbalance, the dead and the unborn, you for whom I would do anything but can do nothing, you ignorant of the unsaid scope of affection, you for whom I came to make espressos after dark and could stay with until dawn.
I consider a photograph that could only be justified by the inclusion of a human element, a photograph of the humpbacked bridge descending upon functional steeples and fading to the empty tarmac car park where no children play. I become so engaged with the natural elements and the desire for a composition as to mistake a curl of air from the extraction fan to be a hand on my arm - your hand in fact.
Walking home I talk amiably to a drunk man ejected from a concert for cheering too loudly. When we part on divergent street corners I tell him that Kant was a midget who never left his hometown. He walks off shouting ‘Kant! Kant!’, his voice echoing on the considered walls of Northumberland Street and fading into the relentless spool loops of traffic lights, taxis and the subterranean metro somewhere not so far beneath our feet.

3 Pastel Colours

2006-03-21T03:17:00.000+04:00

Mantras of coincidence forebode a pagan collapse. Pavlov triggers a face on passing bus billboards as elegies rise from exhaust. Even the ripples in the stately winding river dispense a course of action or Xanax. Meanwhile, I deny the fissure between intent and product. The product shapes intent just as technique governs ambition. I abseil into uncontrol with a song in my head.

Riposte

2006-03-20T05:00:00.000+04:00

light-hearted infusions of sarcasm in hot water douglas coupland as a soft french cheese a postmodern literary analogy perhaps there were many as were there women artists too many of which spells trouble better off making lists on paper folds in paper paper in coconut milk paper scissors stone the crows have you read it only the guardian which remains in the footwell to be recycled and reread as a right-wing editorial in a surrey hamlet where basslines reverberate in the skirting boards nu munki perhaps you are a new monkey not a levellers fan though to your credit genres are dismissed and dissected with sandwiches and family trees coastal erosion examined igneous or sedimentary religious or phallic puffins unnoticed or seen only in pub toilets by french horn enthusiasts involved in rigged musical disputes where rigging would be better used in unrealistic plans of seafaring and modern day piracy arts coucil funded of course as are curious brass figures south of the river as should be john's curios funded only by an obsessive and wandering enthusiasm which at least encourages conversation and sometimes wind which may be closer to networking than i am to being arts council funded for brisk coastal walks to solitary italian restaurants operated by tyneside mafia under the guise of elaborate napkins and antipasto whilst the middle classes discuss poetry and the moral problem with buying north sea cod from local fishermen even if they are in fact artists fishing for relevance with giant pencils prodding the community with a self-conscious lead beating children over the head with apple macs bought off the back of a classic hatchback and left behind in the name of a jolly good day out.please can i have my house keys back it is bitter out xxx

Thames Valley School of Driving

2006-03-18T19:57:00.000+04:00

north shields quayside fish docks, hannah and taryn's art intervention project in empty white walled gallery space, banging on the doors of abandoned lighthouses, along the sea wall to it's point and back again, up steep stairs past boycott netto posters and into a furniture and curio shop full of lost seventies photo albums, kodak colorsplash cameras from the sixties, bags of rusted hammers and pliers, a man who joyously broke wind at great length and noise, a strange hairy rabbi doll in it's original packaging that played a broken melody when shaken, cheap detuned beautiful old upright pianos with free delivery, then departure to south shields through gateshead's relentless traffic.

divided a sandwich in half in the car and ate while polly put her jacket across her lap, looked out the window at the motorway interchanges and engineering and asked me about home, laughing. claims my particular brand of apparent recklessness can be attributed to the Thames Valley School of Driving - hand on roof, window down, music cranked, cigaret in hand and handbrake turns. I refute.

south shields beach and then to another sea wall where the waves were leaping up over the railings and I played the game but got soaked and my phone filled with little shrimps and is now broken; staggering back whilst wiping the salt water out my eyes, I stood in 4 inches of water and ruined my shoes; climbed the red iron steps of another abandoned warning tower and mocked the unimaginative graffiti there, carnival on to marsden grotto and pints of guinness by the squally dashed north sea, admiring the limestone erosion patterns like geography teachers on holiday.

to the byker wall for hannah's delicious fresh veg curry and origami crocodile competition then on to the cumberland where tom and fabienne slaved and al talked cheerfully with his silly booming laugh to some nice looking people, on to the free trade to see a woman like lolo ferrari with an arbitrary line drawn around her jaw to demark the alleged zone of her lips, ugly tits spilling out of an ugly top, talk of funding from arts developement council and angry arguments with insistent feminists then home, home to my house to sleep.

Camera Obscura

2006-03-17T04:56:00.000+04:00

At 3 ante, brut glugged obscene
into stolen arcoroc - an insipid
grubby popera for the audience
at Dawn. Half step to youthful
moon, his white hair stainless
iridium and coy, dress ripped by
the silent blue light of passing
suburban police. Fulcrum on the
Milton rails like blizzard outside
home, that sweetnd cup of
warmed up milk for rook buildings
on country roads. Testament and
legacy a hot-tub full of painted
stockings and kissed photo
graphs. Tomorrow is a brawl with
a fair skinned girl beaten up against
stadium walls, as deep fat
prayers fire up a’bubblin viscous
unthought process like broken traffic
or communal dependence, a promise
of rain and slate clean skies and
as ever the music in my mind
that no one else should hear.
Fulcrum on the Solzhen line of
ritalin and sugar puffs, I turn off
the alarm clock and fall into bed
to dream or maybe not.

A Bird Loves The Sun On Her Back

2006-03-09T06:51:00.000+04:00

Ext. Day: Whitley Bay in late afternoon

I
In scarlet electric storm fields that lead to the coast
where waves crash an ice tide of crack’d pearls,
iridescent driftwood and convulsive silver fish,
she sings to me a warning song.

II
Scything auld thermals above resort in decay
and the traffic of our talkshow youth below,
we hunt the ocean of perpetual summer in yesterday’s
chip-wrapped headlines snagged on the broken glass
of abandoned arcades.

III
Doric cliff columns absorb the red ink dusk
and will do so until the day does not come,
for Time is no mere chronological concept
of knots in a strand that must be undone.

IV
Far out in the swells where light falls in bands
and dusk is depicting a few early stars,
she flies in defiance of thundrous cars
curling the serpentine road.

V
Polarised by latitude, we regurgitate in gutters
the rhetoric of a doctrine sold in triplicat and hope,
while the view of Norway is gradually obscured
by the tacked up chipboard windows.

VI
And as I turn and leave this town along a promenade
and through a labyrinth underground,
I hear her song as a hymn to tomorrow
where our children fight ever on.

Transposed With Dictionaries From The Old English

2006-02-27T23:01:00.000+04:00

Vär skap kohl floes
kraked Sîan bohr
Spectre ah köhve
truqil ø pashk
in urban woodland.

Ciklan pär
ø Lucufus rokk
unbroke morn
sihillati
ø dejets.

Ry nils Spectre
behrehn ø schäde vilo
tranz kahbĕ Solus
church bells
enviktu ti antti.

And in the pines
ti axen kahsp
ø Lucufus raggan ah rahw
bljed halle mund
in the pines.

“Bahn espri,
phoe ex ash
North Kar,
negla eglise,
kraked constella!

Bahn schäde fernus!"

apok Solus
arose alight,
and still.

They will come at dawn
vär skap kohl Sîan
bledden kopse
ø Spectre tranz
cyrran Lucufus
sheher kyss
blue on lips
ciklan frey
with courage.

See You When I See You

2006-02-27T22:46:00.000+04:00

“If an ox could draw his god
he'd draw an ox if an ox
could draw his god…”

- Xenophanes

I

Feral children climb carcass bones on the back
lawn of a red brick, semi detached house
and drink around circular tables of iron wrought
into the chaotic equations of an ivory vine. A murder
of crows sits in the pine tree Palace
kahwing through the velux, open and cold,
in a burst vacuum can.

II

His legs slick with sweat, hers with the glaze of the sun.

III

Яapists come in all shapes and sizes
and there is abuse in geology.
State funded school children
as legal age camouflaged
TVs on T.V.
y’kna, daisy chains
of the obscene
absence of love.

Great love is a holy fear/:
the contrapuntal cello in Dumbarton oaks,
a symphony of fallen leaves –
heavy, leather
forecasts of autumn.

Or for ten points
the rising choir, female and modular,
accessing that tropos condition of innocence:
the fighter pilot’s inferno,
the cirrus Eden of a wilful melody,
the blender full of eyeballs?

Feral children climb the steeple’s velvet apex above
gravestones pocked by cedillas \ umlauts
to watch the solemn mourning carnival
of stoats and shrews devour their young
to the insistent pulse of old candle moon.
Bengalsky’s men surround the Theatre
awaiting the fallen dancer –
the strangled swan.

A latex woman in our cold bed.

VII

Seventy Kopek steam rushes out my kitchen window
filling Bronnaya with cabbage and tangerine.
On the pavement, young proley florist re-arranges
long stem roses in a red mop bucket, occasionally
touching his breast pocket
and a postcard from The Yalta.
Feral children yell a Prok requiem.

VIII

Great love is nil cacosonis and
the forming of songs of tranquil indolence/:
consonants repeated in the gymnopaedie,
upon the high beam and all over the floors.

I fly tonight.

Spatial Ship

2005-12-02T03:21:00.000+04:00

((p is true) v (false is q)
under the brown wood table))

The philosophy of problems tells of an end,
a flag on a minor moon.

Triplets For Clifford Duffy

2005-11-25T19:12:00.000+04:00

no middle initial to hide India in a box fort
or grapple the pockmarked back
skin of time.

no bottle of Uzo at the end of the rope,
nightmares of the Loch Ness Monster or
daydreams of id.

no carousellesque of sugared almond stalls
or acute prostitutes seducing the obscure
at the gates to Lunar Park.

no notes on bark with charcoal
upon a desert island formed of ideas, of lava,
and of the pearly shells of hermit crabs.

no quilt,
sunday,
or discarded jumper brushed with perfume.

no cheques cashed till payday,
payday,
or the franchise of poetry.

no mother;
tombstone vase birdbath cherrytree
or regret.

no being held
cradled
and hushed.

no
no.
only now.

Expo I

2005-11-17T00:25:00.000+04:00

2005-11-17T00:18:00.000+04:00

TGI Heaven

2005-11-16T02:54:00.000+04:00

At a buffet cooked in Hell's kitchen
(with napkins starched in purgatory)
I sit at a table for one admiring
views of Lake Vanda and it's 2 million year drought
surfed by blue and gold pleasureboats
beneath a crescent of desert mountains
brewing up electrical storms and
some 22nd century composer whose name I don't know
is playing a strange haunting song on the one key piano.

I eat cracked crab on a pak choi and spinach bed
and drink three barrels brandy from the bottle.
I light cigarets and place them untouched in the ashtray
to smoulder like an aggravating incense.
I suppose I am lonely and that life and soul
departed from my lips in a foxes wedding
years ago, ho ho, I suppose.

And round the circular table adjacent to mine
a whoop of baboons talk stocks and share
several bottles of non vintage German wine
as I mutter into the tape recorder:

'8.05 pm still waiting to go out sailing
on a blue and gold pleasureboat
under the studied danger of electrical storms.'

Then when talking to myself I remember a joke you made
about your body
and I repeat it without
realising how weird I must look
to all the other customers here,
and it makes me smile,
and its only when I smile that I realise how abnormal it is
to be in touch with an unseen friend,
rather like writing to heaven
and getting answered by god's secretary,
who's probably just some low ranking
angel anyway.

Class Streaming

2005-11-08T03:57:00.000+04:00

In my day, which is now and tomorrow, a child's education of literature involves the identification, dismantling and analysis of components in order to manufacture a reasoned critical standpoint.

Presented with any written work, be it prose, play or poem, identification of subject matter, theme, tone and perspective follows. This is to break down the overt, to interpret that which can be translated.

In dismantling, the child is asked to deconstruct passages into emotive and didactic cores in order to attribute them with personal meaning, or resonance.

In the final critical analysis, the child is expected to opine and extrapolate theories as to the success of the piece, and wherever possible to identify faults by making use of refined examples.

So here’s a kid who hands in a critique on unlined paper written in green biro and filled with patois, sarcasm, vitriol and curses. The paper itself is crumpled and the ink has been smudged. She receives the lowest possible mark. She is punished because she has not attempted to represent her feelings within the guidelines of the teacher, the exam board or the government.

“She’ll never learn,” they will say of her in their rooms.

And they are, of course, correct. Because they will not encourage indiscipline, which they fear will become independent discipline.

“They’ll not teach me,” the girl is saying through her actions.

And she is correct too. If she feels that a piece of work is irrelevant to her, then so her response becomes irrelevant.

Everybody’s happy.

Our Contribution To The Insurgency

2005-11-01T01:11:00.000+04:00

We were a hundred miles outside of Raxaul and Birgunj on the Indian border with Nepal, headed south for Varanasi. There was no moon.

The bus had dead shocks and it was covered in neon acrylic daubings for spiritual protection. Many of them were faded. The driver was a small man who played trebly bhangra at full volume through blown speakers to remain conscious. He wore a collared beige shirt and slacks pressed with an immaculate crease. Both were stained.

Sparse jungle. From the depths of a footwell (I had offered my slatted bench to a middle aged woman in a turquoise sequinned sari) the weak headlights flashed off coconut palms and sequoia trees draped with vines. Out of the rear window, a dust storm rose in swirling clouds burned a deep red by faulty brake lights that were jammed on.

Books had informed me that tigers lived within these trees, prowling the forest floor for infant monkeys fallen from the nest. They hunted alongside rhinos, hippos, cobras, and spectacular ants with fat bodies who could devour an abandoned baby in minutes. I never saw any of these things.

The bus came to a sudden and obvious halt, as if the driver had been forced to stop for a landslide.

Voices outside. The door prised open. Automated interior lights on to a burst of shouting. Then the bus driver shouting. Passengers awoke and slowly sat up.

A gang poured in, filling the central aisle. There were big and powerfully built farmers, small and twitchy sons, and old, lithe men. Their jet eyes flashed with adrenaline through the gaps in handkerchief balaclavas. One of them shouted at the driver to turn off the bhangra. They carried an assortment of weapons - the old man nearest me held the kind of hooked machete a butcher uses to gut a pig. he smelt of patchouli and hemp oil and I thought of his wife for a second.

He thrust the polished blade at my throat and as I shrunk back against the wall of the bus, I could see the thousands of tiny hammer marks that had beaten his steel. Then I looked him in the eyes. He was shouting something at me.

The woman in the turquoise sari had gathered up her legs and clutched at them like a little girl.

‘Money. They want money,’ she said to me tremulously. I turned my head slightly on this remark and saw that the sequins around her shoulders were shimmering in the yellow cabin light. She was shaking.

The butcher held up the four beautifully twisted fingers of his free hand. I took that to mean a demand of four hundred rupees. He pushed the blade an inch closer to my throat.

I slowly removed the only note in my pocket, which happened to be five hundred rupees, and held it out. He switched the machete to his left hand and took the note sharply from my grasp with his right, withdrew the blade sharply and turned to check on the progress of the gang.

Other travellers were being liberated of banknotes. An Israeli fresh out of national service had been struck across the face and his nose was broken and bleeding badly. He was spitting on the floor. A young, frail looking bandit stood over him with his club raised, shouting indecipherable local dialect at the back of his head. I assumed the Israeli had offered misguided resistance or machismo, since when I had spoken to him upon embarkation he had talked with a guttural enthusiasm of Palestine and his role as a gunner.

The entire ambush took no longer than three minutes. They dissolved into the dangerous jungle, and I saw that one man had his arm around the shoulder of his son.

*

Be aware of how the language of the International News Bureaus subtly shapes our impressions of world events. Thirty years ago they talked of Rebels, twenty years ago it became Freedom Fighters, ten years ago it was Armed Factions, five years ago it was Militants, and now, now, very now we have the Insurgents. Beware of the International News Bureaus - they know what they’re doing.

The New Gonzo

2005-10-24T19:41:00.000+04:00

'I cannot help but scene myself, sketch my position into my academic wanderings, give a reader the sense of not simply what I have been reading, but where.'

And how. As an arbitrary triumvirate, Kerouac, Thompson and Wolfe positioned themselves within the constraints of self-induced drug dystopia. They were the central characters operating within the masquerade of their own reportage, telling stories set within a psychadelicatessen full of sliced revelations and coldcut epiphanies.

For the Millenials, it is tempting to dismiss the excesses of the beat and the post-beat writers. To we who are governed by the steel muzzle of commerce and cradled by the feathered down of dollars, pounds, euros and yen, this is the age of the atrocity and the work of the Gonzo godfathers seems inebriated.

Would Hunter, for all his work against impingements on civil liberties, have functioned pro-actively without such a monumental hangover? The temptation is to say that the drugs gave him a cause and made him fight, but I don't believe that. The man himself claimed he would never have survived if all his stories had been true and frequently nodded to Neil Cassady as proof.

Yet it is an invalid exercise to theorise about a quasi-Hunter aware of the Nietzschean superman who chooses intoxicated discretion whilst simultaneously remaining in control of his dominant Id and directing his attentions on a sober attack upon the state. Invalid because it is the wild freedom of mescaline binges inside the state line that attracts us to the writings of the Gonzoid beat boys and their dictatorial impositions of will and choice. We risk standing upon soapbox hypocrisy and echoing Leary’s latter day denouncement of drug use if we call for detoxicated heroes in rehab.

*

To place one’s self at the centre of a story empowers our unique, personal truth. Within this notion are contained the possibilities of humanising tragedy, of quantifying injustice with the humanity of humour, and of abnegating statistical empiricism.

So instead of:

‘2,000 were killed in riots between the Lebanese mafia and Mananga tribesmen in Gambia yesterday’,

We get something akin to:

‘An orange sun defined the idyllic diesel generators and cocktail shacks of Mbama beach, but as I walked, I became aware of several columns of acrid black smoke dispersing in the distance. Then, as I came closer to the suburbs, I realised that sounds previously taken to be the thunderclaps of some encroaching tropical swell were, in fact, large bore automatic weapons posing questions. I didn’t see a dead body until I arrived at the children’s adventure playground that backs onto my hotel’s garden. A police officer was slumped over a swing, his exposed intestines already covered in flies. A large pool of treacle was spreading underneath him, and he seemed to have died with his eyes open, in great pain.’

*

In order to report a story, you have to live the story. In order to read it, you have to use your imagination to make it come alive, and a writer can help with this. Barren statistical writing and bleakly conjugated ideas - no matter how erudite - will ultimately only deliver a message to a tiny minority of gentrified intelligentsia and pathetique sympathisers. It is indolent journalism.
Most subs claim that only type A will do, and that people don’t have time to read type B for the Millennial urbanite is far too busy to empathise with a distant reporter attempting to find super-ego equilibrium through her verbose story telling. This is an economic oligarchy that encourages empirical news reporting and desensitization. It spreads like influenza, unnoticed, through the news-digesting nation, until eventually even the most terrible soundbite loses all impact because it has no founding in steeled personal truth.

‘2,000 were killed in riots between the Lebanese mafia and Mananga tribesmen in Gambia yesterday’.

*

Empathy is a divine word for the godless. It promotes respect, forethought, insight, compassion and, most importantly, imagination.

Foundations

2005-10-24T19:36:00.000+04:00

When set as cement in the correct measurements, the ambiguities of the English language can construct glacial insights into any chosen theme - ever shifting yet apparently monolithic. But when carelessly juxtaposed, such cement will not set, remaining a uselessly inert and viscous mixture of yellows and greys.

Much modern poetry utilises a sloppy congress between aesthetics and form in order to create a universe of infinite meaning and meaningless infinity.

Reformulated poetic structure evoking the angst of the writer and justified by killer one-liners and clever sentences will never do. Poetry is Rilke’s naming of the nameless. It is an impressionist artform, but like Cézanne, it requires recognition of laws or else it will forever flounder in the beautiful lagoon of shallow ambiguity.

What’s He Building In There?

2005-10-21T20:48:00.000+04:00

Adam Thomas, architect of shadowplay upon barren walls and sometime clean shaven anti-poet, is undertaking a new project discussing his growth into interpretive academia, focusing specifically on post war literary theory.

For Thomas, a central concern has long been the camouflage of actualities in order to saturate reality with a refreshed truth. In previous incarnations the m.o. was to isolate the colourwheel rotations of the day: to distil the experience of becoming a man into a palette of graphite sketches. The resulting stark, spare language and profusion of colliding core concepts lent the old Thomas a lyrical, yet angular aesthetic firmly rooted within the minutiae of a bleached world. Reading him was rather like finding emeralds on the floor of a sterile laboratory - he invoked a sun seen through a double glazed window.

“Speckled carpet, shorn of dust, clean parallels, no sex anymore.”

Such exposure to a quixotic world required a constant configuring and restructuring of reactions. In order to maintain his logical continuum, his growth, Thomas was perhaps occasionally victim of his own emotive subterfuge. When precise geometries are described with such definitive cruelty, it seems almost as if there is no space left for the boy to grow into, as if any deviation from previous revelations will jeopardise the integrity of the original thought.

“I wait for my words to mean nothing, pared down as they are by a lack of context, a discreet humbling which renders my outpourings little more than an exercise in hand-eye co-ordination.”

And so divorcing the ‘years worth of unfocused idiocy’, we find him cut loose upon the lifeboat, scraping sodden matches against their vesta case and hurling scraps of unrequired flesh to the sharks. Alone upon some Northern ocean, he is exerting constraints upon his environment like the man who was god. This unflinching, acetate etching is both an evocative diary of the mundane and a blackboard for the de/construction and debate of modern literature. The voice has matured without losing the laconic and likeable nuances, and his most powerful character is still the city.

Personally, since the subject matter is specified to a degree, it is way over my head. But then I like nice words, so I tend to sit at the screen absorbing as much as I interpret and listening as much as I read.
It is far too early to remark upon much else, so I suggest you take a look for yourself and find out what he’s building in there. You have a right to know.